FUTURE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGANCE The future of aritificial intelligance will be new types of animal-inspired machines that are more

`messy' and unpredictable than any we have seen before. These machines will change over time as a result of their interactions with us and with the world. These silent, pre-linguistic, animal-like machines will be nothing like humans but they will gradually come to seem like a strange sort of animal. Machines that learn, familiar to researchers in labs for many years, will finally become mainstream and enter the public consciousness. Machines that learn tend to develop an individual, unrepeatable character which humans can find quite attractive. There are already a few games in software - such as the Windowsbased game Creatures, and the little Tamagotchi toys - whose personalities people can get very attached to. A major part of the appeal is the unique, fragile and unrepeatable nature of the software beings you interact with. If your Creature dies, you may never be able to raise another one like it again. Machines in the future will be similar, and the family robot will after a few years be, like a pet, literally irreplaceable. To the extent that ethics is a cognitive pursuit, a superintelligence could do it better than human thinkers. This means that questions about ethics, in so far as they have correct answers that can be arrived at by reasoning and weighting up of evidence, could be more accurately answered by a superintelligence than by humans. The same holds for questions of policy and long-term planning; when it comes to understanding which policies would lead to which results, and which means would be most effective in attaining given aims, a superintelligence would outperform humans. AI will go on producing more and more sophisticated applications in restricted domains - expert systems, chess programs, Internet agents - but any time we expect common sense we will continue to be disappointed as we have been in the past. At vulnerable points these will continue to be exposed as `blind automata'. Whereas animal-based AI or AL will go on producing stranger and stranger machines, less rationally intelligent but more rounded and whole, in which we will start to feel that there is somebody at home, in a strange animal kind of way. In conclusion, we won't see full AI in our lives, but we should live to get a good feel for whether or not it is possible, and how it could be achieved by our descendants. Historically there were two main approaches to AI:

classical approach (designing the AI), based on symbolic reasoning - a mathematical approach in which ideas and concepts are represented by symbols such as words, phrases or sentences, which are then processed according to the rules of logic. a connectionist approach (letting AI develop), based on artificial neural networks, which imitate the way neurons work, and genetic algorithms, which imitate inheritance and fitness to evolve better solutions to a problem with every generation.

Symbolic reasoning have been successfully used in expert systems and other fields. Neural nets are used in many areas, from computer games to DNA sequencing. But both

approaches have severe limitations. A human brain is neither a large inference system, nor a huge homogenous neural net, but rather a collection of specialised modules. The best way to mimic the way humans think appears to be specifically programming a computer to perform individual functions (speech recognition, reconstruction of 3D environments, many domain-specific functions) and then combining them together. Additional approaches:

genetics, evolution Bayesian probabily inferencing combinations - ie: "evolved (genetic) neural networks that influence probability distributions of formal expert systems"

y breaking up AI research into more specific problems, such as computer vision, speech recognition and automatic planning, which had more clearly definable goals, scientists managed to create a critical mass of work aimed at solving these individual problems. Some of the fields, where technology has matured and enabled practical applications, are:

lollypop Skynet Speech Recognition Systems. Computer Vision Text Analysis Robot Control Planning. Humans excel at creating real world plans on a daily basis seemingly effortlessly. A review of the problem of creating a problem however will reveal that the creation of a real world plan requires a vast amount of knowlege about the real world. Consider for instance that a friend asks to be met at the Tate Museum in London, 21 days hence. The meeting should be in time for lunch at a restaurant within walking distance of the museum. An agreement to make the meeting would require a plan that takes many things into consideration. For instance, if you were to agree to meet your friend at the Tate Museum and you were situated in North America, then you would first have to realize that there are no bridges to England. It is not possible to walk there. Likewise it is not possible to take a train. One might take an ocean liner or one might fly. Entering England requires authentic identification papers. Therefore a passport is required. Were you a US citizen then you would be obliged to acquire a passport if you did not already have one. Delays are associated with acquiring a passport. The US government is not driven by the profit motive. Therefore a wait of several weeks might not be unreasonable. British is a soverign nation. It has its own legal system as well as its own legal tender. The British Pound. One would therefore be obliged to convert US dollars into British Pounds prior to making the trip, or immediately upon arrival. The US dollar floats relative to other currencies. One would therefore need to account for exchange rate shifts. Britain is in a time zone that is advanced by 6 hours from that of East Coast time (US). Upon arriving, therefore one might find oneself psychologically and

physiologically off balance - hence, resting might be in order. One will very likely not rest in a public place but acquire accommodations. The Tate Museum is not a hotel, therefore one could not rest there for the time needed. And on it goes. In order to make a simple yes or no answer to making the meeting one must factor in a huge amount of real world knowledge. Enabling machines to create real world ad hoc plans therefore requires that an extensive knowledge base be created to account for the combinatorial explosion that typically arises when trying to move forward.

