A thing, tell me, when will I die? Frightening (and not very) successes of artificial intelligence

Can I teach the computer to bluff? Three stories from the book of Clifford Pikover “Artificial Intelligence. Illustrated story. From automatons to neural networks "

American shock drone MQ-9 Reaper. There are many ways to fool a “smart” drone so that, for example, he takes the hospital as a military purpose

Photo: US Air Force

“The period of the existence of the biological mind is only a brief interval between the early forms of life and the long era of machines,” this phrase of the famous British cosmologist Martin Rice serves as a logical epigraph for the book of American scientific journalist Clifford Pikover “Artificial intelligence. Illustrated story ” (recently came out at the Sinbad Publishing House).

However, according to the author, the “long era of cars” began unnoticed for a very long time-at least from the moment the game “Cross-Nolics” was invented in ancient Egypt-“an atom, on the basis of which molecules of increasingly complex games were formed”. Or even earlier: a man’s burning interest in artificial intelligence arose almost simultaneously with the birth of the human mind itself; The images of “reasonable things” fill the culture for millennia.

The book of Pikover has a subtitle “from machine guns to neural networks” ; In a hundred short sections, the most striking achievements of the “long era of cars” are compressed. In parallel, we observe how the attitude of mankind towards “reasonable things” changes: if the ancient builders of automatons (mobile mechanical devices simulating living creatures) were absorbed in the solution of purely technical problems, today the most difficult ethical issues related to the use of AI come to the fore. These issues are often painted with paranoid fear of the inevitable (supposedly) “uprising of cars” and the impending enslavement of mankind.

With the kind permission of the publishing house, we chose three sections from the final part of the book for the publication. They tell about the achievements of recent years, when artificial intelligence has matured to solve non -trivial (and sometimes very dangerous) problems.

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