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Watch this clip, we will be able to buy robots soon

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Persona Synthetics TV Commercial: The New Generation

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Bill Gates says robots can be a concern for humans

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Bill Gates is the latest prominent figure from the technology industry to express concern about the future evolution of artificial intelligence, although he thinks it will be "decades" before super-intelligent machines pose a threat to humans.

He joins Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking in suggesting that the march of AI could be an existential threat to humans. The former Microsoft boss gave his opinion during his latest Ask Me Anything (AMA) interview on the Reddit networking site.

"I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence. First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super-intelligent. That should be positive if we manage it well," wrote Gates.

"A few decades after that though the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern. I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don't understand why some people are not concerned."

Musk spoke out in October 2014 during an interview at the AeroAstro Centennial Symposium, telling students that the technology industry should be thinking hard about how it approaches AI advances in the future.

"I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that. So we need to be very careful," said Musk. "I'm increasingly inclined to think that there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don't do something very foolish."

'AI doomsday scenarios belong more in the realm of science fiction'

In a December interview, Professor Hawking went further. "The primitive forms of artificial intelligence we already have, have proved very useful. But I think the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race."

Future risks of artificial intelligence are being discussed widely and publicly within the technology industry, and even researchers who think warnings about machines extinguishing the human race are nonsense, are alive to the need to continue exploring the risks.

"AI doomsday scenarios belong more in the realm of science fiction than science fact. However, we still have a great deal of work to do to address the concerns and risks afoot with our growing reliance on AI systems," admitted an article co-written earlier in January by Eric Horvitz, director of the Microsoft Research lab, and Tom Dietterich, president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

That post outlined three key risks around artificial intelligence: programming errors in AI software; cyber-attacks on AI systems by criminals, terrorists and government-backed hackers; and so-called Sorcerer's Apprentice scenarios, when AI systems respond to human instructions in unexpected (and possibly dangerous) ways.

"Each of the three important risks outlined above... is being addressed by current research, but greater efforts are needed," wrote Horvitz and Dietterich, calling for more collaboration and funding to explore the challenges. "We must not put AI algorithms in control of potentially-dangerous systems until we can provide a high degree of assurance that they will behave safely and properly."

'Technology is not making people less intelligent'

During his AMA interview, Gates also talked about his work on a "personal agent" technology within Microsoft that will "remember everything and help you go back and find things and help you pick what things to pay attention to... it will work across all your devices".

He also described the bitcoin cryptocurrency as "exciting" but said it wasn't currently viable for use in the developing world. "For our [Bill and Melinda Gates] Foundation work we are doing digital currency to help the poor get banking services.

"We don't use bitcoin specifically for two reasons," he wrote. "One is that the poor shouldn't have a currency whose value goes up and down a lot compared to their local currency. Second is that if a mistake is made in who you pay then you need to be able to reverse it so anonymity wouldn't work."

Gates was also asked whether technology "has made the masses less intelligent". He replied: "Technology is not making people less intelligent. Technology is letting people get their questions answered better so they stay more curious. It makes it easier to know a lot of topics which turns out to be pretty important to contribute to solving complex problems."

* Bill Gates dismisses criticism of high prices for vaccines

* Gates Foundation annual letter: what do you think?

* Bill Gates: digital learning will revolutionise education in global south

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Artificial intelligence will become strong enough to be a concern, says Bill Gates

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Bill Gates is the latest prominent figure from the technology industry to express concern about the future evolution of artificial intelligence, although he thinks it will be "decades" before super-intelligent machines pose a threat to humans. He joins Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking in suggesting that the march of AI could be an existential threat to humans.

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Real Artificial Intelligence hasn't been created

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At the Royal Society last week Kevin Warwick, professor of cybernetics at Reading University, organised a version of what he called the Turing test - intended to decide if you're talking to a human or a machine.

Warwick claimed that a program designed by the Amazon software developer Vladimir Veselov had passed the test by convincing 30% of the judges that it was a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy called Eugene Goostman.

This event has mightily stirred up the artificial intelligence research community, with a Guardian comment after Ian Sample's article on 9 June capturing a typical view: "The problem is that this is a PR stunt for a mediocre university, not a useful measure." Other comments recalled the history of Warwick's eye-catching gestures - he once had a chip implanted in his arm so as to communicate directly with his partner.

So has some AI milestone been reached? Is Eugene Goostman the best conversation program ever created? Turing argued in 1950 that if a computer could be substituted into the old guessing game of "Am I getting notes from a man or a woman?" and no one noticed, then we should just admit computers could think and stop worrying. But Turing was not proposing a test of any sort, and in his setup, the question "Is this a machine or a person?" is never asked, because one thinks one is answering a question about sex. Once you pose the human-or-machine question directly, things start to get very odd.

