THE DAYS OF AI
Researchers say that interactions will be more personalized.
Iwake up in the middle of the night. It’s cold. “Hey, Google, what’s the temperature in Zone 2,” I say into the darkness. A disembodied voice responds: “The temperature in Zone 2 is 52 degrees.” “Set the heat to 68,” I say, and then I ask the gods of artificial intelligence to turn on the light.
Many of us already live with AI, an array of unseen algorithms that control our internet-connected devices, from smartphones to security cameras and cars that heat the seats before you’ve even stepped out of the house on a frigid morning.
But, while we’ve seen the AI sun, we have yet to see it truly shine.
Researchers liken the current state of the technology to cellphones of the 1990s: useful, but crude and cumbersome. They are working on distilling the largest, most powerful machine-learning models into lightweight software that can run on “the edge,” meaning small devices such as kitchen appliances or wearables. Our lives will gradually be interwoven with
brilliant threads of AI.
Our interactions with the technology will become increasingly personalized. Chatbots, for example, can be clumsy and frustrating today, but they will eventually become truly conversational, learning our habits and personalities and even develop personalities of their own. But don’t worry, the fever dreams of superintelligent machines taking over, like HAL in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” will remain science fiction for a long time to come; selfawareness and free will in machines are far beyond the capabilities of science today.
Privacy remains an issue, because artificial intelligence requires data to learn patterns and make decisions. But researchers are developing methods to use our data without actually seeing it — so-called federated learning, for example — or encrypt it in ways that currently can’t be hacked.
Our homes and our cars will increasingly be watched over with AI-integrated sensors. Some security cameras today use AI-enabled facial recognition software to identify frequent visitors and detect strangers.
But soon, networks of overlapping cameras and sensors will create a mesh of “ambient intelligence,” that will be available to monitor us all the time, if we want it. Ambient intelligence could recognize changes in behavior and prove a boon to older adults and their families.
“Intelligent systems will be able to understand the daily activity patterns of seniors living alone, and catch early patterns of medically relevant information,” said Fei-Fei Li, a Stanford University computer science professor and a co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. While she says much work remains to be done to address privacy concerns, such systems could detect signs of dementia, sleep disorders, social isolation, falls and poor nutrition, and notify caretakers.
Increasingly, more of the media we consume will actually be generated by AI. Google’s open-source
Magenta project has created an array of applications that make music indistinguishable from human composers and performers.
The research institute OpenAI has created
MuseNet, which uses artificial intelligence to blend different styles of music into new compositions. The institute also has Jukebox, which creates new songs when given a genre, artist and lyrics, which in some cases are co-written by AI.
Musicians are experimenting with these tools today and a few startups are already offering AI-generated background music for podcasts and video games.
Artificial intelligence is even starting to write software and may eventually write more complex AI. Diffblue, a startup out of Oxford University, has an AI system that automates the writing of software tests, a task that takes up as much as a third of expensive developers’ time. Justin Gottschlich, who runs the machine programming research group at Intel Labs, envisions a day when anyone can create software simply by telling an AI system clearly what they want the software to do.
“I can imagine people like my mom creating software,” he said, “even though she can’t write a line of code.”