Wait for HAL? Don't hold your breath.
Joe Marks, executive director of the Center for Machine Learning and Health at Carnegie Mellon University, tells Modern Healthcare whether some AI in pop culture is realistic or possible today.
Joe Marks: If you take a broad view of AI, it’s been around a long time. There are many subdisciplines in addition to machine learning, and they have had a number of successes over the years to the point where people maybe don’t even think of them as AI anymore and they’re using them all the time. The combination of genomic data and machine learning might be the big trend of the next decade or two. You’re going to see incremental results coming out and then mushrooming as more data are available.
What about HAL from “2001: A Space Odyssey”?
Marks: The sentient computer HAL and all that it does—that’s still a long way away. Take the fact that it’s interacting with speech: The things that do work, for example, are simple Q& A with speech where you’re asking it to retrieve a fact. It’s still amazingly impressive what you can do on Google on your smartphone and just ask a question in English and it comes back with an answer, often a Wikipedia answer. There’s a very, very long way between that and the conversational and cognitive and thinking capabilities that HAL had. They are far beyond what we can do.
“Minority Report”?
Marks: We have some intelligent interfaces. They’re on your smartphone, if you think about it—maybe not the gestural stuff but certainty the speech stuff. The idea that it knows your consumption habits and can provide recommendations—that already exists. Amazon and Netflix do that decently.
R2-D2 and C-3PO from “Star Wars”?
Marks: That’s still very, very hard AI. And there are also the power requirements holding it back. The hero has to solve some task and consults with the robot, and that’s hard. There’s a multistep process that needs to be done to solve some task, and the human and computer together are going to work, reason through that, and then follow the steps perceiving the changes to the environment and everything else. Collaborative, complex problem-solving is very different from fact retrieval and simple perception. That’s the thing that makes these robots in movies compelling and exciting and interesting, and that’s what we don’t know how to do.
“Blade Runner”?
Marks: We’re so far away from that kind of a robot that’s so convincingly human that it could fool us. That’s an unlikely one.
Killer robot dogs in the “Black Mirror” episode “Metalhead”?
Marks: Tragically, that kind of thing might actually be closer to reality. With something like killer drones, you want much more sophistication. When they have military robots that are as clever as a patrol leader, yes, then I’ll feel safe having them deployed, but just simple-minded drones with simple-minded commands like “kill everything in this zone”— that’s doable but really not what humanity needs or wants.