Thursday, June 4, 2009

Is VIKI finally coming?

Right now I'm in IIT doing a summer project. Over the past year or so I had added new words to my vocabulary. "Artificial Neural Networks", "Machine learning" were simply words which warranted a wikipedia article. But their full implicattin has hit me only now that I have gone through some of the amazing work that has gone into automating our world.
Gone are the days when we lived safely under the premise that fast as computers may be, they cannot match a human. today computers have acquired a new ability "Learning".
Machines can be trained into identifying and classifying data which they have never encountered before.
To the computer theorist, this is an enthralling prospect. to me its just plain scary.
we as humans hold ourselves above all creation because of our single ability to learn from our surroundings. Now imagine a whole population's experience being learnt by a computer in a matter of minutes. I'm not exaggerating. This is not a doomsday theory. It IS happening. Present tense. the guy sitiing next to me just trained a program to id a face, given hundreds of photos of human faces taken from various angles. it took all of 15 seconds. later it tracked my face input to it from a webcam.

As humans we go through a similar cycle from birth to death. everyday we come across new experiences which we upload into our database for reference at a later date. theoretically our brains are currently at the same level as these learning machines.But comps hold two distinct advantages over us
1)they do not forget experiences. Hence in the near future it will be near impossible to trick them twice.
2)they learn much much faster than any human could.
If you think this is not a matter to lose sleep over, think again. Our lives have already been invaded y technology in ways we do not suspect. For instance every web page in the whole world is reviewed by web bots which are in the constant lookout for extremist activities. A noble enough issue. now put two and two together. By scanning the pages if a powerful enough computer does figure out that the cause of human distress is in fact individualism(and it is mind you... Just look at every human revolution. from Napolean to gandhi , it has required the force of one man or a small group to turn the world on its head..... A simpler, more logical solution as anyone would agree, is simply to acknowledge that all humans are made equal and break all social barriers.... But NO.... we are constantly in the need to impress our peers), whats to stop it from organising the world for us? true, this sort of computing power is possible today only under distributed computing but for how long will that dam stand strong? I,Robot come to mind?

1 comment:

patanjali said...

admirable concerns mate
but still as you said it is happening and still here we are going on.so should we worry?