‘Deep Mind’ AI As Advanced as a 4yr old!

The ‘Deep Mind’ team have developed an AI that can think ‘like a four year old’ will this be our making or undoing?

[dropcap style=”font-size:100px;color:#992211;”]D[/dropcap]eep Mind, have developed robot toddlers! Well not quite, reported in the New Scientist and the Metro, the team that brought us the first AI that could beat a human player at GO have now managed to give skills to an AI intelligence previously thought only to be possible in humans (and yes probably the Dolphins! Sigh.)

“MACHINES are getting to know each other better. An artificial intelligence, developed by Google-owned research firm DeepMind, can now pass an important psychological assessment that most children only develop the skills to pass at around age 4. Its aptitude in this key theory of mind test may lead to AIs that are more human-like,” Timothy Revell, ‘DeepMind AI is learning to understand the ‘thoughts’ of others’ New Scientist, 2018

This is the ability to infer what someone else is thinking. The team are expanding and like it or not this technology will come to define much of the future from warfare to elderly care,

Of course we are all hoping for C3PO or Rachel from ‘Blade Runner’

“In the UK, we feel we’ve helped played an important role in encouraging and supporting the AI community to flourish – from start-ups and universities, to new organisations like the Turing Institute – and we hope that we can contribute to the success of Canada’s pioneering centres of research too,” Deep Mind official research web page

Recall Stephen Hawking’s warning that we may be planting the seeds of our own demise,

“Professor Stephen Hawking has warned that the creation of powerful artificial intelligence will be “either the best, or the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity”, and praised the creation of an academic institute dedicated to researching the future of intelligence as “crucial to the future of our civilisation and our species,” Alex Hern, Stephen Hawking: AI will be ‘either best or worst thing’ for humanity, 2016 Guardian.com

Of course we are all hoping for C3PO or Rachel from ‘Blade Runner’ but there is a risk we might create something that just doesn’t get us, or does, and doesn’t like us!

Rachel in Blade Runner 1982

It’s more likely though that we will see machines being used for more and more tasks that once belonged to humans and that could be wonderful if our lives are subsidized when the robots take our jobs, think on.