The Rapid Advance of Artificial Intelligence - NYTimes.com
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Oct 14, 2013 - Scientists
and engineers are creating a world in which cars drive themselves,
machines recognize people and humanoid robots travel ...Business Day Technology
The Rapid Advance of Artificial Intelligence
Sally Ryan for The New York Times
Baxter, made by Rethink
Robotics, doesn’t rely on programming alone: It can sense what needs to
be done and adapt itself to the task.
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: October 14, 2013
A gaggle of Harry Potter
fans descended for several days this summer on the Oregon Convention
Center in Portland for the Leaky Con gathering, an annual haunt of a
group of predominantly young women who immerse themselves in a fantasy
world of magic, spells and images.
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The jubilant and occasionally squealing attendees appeared to have no
idea that next door a group of real-world wizards was demonstrating
technology that only a few years ago might have seemed as magical.
The scientists and engineers at the Computer Vision and Pattern
Recognition conference are creating a world in which cars drive
themselves, machines recognize people and “understand” their emotions,
and humanoid robots travel unattended, performing everything from
mundane factory tasks to emergency rescues.
C.V.P.R., as it is known, is an annual gathering of computer vision
scientists, students, roboticists, software hackers — and increasingly
in recent years, business and entrepreneurial types looking for another
great technological leap forward.
The growing power of computer vision is a crucial first step for the
next generation of computing, robotic and artificial intelligence
systems. Once machines can identify objects and understand their
environments, they can be freed to move around in the world. And once
robots become mobile they will be increasingly capable of extending the
reach of humans or replacing them.
Self-driving cars, factory robots and a new class of farm hands known as
ag-robots are already demonstrating what increasingly mobile machines
can do. Indeed, the rapid advance of computer vision is just one of a
set of artificial intelligence-oriented technologies — others include
speech recognition, dexterous manipulation and navigation — that
underscore a sea change beyond personal computing and the Internet, the
technologies that have defined the last three decades of the computing
world.
“During the next decade we’re going to see smarts put into everything,”
said Ed Lazowska, a computer scientist at the University of Washington
who is a specialist in Big Data. “Smart homes, smart cars, smart health,
smart robots, smart science, smart crowds and smart computer-human
interactions.”
The enormous amount of data being generated by inexpensive sensors has
been a significant factor in altering the center of gravity of the
computing world, he said, making it possible to use centralized
computers in data centers — referred to as the cloud — to take
artificial intelligence technologies like machine-learning and spread
computer intelligence far beyond desktop computers.
Apple was the most successful early innovator in popularizing what is
today described as ubiquitous computing. The idea, first proposed by
Mark Weiser, a computer scientist with Xerox, involves embedding
powerful microprocessor chips in everyday objects.
Steve Jobs, during his second tenure at Apple, was quick to understand
the implications of the falling cost of computer intelligence. Taking
advantage of it, he first created a digital music player, the iPod, and
then transformed mobile communication with the iPhone. Now such
innovation is rapidly accelerating into all consumer products.
“The most important new computer maker in Silicon Valley isn’t a computer maker at all, it’s Tesla,” the electric car
manufacturer, said Paul Saffo, a managing director at Discern
Analytics, a research firm based in San Francisco. “The car has become a
node in the network and a computer in its own right. It’s a primitive
robot that wraps around you.”
Here are several areas in which next-generation computing systems and
more powerful software algorithms could transform the world in the next
half-decade.
Artificial Intelligence
With increasing frequency, the voice on the other end of the line is a computer.
It has been two years since Watson, the artificial intelligence program created by I.B.M.,
beat two of the world’s best “Jeopardy” players. Watson, which has
access to roughly 200 million pages of information, is able to
understand natural language queries and answer questions.
The computer maker had initially planned to test the system as an expert
adviser to doctors; the idea was that Watson’s encyclopedic knowledge
of medical conditions could aid a human expert in diagnosing illnesses,
as well as contributing computer expertise elsewhere in medicine.
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