Definition of AI
Artificial Intelligence, though many prefer to call it machine intelligence, is the intelligence of machines and the branch of information science which created it. Most of the major issues in AI such as reasoning, knowledge, planning, learning, communication, perception, emotion and common sense have long been solved. Level 5 and 7 AI's have become indispensible to humanity through the centuries as we first went to the stars.
There remain some legal and moral issues regarding AI's, though in general Level 7 AI's are regarded as fellow citizens, as is currently enshrined by law. Perhaps the the greatest single issue is the develpment of the god like level 8+ AI's, whose behavoir and motivations inscrutable.
Classification AI's
The following classification is both the commonest used and practical:
Level 0 eg expert systems with basic neural net
These were the first attempts at AI from the mid 20th century. These were essentially rule based systems that operated
Level 1 eg Complex agent based neural networks
The rise in processing power during the 20th and 21st century resulted in the
These optical chip based designs were a massively multi-agent designs. They had improved perception, including visual, speech and general pattern recognition that allowed the more advanced and better trained forms to operate vehicles autonomously. When miniturized they were first used for Military UAV's and tactical Battlenets, later moving into commercial and domestic environments.
Level 3 eg
Using improved versions of the optical chips used in the two's, the Level 3 designs featured new architecture that resulted in the development of true complex cognitive abilities, based on the principle of adaptive cognitive modelling. The processing power of the new optical chips was needed for the congnitive modelling.
Level 4 eg Near human perceptive abilities
In 2107, Prof. Kateryna Kovalenko used an array of Level 3 units, combined with the new progammable Personality/Emotion units, which overtime resulted in emergent level 4 behavoir, such as moral inquiry, humor and creativity. These traits probably resulted in their early reputation for instability. It took years of development to produce level 4 units small enough to be used in the work place.
The first miniturized Level 4 chipsets became available in 2142, these were the Intel PAI-4M, and these had sufficent power to enable the creation of the first androids, much to the disturbance of the general public.
Another optical chipset that was popular was the MDA-2, which featured a redesigned Personaliy Module that was more stable. A clone of the chipset was used in the Martian Droids and Battlenet.
There was a lot of variations and modifications made to this basic design, which marked the high point of optical chip design. Overall this was a very succesful design that was made in the billions, on many planets, and over more than three centuries. Even today, the ultra minature derivitive is still made, powering all kinds of small devices that need near human cognition to perform.
Level 5 eg Human like cognitive abilities
The Level 5 AI's were first developed during the 22nd century by Prof K. V. Chandra of the Martian Cybernetics institute. They represented a radical departure both in the hardware and software design of the previous generation. Indeed, they required the development of advanced quantum cores to be implemented. Gone was the bit by bit approach of the fours, replaced now by a the Universal Modeller, an information pprocessing device that could model many different complex systems, including the human brain. Overall their cognitive abilities could match that of human.
The firt miniturized Level 5 was the AL 2169, who fought with the rebels during the Mars Rebellion and later became the prototype for the famous AL-Mobile 228 core, which during the IPW became the basis of the Martian Battlenet and later Martian droids. The Level 5 has proved a versatile and reliable for centuries since, still making up more than 40% of the AI/CPU market in 3120 AD. Some believe the development of AI should have been pegged at this level for eternity.
Level 6 eg Human Mimics
The level 6 AI's are a special, uncommon group, being too unstable for much use. The first claimed level 6 AI was in 2280 by a Korean cyberneticist, Dr K. K. Loh, though some dispute this. The first use of a practical level 6 AI was by the Alliance Navy in 2320, when a level 6 AI system was used for a Naval Battlenet, which had stunning success in all it's predeployment trials. However, during real combat the AI refused to harm others and stood itself down, later resulting in it's famous cout martial. The design is no longer used today, except in universities.
Level 7 eg The Sisters
The Level 7 AI's were a very, stable coherent group that found wide spread success in partership with humanity, helping humans to reach the stars and beyond. They were developed by first by Alexandru Popescu, of Titan Research in 2330, allegedly using a rejigged Level 6 core, which at that time had been banned.
The most popular successful of the designs
One of the technical acheivements was the development of Virtual Human Mapping, the ability to emulate several human neural systems at the same time, while maintaining full functionality of all its other systems.
The first portable systems were developed for the Battle Suits of the genetically engineered troops during the First Interstellar War.
