Re-examine future of artificial intelligence

Public meeting will re-examine future of artificial intelligence
Tom Abate, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, September 7, 2007

For decades, scientists and writers have imagined a future with walking, talking robots that could do everything from cooking your eggs to enslaving your planet.

Trouble is, this fabled artificial intelligence has never happened.

But this weekend, more than 700 scientists and tech industry leaders will gather at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts Theatre to plan for the day – still decades away – when computers start improving themselves without the approval of their former masters. Participants wonder whether this will yield the kindly Commander Data of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” fame or the mob of killer machines that attempted a world takeover in the movie “I, Robot.”

“The history of technology tells us that inventions can be used or misused for good or evil. It could be that an Orwellian state could use this technology, or it could lead to a world with more accountability and transparency,” said technology financier Peter Thiel, a principal backer of the two-day event called “The Singularity Summit: AI and the Future of Humanity.”

The Singularity is the term used to describe this anticipated – or feared – day when machines become smart and perhaps ambitious enough to reprogram themselves. This weekend’s gathering expands on a similar event held last year at Stanford University.

Thiel, who holds philosophy and law degrees from Stanford, co-founded PayPal and sold it to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. In addition to running Clarium Capital Management, the hedge fund he founded in San Francisco, Thiel, 39, is using his wealth and celebrity to raise public awareness of the stakes surrounding artificial intelligence, or AI.

So, why should society take AI seriously now when its promoters have oversold it so far?

“The pendulum has swung too far, and people now underestimate it,” said Thiel, arguing that recent advances in computer hardware, software, cognitive science and computer networking have created a technological primordial ooze. Moreover, these primitive AI systems have already made themselves useful parts of everyday life.

“Google, to a certain extent, you could characterize as a limited artificial intelligence,” said Tyler Emerson, executive director of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the Palo Alto nonprofit group sponsoring the weekend summit with financial support from Thiel.

As Emerson explained, computer scientists now freely admit that they vastly underestimated the complexity of human intelligence when they first defined AI as an all-knowing, smarter-than-human system that could do everything from calculating the trajectories of planet-killing asteroids to composing an opera.

But while that general-purpose vision of AI has proved elusive, Emerson said technologists have gradually built and deployed special-purpose artificial assistants that we already take for granted.

In addition to search engines, he cited the way nonhuman characters in online video games react to their human counterparts. He noted that 10 years ago, Deep Blue, the IBM computer, whipped world chess champion Garry Kasparov. And he acknowledged advances in robotics exemplified by Stanley, the Volkswagen that drove itself across the Mojave Desert in 2005 using onboard sensors and software developed by computer scientists at Stanford.

Here is the full story on the San Francisco Chronicle.

(For your information, Peter Thiel is also a USCF Master with a rating of 2287)