The definitive AI guide

Your life will soon be shaped by intelligent machines in unexpected ways. Welcome to a unique series on artificial intelligence (AI) that will reveal the real implications of this technology for you.

What do you mean when you say artificial intelligence?

 

Hollywood portrays artificial intelligence (AI) as a theoretical, far-off future technology. It’s either a rogue robot or a malicious piece of programming that wants to rule the entire globe. Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking have all recently expressed concerns about AI, which has only served to fuel this unsettling yet improbable science fiction story. Alternatively, the AI you are familiar with can be a chatbot producing meaningless sentences or an awkward robot that fails miserably a far cry from human intellect.

This perspective on AI is problematic since it fails to show how the technology will truly impact our lives. We make jokes about our robot rulers of the future and then get back to living as humans. Actually, artificial intelligence is all around us; it just behaves differently than we might think. It drives search engines, trades on the financial markets, and is always monitoring your activities, from your CCTV behavior to your online surfing history. You most likely engaged with an intelligent machine in the process of making a decision today.

For this reason, BBC Future has chosen to air a unique series debunking artificial intelligence myths and realities. In the upcoming two weeks, we’ll release engaging films, articles that make you think, and mind-expanding infographics about this world-changing technology. We’ll bust myths, and show what our future with AI will really be like.

How concerned about AI should we be? An extensive IIB Studios graphics explainer.

Are machines ever able to think?

• How social robots can reveal our secrets and why they play with our minds.

• The terrifying killer robots from South Korea. We traveled to the nation that leads the world in the creation of artificially intelligent soldiers; they are here and deadly, we haven’t turned them on yet.

Can a computer program be a criminal?

The consequences of criminal bots for the law.

•The Turing test’s real story.

• Plus a lot more..

Artificial intelligence won’t be apocalyptic, but that doesn’t mean its changes won’t be far-reaching. As we hand more and more decisions to intelligent algorithms, they will have some very real human consequences. They’ll raise new ethical questions, expose some of our flawed laws and potentially change our relationships with one another.

AI is already here, and it’s only going to get smarter. But the biggest myth about AI is that it’ll be like our own intelligence, with the same desires; greed, jealousy, hunger for power. In fact, it’s something alien and new. The ‘machine learning’ algorithms that fuel so much of modern life already are often inscrutable; even their designers don’t really know how they form decisions.
We’re building a new form of intelligence, utterly unlike our own and we need to understand what that will mean for us.