ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: are we really doing it right?

THE DEVELOPED world

The stone age had come and gone; which gave birth to the industrial age; over the last couple of centuries, tremendous scientific breakthrough have changed the way we live and even the definition of life itself has changed over the years. Our perception of time and speed have also changed, time consciousness has been the theme of the past couple of centuries and our contemporary time; I could remember the most popular rhyme back in kindergarten; “tick says the time…what ever you have to do, do it quick ”, lol.

^{Image credit Flickr. Creative commons license. Author Many Wonderful Artists}

Every second is worth a lot, this orientation has been the main drive of our ‘speed-based’ twenty-first century technology and science, we suddenly moved from the very powerful horses and camels to the ‘two horses driven’ chariots, this means a double in speed and an increase in comfort and user satisfaction, but that was just an onset of what turned out to be a sort of revamp of knowledge; the only reminder of this past era being the fact that the abilities of our car engines are measured in ‘horse-powers’ and some basics of these earliest automobiles are still being applied in today’s technology.

Rating the mechanical abilities of our automobiles in horse-powers has also evidenced how much the automobile technology has advanced over the years as an average speed car would have over a hundred horse power rating, the comfort associated with this development is also something to write home about as many would prefer journeying all day in a car than sitting in the comfort of their various houses, this is because the cars have been conditioned to provide the users with almost a perfect comfortability which can be compared to the normal household comfortability, to an extent though. Even the sitting arrangement in some cars marks a resemblance to that of our sitting rooms.

Apart from speed and comfort, this technological advancements have also been more ‘accuracy-based’ and these products are geared towards providing more accuracy and efficiency than the pre-existing products and/procedures. The computer –the most important electronics have livened the hopes of a near perfect result and have been developed to an extent that any error in the results produced by a computer can only be traced back to the operator and not the machine itself.

The GIGO theme is truly a strict one as you’d only receive a result of what you instructed the computer to do. My classmate back in high school defined the computer as an ‘idiot machine’, this was a subject of many jokes ,but on a closer look; I’d say he was correct with this definition as the computer does not detect errors which was made by the instructor, it only carefully carries out every bit of instruction and presents the results in a human language even though the tasks were performed in ones and zeros, the machine language (binary numbers).

This simplifies it’s use as understanding the computer language would even be more tedious and the computer would be difficult to use, at least for the non-technically literate ones. These technological advancements and many more has shaped our present ‘jet age’

NATURAL INTELLIGENCE –the mother figure

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Humans have been at the helm of these amazing breakthroughs, each and everyone of them, human intelligence have shown to be boundless and this have been evidenced in many ways; an astrologer could predict the personality of a new born baby just with the position of the celestial bodies at the time if his/her birth; astrology could be traced back to the ancient Babylon and this proves the might of natural intelligence even before the industrial and computer age, even though the theories of astrology have been proven wrong in many occasions.

Apart from astrology, the activities of many centuries and hundreds (if not thousands) of years ago have come to shape the way we live presently; with their crude tools; the earliest inhabitants of earth has created many structures which even present day scientists are finding hard to demystify amidst the much developed tools and methods.

Tourist attractions in ancient countries such as Egypt, Greece and Italy are to a large extent, structures which were put-up by people who first trekked these soils; the pyramids of Egypt have shown a clear cut of ‘super-human' intelligence while our present day architects and civil engineers spend a lot of time trying to imitate the structures seen in many ancient buildings. Writing and record keeping which dates back to the origin of man also forms the bulk of our present day education system and is equally as useful as our technology and science.

Present day leadership and financial system strikes a significant resemblance to that of ancient times, how our government works and how the economic and financial systems is structured is just a development of the pre-existing systems as both of them shares a similar basics.

The activities of the African earliest humans who made more use of natural intelligence has shown a great deal of masterpiece and even with our technology we struggle to unravel how they could do all these.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE : what does the future hold?