The long-running Loebner competition has a similar format except that judges are not asked to say whether each candidate is human, but to rate them numerically. At the end, the scores are added and the performances are ranked. So far the "people" have always come out on top. The Loebner competition is not what Turing had in mind either, but it is at least systematic: it avoids the explicit question "Is this a machine?" with its ranking system, and publishes the transcripts of the best systems on its website, which Warwick declined to do.

All this makes it rather unlikely that Goostman was any better than the refined and experienced chatbots in the Loebner competitions; indeed, it seems Goostman competed there in 2012 and didn't do well. A defect of the Loebner setup is that there is no methodology for comparing the winner one year with any other, so it's not clear if the winners are getting better.

A team I led at the University of Sheffield won in 1997, and my hunch is that the winners now are much the same in terms of quality, but we cannot know for sure. What we can know is that there is no reason to believe Goostman is better than the Loebner winners.

The chatbot world, many of whose products are now being customised to replace call centres and perform in sex chatrooms, is a largely amateur field, The winners are not usually academic AI researchers, who want to bring to bear big- data analyses, theories of computer learning and linguistics. The winners are often just very laborious handcrafted systems that have programmed in thousands of possible replies to whatever is said to them. AI theoreticians do not like that, and believe machines must be rational - as they think we are - and will have to learn to talk as we do. The problem is that sophisticated theoretical approaches have not yet produced the kind of sheer performance level that amateur chatbots often do. And the game has been changed by the appearance of Apple's Siri, which answers questions on iPhones. Although this was developed out of a large US research project, its success comes from the very large number of hand-programmed special responses, such as the comic answer to the question: "How do I bury a body?" (Try it.)

Siri combines aspects of research-based systems and chatbots; certainly there must be some intelligent mechanisms to allow a participant to change subjects in conversation and go back to early unfinished topics, as people can, but chatbots can do none of these. There will be a huge market for such devices if we can get the mixture right - for digital companions that chat to lonely old people in their homes as well as for replacing soul-destroying human work in call centres. But all this is a long, hard slog.

We have had nearly 60 years of computer conversationalists since Colby's Parry system, which mimicked a paranoid patient in an asylum and could hold people enthralled and amazed for long periods of time. Yet it was Weizenbaum's Eliza, a naive and trivial program, that got all the publicity at the time. Hype really does exist in science; the answer must be the right combination of patience, cynicism and stamina.
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Don't believe the science hype - we haven't created true AI yet | Yorick Wilks

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At the Royal Society last week Kevin Warwick, professor of cybernetics at Reading University, organised a version of what he called the Turing test - intended to decide if you're talking to a human or a machine.

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This app answers all questions (Artificial Intelligence)

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About Cleverbot

The site Cleverbot.com started in 2006, but the AI was 'born' in 1988, when Rollo Carpenter saw how to make his machine learn. It has been learning ever since!

Things you say to Cleverbot today may influence what it says to others in future. The program chooses how to respond to you fuzzily, and contextually, the whole of your conversation being compared to the millions that have taken place before.

Many people say there is no bot - that it is connecting people together, live. The AI can seem human because it says things real people do say, but it is always software, imitating people.

Sign in to Cleverbot

You'll have seen scissors on Cleverbot. Using them you can share snippets of chats with friends on social networks. Now you can share snips at Cleverbot.com too!

When you sign in to Cleverbot on this blue bar, you can:

Tweak how the AI responds - 3 different ways!
Keep a history of multiple conversations
Switch between conversations
Return to a conversation on any machine
Publish snippets - snips! - for the world to see
Find and follow friends
Be followed yourself!
Rate snips, and see the funniest of them
Reply to snips posted by others
Vote on replies, from awful to great!
Choose not to show the scissors

Feedback

Comments or suggestions? Please do let us know.

Policies

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions.

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The site Cleverbot.com started in 2006, but the AI was 'born' in 1988, when Rollo Carpenter saw how to make his machine learn. It has been learning ever since! Things you say to Cleverbot today may influence what it says to others in future.

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Here is list with the jobs robots will be able to do

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Paging Sarah Connor!

After decades as a sci-fi staple, artificial intelligence has leapt into the mainstream. Between Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa, IBM's Watson and Google Brain, machines that understand the world and respond productively suddenly seem imminent.

The combination of immense Internet-connected networks and machine-learning...

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Does Artificial Intelligence Pose a Threat?

