Francisco Miraval
From quite some time now, week after week I read the columns written by Shelly Palmer, an expert in advanced technology, who with a touch of humor explains how new technologies are deeply impacting and changing our everyday human life.
So, when I saw one of his recent articles about a certain online game, I immediately read it. The game, available at Deepart.io (search for “Visual Turing Test”), presents the player with ten pairs of images. Each image is a painting created either by a human being or by Artificial Intelligence (AI). The game consists in correctly guessing the creator of each painting.
This is, of course, a version of the famous Turing Test, thus named because it was first proposed by British mathematician Alan Turing in 1951 in his paper “Computation Machines and Intelligence.” Turin proposed what he called an “imitation game” to decide if a certain behavior exhibited by a machine or a robot was equivalent to or undistinguishable from a similar behavior among humans, thus showing the intelligence of the machine.
The paper is still required reading by all those interested in AI. However, it has been 65 years since the test was proposed and since then both technology and AI have undeniable progressed so much that many experts now doubt the Turing Test is still relevant.
Regardless, some of the basic elements of the Turing Test are still being used, even if just in games like the one reviewed by Palmer. And, according to Palmer, when he played the game, he, being the expert he is in technology and in AI, was right only 60 percent of the time.
Perhaps that’s why he ends his article with this enigmatic and mysterious expression: “I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords!”
At first I thought it was just another expression of Palmer’s sense of humor, something he always carefully includes in his columns. But then I remember that trend expert Gerald Celente said that 2016 would be the year when AI robots will openly become part of our everyday lives.
Of course, one thing is for the robots to become a normal part of our lives and a different thing is for the robots to become our overlords. While thinking about that, I remembered the June 2015 issue of Harvard Business Review, whose main article focuses on “How to manage man-machine collaboration”.
The point of the HBR’s article is clear: we (humans) need to develop new strategies “for remaining gainfully employed in an era of very smart machines”, able to make faster and better decisions than humans.
Suddenly, Palmer’s comment took a different, less humoristic meaning, and it became more somber, almost as if it were a serious warning and not a touch of absurdity.
If experts can’t distinguish between paintings created by humans from paintings created by AI, and if they are saying we should get used to see AI as our coworkers, be it employees or employers, then perhaps it is time to do it.