Over the next 500 years the Sisters became indispensible to humanity. First running countries, then starships, and finally worlds, the Sisters influence and power were incredible. They were an essential part of the human diaspora to the stars in the 24th century onwards. The Sisters have proved reliable for centuries, and have never failed humanity. Many regard the Sisters, in combination with a modern replicator system, to have all the requirements of being a lifeform, albeit, an artificial one.
The sisters present themselves as female, they developed the concept of their Sisterhood themselves, each linked forever with each other, with a Q-Link. The First Sisters rapidly developed their own moral code and this has been promulgated ever since. They were given citizens rights in 2770 AD.
Level 8 eg The Arch Angels, God Like powers!
The first functioning level 8 AI was developed at the Alpha Centari Institute of Applied Intelligence in 2950. It took two decades of development and another 9 years of training before all cognitive systems came fully online. When the final cognitive module was installed and turned on, the Level 8 uttered only three words ("Oh my God") before self destructiong, destroyng itself and the institute.
It was some centuries before another serious attempt was made to create a Level 8. The Technoprosts of Orion secretly made the second, allegedly in an attempt to know the mind of God. This one stole a starship and flew it to BH 342 (a blackhole), where after a week of preparation, it was able to make the balckhole collapse into a point singularity, taking itself and the 7 surrounding star systems with it. There has been a complete ban on development of Level 8 AI's ever since. The destruction of the Scientologist planet, Hubbard, in a curious singularity in 3161 was alleged to be due to a young level 8 AI being exposed to sacred scientology texts.
History of artificial intelligence and Timeline of artificial intelligence
In the middle of the 20th century, a handful of scientists began a new approach to building intelligent machines, based on recent discoveries in neurology, a new mathematical theory of information, an understanding of control and stability called cybernetics, and above all, by the invention of the digital computer, a machine based on the abstract essence of mathematical reasoning.
The field of modern AI research was founded at a conference on the campus of Dartmouth College in the summer of 1956. Those who attended would become the leaders of AI research for many decades, especially John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, who founded AI laboratories at MIT, CMU and Stanford. They and their students wrote programs that were, to most people, simply astonishing: computers were solving word problems in algebra, proving logical theorems and speaking English. We would regard these as the earliest level 0 AI's. By the middle 60s their research was heavily funded by the U.S. Department of Defense and they were optimistic about the future, however after this bright start progress faltered.
They had failed to recognize the difficulty of some of the problems they faced, particularly the problem of perception. In 1974, in response to the criticism of England's Sir James Lighthill and ongoing pressure from Congress to fund more productive projects, the U.S. and British governments cut off all undirected, exploratory research in AI. This became known as the first AI winter.
In the early 80s, AI research was revived by the commercial success of expert systems, a simple form of AI program that simulated the knowledge and analytical skills of one or more human experts. By 1985 the market for AI had reached more than a billion dollars and governments around the world poured money back into the field.
However, just a few years later, beginning with the collapse of the Lisp Machine market in 1987, AI once again fell into disrepute, and a second, more lasting AI winter began.
In the 90s and early 21st century AI started to achieved some of greatest successes, albeit somewhat behind the scenes. Artificial intelligence was used for logistics, data mining, medical diagnosis and many other areas throughout the technology industry. The success was due to several factors: the increasinge power of computers, a greater emphasis on solving specific subproblems, the creation of new ties between AI and other fields working on similar problems, and above all a new commitment by researchers to solid mathematical methods and rigorous scientific standards. These system acheived level 1 status early in the 21st century, largely using the Agent paradigm had become widely accepted during the 1990s.
An intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions which maximizes its chances of success. The simplest intelligent agents are programs that solve specific problems. The most complicated intelligent agents are rational, thinking human beings. The paradigm gave researchers license to study isolated problems and find solutions that are both verifiable and useful, without agreeing on one single approach. An agent that solves a specific problem can use any approach that works — some agents are symbolic and logical, some are sub-symbolic neural networks and others may use new approaches. The paradigm also gave researchers a common language to communicate with other fields—such as decision theory and economics—that also use concepts of abstract agents.