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Everything we love about civilization is a product of intelligence, so amplifying our human intelligence with artificial intelligence has the potential of helping civilization flourish like never before–as long as we manage to keep the technology beneficial
(Max Remark; president, The future of life institute)

Natural intelligence has advanced also with the development of science and technology, natural intelligence have grown much in capability and have acquired the ability to develop equipment which works just as the humans, with more accuracy.

Since the onset of artificial intelligence as an academic discipline in 1956, the study has faced intense struggles and have also made enormous breakthroughs.

To completely imitate the human ability is not as easy as it seems, as this involves encoding this machine with several abilities such as perception, learning, language, knowledge and reasoning, movement and manipulation through the means of computer science and mathematics, however, with precise description of some human behavior, the scope of artificial intelligence was simplified only to a little extent as even with a precise description, these qualities are hard to interpret into a language which can be understood by the machine, certain human qualities such as emotions as almost impossible to be encoded in a machine language, unlike perception and movement which can be readily programmed using sensors and mechanical technologies respectively

Artificial intelligence has developed over the years in both efficiency and dependability and has gained application in many aspects of our lives, ensuring increased output in these areas where it has been applied, however the use of artificial intelligence oriented gadgets are seriously regulated, this limits their application, but nevertheless, it is in use in many fields.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN SPORTS: The goal-line technology

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The round leather hitting the back of the net is the main aim of the struggle between the teams in soccer, while others strives to prevent their opponents from tucking the soccer ball into their net, the opponents struggles to overcome this barrier created by the contesting team, thus the much entertaining game of football.

However, controversy arises as regards to when to declare a ‘Goal' or not, and the conditions which annuls a goal even though the ball had hit the net, on-pitch soccer are tasked with this job as they try everything within their human limits to ensure that a false goal is not awarded as this is traumatizing. Sometimes this human limits is exceeded as the fast actions taking place on the soccer pitch sometimes passes our human cognizance and many false goals were aware and many goals canceled.

During the 2010 FIFA World Cup, then Chelsea football club midfielder Frank Lampard’s shot which actually crossed the goal line was disallowed in their 4-1 loss to Germany as the referee did not call for a goal. Marko Devic’s shot which briefly crossed the goal line was not awarded as it was cleared by England’s defender John Terry before it had completely crossed the goal line in Ukraine’s 1-0 loss to England in the UEFA Euro 2012.

These incidents called for the application of the goal line technology as these errors would have been averted had it been applied before then, some of these products had already been manufactured before these incidents, but were not approved for diplomatic reasons, Frank Lampard’s disallowed goal against Germany being a major trigger to the idea of using these gadgets in a FIFA approved match. Many goal detecting systems have been tested and this have proven more efficient than the referee’s eye.

In corporation with Adidas, Cairos Technology in Germany produced a goal line technology system which makes use of sensors and magnetic grids to detect when the ball crosses the goal line, the grid is made up of thin cables with the electric current running through them, and the sensor measures the magnetic grid and relays the data to a computer which determines whether the ball had crossed the line or not.

Harry Barnes and Dave parden manufactured the ‘goal minder' which makes use of high speed cameras to capture images to show evidence of whether the ball crosses the line or not, the Hawk-eye and Goalref goal line technologies have also been used in competitions where their use is sanctioned by FIFA.

Then Manchester City’s player Edin Dzeko was the first player whose goal was awarded using the goal line technology in the English premier league. The goal line technology when used would cancel the controversy surrounding goals in the game of soccer.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN TRANSPORTATION – self-driven cars

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Maybe our driving school days are over, the self-driven car can actually find its way and keep you moving with no one at the stirrings, through various techniques such as advanced control systems, GPS, computer vision, radar and laser light, the self-driven interpret sensory information to detect appropriate navigation paths and obstacles on their way, hence these cars can drive themselves. Self-driven cars have been tested put even before the 1950s, in 1977;

^{Autonomous Waymo Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivan undergoing testing in Los Altos, California. Image source Wikimedia. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Author Dllu}

Tsukuba mechanical engineering laboratory in Japan produced the first self-driven car which could move at a speed of over 25kilometers per hour tracking white street marks. Many cars of this sort have been produced by numerous mechanical engineering firms.