Plan Recognition. A computing system that is capable of recognizing the plan that an actor or agent is formulating is in the position of either assisting in implementing the plan or maybe able to thwart the plan ([Henry Kautz - Plan Recognition]). Using Kautz' system, one can create a knowledge base about a specific domain. The expert system that uses this knowledge base is then able to recognize the activity in question and make inferences about the state of completion of the plan. Sufficiently robust plan recognizers can identify the actions of both individual agents but also teams of agents all of whom may be actively attempting to coordinate their efforts to accoplish a goal.

Expert Systems. These information systems draw upon several areas of artificial intelligence to perform their operations. Developing an expert system requires an understanding of knowledge representation. Human knowledge can be represented as production rules, i.e. simple or complex if-then combinations if antecedentconsequent constructions, first order logical constructions such as: likes(mary, wine), or extended representations called frames. Frames represent human knowledge as objects that have attributes which have values. These O-V-A combinations can be assembled into recursive structures that map very closely to their real world counterparts. Knowledge about the world and the functioning of these objects can then be applied to real world situations. Knowledge is not always exact, therefore a robust knowledge representation scheme need to have some for of representing ambiguity. Fuzzy logic is a way of capturing ambiguity about a real world phenomena. For instance one might make the observation that a man it "tall" because he stands 6 feet, 2 inches in height. Would a man who is 6 feet, 1 inch still tall? A man who is 6 feet and 1/2 inches? Fuzzy logic enables ranges of confidence to be expressed about a particular object or rule. Once some form of representation scheme is identified an inferencing strategy is required. Humans use both forwardchaining and backward-chaining strategies. They often use combinations of the two to solve complex problems. Problems that require identification from a few facts is a typical use of forward-chaining. A forward-chainer can be provided with a small set of facts about a situation or object and reason about the problem. For instance an opthomologist can quickly assess the type of problem that a patient presents just based upon a few facts and observations. The problem can quickly be identified and classified as to whether it is caused by trauma, infection, toxicity, congential or

systemic (e.g. detached retina as a result of high blood pressure). A backwardchaining system can create theories. A famous backward-chainer was Sherlock Holmes. Holmes was presented with a finished result. A person might have been murdered under mysterious circumstances. Holmes was able to reason backward from the presented corpse to how the person ended up in a terminal state. He created theories based upon observations and knowledlge about the real world. In order to rapidly achieve a goal or formulate a correct theory means that the chainer utilize operators and meta-operators. Solving a Rubik's cube requires the use of both. This is because the act of putting a Rubik's cube back in order involves interacting-subgoals - i.e. partial goals that conflict with solving the larger puzzle. Operators and meta-operators are used to navigate the search space and constrain the combinatorial explosion that results when one attempts to solve a problem. Knowledge can be characterized in terms of the "strength" of the knowledge. This characterization is described as "f-hat" i.e. the letter "f" with a carat over it. The more effective the knowledge, the less time is required to traverse the space. Conclusion I've been trying to give an idea of how artificial animals could be useful, but the reason that I'm interested in them is the hope that artificial animals will provide the route to artificial humans. But the latter is not going to happen in our lifetimes (and indeed may never happen, at least not in any straightforward way). In the coming decades, we shouldn't expect that the human race will become extinct and be replaced by robots. We can expect that classical AI will go on producing more and more sophisticated applications in restricted domains - expert systems, chess programs, Internet agents - but any time we expect common sense we will continue to be disappointed as we have been in the past. At vulnerable points these will continue to be exposed as `blind automata'. Whereas animal-based AI or AL will go on producing stranger and stranger machines, less rationally intelligent but more rounded and whole, in which we will start to feel that there is somebody at home, in a strange animal kind of way. In conclusion, we won't see full AI in our lives, but we should live to get a good feel for whether or not it is possible, and how it could be achieved by our descendants.