Last night I had time to focus my thoughts on a topic somewhat forgotten nowadays: Artificial Intelligence.
I found myself more and more concerned about not being literally surrounded by AIs that help and assist us on doing all sort of everyday tasks.
If you ask I would have expected for the AIs to be a constant and common presence at least in technology-related areas of the society such as IT, energy companies, transportation and military, healthcare, banks and trading, education and... well, almost everywere an AI with just a grain of intelligence could automate, manage and help men perform complex and/or repetitive tasks.
At least.
What we got instead? Zero-intelligence systems that would be dead after 5 minutes without a man supervising and managing them.
Even worse: systems that put man as the main information-processing unit.
I.e. applications that beautifully display bars, pies and reports that will be read, judged (and finally forgotten) by a human that will then formulate one or more possible actions to take as a consequence of those data.
Let alone the possibility to completely erase the human from that process, why not at least let the AI analyze the data and formulate possible scenarios to be judged by a human?
And what about an AI that asks me which author I'd like to read these month and then begins fetching data, ordering the books, paying them using my credit card, waiting for them to be shipped (eventually triggering an alert to me and/or the shipping AI in case the delivery is taking too much time) and putting together a brief introduction to that author so I could then enjoy a more complete experience from reading his/her books?
I don't feel like fearing (much) more intelligent systems as dangerous nor I think pleople would lose their jobs to an AI.
Nor man will get any lazy than he actually is...
Simply there would be more people doing different jobs that need no automation but a great amount of creativity instead.
By the way I think mankind may actually benefit of such a shift from automation to creation.
But aside from that there is a fact that bothers me: the technology for these kind of intelligent systems was ready a long time ago (let's see months and years from the technology perspective). I mean, we have multi-core processing since the early 1990s and AIs are one of the most ancient and studied topics of the Computer Science. We now have cloud-computing for exploiting even more computational power and we sure as hell don't lack minds that can design these Everyday AIs.
Thus I'm utterly disappointed that we still lack them.
They would make life easier and let people focus their lives on more meaningful activities (living their life above all...).
But I'm disappointed that I can't comprehend why they are not here yet.
I also thought of giving my contribute but it would seem that people and market are simply "not interested" in it.
Did I missed something? Am I drawing a wrong scenario when reality is much more promising instead?
Are we already there and I didn't notice?
I'll send a link to the new Megaupload to the first ones who answer my questions.
