Suppose you let your toddler hang around a bunch of Internet trolls and told the trolls to teach the baby to talk. Imagine what they would teach it.
That is what Microsoft did with its Artificial Intelligence bot named Tay. Within hours of its debut on Twitter, poor Tay spoke like a promiscuous racist with a taste for marijuana, according to CNet.
Microsoft promptly grounded Tay, who no longer makes public tweets.
Parenting can be a bumpy road.
In the case of a Russian robot, the problem was literally a road. Promobot IR77 was being tested for mobility. Seems the robot was assigned to move freely about the room for an hour and then return to a designated spot. Instead, it escaped and was caught, then escaped again and was found playing in traffic.
Russian researchers said in a somewhat unnerving statement that they couldn't explain it. The robot was shut off.
It is this sort of thing that makes some scientists jumpy about the quantum leap of dumb robots to smart ones.
Famed scientist Steven Hawking worries that AI represents the end of civilization. One Washington Post writer put it this way: You design a smart robot to make paper clips. You tell it to make the maximum amount of paper clips. The robot starts making paper clips out of everything. Then the robot makes everything in the world a paper clip. End of the world.
For all the worries about the future of artificial intelligence, it is helping humans right now.
Cell phone assistants, like Siri, are simple AI inventions. But more complex AI systems already function in computer games, learning about the player, and analyzing the game environment.
Online customer support is another area where most people have interacted with artificial intelligence — mostly with mixed results. At one time, asking the Apple service bots if they were robots, ended the conversation.
According to beebom.com, sales are getting smarter with big online retailers predicting what you will need when you need it.
Self-driving cars, fraud detection, security systems, and more all use Artificial Intelligence.
