Artificial Intelligence Imaginable for Skype Co-founder (3)

Published: 22.10.2010 13:35

Photo: ERR

Jaan Tallinn, one of the founders of Skype, believes humans may succeed in creating artificial intelligence by midcentury.

Tallinn told uudised.err.ee that in order to create artificial intelligence, two important problems need to be solved. "First, we need to ensure that a self-correcting system will stay true to its initial purpose. Secondly, we need to solve a more difficult problem – to determine what we actually want. What are those initial goals for a computer that is given super intelligence?" Tallinn asked.

He added that there could be negative outcomes if artificial intelligence is more powerful than humans but cannot interpret human values. "If a computer needs to get carbon atoms, and it doesn’t care about humans, then it would think the easiest place to get them is from humans. It would be more difficult to acquire them from the air," said Tallinn.

It is hard to say what qualifies as artificial intelligence, said Enn Tõugu, senior researcher of the Cybernetics Institute at the Tallinn University of Technology. "I can’t really even tell you what exactly is intelligence, intellect, reason or knowledge," he said.

"I tend to think that we can talk about intelligence as a human quality […] that computers can possibly attain. To some degree, it already is so. For example, I see such beginnings in Google," Tõugu said.

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Comments (3)

  • Brad Arnold

    22.10.2010 16:07

    Many said 20 years ago that a computer won't beat the best human chess player...computers can be taught to reason better than a human in another 20 years...computers are already beating the Dow and the best human chess players...sometimes I think multi-national corporations are computers.

  • auslane

    22.10.2010 20:57

    Chess and stock market analysis are well-understood and finite-bound problems, the solving of which is limited only by the skill of the programmer and the amount of processing power available. Actual AI is still in the very, very early stages of development. I think your figure of 20 years is somewhat optimistic. :^)

  • bugra cakir

    25.10.2010 22:58

    Computer programs need to evolve just like humans in order to compete with human intelligence. Think about computer programs taking good parts of each other and form a new program. This is like genetic programming. In addition to this if we reinforce learning something, feeding programs by our knowledge, it is then knows how to do something. Finally its intelligence converges to ours !!!