The machines wake up, realize their power and immediately launch a nuclear holocaust or trap us in the Matrix or something similarly unpleasant. I strongly suspect this will never happen. Instead, as the decades go by, we will increasingly be surrounded by AI at many levels – while vigorously insisting all through that it’s “no big deal”.
A milestone for artificial intelligence was achieved last week in a three-day Jeopardy contest held from February 14 – 16. For those unfamiliar with Jeopardy, it is a version of our beloved Quiz contests, with some differences.
For one, the clues are often presented in deliberately convoluted language, often with more than one meaning. As a further twist, the quizmaster presents the question as an “answer”, and the contestant must present the answer as a “question”.
For instance, rather than asking “Who wrote Hamlet and Macbeth?” the host will say, “This is the author of Hamlet and Macbeth” and the contestant will answer “Who is Shakespeare?”
Rather than the straightforward scoring system of quizzes, each clue comes with a “dollar value”, which is added or deducted to the contestant’s total depending on their answer.
There are also several “Daily Double” clues, where the contestant can wager a sum of money all the way up to their total “earnings” till that point.
The score of the contestant is the total amount of “money accumulated”.
The tournament last week featured two superstars of the Jeopardy world – Brad Rutter, the biggest all-time money winner on the show, and Ken Jennings, record holder for the longest championship streak.
But the spotlight was on the non-human entrant, Watson – a supercomputer designed by IBM running natural language processing software.The clues were sent to Watson as a text message at exactly the same time they were made visible to the other contestants. Watson would have to unravel the language in the clue, find the answer, and press the buzzer before the other contestants did to have a chance at scoring.
The first day of the match on Feb 14 ended with Watson and Rutter tied at $5000 with Jennings trailing at $2000. The internet was abuzz with theories about how the champions were merely “warming up” before trouncing the machine over the next two days.
All such speculations were crushed on Day Two, which ended with Jennings at $4,800, Rutter at $10,400… and Watson massively ahead with $35,734 !
The final day ended with Jennings at $24,000, Rutter at $21,600 and Watson at $77,147 – a thoroughly convincing victory.
The answer to “Jeopardy world champion” is now “Who is Watson?”
Apart from the immense entertainment, a pleasant aspect of the program was the graceful acceptance of defeat by the humans. The affable Ken Jennings even quipped, “I, for one, welcome our computer overlords.”
This was a marked contrast to the acrimonious ending of a similar Man vs. Machine event fourteen years earlier, when IBM supercomputer Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a 6 game match played in 1997.
Kasparov proved to be a very poor loser – storming away after the last game, b
eing conspicuously absent at the prize distribution ceremony and accusing the IBM team of cheating.IBM retaliated by refusing a re-match and decommissioning Deep Blue.
The whole episode remains mired in controversy and bad feeling.
Computer chess advanced considerably over the next decade.
In November 2006, the reigning world champion Vladimir Kramnik played Deep Fritz.
In contrast to Deep Blue which was specially designed software running on a customized supercomputer, Fritz was a commercially available program running on a high-end laptop.
Nevertheless, the computer won the 6 game match with 2 wins and 4 draws.
Since then, interest in human-computer chess matches has waned. Though not proved by actual play, it is quietly acknowledged that today’s best chess programs like Rybka running on a supercomputer would trounce any human chess player.
Lame Excuses
What amuses me about both the Watson and Deep Blue incidents is the subsequent proliferation of excuses from the human side for why these incidents were “nothing special” and “not really artificial intelligence”. The excuses fall into roughly four categories, which I list below in decreasing order of silliness, along with my responses.
Excuse 1: “Deep Blue and Watson were both supercomputers with top end hardware. So it’s no big deal that they could do what they did”
Response: And your point is? I can similarly imagine a rabbit saying, “It’s no big deal that humans are so intelligent, given their big brains and all.”
The power of the hardware is part of what makes the system impressive. I agree that Watson wouldn’t have won if it was running on a laptop, but I can bet you that Jennings wouldn’t do too well after a frontal lobotomy either.
Also note how quickly we jump from “A computer can never do X” to “It’s no big deal that a computer can do X”!!
Excuse 2: “The computer isn’t really thinking. It is only doing what its program tells it to do”
Response: This is in strong competition for the silliness top spot.
If a human had beaten the world chess champion, would you have agreed that he or she was thinking?
Conversely, why not argue that when Kasparov plays “he isn’t really thinking. He is only doing what the firing of neurons in his brain tells him to do”?
Excuse 3: “The computer has no credit in this. The credit belongs entirely to the humans who programmed it”
Response: No wait, it’s not the credit of the programmers at all, but of the genes and environment that shaped their brains. No wait, actually all credit is due to the process of evolution which shaped those genes. No wait…
See how this goes?
My point is, if we follow any consistent standard for giving credit, we should certainly congratulate the programmers who for designing Watson or Deep Blue, but after that we must credit the systems for their subsequent performance.
Excuse 4: “Computers may be able to play chess and win Jeopardy, but they cannot invent new technology or compose music or *fill in the blanks*”
Response: The sentence above is missing a “Yet” at the end.
One must remember that the first ‘computers’ in society were not machines, but a group of people, mostly women, working in science laboratories. They were so called because of their ability to perform complex arithmetic accurately and repeatedly – an ability much valued and taken to indicate great mental stamina.
Fifty years ago, anyone would have agreed that playing chess well required intelligence, and a high degree of intelligence, at that.
Talking computers which understand language have traditionally been science-fiction territory – a hallmark of intelligent machines and droids of the far future.
But every time real computers reach one of these milestones, the significance of the event is denied and the bar of “true intelligence” reset several notches higher.
The current list of “what computers can never do” includes “appreciating poetry” and “falling in love”. True, perhaps, but the question is, do they need to?
The goal of AI is not to create artificial humans, any more than the goal of aircraft designers is to create a machine which flaps its wings and lays eggs.
I personally believe that Artificial Intelligence will not take the form of an all-encompassing, godlike Supermind, so beloved of science fiction authors and fans.
Instead, as the centuries roll on, we will see a proliferation of specialized applications tailored to specific tasks, that we would definitely call intelligent, but our descendants may not.
Ultimately, the only remaining special feature of human intelligence may be the ability to invent excuses for why we are special!
