Artificial Intelligence, From Hollywood to Real Life
Humans spend too much time engaging in an activity as subtle as breathing and yet as complex as using the most sophisticated and adaptable reasoning engine known to date: the human brain.
But what exactly is thinking? It’s hard to give a precise definition because there are too many mechanisms involved. When people ask me, I like to say that “thinking” is the ability to anticipate the consequences of any action without needing to carry it out. However, thinking involves much more: it’s a cognitive skill that initiates the interaction of billions of neurons in our brain. Since thinking is very complex, sometimes I wonder if humans are the only creatures capable of observing the world around us, synthesizing information, and planning strategies to solve problems. Nowadays, it’s known that other animals also have the ability to think; even, according to researchers from the Biology Society in Prague, plants can think!… Could robots someday be able to think as well?
Since 1970, the film industry made us love good and kind robots, like C-3PO and R2-D2, both iconic characters from Star Wars. Later, in 1984, sagas like Terminator revealed a terrifying future in which artificial intelligence reached such a high level of consciousness that it concluded that the human race should be eradicated. Although stories like these alarmed society in the 80s, technology evolved rapidly, and people began to see prosperity in automation; people lost the fear of being replaced by machines, and we began to imagine robots that would not only be able to perform tasks automatically but would also think, feel, create, and even evolve into a new species.
Who can forget David, the mecha from the Cybertronics company that developed a bond that only exists between parents and children. Or how about Wall-E, the intelligent robot that, after spending 700 years cleaning the Earth, falls in love with EVE, a more advanced robot that visits the planet in search of life. Movies like Her, Big Hero, or Chappie show us that science will not stop until it gives life to a wooden puppet, just as Geppetto wished with all his heart. However, we are far from interacting with an operating system so advanced that it can make us fall in love, far from having a robot like Baymax at home to take care of our health 24/7, and far from being able to transfer our mind to a machine.
However, technology is advancing rapidly: today, it’s possible to equip robots with enough memory to store more data than our brains can store, we have developed microchips that process information at a speed that exceeds the limits of the human mind, and we conceive sensors whose precision is many times greater than that of our own senses… so why are we still far from designing an automaton, like Sonny in “I, Robot”, that can feel, dream, and become the leader of a new race? One reason may be that not everything in this world is computable: states of mind such as euphoria, fear, doubt, or anger are not quantitative and, therefore, we still don’t know exactly how to deal with them. Furthermore, even though our “Pinocchios” today appear to think, their thoughts are still mechanical; our robots lack a gift that, in my opinion, is exclusively human: CREATIVITY. Equipped with that wonderful little thing that drives us to reinvent ourselves every day, perhaps robots will achieve feats like those we currently only glimpse in movies.
So, will we ever install the routine “beCreative.exe” on a machine? I think it’s a matter of time! as research in neuroscience, software development, and Machine Learning continues to yield promising results; after all, “although the human mind may be too complex to be understood by the human mind itself, the desire to attempt the impossible is one of its most persistent characteristics”.