A.I. made international headlines in the last week of February 2015, following a high-profile breakthrough in Google’s DeepMind computer, which was able to master a handful of Atari video games through visual perception and complex learning abilities.
DeepMind Artificial Intelligence was able to best human scoring records in a handful of Atari Games.
Deepmind, which was purchased by Google last year in a $400 million acquisition, is at the forefront of so-called “Machine Learning”. They put their program to the test by showing that it could learn how to play a range of vintage console games without any prior knowledge of their rules or objectives. In a New Yorker article February 25th, computer scientist Zachary Mason speculated that “[DeepMind’s] current line of research leads to StarCraft in five or ten years and Call of Duty in maybe twenty, and controllers for drones in live battle spaces in maybe fifty,”
But DeepMind is not the first A.I. to raise eyebrows across the world. IBM’s Watson, an A.I that dominated Jeopardy in 2013, is now being used at the Cleveland Clinic, assisting in diagnostics and “utilization management”- industry jargon for the methods in which healthcare providers and insurance companies agree on treatments and their relative coverage. According to Forbes, WestMed Practice Partners and the Maine Center for Cancer Medicine & Blood Disorder were some of the first customers for Watson’s artificial smarts.
DeepMind Founder Demis Hassabis told The Washington Post these developments were nothing to worry about– for now. “We’re many, many decades away from anything, any kind of technology that we need to worry about. But it’s good to start the conversation now and be aware of as with any new powerful technology it can be used for good or bad”.
So a Predator Drone and an Android Walk into a Bar…
Intelligent machines have begun to leave the realm of science fiction and place themselves squarely in the present. All of these breakthroughs in A.I are taking place in a larger context of advancements in robotics, engineering, surveillance, and aviation. These developments have resulted in the first self-driving cars and facial recognition technologies. Predator Drones, the unmanned robots operated by agents of the US military and CIA, are among the most dangerous applications of automation that have emerged to date.
Predator Drone operators in the US Air Force.
According to the casualty figures by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ), up to 5,127 people were killed by drone strikes since 2002, including hundreds of civilians. This figure was derived by adding together BIJ’s highest estimates of the dead in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. On February 27th, BIJ reported an additional 35-44 deaths-by-drone in Afghanistan over the last two year period. These figures do not include possible drone casualties in Syria and Iraq since the beginning of the US bombing campaign against the Islamic State.
The heaviest bombings have been in North Warzistan, Pakistan. BIJ’s Jack Serle told Huffington Post that the region was “extremely unstable. It’s really dangerous for our people to report on the ground and it’s dangerous for sources to be seen talking to the researchers.”
While technology experts like Mason and Hassabis don’t believe A.I. controlled predator drones are possible in the near future, the technology may not be as far behind as they would have us believe. Drones are already being deployed for surveillance purposes throughout war zones across the globe. Surveillance technologies in general have made huge leaps in automation and A.I driven data-crunching in recent decades. And far from being the “surgical” assassination tools touted by Obama and his allies, the death tolls from drone strikes in Africa and the Middle East indicate that significant civilian casualties are acceptable to the people pushing the kill button.
Drone operators already rely on questionable NSA surveillance tactics, such as SIM-card tracking, as I’ve written previously. This sophisticated method of tracking cell phones, revealed by The Intercept last year, is largely the domain of an automated surveillance web run by clandestine agents of the NSA.
From Science Fiction to Science Fascism
After decades of setbacks, the age of accelerating A.I. is here. According to Bloomberg, Bridgewater Associates “will start a new, artificial-intelligence unit” this month. This massive hedge fund will use A.I. to create “trading algorithims” which facilitate risky financial bets. In the same article, the CEO of a high-tech recruiting firm said there was more to come. “Machine learning is the new wave of investing for the next 20 years and the smart players are focusing on it.”
With significant investments into A.I. in the medical, financial, and military fields, it’s difficult to predict how these technologies will have changed our lives in 2025, 2035, and beyond, as the children of millennials begin to grow up and come into adulthood. While science fiction fantasies like The Matrix, Blade Runner, and I Robot are today’s popcorn fare, they might just as easily be tomorrow’s dystopia. Let’s hope that future generations keep the warnings of science fiction writers in mind as we move steadily into the age of A.I.
Web Address of Paul Murufas 