Gonzalez 1

Oddett Gonzalez

Moberg

English 120

Research Paper - Final Draft

Nov 12, y

Artificial Intelligence

We live in a world that has been around for 4.5 billion

years, and through out the existence of Earth their have

been many changes and advancements made. One of the most

popular and most controversial advancements is technology.

The topic of advancements in technology can be very broad,

as there are advancements in different types of technology,

but this paper will focus on the development of Artificial

Intelligence. You may ask yourself what is Artificial

Intelligence? According to Science Daily “the modern

definition of artificial intelligence is 'the study and

design of intelligent agents’ where an intelligent agent is

a system that perceives its environment and takes actions

which maximizes its chances of success”. Artificial

Intelligence or A. I. is the theory and development of

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computer systems that are capable of performing tasks that

normally require human intelligence, such as visual

perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and

translation between languages. Imagine a robot, like in

Disney’s WALL-E who is able to do what any human can do,

but at a greater scale.

Origins of AI

”Our history is full of attempts—nutty, eerie, comical,

earnest, legendary and real—to make artificial

intelligences, to reproduce what is the essential us—

bypassing the ordinary means. Back and forth between myth

and reality, our imaginations supplying what our workshops

couldn't, we have engaged for a long time in this odd form

of self-reproduction." (McCorduck p. 3) It may seem as if

the idea of artificial intelligence is a recent thing but

the intellectual roots of A.I, and the concept of

intelligent machines can be found in Greek Mythology. The

Greek God Hephaestus and his creation of Talos a giant man

made of bronze incorporated the idea of intelligent robots,

and Pandora who was the first human woman created by the

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gods, specifically Hephaestus and Athena, can be seen as an

example of an artificial being. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is

another example of an artificial being. Mary Shelley's

Frankenstein considers this issue in the ethics of artificial

intelligence: if a machine can be created that has

intelligence, could it also feel? If it can feel, does it

have the same rights as a human? This is called Robot

rights. During a personal Interview I asked my classmate

Julianna what she thought about the future development of

robots with the emotions and feelings. Julianna believes

that when an Artificially Intelligent specimen is given

emotion it must be given rights. There is a vast difference

between a robot who follows a command at a push of a

button, and a robot that has its own emotions and thoughts.

She believes that an A. I. who doesn't have its own

feelings can be controlled to do what ever the creators

like, but a robot with emotions who is basically human

should have its right, taking control of it would be a form

slavery.

Modern AI

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The field of A. I. research was founded at a conference

on the campus of Dartmouth College in the summer of 1956.

The attendees, including John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky,

Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, who later became the

leaders of A. I. research for many decades. John McCarthy,

created the term Artificial Intelligence and defined it as

"the science and engineering of making intelligent

machines.”

A. I. that we use today

If you have a certain understanding of AI, you would

most likely imagine a robotic toy as a type of A. I. that

we use today. But did you ever stop and ask yourselves of

any other A. I. that we use? Siri is a form of A. I. that

we use today, it may not be strong but it has been program

to respond and help with request in an intelligent matter.

There are some limitations to what Siri can do, but with

more updates comes more features and I can see Siri being

more helpful and intelligent in the future. Recommendation

systems that are given to you on YouTube, Amazon, and other

websites is a form of AI. Google Translate is another

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example of A. I. that we have access too and that is

commonly used.

Strong AI

Strong A. I. will be equal to people in all respects,

it will be able to do what any normal person can do and it

will have consciousness in some common sense. Computers can

reason but they don't know about the world. Unlike humans,

robots can’t experience the world like we do. The human

brain is complex entity, and it is hard to capture it

through engineering. Scientist think that for a robot to

have the same comprehension and understanding as humans it

must build itself from observing the world. Animals and

people do this by learning, our brain built it self by

learning. This brings us to the topic of brain emulation.

Brain emulation or mind uploading is the hypothetical

process of copying the mental content from a human brain

and copying it to a robot, AI, or any computational device.

If brain emulation ever became a reality scientist would be

able to take a scan of a humans brain and transfer it on to

a robot or droid and hopefully this way the A. I. would

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have a consensus of emotions such as love, passion, and

fear. .

Survey

I got a total

of 6 responses on

my Artificial

Intelligence

Survey; here

are some of my

results.

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For the most part, the respondents had some sort of idea of

what A. I. is. I asked the respondents what they though was

the definition of Artificial Intelligence and 5/6 answered

Robots. Only one respondent answered with “the use of smart

technology that can beat man kind”. Half of the

respondents from the same survey said that they didn’t want

to be in a world were artificial intelligence was very

prevalent. The other half said that they would like to live

in a world where artificial intelligence was prevalent. The

negating side didn't want to be in a world with A. I.

because they didn't want the world to be dominated by A. I.

one day. The respondents who where okay with A. I. in a

near future thought that this type of technological

advancement would help improve the quality of life, as well

as make it easier for them to be lazy, that “A. I. will

happen one day, its inevitable”.

Perspectives for future research

The end goal is to have machines that are as capable

and flexible as humans are. A sufficiently powerful A. I.

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could develop new medical technologies capable of saving

millions of human lives (Yudkowsky p. 9). A. I. can help

better diagnoses to patients, and provide greater and safer

treatments for surgery. A. I. can replace public

transportation and automobiles, it will end up causing

people to lose jobs, but it would overall be better for

safety. Intelligent personal assistants like Siri or Google

Now will be capable of completing more advanced task with

just a voice command, like making a reservation at a

restaurant or booking a plane ticket. Once computers become

cheap enough, the vast majority of jobs will be performable

by Artificial Intelligence more easily than by humans. A

sufficiently powerful A. I. would even be better than us at

math, engineering, music, art, and all the other jobs we

consider meaningful.