Self-driven cars provides an increased comfortability, mobility and a reduced rate of automobile accidents and crimes, if introduced, the problem of grid locks and ‘hold-ups’ will be solved as the self driven cars would enhance traffic flow and also reduce the rate of crimes. However, self-driven cars' intelligence level would vary, some of these cars would still need a reasonable control by a driver, some self-driven cars wouldn’t even need the presence of any driver at all.

ROBOTS AND BOTS: Artificial intelligence personified

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Man always needs an assistant, which is preferably something they can control to their taste, this has led to many researches and discoveries in producing a near-human abilities device which can perform many human-related functions at least in a given field. Before the emergence of what we presently define as robots, many robot-like machines have been described in many ancient mythologies.

Leonardo da Vinci had in 1495 sketched a pan for a humanoid robot, this ‘robot’ was equipped with the ability to live it’s head and jaw, wave it’s arm and sit up, however, there is no record till date confirming whether such structure was actually built but the plans are found in Leonardo’s book ‘Vitruvian man’.

Robots are programmed with the human abilities in mind, a robot is basically a machine which exhibits human-like behaviours, accept and process data and by perception and via the information obtained, operate itself or other devices around them autonomously. Thus with a robot, many dangerous activities which were controlled by humans can be undertaken by machines, this includes works in places such as war zones, chemical industries and radiological units where humans may encounter dangerous chemicals and rays respectively.

Here on steemit, you must have come plagiarized posts which were voted and commented on by the very popular ‘cheetah’ bot and many voting bots used by steemit communities, this is just a perfect example of a bot. Bots are software robots, they are programmed to perform actions which normally human-controlled such as sending and replying messages over the internet, the bots perform a wide array of activities in a software based platform.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN HUMAN MEDICINE

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we already have some scientists who know artificial intelligence and machine learning but we want complementary people who can look forward and see how this technology will evolve
(Ball Patel, associate centre director for Digital Health of the FDA)

Artificial intelligence based products and methods are currently subject to intense research and development, and has gained application in several medical procedures such as radiology, patient monitoring and assistance and other medical diagnostic procedures.

^{A telemedical system. Image source Wikimedia. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. Author Intel free press.}

Using artificial intelligence, medical radiologist can interpret imaging results with more accuracy, however the artificial intelligence means that interpretation of this results do not need much expertise from the radiologist, the Telemedicine can convey information to the physician as regard the occurrence of any disease activity. This would decrease the need for the much human-based processes in the healthcare and may provide more efficiency and speed to medical sectors.

CONCLUSION : Are we really doing it right?

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Is this actually how it is supposed to be? Should we spend much time and resources on producing artificial intelligence than developing the already existing natural intelligence? Should our everyday procedures and activities be shifted from the human-based to machine-based? These questions keeps coming in many forms. Even though the artificial intelligence provides us with more accuracy, speed, safety and comfortability, delegating some activities to machines would still expose humans to a new set of dangers which may be even more severe than that encountered in a human-based control system.

Continued researches and discoveries in the artificial intelligence discipline will eventually reduce the role which humans has to play in the concerned field as these machines are always built to out- smart humans, this would remove the role played by emotions and decreased use of the human brain reduces it’s capabilities, this is in congruence with Jean Larmack’s law of use and disuse, hence while we make machines more efficient, we render humans less-efficient and decrease their role in the ecosystem, artificial intelligence is awesome I must say, but in essence, it should be geared towards the performance of humanly impossible tasks and reducing the unnecessary stress for workers, precisely, artificial intelligence should be geared more towards ergonomics and creating a stress-free working environment for humans.

REFERENCES

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1. Artificial intelligence -Wikipedia
2. Goal line technology -Wikipedia
3. Autonomous vehicles -Wikipedia
4. Your future doctor may not be human -futurism

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