Can AI machines think without humans? 

 

 

 

Humans are creative in many walks of life. Great works of art, literature and
music give testament to this fact. Creativity is the use of skills and intelligence
to generate something unique. At SmartCloud, with artificial intelligence (AI)
being a core of our software technology, we sometimes ask if machines with
AI can be creative without humans. But a more relevant question for us is:
"Can AI machines think without humans?" 

 

The Imitation Game 

 

For many years, scientists have been debating whether AI machines would
ever be able to think for themselves. The English mathematician, Alan Turing,
who is featured in the just released movie "The Imitation Game," created the
"Turing Test" in 1950 to determine if a computer could imitate a human well
enough to fool judges 30% of the time. If so, it could be concluded that the
computer had artificial intelligence. 

 

This year, a Russian-developed chatbot named "Eugene Goostman" was given the Turing Test. After a 5-minute conversational test, it was judged to be "human" by 33% of the judging panel. This follows an earlier test, in 2011, when a "chatbot" named "Cleverbot" also passed the Turing Test in front of 30 judges and a 1,000-member audience who also participated in the judging. 

 

But the critics of the test say that it only measures how well an AI machine can simulate conversation. That’s what these chatbots do impressively. There is no deep kind of intelligence behind the
algorithms. There is little, if any,
evidence of "self-awareness",
"consciousness", or a "common
sense" that broadly understands
the context of everyday life. 

 

At SmartCloud we think of intelligence as an adaptive process of
observation, decision, and action. In many situations AI machines
can do these things faster than humans. But they do not fully "think"
on their own as humans do. At least not yet. 

 

However, AI systems are being built to partner with humans in
many ways. 

 

AI partnerships with humans

 

Technologists and scientists around the world are developing AI machines to assist their human counterparts. Personal assistants like Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Google’s Now are helping humans get faster
answers from the Web and to more quickly plan activities. Video games embrace AI to give players a more immersive, entertaining experience. IBM’s "Watson" evaluates thousands of documents for physicians to suggest diagnoses in complex diseases like cancer. And Mercedes is providing a glimpse into the future of transportation with its semi-trailer Future Truck that can go driverless on a highway under human supervision. 

 

A growing partnership between AI and humans is inevitable in tomorrow’s society. 

 

Industrial AI partnerships 

 

SmartCloud focuses on the partnering of industrial-strength AI
and humans in settings like utility grids, oil and gas production,
manufacturing, financial compliance, and supply chains. 

 

We aim our AI solutions at helping human operators do what
they do best as they maintain awareness of, apply intelligence to,
and take control of complex operational situations in real time. 

 

Instead of using AI to engage in a casual conversation, query the
Web, play a game, or drive a truck, SmartCloud’s AI teams with
humans as they do things like detecting fraud, predicting and
diagnosing problems in an electric grid, determining optimal energy
settings for a facility, or bidding into a real-time energy market. 

 

Our AI combines reasoning techniques such as Semantic Web knowledge bases, semantic reasoners, AI Agents, rules, and machine learning. We’ve given our AI industrial strength by designing it to be non-stop, understand time, model and simulate complex systems, handle noisy data, process streams of big data, and orchestrate control actions in real time. 

 

 

Alan Turing and other AI pioneers expected machines to imitate human thinking, certainly by now. But with all due respect to their work, the AI machine still needs a thinking sidekick – one of us.