The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (51 page)

Mike Young, director of biology at the University of Wales, was one of the human scientists who lost to the machine. He explains that “the robot did beat me, but only because I hit the wrong key at one point.”

A long-standing conjecture in algebra was finally proved by an AI system at Argonne National Laboratory. Human mathematicians called the proof “creative.”

Business, Finance, and Manufacturing
. Companies in every industry are using AI systems to control and optimize logistics, detect fraud and money laundering, and perform intelligent data mining on the horde of information they gather each day. Wal-Mart, for example, gathers vast amounts of information from its transactions with shoppers. AI-based tools using neural nets and expert systems review this data to provide market-research reports for managers. This intelligent data mining allows them to make remarkably accurate predictions of the inventory required for each product in each store for each day.
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AI-based programs are routinely used to detect fraud in financial transactions. Future Route, an English company, for example, offers iHex, based on AI routines developed at Oxford University, to detect fraud in credit-card transactions and loan applications.
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The system continuously generates and updates its own rules based on its experience. First Union Home Equity Bank in Charlotte, North Carolina, uses Loan Arranger, a similar AI-based system, to decide whether to approve mortgage applications.
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NASDAQ similarly uses a learning program called the Securities Observation, News Analysis, and Regulation (SONAR) system to monitor all trades for fraud as well as the possibility of insider trading.
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As of the end of 2003 more than 180 incidents had been detected by SONAR and referred to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Department of Justice. These included several cases that later received significant news coverage.

Ascent Technology, founded by Patrick Winston, who directed MIT’s AI Lab from 1972 through 1997, has designed a GA-based system called Smart-Airport Operations Center (SAOC) that can optimize the complex logistics of an airport, such as balancing work assignments of hundreds of employees, making gate and equipment assignments, and managing a myriad of other details.
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Winston points out that “figuring out ways to optimize a complicated situation is what genetic algorithms do.” SAOC has raised productivity by approximately 30 percent in the airports where it has been implemented.

Ascent’s first contract was to apply its AI techniques to managing the logistics for the 1991 Desert Storm campaign in Iraq. DARPA claimed that AI-based logistic-planning systems, including the Ascent system, resulted in more savings than the entire government research investment in AI over several decades.

A recent trend in software is for AI systems to monitor a complex software system’s performance, recognize malfunctions, and determine the best way to recover automatically without necessarily informing the human user.
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The idea stems from the realization that as software systems become more complex, like humans, they will never be perfect, and that eliminating all bugs is impossible. As humans, we use the same strategy: we don’t expect to be perfect, but we usually try to recover from inevitable mistakes. “We want to stand this notion of systems management on its head,” says Armando Fox, the head of Stanford University’s Software Infrastructures Group, who is working on what is now called “autonomic computing.” Fox adds, “The system has to be able to set itself up, it has to optimize itself. It has to repair itself, and if something goes wrong, it has to know how to respond to external threats.” IBM, Microsoft, and other software vendors are all developing systems that incorporate autonomic capabilities.

Manufacturing and Robotics
. Computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM) increasingly employs AI techniques to optimize the use of resources, streamline logistics, and reduce inventories through just-in-time purchasing of parts and supplies. A new trend in CIM systems is to use “case-based reasoning” rather than hard-coded, rule-based expert systems. Such reasoning codes knowledge as “cases,” which are examples of problems with solutions. Initial cases are usually designed by the engineers, but the key to a successful case-based reasoning system is its ability to gather new cases from actual experience. The system is then able to apply the reasoning from its stored cases to new situations.

Robots are extensively used in manufacturing. The latest generation of robots uses flexible AI-based machine-vision systems—from companies such as Cognex Corporation in Natick, Massachusetts—that can respond flexibly to varying conditions. This reduces the need for precise setup for the robot to operate correctly. Brian Carlisle, CEO of Adept Technologies, a Livermore, California, factory-automation company, points out that “even if labor costs were eliminated [as a consideration], a strong case can still be made for automating with robots and other flexible automation. In addition to quality and throughput, users gain by enabling rapid product changeover and evolution that can’t be matched with hard tooling.”

One of AI’s leading roboticists, Hans Moravec, has founded a company called Seegrid to apply his machine-vision technology to applications in manufacturing, materials handling, and military missions.
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Moravec’s software enables a device (a robot or just a material-handling cart) to walk or roll through an unstructured environment and in a single pass build a reliable “voxel” (three-dimensional pixel) map of the environment. The robot can then use the map and its own reasoning ability to determine an optimal and obstacle-free path to carry out its assigned mission.

This technology enables autonomous carts to transfer materials throughout a manufacturing process without the high degree of preparation required with conventional preprogrammed robotic systems. In military situations autonomous vehicles could carry out precise missions while adjusting to rapidly changing environments and battlefield conditions.

Machine vision is also improving the ability of robots to interact with humans. Using small, inexpensive cameras, head- and eye-tracking software can sense where a human user is, allowing robots, as well as virtual personalities on a screen, to maintain eye contact, a key element for natural interactions. Head- and eye-tracking systems have been developed at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT and are offered by small companies such as Seeing Machines of Australia.

