Escalating Artificial Intelligence

Fortunately, most robots aren't the complicated emotional beings that star in movies, and we're still pretty good at identifying android impostors. Even if you don't recognize the stilted robotic diction over the phone, they usually give themselves away when they can't understand a thing you're saying. But how long will it be before you have an entire conversation with a machine without realizing it?
This isn't just cocktail party chatter; it's the long-term goal of artificial intelligence research. Alan Turing, the man many identify as the father of AI, in 1950 defined an intelligent machine as one that could masquerade as a human. Even without having to talk or understand the spoken word, there isn't a machine that can pass the Turing Test. Truly humanlike intelligence has frustrated AI researchers because it involves two skills that machines are bad at: perceiving their environment and usefully incorporating past experiences into their knowledge base. Knowledge, for even the "smartest" robots and computers, cannot take prieviously learned facts to fuse into the information that is presently available to them. "Remembering" for computers, is like setting up back-up or restoring to a prievious date, but is nothing much more than that,Think, for a minute, about what it takes to recognize a can of soda sitting in your refrigerator. The photons bouncing off the scene in your refrigerator are recorded on your retina. The optic nerve translates the image into electrical signals and carries them to your brain. So far, so good for the machines. Digital cameras have long been able to capture photons and store them as transmittable electrical signals.

The next step, though, is a bridge too far for most robots. Your brain manages to pick out the can from the rest of the scene, even though every time you see a soda can, it looks a little bit different. Your brain has what researchers call an internal representation of a soda can, so even if the lighting is different or the background changes or the can is a slightly different size, you still recognize it. It takes an incredible amount of computing power, plus the ability to filter out extraneous details, to make this happen.