Al and robotics are coming into our lives in unprecedented ways and may bring new benefits to health care, transportation, manufacturing, and even housework. Cummins said that AI technology can reach its maximum potential in cooperation with human beings. Although taxi drivers may worry about being robbed of their jobs, she believes that by 2030, there will be a shortage of robotics experts all over the world.
Why should people pay attention to AI and robots?
Al and robotics are being incorporated into every part of our lives, from driving cars, to using mobile phones, data management, to how our homes will be built in the future, and so on. Therefore, since this technology is ubiquitous, it is very important to start exploring the advantages and limitations of AI now.
What real breakthroughs have been made now? What do you expect to see in the next few years?
Now, many breakthroughs have been made in data analysis. Watson from IBM is an example. It is impressive in managing large amounts of data and organizing them. It allows you to see horizontal patterns that you wouldn’t otherwise see. This is a great leap. However, people often confuse this leap with machine intelligence. Our recent giant leap in data analysis is significant, but it also leaves a lot of room for humans to help with AI systems. The upcoming trend is the cooperation between human beings and A1.
How will AI and robots change society and human beings?
To some extent, they will make us more smarter, for we can use computing in an unprecedented way to search database by computers. This will change the leadership of medical care and health care. We have seen that machine learning technology is trying to better understand what symptoms may imply a certain kind of illness.
At present, AI is not as smart as people expect. Vehicles that can drive automatically at any time and in any situation are still far away from us. However, we have seen that when the road conditions are good, or when extra sensors are installed on the road, automatic driving is relatively reliable.
What do you think of AI and robot ethics?
We need to make sure that the decision logic programmed into the system is ethical and that the sensors can truly reflect the real world.
There is a lot of discussion about automatic cars - how Google programmed an algorithm to choose between hitting a person and hitting a building. It is interesting to consider this pragmatic idea.
We should fight for kindness from a broader perspective or start from the perspective of respecting people. Why does a pedestrian have a higher priority than a building? We may not think much about being knocked down by a car driven by a human driver. But when we think that it is a computer that decides to put other people’s lives above ours, it is quite a different story.
