December 20168 IN MY VIEWT he world of film and fiction writing has always contained fascinating predictions of how we would live in the future. Some have been way off, but Arthur C Clarke's visions of the 21st Century were more perceptive than most. In 1966, in collaboration with Stanley Kubrick, he created the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. It starred a `robot' called HAL 9000, a `Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic (HAL)' computer endowed with artificial in-telligence. The movie was a powerful demonstration of the possibilities of disaster caused by placing too much power or faith in a machine that argu-ably has no real conscience or aware-ness. Are we at risk of repeating this screenplay?HAL was the first mainstream ex-ample of Machine Learning who used Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) to constantly learn and deepen its knowledge and functionality, yet this superior intelligence was of little use when the two astronauts on the space-ship (who the robot was admittedly planning to kill) decided to turn it off.For the sake of this article, let's assume HAL hadn't been unplugged and try and imagine what it would think and feel about the digital world we inhabit today.Would it be `pleased' with the progress of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning? How would it have `reacted' to IBM's Watson winning Jeopardy? When Google's artificial intelligence algorithm beat a professional Go player earlier this year, would it have felt `a deep sense of pride' at a machine's obvious supe-riority in a game in which it really is impossible to calculate all of the pos-sible future moves? And what would the film critic in HAL make of Sun-spring, an experimental film written by a machine called Jetson and direct-ed by a man called Oscar Sharp? Per-haps the robot would have suggested they should have swapped roles?What would it have to say around the ethical issues involved in allow-ing machines to make important de-cisions regarding human life without involving any humans ­ such as an algorithm-based software used in the USA to calculate the likelihood of criminals re-offending, which What Will Humans Need to Do to `OUTSMART' the Robot?By Chris Harrison, Systems Designer, AureconAustralia based Aurecon is a global engineering and infrastructure advisory company operating since 2009. The organization provides advisory, design, delivery, and asset management services on projects across a range of markets.
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