Tommy Collison

First up in the blogging chair is Jeremy Schroeder. He talks to us today about Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence is getting much more advanced. Robots are now making scientific discoveries.

A robot named Adam was built in the UK to help lab scientists. It performs hundreds of similar experiments in a controlled environment.

It is the first robot to ever make a scientific discovery. By experimenting and using only its own artificial intelligence, it made discoveries about yeast. It made a hypothesis that a few genes in yeast make enzymes that speed up chemical reactions. Then, Adam ran experiments to test if this was true. It was.

This is the first instance in which an object with no brain or authentic intelligence has beaten humans to a finding.

If you think about it, AI (artificial intelligence) this advanced is scary. This robot was almost thinking for itself. Of course, it was only thinking about what it was programmed to think about, but robots can always be programmed to think about more sinister things.

So think about this. Computers that play chess are commonplace now. And even though it is difficult to program a chess playing program, it has been done to such a degree that they routinely beat the best people in the world. This has been done, and there isn’t much funding for the people who do this.

There is a lot of funding for the army though. The United States Armed Forces is investing almost $340 billion on robotic vehicles alone. Imagine if they were investing half of that on a computer program that plans attacks and manuvers for robot drones out in the field. The computer would know where the soldiers were with gps, and control them using satellite communication. I know, it sounds pretty far fetched, but it is possible. The computer would have to be a supercomputer to handle all of the information.

This only accounts for the strategic part of warfare. Suprisingly though, armies already have the knitty gritty fighting part covered. The US military owns and uses over 7000 robot drones, and 12000 unmanned vehicles.

We already us robots in warfare, and there have already been some casualties from accidents.

If we use robots more, we could be in a lot of trouble from accidents. If there was a central computer, I don’t believe that it would think of us as a threat and get rid of us, because artificial intelligence will never get that strong.