AI Cannot Do These Yet

My impression of AI

I had read a novel (published in a magazine) during my secondary school time. Unfortunately I could not recall the title. The story background was about a future city. A city where human and robots were living together. Those robots were looked so similar and capable of doing things like a human. Both human and robot collaborate in so many industries, included politics, education, transportation, etc. The only way to find out if you are a robot or human is to open up the head skull which underneath your hairs. Could you imagine how strong or perfect AI that city has?

Not the Terminator-AI yet

I believe this is mostly common understanding of people on AI. People often anticipate AI like a magic or something very advanced like what we have seen in the blockbuster movies. If you build robot, people tend to imagine that it must be look like The Terminator type, i.e. highly intelligent than a human being. In fact, AI today, generally known as a third wave breakthrough which is mainly achieved on deep learning algorithm. This is applied widely on machine vision and audio. And, I must mention that, this is a supervised learning result.

Not a mixed conversational-AI yet

Some countries in this region like Malaysia or Singapore are so unique of their rojak(mix) culture in the true localised language speaking environment. I have seen how good a conversational enabled device, e.g. Alexa, Google Home to handle English conversation; Yet a true rojak AI to appear in our space. Apparently, a teacher’s job is still quite secured and not easily replaced by AI in our country. By the way, I remember that probably three years ago there is a mini robot called Robi which claimed it was designed to interact in English, Malay and Mandarin. Please share with me your experience if you had one.

Not a creator-AI yet

Human emotions in a machine have always been controversial. You might argue that the reinforcement learning could enable a machine to have a self-consciousness capability. Well, there is no denying that AI has enabled a machine to simulate human’s thinking and behaviour. However, in my opinion, this is still far from achieving the true human emotions level. Thus, we could notice that a low adoption of AI in creativity industries like artists, software programmers, researcher, scientist, etc.

Conclusion

Today, the so called intelligence is based on Turing test which aims to solve problem in a mathematical way.

Is strong AI possible?

Will a computer really think?

Well, in my view, it is still early to debating on this. Let’s focus and appreciate what benefits of AI could bring to human at each of its breakthrough stage.