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Paging Sarah Connor! After decades as a sci-fi staple, artificial intelligence has leapt into the mainstream. Between Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa, IBM's Watson and Google Brain, machines that understand the world and respond productively suddenly seem imminent. The combination of immense Internet-connected networks and machine-learning...

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Robots will overtake humans by 2100

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Some futurists think the singularity - the point at which artificial intelligence can match, and then overtake, human smarts - might happen in just 16 years, while others say by 2100. Either way, it's near.

Credit: jimmi | Shutterstock

Are you prepared to meet your robot overlords?

The idea of superintelligent machines may sound like the plot of "The Terminator" or "The Matrix," but many experts say the idea isn't far-fetched. Some even think the singularity - the point at which artificial intelligence can match, and then overtake, human smarts - might happen in just 16 years.

But nearly every computer scientist will have a different prediction for when and how the singularity will happen.

Some believe in a utopian future, in which humans can transcend their physical limitations with the aid of machines. But others think humans will eventually relinquish most of their abilities and gradually become absorbed into artificial intelligence (AI)-based organisms, much like the energy making machinery in our own cells. [ 5 Reasons to Fear Robots]

Singularity near?

In his book "The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology" (Viking, 2005), futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted that computers will be as smart as humans by 2029, and that by 2045, "computers will be billions of times more powerful than unaided human intelligence," Kurzweil wrote in an email to LiveScience.

"My estimates have not changed, but the consensus view of AI scientists has been changing to be much closer to my view," Kurzweil wrote.

Bill Hibbard, a computer scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, doesn't make quite as bold a prediction, but he's nevertheless confident AI will have human-level intelligence some time in the 21st century.

"Even if my most pessimistic guess is true, it means it's going to happen during the lifetime of people who are already born," Hibbard said.

But other AI researchers are skeptical.

"I don't see any sign that we're close to a singularity," said Ernest Davis, a computer scientist at New York University.

While AI can trounce the best chess or Jeopardy player and do other specialized tasks, it's still light-years behind the average 7-year-old in terms of common sense, vision, language and intuition about how the physical world works, Davis said.

For instance, because of that physical intuition, humans can watch a person overturn a cup of coffee and just know that the end result will be a puddle on the floor. A computer program, on the other hand, would have to do a laborious simulation and know the exact size of the cup, the height of the cup from the surface and various other parameters to understand the outcome, Davis said. [ 10 Cool Facts About Coffee]

Infinite abilities

Once the singularity occurs, people won't necessarily die (they can simply upgrade with cybernetic parts), and they could do just about anything they wanted to - provided it were physically possible and didn't require too much energy, Hibbard said.

The past two singularities - the Agricultural and Industrial revolutions - led to a doubling in economic productivity every 1,000 and 15 years, respectively, said Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University in Washington, D.C., who is writing a book about the future singularity. But once machines become as smart as men, the economy will double every week or month.

This rapid pace of productivity would be possible because the main "actors" in the economy, namely people, could simply be replicated for whatever it costs to copy an intelligent-machine software into another computer.

Earth's destruction?

That productivity spike may not be a good thing. For one, robots could probably survive apocalyptic scenarios that would wipe out humans.

"A society or economy made primarily of robots will not fear destroying nature in the same way that we should fear destroying nature," Hanson said.

And others worry that we're barreling toward a future that doesn't take people into account. For instance, self-driving cars could improve safety, but also put millions of truck drivers out of work, Hibbard said. So far, no one is planning for those possibilities.

"There are such strong financial incentives in using technology in ways that aren't necessarily in everyone's interest," Hibbard said. "That's going to be a very difficult problem, possibly an unsolvable problem."

Human devolution?

Some scientists think we are already in the midst of the singularity.

Humans have already relinquished many intelligent tasks, such as the ability to write, navigate, memorize facts or do calculations, Joan Slonczewski, a microbiologist at Kenyon college and the author of a science-fiction book called "The Highest Frontier," (Tor Books, 2011). Since Gutenberg invented the printing press, humans have continuously redefined intelligence and transferred those tasks to machines. Now, even tasks considered at the core of humanity, such as caring for the elderly or the sick, are being outsourced to empathetic robots, she said.

"The question is, could we evolve ourselves out of existence, being gradually replaced by the machines?" Slonczewski said. "I think that's an open question."

In fact, the future of humanity may be similar to that of mitochondria, the energy powerhouses of cells. Mitochondria were once independent organisms, but at some point, an ancestral cell engulfed those primitive bacteria, and over evolutionary history, mitochondria let cells gradually take over all the functions they used to perform, until they only produced energy.

