【明報專訊】The Incident
A wave of artificial intelligence (AI, 人工智能) development has recently swept across the Silicon Valley (矽谷). CEO and co-founder of Tesla Motors Elon Musk, founder of facebook Mark Zuckerberg and American actor Ashton Kutcher have supported Vicarious FPC, an AI company, by investing US$40 million into it. Vicarious FPC aims at building a machine that replicates (仿製) the neocortex (新皮質), the part of the brain that controls vision, movement, language comprehension and computing ability. Founder of Vicarious Scott Pheonix believes that, by recreating the human neocortex as computer code, computers can think like human beings.
Soon after the IBM computer ''Watson'' had beaten a human being in a quiz contest in 2011, Google and facebook started researching and experimenting on AI that could solve practical problems. Google now owns the world's most commonly used search engine and the largest data base (considered to be the ''World Brain''). Experts believe that Google will make a breakthrough in AI development.
British scientist Alan Turing (right), known as the father of computer science, raised a question in 1950 - ''Can machines think?'' He put forward the Turing Test used to determine whether machines could be equipped with intelligence. His point of view was considered radical (極端的) back then.
Now, Google's director of engineering Ray Kurzweil has predicted that, in fifteen years, robots will be smarter than the most intelligent humans. Kurzweil thinks the main duty he has as an AI expert is to make computers understand human language truly instead of just ''seeing'' words. ''We want them (the computers) to read everything on the web and every page of every book and then to be able to engage in intelligent dialogue with humans and answer their questions.''
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