Call them robots, Skynet or Artificial Intelligence (AI): Literature is full of machines that have a life of their own. The big question is: Will these machines create heaven on earth? Will they strive to destroy us? Or will they just be indifferent?
The scientist Ray Kurzweil introduces the concept of the “Singularity”: This is the point in time where machines will be as intelligent in humans. At this point, these machines will build even better machines. In other words, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence. This is the runaway-point: We have no idea what will happen thereafter.
Our sole responsibility is to produce something smarter than we are; any problems beyond that are not ours to solve …”
Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
However, we are still years, if not decades away from this point. At least for now, this is good news: While Artificial Intelligence is far from showing human intelligence, it is smart enough to take over more and more mundane tasks.
One such skill is the ability to process human language. Not “understand”, mind you: A machine today can understand the structure of a sentence, extract concepts and put it in relationship to others. It can even find unusual outliers and point them out to a human. But it cannot understand.
But this still helps: We humans can do the creative work, while the AI tells us where to look.
This is where Semiant, our virtual quality assistant helps experts in product development. Semiant performs the mundane tasks, so that the humans can do the interesting work.
Photo by Keitravis Squire on Unsplash