It is amazing how far technology has come in this day and age; you have cars that can park themselves, apps on phones that let you turn on lights or control things in the physical world. All of these amazing technology held together by a literal mess of 0’s and 1’s. All the circuits, and programs made up of what could easily be random garbled words translated into binary just to piece together these amazing works of technology. Now imagine if your phone could also think and be conscious, that a machine could be sentient, just the possibility of machines being so advanced blows my mind.
Yet there are robots that have passed self awareness tests years ago. I mean take a look at the link below and tell me that this isn’t amazing. You can see the robot processing, thinking, as well as trying to figure out which “pill” it was given, which in this case is just a tap on the head. Now you might say this seems pretty dumb, but this is actually a very monumental task, for just a bunch of 0’s and 1’s. How the robots interpreted that tap was an enormous task.
Let me explain the process of this a bit more. The robots were on standby until they received that “tap” which led to a domino effect of an insane amount of calculations and processing. These robots probably went through more data than your computer goes through in a day just to come to a conclusion. This test that these robots went through not only requires for this AI to listen and understand a question but to be able to hear its own voice and recognize it’s own voice. That’s like trying to get your siri or google to talk to itself all on one phone. Next it would have to make sure that it can differentiate it’s own voice from other robots, that’s the equivalent of getting siri or google to understand you over someone else trying to scream out commands at it at the same time. Finally it would need to link back all this information back to the original question just to come up with an answer. You know what that would be like? That’s like trying to ask your phone what you put in your fridge a day ago.
Although as amazing this is, it is honestly terrifying at the same time! I mean if my phone knew what I put in my fridge a day ago, when I never told it is scary. If robots can think for themselves just as humans do, what’s to say some won’t become evil like some humans are? That itself is pretty terrifying.
Who knows what’s in store for us in the future. I have mixed feelings about this, half excited and half scared to see how far AI’s will go. Although, I think the strongest emotion out of me, is pure innocent curiosity of how this idea came to life and how it was made.
By: Bethany Pemberton
Ms. Harner's EN100 Blog 