Centre for Cretive Computing and Media Futures Reserch Centre
Present:
Social machines: Can humanity survive without artificial intelligence?
Professor James A. Hendler
Wednesday 11th February 2015; 4pm in Commons 107
Many people view the triumph of the computer Watson over the world’s best Jeopardy
players in 2011 as the leading edge of a new age of smart machines. Since then, we have
seen self-driving cars, smart search engines, and increasingly able robots moving from the
realm of science fiction to deployed technology. As this occurs, we increasingly hear
dystopian futurists bemoan a world where drones will replace pilots, computers will
replace doctors, and scientists will be put out of work as intelligent computers increasingly
replace the knowledge workers in modern society. They worry whether, as scientist Steven
Hawking stated, “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the
human race.”
In this talk, I present an alternative view. As the increasing power of machine learning is
coupled with more and more data, we see potential areas where machines will, indeed,
start to surpass humans in new and unusual ways. At the same time, when we explore the
reality of these machines, we uncover the surprising fact that most of the smarts are still
coming from humans – but not the humans who write the programs. Rather, the behaviors
of large numbers of humans whether implicit, such as in what they are searching for on the
Web, or explicit, as when they write articles for Wikipedia or share status on Facebook, is
the fuel from which the machines derive their power.
Increasingly, we see the individual, whether human or machine, is no match for the power
of the two combined. I thus contend that Hawking, and the other critics of AI are wrong
and that “social machines,” which bring together humans and increasingly intelligence
computers, may not be something to fear, but rather the best hope to solve the complex
problems facing our world.
Biography
James Hendler is the Director of the Rensselaer Institute for Data Exploration and
Applications and the Tetherless World Professor of Computer, Web and Cognitive Sciences
at RPI. He also serves as a Director of the UK’s charitable Web Science Trust. Hendler has
authored over 250 technical papers in the areas of Semantic Web, artificial intelligence,
agent-based computing and high performance processing. One of the originators of the
“Semantic Web,” Hendler was the recipient of a 1995 Fulbright Foundation Fellowship and
is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the British Computer
Society, the IEEE and the Association for the Advancement of Science. He is also the former
Chief Scientist of the Information Systems Office at the US Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA) and was awarded a US Air Force Exceptional Civilian Service
Medal in 2002. He is the first computer scientist to serve on the Board of Reviewing editors
for Science. In 2010, Hendler was named one of the 20 most innovative professors in
America by Playboy magazine and was selected as an “Internet Web Expert” by the US
government. In 2012, he was one of the inaugural recipients of the Strata Conference “Big
Data” awards for his work on large-scale open government data, and he is a columnist and
associate editor of the Big Data journal. He recently received a faculty research award from
IBM for his contributions to cognitive computing and the Watson system.