Tuesday, December 3, 2019

How Far is AI from Westworld?


In this episode, Byron talks about AI in Westworld. For more on Artificial Intelligence: https://voicesinai.com https://gigaom.com https://byronreese.com https://ift.tt/31WftGA... Transcript: Many of the ideas that we have about artificial intelligence have come to us via science fiction. And one of these is the HBO show, Westworld. In that universe, humans vacation in a facsimile of the old west, populated by intelligent human-like androids, who don’t know that they're not human. They are created with artificial backstories that they fully believe and then as they have experiences and interact with guests in Westworld, those experiences are later erased, resetting them back to their original character. Like in Blade Runner, the drama is twofold. First, is the question of are the androids actually alive or not, and the degree to which they may or may not be conscious. Given that we don’t really have a definition of life that is widely agreed upon, and the source of consciousness remains a perplexing mystery, these two central questions remain fertile ground for storytelling. Now, while we’re a long way from being able to mechanically build devices that can pass for humans in the way that the androids in Westworld do, we may be closer to building conversational AIs that we can program with a sort of history of their own, and be able to interact with people along the lines of that history. At present, these systems are so primitive that humans can’t really have any sort of emotional attachment to the bots we interact with. I know of no one, for instance, who has fallen in love with Siri yet. Who knows how long it will be, however, before we reach a midpoint between our rudimentary devices of today and the fantastic world of Westworld and beyond.

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