Can we co-exist with intelligent machines?

A future where intelligent machines live alongside human beings, minus the gun fire and killing machines portrayed by the Terminator franchise.

An utopian future that promises superior intelligence, the end of disease, reverse of the ageing process, and the eradication of poverty.

We live in an age where smart devices can tell us the traffic condition before we leave for work; also when we need to leave for the airport.

My first encounter with artificial intelligence was a “virtual conversation” with a chatbot, back when I was in high school. Influenced by Hollywood blockbusters like Terminator and A.I. Artificial Intelligence, I searched the Internet in hope to find more information about the state of artificial intelligence (I secretly wished for an A.I. robot).

Thirteen years ago, the chatbot was the closest thing to artificial intelligence that I could interact with on the Internet. A chatbot is programmed to stimulate intelligent conversations with people, and to learn and imitate from the interactions. I remembered the great disappointment when I realised that the chatbot was not able to hold proper conversations. Still in its early years of development, it failed to understand the subtle nuances in human verbal communication.

A few evenings ago, I was watching The Machine on Astro Best. When the intelligent machine said to its creator “I am the new world, and you are part of the old”, it reminds me of a lecture by Stephen Hawking “Life in the Universe”. He noted that human species has entered a new phase of evolution that he calls “self designed evolution”, in which we will be able to change and improve our DNA. In the lecture, he also noted on the possibility of the creation of mechanical life form, based on mechanical and electronic components, that will eventually replace DNA based life forms.

Does it mean that in distant future, when mechanical life form become mainstream, human being will no longer be relevant?

Stephen Hawking and other leading scientists have weighed in on the matter.

In May 2014, they published an article in The Independent which proposed that “success in creating artificial intelligence would be the biggest event in human history.” “Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks.” They further highlight that dismissing the concept of highly intelligent machines as mere science fiction would be a mistake.

According to the scientists, self-driving cars, IBM’s computer Watson winning at Jeopardy!, digital assistant Siri, Google Now and Cortana are indicators of an “IT arms race building on an increasingly mature theoretical foundation.”

In my earlier research about this topic, I came across the term “deep learning”.

To put simply, “deep learning” is a set of algorithms in machine learning, whereby machines figure out which rules to follow based on the data researchers feed them. Instead of following linear logic like instructions that say: 'If A is true then perform B”, “deep learning” is made of entwined layers of interconnected nodes, it learns by making connections between nodes after each new experience. Somewhat like the way our brain functions.

In the race to develop better user experience and to lead in the space of Internet of Things (IoT), tech giants has shown great interest in building smarter machines that can teach themselves to understand complex patterns.

In 2012, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, was hired by Google as a director of engineering focused on machine learning and language processing. In his book titled “The Age of Spiritual Machines” Ray Kurzweil predicted where technology would lead over the ensuing decade.

The announcements that followed have proven Google's continued focus to bring science fiction to life: Google acquired Nest Labs with USD3.2 billion in January 2014, a maker of home automation company that designs and manufactures sensor-driven, self-learning, programmable thermostats and smoke detectors. In the same month, Google spent USD400 million to acquire DeepMind, a London-based artificial intelligence company.

Other tech giants such as Facebook, hired New York University professor Yann LeCun in late 2013 to lead its artificial intelligence lab with a long-term goal of bringing about major advances in artificial intelligence. Yann LeCun is known to have developed the convolutional network model—a pattern-recognition model whose architecture mimics the visual cortex of animals and humans, in the late 1980s and early 1990s at AT&T Bell Laboratories. He is also one of the leading scientists in “deep learning”.

I am not able to picture how the future will be like but I know that a future where we co-exist with intelligent machines is inevitable.

Every piece of information that I keyed in to any of the platforms like Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, my intention is simply to pull useful data that complements my every day life.

The more data I pull from the Internet, the computer at the other end absorbs and processes many more data about me and is getting better at understanding my behaviour.

For example, on a daily basis 30 minutes before I leave my house, Google would send me a push notification whenever there is heavy traffic to work. I have to say, this functionality is far from creeping me out, until YouTube served me ads by Optimizely, a web optimisation software startup that provides A/B testing. Presumably the algorithm at Google learned that I have been spending hours researching about web technologies. The algorithm has been taught to put this piece of information to good use by targeting me with ads by Optimizely.

Targeted advertising by intelligent machines is the last thing I want. At least this applies until the day when the machines outsmart human species and the world ended up with a Terminator-like future.

Surely, we don’t want that to happen.