Artificial Intelligence

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” – Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.

Predicting the future isn’t easy. As we can see from what the chairman of IBM had said.

Ever since machines were invented, scientists have dreamt of making them learn and perform intelligent tasks – like humans.

Artificial intelligence is a branch of science which is into making machines think like humans. These machines, or computers, can store large amounts of information and process them accurately and at an amazing speed. What they lack is an ability to learn and make ‘intelligent decisions’.

What do we need to make an intelligent machine?
A memory or a space where experiences or information can be stored, a method of applying these experiences to new ones, comparing experiences to come to logical conclusions, like holding the hot object with a glove on. That would be an intelligent machine.

Take your iron for example. The electric iron understands that its temperature is beyond what is required and automatically switches itself off.

We could say that the electric iron is intelligent as it can react to a particular state (the iron being hot), make a decision based on it and switch itself off. However, since the iron has not learned this through experience, it is not a truly intelligent machine.

Scientists are creating new software programs which try to recreate the process of human learning in a computer, in an attempt to make them ‘think’. These programs try to copy the functioning of the brain. One such program is called a neural network.

Today scientists at MIT‘s (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also known as MIT, is an American private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence are working on their first thinking robot named HAL. HAL is also the main character of Arthur Clark’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, a book turned into a movie in 1968 by Stenley Kubrick.

Movies about about Artificial Intelligence

– Artificial Intelligence: A. I. (2001)

Movie magicians Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick teamed up just the once, and their under-appreciated effort received a mixed reaction from audiences. The film is defended on the strength of the ideas and themes it so boldly plays with, and not on the terrifying voice work cameo by Robin Williams. It is still maintained that the film would be far more compelling if the film had ended with the Haley Joel Osment character entombed, frozen and alone for an eternity at the bottom of the ocean, but, robot or not, Steven Spielberg can’t just abandon a kid and then run the credits. The film’s art direction and visual style are brilliant, and the challenging narrative has all the hallmarks of top-notch philosophical science fiction.

– Alien (1979)

– Robocop (1987)

– The Matrix (1999)

– The Wachowski brothers created the concept of an imaginary world contained within a planetary wide computer matrix. This is one of the modern era’s most undeniably original storylines. The computer brain is personified by Agent Smith, played marvelously by one of modern cinema’s finest support players, Hugo Weaving. Without the sequels, “The Matrix” goes down as a landmark film. With them it’s just number six on some silly list of movies about artificial intelligence.

– Transformers (2007)

– Blade Runner (1982)

– The Terminator (1984)

Like “The Matrix,” this film, if taken all by it’s lonesome, is a monument of modern science-fiction storytelling. Humanity itself is faced with extinction, in the not so distant future at the hands of Skynet, a computer network that we created which has decided we’ve outgrown our usefulness. The inherent danger in creating artificially intelligent beings is that they might figure out eventually that the world just might be a more efficient place if there weren’t so many humans messing up the works. One of the problems with exceptional sci-fi is that audiences want more and studios are willing to give it too them, whether it dilutes the power of the original ideas or not.

– And maybe the most important, and one of the best movies of all times 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968). Two astronauts, Dr. Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Dr. Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) and their computer, the HAL 9000, watch over the three other crew members in suspended animation as their ship journeys toward the target of the monolith’s transmission.

After a slight miscalculation, HAL becomes concerned that his human companions intend to shut him down. Before they can do this, HAL, using the arms of a small shuttle pod cuts Frank’s air hose while he’s on a space walk. When Dave gets into one of the remaining shuttles to retrieve Frank’s body, HAL shuts down all of the life support systems on the crew in suspended animation. Dave returns to an angry computer and dead crew…