A Quiet Trepidation

A few years ago, yours truly was invited to Watson's coming out party whereby IBM's AI was now open for business. It was impressive without question in terms of how Watson was being used and how it going to be used in the months and years ahead as seen by the demos driven by the software. The highlight of the presentation was a talk by one of the lead programmers discussing the state of the environment as of that day, which started off with the fact the "app" was 11 times smarter then the iteration that won Jeopardy in overwhelming fashion. The last statement that gives one pause was this. "We don't know how it works."

BRT has discussed the implications of this open ended tech many times as this genie is something that extends beyond anything else man has ever created as the tech is just that, open ended where its acceleration of intelligence is becoming exponential and mysterious as the creators of AI are now discovering with quiet trepidation.

Last year, a strange self-driving car was released onto the quiet roads of Monmouth County, New Jersey. The experimental vehicle, developed by researchers at the chip maker Nvidia, didn’t look different from other autonomous cars, but it was unlike anything demonstrated by Google, Tesla, or General Motors, and it showed the rising power of artificial intelligence. The car didn’t follow a single instruction provided by an engineer or programmer. Instead, it relied entirely on an algorithm that had taught itself to drive by watching a human do it.