人工智能：拥有不同于人类思维的机器.docx

人工智能：拥有不同于人类思维的机器Artificial intelligence: The machines with alien mindsOur smartest machines look nothing like we predicted – has the field lost its way, or do we need to rethink what AI actually means, asks Tom Chatfield.Would modern artificial intelligence live up to the dreams of the field’s founders? Perhaps not. But in many ways, the smartest machines we have built are entities they never could have imagined.In 1956, attendees of a research camp at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire coined the phrase artificial intelligence to describe its efforts to “find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves.”Compare that with the AI project that Facebook announced this month. Under one of the world’s most prominent experts, it will “do world-class artificial-intelligence research using all of the knowledge that people have shared on Facebook” – with potential gains including building “services that are much more natural to interact with.”What does that mean? Like much of modern AI, they will be training algorithms to sift and analyse unimaginably vast amounts of data in the hope that smart answers will emerge. Google, IBM and many others are now using this technique – called machine learning – to great commercial success, and the “intelligence” they create underpins everything from your internet searches to online language translation. Since the calculations of these machines involves making statistical correlations within huge caches of data, their reasoning can be unfathomable to the human mind – often these systems provide apparently intelligent answers, but nobody has any idea how they came to their conclusions.Yet even the most advanced forms of machine intelligence cannot hope to pass for a human in Turing’s famous test – let alone use natural language or develop concepts themselves, as the pioneers hoped. More than half a century of research has brought us a far more s