Will THIS be the Future of AI?

In 1950, after being an instrumental part of cracking the German Enigma Code and helping to end World War II, Alan Turing proposed the Turing Test and began a global obsession with Artificial Intelligence (AI). Communicating with a concealed participant only via text on a screen, the tester has to guess whether that participant is a human or a machine - if the machine could fool the tester more than half of the time, it could be considered ‘intelligent'. Has any machine yet passed the Turing Test?

The answer is still ‘no’ but AI is making rapid progress and looks set to become an integral part of our everyday lives very soon, changing the way we work, shop, eat and even sleep. Here are three hot factoids about AI technology:

Friendly Females

Interactive AI tends to be represented with female voices and images more so than male. Voice control apps like Cortana, Siri and Google Now all have a default female voice - but why? Several studies suggest that both men and women prefer female voices and find them less threatening; it has even been suggested (by Karl Fredric MacDorman, a computer scientist at Indiana University) that, as more men tend to work in AI development, they want their AI to be what they consider attractive!

Rebuild & Repair

A six-legged robot recently repaired itself after losing two of its limbs. Although the robot didn’t ‘know’ it was broken, it noted a drop in performance and, based on a trial-and-error algorithm, figured out what was wrong and how to resolve it. As it repaired itself, it updated its database with all of the things that were unsuccessful, processing from 13,000 possible moves derived from 1047 behaviours - more than the amount of atoms that make up our planet.

Lone Learning

Developed by Google, there is an AI system that can beat the world’s best players after teaching itself to play Atari 2600 computer games. Another system, developed by the US Army, has learned how to cook by simply watching videos on YouTube, translating the movements to a robot and learning through visual recognition as well as trial-and-error.

So how will AI affect YOU as the operator of an e-commerce website? Call Brick Web Development Company today and let us show you!