An impressive demonstration of machine vision was a vehicle that was
driven by an AI system with no human intervention for almost the entire distance from Washington, D.C., to San Diego.
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Bruce Buchanan, computer-science professor at the University of Pittsburgh and president of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence, pointed out that this feat would have been “unheard of 10 years ago.”

Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) is developing a swarm of robots that can navigate in complex environments, such as a disaster zone, and find items of interest, such as humans who may be injured. In a September 2004 demonstration at an AI conference in San Jose, they demonstrated a group of self-organizing robots on a mock but realistic disaster area.
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The robots moved over the rough terrain, communicated with one another, used pattern recognition on images, and detected body heat to locate humans.

Speech and Language
. Dealing naturally with language is the most challenging task of all for artificial intelligence. No simple tricks, short of fully mastering the principles of human intelligence, will allow a computerized system to convincingly emulate human conversation, even if restricted to just text messages. This was Turing’s enduring insight in designing his eponymous test based entirely on written language.

Although not yet at human levels, natural language-processing systems are making solid progress. Search engines have become so popular that “Google” has gone from a proper noun to a common verb, and its technology has revolutionized research and access to knowledge. Google and other search engines use AI-based statistical-learning methods and logical inference to determine the ranking of links. The most obvious failing of these search engines is their inability to understand the context of words. Although an experienced user learns how to design a string of keywords to find the most relevant sites (for example, a search for “computer chip” is likely to avoid references to potato chips that a search for “chip” alone might turn up), what we would really like to be able to do is converse with our search engines in natural language. Microsoft has developed a natural-language search engine called Ask MSR (Ask MicroSoft Research), which actually answers natural-language questions such as “When was Mickey Mantle born?”
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After the system parses the sentence to determine the parts of speech (subject, verb, object, adjective and adverb modifiers, and so on), a special search engine then finds matches based on the parsed sentence. The found documents are searched for sentences that appear to answer the question, and the possible answers are ranked. At least 75 percent of the time, the correct answer is in the top three ranked positions, and incorrect answers are usually obvious (such as “Mickey Mantle was born in 3”). The
researchers hope to include knowledge bases that will lower the rank of many of the nonsensical answers.

Microsoft researcher Eric Brill, who has led research on Ask MSR, has also attempted an even more difficult task: building a system that provides answers of about fifty words to more complex questions, such as, “How are the recipients of the Nobel Prize selected?” One of the strategies used by this system is to find an appropriate FAQ section on the Web that answers the query.

Natural-language systems combined with large-vocabulary, speaker-independent (that is, responsive to any speaker) speech recognition over the phone are entering the marketplace to conduct routine transactions. You can talk to British Airways’ virtual travel agent about anything you like as long as it has to do with booking flights on British Airways.
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You’re also likely to talk to a virtual person if you call Verizon for customer service or Charles Schwab and Merrill Lynch to conduct financial transactions. These systems, while they can be annoying to some people, are reasonably adept at responding appropriately to the often ambiguous and fragmented way people speak. Microsoft and other companies are offering systems that allow a business to create virtual agents to book reservations for travel and hotels and conduct routine transactions of all kinds through two-way, reasonably natural voice dialogues.

Not every caller is satisfied with the ability of these virtual agents to get the job done, but most systems provide a means to get a human on the line. Companies using these systems report that they reduce the need for human service agents up to 80 percent. Aside from the money saved, reducing the size of call centers has a management benefit. Call-center jobs have very high turnover rates because of low job satisfaction.

It’s said that men are loath to ask others for directions, but car vendors are betting that both male and female drivers will be willing to ask their own car for help in getting to their destination. In 2005 the Acura RL and Honda Odyssey will be offering a system from IBM that allows users to converse with their cars.
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Driving directions will include street names (for example, “turn left on Main Street, then right on Second Avenue”). Users can ask such questions as “Where is the nearest Italian restaurant?” or they can enter specific locations by voice, ask for clarifications on directions, and give commands to the car itself (such as “Turn up the air conditioning”). The Acura RL will also track road conditions and highlight traffic congestion on its screen in real time. The speech recognition is claimed to be speaker-independent and to be unaffected by engine sound, wind, and other noises. The system will reportedly recognize 1.7 million street and city names, in addition to nearly one thousand commands.

Computer language translation continues to improve gradually. Because this is a Turing-level task—that is, it requires full human-level understanding of language to perform at human levels—it will be one of the last application areas to compete with human performance. Franz Josef Och, a computer scientist at the University of Southern California, has developed a technique that can generate a new language-translation system between any pair of languages in a matter of hours or days.
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All he needs is a “Rosetta stone”—that is, text in one language and the translation of that text in the other language—although he needs millions of words of such translated text. Using a self-organizing technique, the system is able to develop its own statistical models of how text is translated from one language to the other and develops these models in both directions.

This contrasts with other translation systems, in which linguists painstakingly code grammar rules with long lists of exceptions to each rule. Och’s system recently received the highest score in a competition of translation systems conducted by the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Entertainment and Sports
. In an amusing and intriguing application of GAs, Oxford scientist Torsten Reil created animated creatures with simulated joints and muscles and a neural net for a brain. He then assigned them a task: to walk. He used a GA to evolve this capability, which involved seven hundred parameters. “If you look at that system with your human eyes, there’s no way you can do it on your own, because the system is just too complex,” Reil points out. “That’s where evolution comes in.”
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