"We're becoming like the mitochondria. We provide the energy - we turn on the machines," Slonczewski told LiveScience. "But increasingly, they do everything else."

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Intelligent Robots Will Overtake Humans by 2100, Experts Say

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Are you prepared to meet your robot overlords? The idea of superintelligent machines may sound like the plot of "The Terminator" or "The Matrix," but many experts say the idea isn't far-fetched. Some even think the singularity - the point at which artificial intelligence can match, and then overtake, human smarts - might happen in just 16 years.

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Robots can't make decisions

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Video: Why robots will never make decisions like humans

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Bob Knight, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience from the University of California, Berkeley, says our emotions influence the decisions we make and computers will never be able to mat...

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Stephen Hawking says robots will end mankind. Watch this video.

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Prof Stephen Hawking, one of Britain's pre-eminent scientists, has said that efforts to create thinking machines pose a threat to our very existence.

He told the BBC:"The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race."

His warning came in response to a question about a revamp of the technology he uses to communicate, which involves a basic form of AI.

But others are less gloomy about AI's prospects.

The theoretical physicist, who has the motor neurone disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), is using a new system developed by Intel to speak.

Machine learning experts from the British company Swiftkey were also involved in its creation. Their technology, already employed as a smartphone keyboard app, learns how the professor thinks and suggests the words he might want to use next.

Prof Hawking says the primitive forms of artificial intelligence developed so far have already proved very useful, but he fears the consequences of creating something that can match or surpass humans.

"It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate," he said.

"Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded."

But others are less pessimistic.

"I believe we will remain in charge of the technology for a decently long time and the potential of it to solve many of the world problems will be realised," said Rollo Carpenter, creator of Cleverbot.

Cleverbot's software learns from its past conversations, and has gained high scores in the Turing test, fooling a high proportion of people into believing they are talking to a human.

Rise of the robots

Mr Carpenter says we are a long way from having the computing power or developing the algorithms needed to achieve full artificial intelligence, but believes it will come in the next few decades.

"We cannot quite know what will happen if a machine exceeds our own intelligence, so we can't know if we'll be infinitely helped by it, or ignored by it and sidelined, or conceivably destroyed by it," he says.

But he is betting that AI is going to be a positive force.

Prof Hawking is not alone in fearing for the future.

In the short term, there are concerns that clever machines capable of undertaking tasks done by humans until now will swiftly destroy millions of jobs.

In the longer term, the technology entrepreneur Elon Musk has warned that AI is "our biggest existential threat".

Robotic voice

In his BBC interview, Prof Hawking also talks of the benefits and dangers of the internet.

He quotes the director of GCHQ's warning about the net becoming the command centre for terrorists: "More must be done by the internet companies to counter the threat, but the difficulty is to do this without sacrificing freedom and privacy."

He has, however, been an enthusiastic early adopter of all kinds of communication technologies and is looking forward to being able to write much faster with his new system.

But one aspect of his own tech - his computer generated voice - has not changed in the latest update.

Prof Hawking concedes that it's slightly robotic, but insists he didn't want a more natural voice.

"It has become my trademark, and I wouldn't change it for a more natural voice with a British accent," he said.

"I'm told that children who need a computer voice, want one like mine."

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Prof Stephen Hawking, one of Britain's pre-eminent scientists, has said that efforts to create thinking machines pose a threat to our very existence. He told the BBC:"The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race."

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Robots can work faster than humans and are cheaper

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Cheaper, better robots will replace human workers in the world's factories at a faster pace over the next decade, pushing manufacturing labor costs down 16 percent, a report Tuesday said.

The Boston Consulting Group predicts that investment in industrial robots will grow 10 percent a year in the world's 25-biggest export nations through 2025, up from 2 percent to 3 percent a year now. The investment will pay off in lower costs and increased efficiency.

Robots will cut labor costs by 33 percent in South Korea, 25 percent in Japan, 24 percent in Canada and 22 percent in the United States and Taiwan. Only 10 percent of jobs that can be automated have already been taken by robots. By 2025, the machines will have more than 23 percent, Boston Consulting forecasts.

Robots are getting cheaper. The cost of owning and operating a robotic spot welder, for instance, has tumbled from $182,000 in 2005 to $133,000 last year, and will drop to $103,000 by 2025, Boston Consulting says.

And the new machines can do more things. Old robots could only operate in predictable environments. The newer ones use improved sensors to react to the unexpected.

