As we have talked about in some occasions, “The Singularity” is a point in the future where the machines that we have built become capable of building more machines as intelligent as themselves.

There are a lot of discussion about this topic; some people argue that this is an utopic issue, but other ones are absolutely sure about The Singularity.

The November 2, a group of scientists (all from the United States), joined to deal with this topic. In fact, they discussed about the future of artificial intelligence, or more specifically, about questions like these ones:

• Could robots eventually become so smart that they pose a threat to society?
• Is it necessary to include an ethical and legal code about artificial intelligence?

Tom Mitchell, from Carnegie Mellon University, showed his worry about what people could do with artificial intelligence, not what machines themselves could do. Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft Researcher and ex-director of the Association for the advancement of Artificial intelligence (AAAI), was in the meeting too. In fact, Horvitz was the one who joined this group in order to write a report about this topic.

Horvitz said that this was the first time that AAAI merged to discuss about AI’s positive and negative impacts, and from my point of view, this is a good point, since technology evolves very fast and there is no problem in talking about the possible impacts (and I am not talking only about AI).

The most radical opinions were David McAllester’s and Manuela Veloso’s.

In one hand, David McAllester, professor and chief academic officer at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, believes that singularity is absolutely real, and that there is no way to avoid it in the future. Machines would be able to construct smarter and better versions of themselves and become infinitely intelligent.

In the other hand, Manuela Veloso, another professor from Carnegie Mellon, doesn’t think that Singularity is a future problem. She doesn’t believe that artificial intelligence would evolve that way. She declares herself as an engineer, and as a realistic person. Definitely, she observes robots as a medium for improving humanity’s well-being.

As it can be seen, there are various opinions about the topic, what is yours?

Source: PittsburghLive