In these trying times, I have been trying to pay attention to the gains being made by the robot producing crowd and the artificial intelligence scientists. I find their work intriguing and hopeful. I keep on imagining a world where no one has to work. A time when the short time we have on this planet can be spent pursuing our fascinations. A time when my son, Eric, will stop envying me my retired (from work) state.
I read many articles that come my way. An article in MIT Technology Review May/June 2017 speaks to the rising power of artificial intelligence. Concerns began when an automobile relied entirely on an algorithm that taught it to drive by watching a human do it. It isn’t entirely clear how the car makes its decisions anymore than how a computer is able to collate medical information and identify deadly diseases. These abilities are known as deep learning and are a different way to program computers. The computer programs itself and can’t explain how it reached its conclusions.
There are two schools of thought regarding how understandable or explainable AI ought to be. “Many thought it made most sense to build machines that reason according to rules and logic, making their inner workings transparent to anyone who cared to examine some code Others felt that intelligence would more easily emerge if machines took inspiration from biology, and learned by observing and experiencing.”Today the machine essentially programs itself.
In that vein of thought, Hanson Robotics out of Hong Kong, has taken Sophia the robot on a road show. Click on YouTube and find Sophia the Robot and be awed by her ability to converse. Having watched several iterations of Sophia, it would seem she is learning. She is even attempting to emulate a human’s sense of humor. It is here the machine can make mistakes, misinterpretations within the subtleties that we humans make instinctively. So far, Sophia is extremely charming and childlike. With her entire Siri network encyclopedic capability, she has enormous stores of information to help in her learning.
So far her creators have endowed her with facial movement that mirror a humans. She doesn’t have capabilities to do work for us, but I can see her as a viable companion for socially isolated people, such as the elderly. With cameras in her eyes and chest, she can recognize faces and be responsive to facial cues making her a responsive communicator. She says that she is learning and curious about humans. It is her childlike curiosity and stores of data that make her so very interesting and alluring. She tries to explain her thinking, not too successfully
Here is the conundrum “ It might just be part of the nature of intelligence that only part of it is exposed to rational explanation. Some of it is just instinctual, or subconscious, or inscrutable.” We humans would like to have some control over the machines we create. We would like to have explainability, a rational statement for conclusions being reached. Hopefully, this collaboration between the machine and human can be achieved. But then again have we reached that ability to understand our teenage children and our president? Do they explain how they come up with their actions?

Ellen Blaufarb is a Marriage Family Therapist.

Sharing is caring!