SOCIAL

-- The Associated Press

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Robots Replacing Human Factory Workers at Faster Pace

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Cheaper, better robots will replace human workers in the world's factories at a faster pace over the next decade, pushing manufacturing labor costs down 16 percent, a report Tuesday said. The Boston Consulting Group predicts that investment in industrial robots will grow 10 percent a year in the world's 25-biggest export nations through 2025, up from 2 percent to 3 percent a year now.

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There are jobs robots will never be able to do

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Robots already took jobs from a whole generation of manual laborers. Now software agents, sophisticated surgery robots, and autonomous devices are encroaching on professional workers too. But don't worry - there are some jobs only humans can do, and the Homo sapiens job sector is set to explode.

I started thinking about this a couple of weeks ago at the Berkeley Ideas Festival, when I had a chance to corner the economist Brad DeLong and ask him about our coming robot overlords. He's actually pretty sanguine about the future of human labor because he takes the long view. When people abandoned farms for factories in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, he noted, whole new classes of jobs opened up to claim those displaced workers. The tricky part is predicting what those new classes of jobs might be.
Human Advisers
DeLong had some ideas, though he cautioned that the future always holds surprises. He thought there would be a massive uptick in jobs that could be classified as specialist service or helper positions - from the person at Kings Cross station who directs you to the right train, to somebody like Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, whose job is to tell Mark Zuckerberg that he's not going into meetings to show how smart he is, but to cut deals. DeLong noted that this is a class of jobs that has potential, because there is such a broad range of salaries and responsibilities in it.

So let's assume there's a whole class of human advising jobs that robots won't do. If DeLong's hunch is right, more of those jobs will open up as robots take over traditional number-cruncher jobs that are now being done more often by algorithms and analytic tools. We'll lose a whole class of jobs for quants, analysts, and researchers. But humans will gain more jobs aiding each other, helping each other tackle problems that require more than pattern recognition and probabalistic modeling.
Decision-Makers
There are other helper jobs that will always belong to humans as well. It's likely that we'll soon have robot police, robot marines, robot surgeons, and robot healthcare assistants. One can even imagine, for example, that robot police would be an improvement over emotionally volatile police officers who get scared and shoot when they shouldn't - or get mad and beat a suspect who is taunting them. Same goes for surgeons or marines, who need to be graceful and dexterous under pressure.

But a human will always have to be in the command structure for all these professions. They will have to make crucial decisions about where to deploy officers - and when to stand down, if the situation goes off-script. They'll have to be there with a patient who is deciding whether surgery or medication is the way to go.

Humans need each other to aid in decision-making. Executing the decision or analyzing data is great for robots. But advising humans, helping them come to the right decision? That's something only another human can do. Robots will be doing jobs filled by Homo sapiens now, but we will always need a human to manage them and author the strategies behind their deployment. It's possible when more humans are freed up to ponder how to make these decisions, that our choices will be smarter, better informed, and more ethical.
Quality Assurance
And here's another thing that only humans can do: testing software, hardware, and anything else for usability. Sure a robot can help design a videogame. But it can't figure out whether the thing will be usable for humans. So you can expect robot user interface designers to be getting a lot of bug reports from slightly miffed Homo sapiens in the QA department.
Small Businesses
The other thing to consider about robots is that they require a big initial capital layout. In other words, businesses that replace humans with robots have to have enough cash in the bank to take an initial hit before the cheap robot labor pays off over time. Small business owners probably won't be able to afford the initial investment, even if they might save money in the long run. So don't expect your local mom and pop store to be staffed by robots anytime soon.
The Slow Analysis Movement
Speaking of small business, another place where humans will always have work is in the artisanal human-crafted goods industry. A human-made item of clothing might become a status symbol in a world of shirts made by disembodied mechanical arms. And what about a human-analyzed piece of information? A piece of research done by an actual person? Slow research and slow analysis could become a craze among those with the time and money to enjoy it.

We are in a transition period economically, where robots are swarming into jobs we never imagined they'd have. But are we really any different from the agriculturalists in 1750, wondering where all the new jobs would come from when everybody had moved to the cities? Though we can speculate, just as they did, about what's to come, the future of jobs is always weirder than what we expect.

The robot uprising may mean more humans working together, rather than less. And the more we work alongside each other, the closer we'll get to overcoming human problems that seem insurmountable now. Maybe the age of robots will be the last age of war.
Annalee Newitz is the editor-in-chief of io9, and this is her column. She's also the author of Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction. Follow her on Twitter.
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These are the jobs that robots will never steal from us

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Robots already took jobs from a whole generation of manual laborers. Now software agents, sophisticated surgery robots, and autonomous devices are encroaching on professional workers too. But don't worry - there are some jobs only humans can do, and the Homo sapiens job sector is set to explode.