Drawbacks of A. I.

Silicon Valley’s resident futurist, Elon Musk, recently

said artificial intelligence is “potentially more dangerous

than nukes.” And Stephen Hawking, one of the smartest

people on earth, wrote that successful A. I. “would be the

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biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might

also be the last.” There is a long list of computer experts

who are also fearful of a rogue robot-infested future

(Bilton). Some problems that could come with artificial

intelligence, which leads experts like Musk and Hawking to

worry, is that we are starting to create machines that can

make decisions and do tasks like humans, but these machines

don’t have morality and it is possible that scientist wont

be able to emulate it to an A. I. . Another problem that

could be faced is is how these technologies will be used,

if for example the military used A. I. it could cause a lot

of damage to our world and it’s not hard to imagine

countries engaging in an arms race to make unfriendly A. I.

built specifically to kill.

Why is A. I. Relevant to Our Society?

Artificial intelligence is a goal for researchers, and

the subject of endless works for writers and filmmakers.

Despite the best science fiction visions, creating

artificial intelligence is incredibly difficult. The

universe is a very complicated place, and humans have had

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millions of years to evolve and to gain the ability to

navigate and make sense of it. No matter how we get there,

it is certain that artificial intelligence will have

tremendous impact on our society and economy, and lead us

down a path towards evolving our own definitions of

humanity. A. I. is something that is going to be achieved

one day in time and once it has become a reality our world

will change drastically, it will become a different social

world. Robots are immortal, they can travel around the world

with a push of a button, and their encoding could be

uploaded and sent to a different robot body across the

world. Humans may even have the choice of emulating

themselves and becoming droids. Social change is bound to

happen, and it will continue to happen though time. Original

foragers choose to stay as foragers or decided to leave and

become farmers. Our ancestors experienced and lived in a

different time with different values, and our decedents will

also have different values

Conclusion

I didn’t know what A. I. was three months ago, I knew

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about robots and drones from movies and books but I never

thought that it was something that scientist were working

on currently. I learned about Artificial Intelligence in my

Psychology class this year and this topic has interested me

since then. I don’t know if I will be alive to witness AI,

but I do hope to see more advancement in the future. The

first glimpse I really had of artificial life such as

robots and androids was from a dystopian book series called

The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyers that I read. This series

follows the lives of different characters but the first

book in the series Cinder follows a cyborg girl, Linh

Cinder. Cinder was born human and was in a terrible

accident as a child, and not all of her made it through the

crash and fire. She was given robotic parts to replace and

fix the burnt and damaged parts of her body, in the end she

36.28% not human. Linh Cinder’s augmentations include

brain-computer interface with access to the Net, an

internal lie detector, optical implants, a prosthetic left

hand with bonus functionalities, a prosthetic left calf

with a secret compartment, and a prosthetic left foot.

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Cinder went through a difficult ordeal, but she was able to

surpass it due to the technology in her time. In the Artificial

Intelligence a Modern Approach it has been predicted that humans

and machines will merge in the future into cyborgs that are

more capable and powerful than either (Russell p. 963).

This idea is called transhumanism, and it’s not be confused

with brain emulation. Brain emulation involves scanning a

human’s brain and using it for an A. I. so that it can have

human like emotions and feelings. Transhumanism is

enhancing a human by developing technologies that greatly

enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological

capacities. Right now in our current world and time there

are scientists, engineers, and inventors who are conduction

research and experiments to make what Cinder had a reality.

They may have not reached the capability of creating a

computer for a brain, but as time goes on more advancements

are being made towards these types of technologies.

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Work Cited

"Artificial Intelligence." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, n.d.

Web. 23 Oct. 2014.

"AITopics." History. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Oct. 2014.

"AITopics." Brief History. A. I. Topics, n.d. Web. 04 Nov.

2014.

Juliana. "Artificial Intelligence." Personal interview. 14

Nov. 2014.

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The Rise of Artificial Intelligence | Off Book | PBS Digital Studios. Perf.

Ernest Davis, Yann LeCann, Robin Hanson, Gary Marcus. YouTube.

PBSofbook, 11 July 2013. Web. 04 Nov. 2014.

Gonzalez, Oddett. “Artificial Intelligence" Survey. Survey

Monkey. 23 October 2014. Web.

Yudkowsky, Eliezer. 2008. “Artificial Intelligence as a

Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk.” In Global

Catastrophic Risks , edited by Nick Bostrom and Milan M.

Ćirković, 308–345. New York: Oxford University Press.

McCorduck, Pamela. Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History

and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1979.

Print.

Russell, Stuart J. (Stuart Jonathan), and Peter Norvig.

Artificial Intelligence a Modern Approach/ Stuart Russell ; Peter Norvig. New Jersey:

Prentice Hall, 2003. pp 963. Print.

Bilton, Nick. "Artificial Intelligence as a Threat." The New

York Times. The New York Times, 05 Nov. 2014. Web. 10 Nov. 2014.

Letter to the Editor

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If you have a certain understanding of AI, you would most

likely imagine a robotic toy as a type of A. I. that we use

today. But did you ever stop and ask yourselves of any other A.

I. that we use? Siri is a form of A. I. that we use today, it may

not be strong but it has been program to respond and help with

request in an intelligent matter. In your article you focus more

on Strong A. I. which would be equal to people in all respects,

it will be able to do what any normal person can do and it will

have consciousness in some common sense. There is a vast

difference between a robot that follows a command at a push of a

button, and a robot that has its own emotions and thoughts. It is

unknown now if it will ever be possible to give A. I. morality,

but it’s important to keep in mind that yes these machine can be

used for bad, but they can also bring much improvement to our

world as long as they are used for good.