Having spent most of my career delivering Artificial Intelligence (AI) application ... that solve real world problems ... I think it's fair to say that I'm passionate about AI!
In response to a discussion in the Twittersphere, I thought I would take a few minutes to ponder the question above. Before I start, I should point out that the views I express here are my own personal views and do not in any way reflect the corporate position of IBM.
Let's start by reviewing what the great and the good thought! Alan Turing predicted in 1950 that machines would answer questions in a way that was indistinguishable from a human expert within 50 years (i.e. by the year 2000). In 1967 Minsky said, "Within a generation ... the problem of creating artificial intelligence will be substantially solved". I think we would all agree that both predictions have been shown to be extremely optimistic.
At the 2012 Singularity Summit the predicted date for the Singularity was thought to be around 2040. That is 23 years from now ... I have been working in AI for over 25 years so I have a reasonable grasp on how much progress is achievable in the predicted timeframe.
The very first AI conference I attended was the IEE Second International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks in November 1991. Having just scanned through the proceedings it is clear to me that we have come a very long way in the core sensory and classification tasks. In areas such as image recognition and classification there has been huge progress.
Sadly, machines still struggle with tasks that require higher levels of reasoning. The type of tasks that I am referring to seem incredibly simple for humans but are extremely challenging for machines. Two basic examples are pronoun resolution in documents and word identification in speech recognition. In both these tasks, human beings draw on a vast knowledge base and other clues in order to correctly identify meaning. We resolve pronouns because we know obscure facts or can inference about biographical information. We identify words being spoken in a noisy environment by understanding the context of the conversation, the facial expressions of the speaker and many other hidden clues.
As a simple exercise, try reading a childrens' story and think about how you understand even the most basic of sentences. You will find that your brain is leveraging a vast knowledge base ... the fact that a tortoise walks slowly or that cats like milk ... and picking up clues from the accompanying pictures ... such as the surprised look on the face of a butterfly. Your brain is able to fuse the text in the sentence with the clues in the pictures and use your vast knowledge base to understand the story. I haven't yet seen an AI system that can come close to that capability. I have my own plans to invent one but that's another story!
Whilst I think we are making incredible progress in AI, my personal view is that there is a very long way to go. We are still working on the core sensory skills (e.g. image recognition) and are a long way from the higher level reasoning skills required to enable the Singularity.
It's important to remember though that we can't predict the future through simple extrapolation. Technological breakthroughs tend to result in step changes rather than gradual evolutions.
For the Singularity to happen, AI needs to deliver capabilities that can fuse input from multiple sources including a vast and deep knowledge base. For me, one of the first indicators that we are making progress in this area will be when machines are able to leverage knowledge and common sense to perform basic resolution tasks in areas such as text analytics and speech recognition.
Putting aside my earlier caveat about predicting the future, I have to say that I believe 2040 is very optimistic!
