Fiction has tended to regard artificial intelligence as a threat or challenge to humanity. The science fiction film 2001 Space Oddessy has the computer HAL (one letter back in the alphabet from IBM) plotting to dispose of its human copilots that it despised. Blockbusters such as the Matrix and Terminator are similarly distopian. Stephen Speilberg’s AI is unusual in that it is the machine (in a human embodiment) that is persecuted. But if fiction needs big narratives to make a point, reality tends to be more complex and ambiguous, and where the value of machine intelligence is contested.
The impressive growth in the sophistication of computer technology through the latter part of the 20th century coupled with laboratory experiments in artificial intelligence convinced many that fiction would soon become fact, and intelligent machines would soon relieve us of those tiresome tasks that require us to think.
So where are the intelligent machines now? They didn’t arrive fully formed like their fictional counterparts, but sneaked into our lives in the shape of AI programs in everyday applications. Google uses automatic class detection, an AI classification technique, to link documents to search terms. Not very exiciting maybe, but it’s been the search engines that have levered the web into everyday life. More recently, both Google and Microsoft are investing heavily in speech recognition software to enable voice-driven mobile search technology.
On a more familiar dystopian theme, the US government has a research programme on “sentiment analysis”; AI programs to automatically inspect publications in the US and abroad for unsympathetic or negative opinions of America. And, of course, there’s always robot wars.
