While Elon Musk is anti-Artificial Intelligence for fear it may one day turn against us, it isn’t a direct threat just yet. Right now, we’re still figuring out what it can do for the better while making exciting new discoveries along the way.
Take Google’s DeepMind, for example, which aims to “Solve Intelligence. Use it to make the world a better place.”
There are several interesting projects that DeepMind is currently working on. For example, “teaching itself parkour” for the purpose of understanding the “Emergence of Locomotion Behaviours in Rich Environments.”
What does that even mean? You’ll have to watch the video to get a good visual but to put it bluntly, you’re watching artificial intelligence learn how to run and jump!
Another way DeepMind is helping is in games. The best Go player in the world was defeated by the DeepMind AI powered “AlphaGo” which forced him to re-think his approach.
“After my match against AlphaGo, I fundamentally reconsidered the game, and now I can see that this reflection has helped me greatly,” he said. “I hope all Go players can contemplate AlphaGo’s understanding of the game and style of thinking, all of which is deeply meaningful. Although I lost, I discovered that the possibilities of Go are immense and that the game has continued to progress.”
By getting beat by AlphaGo Ke Jie, who is a master of the game, could potentially develop new strategies along the way that he never thought of. The first time a machine beat someone at their own game was when Gary Kasparov was defeated by Deep Blue in 1997. Go, they say, is much more difficult to solve than Chess and most people thought that A.I. was at least 10-years away from accomplishing this feat.
If AlphaGo can help Ke Jie think differently or more efficiently, it could help us do the same with wide scale problems such as global warming or healthcare systems. By relying on A.I. to think through situations, we’ll find new solutions to age old problems.
These simple yet eye-opening experiments will only build over time until we’re able to apply them effectively to large scale societal problems. Here at coder school we’re all about changing the world for the better. By engaging in our after school programs you’ll lay the foundation for a long, lucrative career in an exciting field such as A.I.