by Angela Guess
Damon Beres recently wrote in The Huffington Post, “We’re entering a new era of technology that’s bound to shape the lives of our children more substantially. It’s the era of artificial intelligence, and a group of academics and industry leaders gathered at the MIT Tech Conference on Saturday assured a full audience that the seeds of this robotic revolution are already planted and growing. ‘We’re only at the beginning,’ Rob High, chief technology officer of IBM Watson, a business unit centered around the titular computing system, said during a keynote speech at the conference. ‘We’re going to see lots and lots of advancements’.”
Beres goes on, “That’s pretty amazing, considering where AI stands today. We’ve already created a smiling robot that can comfort people, a robotic third arm that can play along when attached to a human drummer and software that can steer cars without human drivers. One of the biggest goals for tech developers now — including the people at Facebook — is to create programs and robots that are capable of fully understanding the nuances of human speech and expression.”
Beres continues, “Once that happens, machines will be able to process huge amounts of data — including books, medical studies, social media status updates and facial cues as seen by a robot’s camera eyeballs — in hopes of advancing the human experience. For example, a project already underway with the IBM Watson system would allow a computer to make treatment recommendations to doctors. Those recommendations would be based on hard data from reams of medical studies combined with the doctor’s observations about a specific patient.”
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