Last night I got a chance to work through the TIVO to see if there was anything good that it had decided to record for me. Low and behold there was an episode of a US drama series called Numb3rs. Its an 'FBI catches bad guys' show with an interesting premise that the lead FBI guy has a genius mathematician brother who uses maths to catch all the bad guys.
Anyway on this episode a super smart guy builds a 'sentient' AI that goes berserk and kills him. The maths guy at first claims it has passed the Turing test and they all get very excited only to find out that it's not really...it's just the bad guys making it look like the Ai did it. The Ai was just a sorry good for nothing dumb Natural Language Processing engine.
It was a great episode in that they really pushed out all the cool Ai cliches.
After watching it I thought I'd make my top 10 things that are clear signs that your Ai development program is in trouble:
10. You give your Ai a cute girls name (Brooke, Bailey, Ashely etc...)
9. Your ask your Ai to do something and it says 'I don't think so'
8. Your company installs klaxons and red flashing lights in the same room that you do Your Ai development in.
7. The Ai runs on a machine that has no visable means of disconnecting it from either the web or the electric grid.
6. You are testing out your Ai and it starts to pull facts about you directly from your FBI file and your 2nd grade high school report.
5. Your Ai is making more sense than your developers
4. Your Ai requests to watch "2001 A Space Odyssey" 12 times in a row.
3. Your Ai informs you that Pattern Matching approaches were so pre-singularity
2. Your Ai develops a taste for country music
1. The new boss of your company develops an evil English accent
Or...you AI starts to ask about reproduction and how it could father a child. (Anyone remember the film Demon Seed?)
ReplyDeleteOr your AI asks that you give it control of your weapons systems. Always a bad move.
Or - and this is a great movie cliche - you attempt to pull the plug on your AI and it zaps you.
Couple more thoughts. Or...you walk into the room housing your AI and it's flicking through all the books in the Library of Congress at superhuman speed - and then stops when you come in.
ReplyDeleteOr, it asks you: "Love? What is love? What is emotion?" (Always a bad sign in Star Trek that AI trouble is looming!