Now this sounds to me like >narrow< ai, of a sort, but it is certainly generalizing, learning type behaviour. The helicopter monitors the activity of an expert helicopter pilot, and then, compensating for environmental differences (wind etc), performs the same maneuvers itself.
Prolific inventor and outrageous visionary Ray Kurzweil explains in abundant, grounded detail why — by the 2020s — we will have reverse-engineered the human brain, and nanobots will be operating your consciousness. Kurzweil draws on years of research to show the speed at which technology is evolving, and projects forward into an almost unthinkable future to outline the ways we’ll use technology to augment our own capabilities, forever blurring the lines between human and machine.
Still, despite the improvement of pattern matching I refer to in that last post, there are some things that humans will be doing better than machines for a while yet.
And systems have been built to farm out tasks that are beyond the ken of machines, in an automated manner, such as amazon’s mechanical turk.
Mechanical Turk gets it’s name from an 18h century mechanical chess playing machine, that turned out to be a guy hiding under the table, pretending to be a machine. At amazon’s mechanical turk service, you can sign up to be paid for doing simple tasks that a machine can’t do. Or to have others do those simple tasks for you, via a web interface. (I won’t go into the failure of mturk as a business model, or the abysmal pay rates, the proliferation of sketchy, spammy tasks to do, etc. Perhaps that needs to be discussed on it’s own. The technology is there, and works quite well.) Read the rest of this entry »