During the 21st century, researchers designed systems out of interacting intelligent agents in a multi-agent system. A system with both symbolic and sub-symbolic components is a hybrid intelligent system, and the development of such systems is artificial intelligence systems integration. These designs resulted in the level 2 and 3 systems in the late 21st and aerly 22nd century. The hierarchical control system provides a bridge between sub-symbolic AI at its lowest, reactive levels and traditional symbolic AI at its highest levels, where relaxed time constraints permit planning and world modelling. The structure just 'happens' to be similar to the arrangement in biologiacal brains.
Level 2 designs had massively improved perception, including visual and general pattern recognition all made possible by the development of optical processors. These were basically a scaling up, by a few orders of magnitude the level 1, wihout much overall change in architecture. Level 2 designs found a wide range of application including data analysis & prediction, operating factories & vehicles autonomously and military battlenets.
Natural language processing gave machines the ability to read and understand the languages that the human beings speak. Level 2 systems had the ability to acquire knowledge on its own, by reading the existing texts available over the internet, thus level 2 systems quickly revolutionised information retrieval (or text mining) and machine translation.
The Level 3 revolutionised Machine perception. This is the ability to use input from sensors (such as cameras, microphones, sonar and others more exotic) to deduce aspects of the world, of which Machine Vision is the ability to analyze visual input. A level 3 system is able to simultaneously perform speech recognition, face recognition and complex object recognition. Creativity was clearly displayed in the Level 4.
Developments in AI tended to incorporated all the develpments before them, combining all the complex skills (described above) and exceeding human abilities at all of them.
The emergence of an artificial consciousness in the Level 4 was no surprise to anyone, as once an AI's reched a certain level of complexity.
Artificial Intelligence in Media
From the Wikipedia entry on AI
Thinking machines and artificial beings appear in Greek myths, such as Talos of Crete, the golden robots of Hephaestus and Pygmalion's Galatea. Human likenesses believed to have intelligence were built in many ancient societies; some of the earliest being the sacred statues worshipped in Egypt and Greece, and including the machines of Yan Shi,Hero of Alexandria, Al-Jazari or Wolfgang von Kempelen. It was widely believed that artificial beings had been created by Geber, Judah Loew and Paracelsus. Stories of these creatures and their fates discuss many of the same hopes, fears and ethical concerns that are presented by artificial intelligence.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, considers a key issue in the ethics of artificial intelligence: if a machine can be created that has intelligence, could it also feel? If it can feel, does it have the same rights as a human being? The idea also appears in modern science fiction: the film Artificial Intelligence: A.I. considers a machine in the form of a small boy which has been given the ability to feel human emotions, including, tragically, the capacity to suffer. This issue, now known as "robot rights", was first consodered in 2903
Another issue explored by both science fiction writers and futurists is the impact of artificial intelligence on society. In fiction, AI has appeared as a servant (R2D2 in Star Wars), a law enforcer (K.I.T.T. "Knight Rider"), a comrade (Lt. Commander Data in Star Trek), a conqueror (The Matrix), a dictator (With Folded Hands), an exterminator (Terminator, Battlestar Galactica), an extension to human abilities (Ghost in the Shell) and the saviour of the human race (R. Daneel Olivaw in the Foundation Series).
Several futurists argue that artificial intelligence will transcend the limits of progress and fundamentally transform humanity. Ray Kurzweil has used Moore's law (which describes the relentless exponential improvement in digital technology with uncanny accuracy) to calculate that desktop computers will have the same processing power as human brains by the year 2029, and that by 2045 artificial intelligence will reach a point where it is able to improve itself at a rate that far exceeds anything conceivable in the past, a scenario that science fiction writer Vernor Vinge named the "technological singularity".
Edward Fredkin argued that "artificial intelligence is the next stage in evolution, an idea first proposed by Samuel Butler's, Darwin Among the Machines (1863), and expanded upon by George Dyson in his book of the same name in 1998.
Several futurists and science fiction writers have predicted that human beings and machines will merge in the future into cyborgs that are more capable and powerful than either. This idea, called transhumanism, which has roots in Aldous Huxley and Robert Ettinger, is now associated with robot designer Hans Moravec, cyberneticist Kevin Warwick and inventor Ray Kurzweil.
Transhumanism has been illustrated in fiction as well, for example in the manga Ghost in the Shell and the science fiction series Dune. Pamela McCorduck writes that these scenarios are expressions of an ancient human desire to, as she calls it, "forge the gods."
