Ben Goertzel offers an overview of the future of machine intelligence, commonly called Artificial Intelligence (AI). He was one of the organizers of the Artifical General Intelligence (AGI) conference (AGI-09) held in Arlington, VA March 6-9, 2009.
A must read by teachers of all grades of math and science for a quick authoritative update about AI and AGI.
Teachers, students, education software developers and other readers will find this article a readable overview of attempts to make computer software that outthinks humans. That means a machine that writes software that humans cannot write.
Average reading elementary school and older students will understand main points of this conference. Scientists discuss uses of math and possible futures of artifical intelligence during their lifetimes, including things considered science fiction a decade ago.
The majority of the crowd at AGI-09 hailed from academic institutions. Major firms like Google, GE, AT&T and Autodesk also participated, along with entrepreneurs involved with AI startups, and independent researchers.
Participants presented a particularly large number of high-quality papers dealing with the problem of “program learning” — that is, the creation of software that can take as input a certain behavior (presented as a description, or as a set of examples), and produce as output a computer program capable of demonstrating this behavior.
More than five presenters gave priority to systems or methods for learning new algorithms.
Since its founding in the 1950s and 1960s, the AI field has achieved great successes – to name just a few: the AI linguistics underlying Google and other search engines; the AI planning and scheduling software used throughout the military and industry; the AI fraud detection software underlying modern credit card operations; and the AI gaming software underlying everything from Deep Blue to the bots in massively multiplayer online games.
Albus (a presenter) proposes that — as AGIs gradually take over the economy — the government should gradually transform the population from workers into investors, by giving each citizen an investment account that they can manage themselves, in a manner inspired by current mutual funds.
Did you notice that software developers of writing and speech recognition, such as available with Tablet PCs, used AI?