From health to crimefighting, AI has brought us to the threshold of a new era

It is being woven into the fabric of our lives, but critics say AI could threaten human rights, privacy and society in general. So where is it already being used?

At Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, consultants are facing a familiar problem.

Patient numbers are surging. Age-related eye diseases are becoming more and more common, and as the British demographic gets ever older, numbers are predicted to increase by between a third and one half.

A central goal of the field of artificial intelligence is for machines to be able to learn how to perform tasks and make decisions independently, rather than being explicitly programmed with inflexible rules. There are different ways of achieving this in practice, but some of the most striking recent advances, such as AlphaGo, have used a strategy called reinforcement learning. Typically the machine will have a goal, such as translating a sentence from English to French and a massive dataset to train on. It starts off just making a stab at the task – in the translation example it would start by producing garbled nonsense and comparing its attempts against existing translations. The program is then “rewarded” with a score when it is successful. After each iteration of the task it improves and after a vast number of reruns, such programs can match and even exceed the level of human translators. Getting machines to learn less well defined tasks or ones for which no digital datasets exist is a future goal that would require a more general form of intelligence, akin to common sense.

Related: Why we can't leave AI in the hands of Big Tech

Continue reading... November 03, 2017 at 04:30PM