Artificial Intelligence: Friendly or Frightening? It's a Saturday morning in June at the Royal Society in London.

Computer scientists, public figures and reporters have gathered to witness or take part in a decades- old challenge. Some of the participants are flesh and blood; others are silicon and binary. Thirty human judges sit down at computer terminals, and begin chatting. The goal? To determine whether they're talking to a computer program or a real person. The event, organized by the University of Reading, was a rendition of the so- called Turing test, developed 6. British mathematician and cryptographer Alan Turing as a way to assess whether a machine is capable of intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of a human. The recently released film "The Imitation Game," about Turing's efforts to crack the German Enigma code during World War II, is a reference to the scientist's own name for his test.

In the London competition, one computerized conversation program, or chatbot, with the personality of a 1. Ukrainian boy named Eugene Goostman, rose above and beyond the other contestants. It fooled 3. 3 percent of the judges into thinking it was a human being. At the time, contest organizers and the media hailed the performance as an historic achievement, saying the chatbot was the first machine to "pass" the Turing test. Infographic: History of Artificial Intelligence]Decades of research and speculative fiction have led to today's computerized assistants such as Apple's Siri. Credit: by Karl Tate, Infographics Artist. When people think of artificial intelligence (AI) — the study of the design of intelligent systems and machines — talking computers like Eugene Goostman often come to mind.

But most AI researchers are focused less on producing clever conversationalists and more on developing intelligent systems that make people's lives easier — from software that can recognize objects and animals, to digital assistants that cater to, and even anticipate, their owners' needs and desires. But several prominent thinkers, including the famed physicist Stephen Hawking and billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, warn that the development of AI should be cause for concern. Thinking machines. The notion of intelligent automata, as friend or foe, dates back to ancient times.

A. I. Inteligencia Artificial (título original en inglés, A.I. Artificial Intelligence) es una película estadounidense de 2001 escrita y dirigida por Steven Spielberg. Directed by Steven Spielberg. With Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law, Frances O'Connor, Sam Robards. A highly advanced robotic boy longs to become "real" so that he can. Mankind is threatened with extinction in several fronts. Now, some warn, comes another potentially deadly menace—artificial intelligence.

Mint Lounge profiles 10 tech start-ups that have tapped Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to transform sectors such as healthcare, education, auto, banking. T he future of artificial intelligence begins with a game of Space Invaders. From the start, the enemy aliens are making kills -- three times they destroy the. The statistic shows the size of the artificial intelligence market worldwide, from 2016 to 2025. In 2017, the global AI market is expected to be worth approximately 2. The notion of artificial intelligence, whether on computer screens or in robot form, has long fascinated the makers of science-fiction movies. Cops Season 18 Episode 22. Watch Mob Handed Online Fandango. From an extensive.

The idea of intelligence existing in some form that's not human seems to have a deep hold in the human psyche," said Don Perlis, a computer scientist who studies artificial intelligence at the University of Maryland, College Park. Reports of people worshipping mythological human likenesses and building humanoid automatons date back to the days of ancient Greece and Egypt, Perlis told Live Science. AI has also featured prominently in pop culture, from the sentient computer HAL 9. Stanley Kubrick's "2. A Space Odyssey" to Arnold Schwarzenegger's robot character in "The Terminator" films. A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence].

Since the field of AI was officially founded in the mid- 1. Perlis said. Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, recently hired to be a director of engineering at Google, refers to a point in time known as "the singularity," when machine intelligence exceeds human intelligence. Based on the exponential growth of technology according to Moore's Law (which states that computing processing power doubles approximately every two years), Kurzweil has predicted the singularity will occur by 2.

But cycles of hype and disappointment — the so- called "winters of AI" — have characterized the history of artificial intelligence, as grandiose predictions failed to come to fruition. The University of Reading Turing test is just the latest example: Many scientists dismissed the Eugene Goostman performance as a parlor trick; they said the chatbot had gamed the system by assuming the persona of a teenager who spoke English as a foreign language. In fact, many researchers now believe it's time to develop an updated Turing test.). Nevertheless, a number of prominent science and technology experts have expressed worry that humanity is not doing enough to prepare for the rise of artificial general intelligence, if and when it does occur. Earlier this week, Hawking issued a dire warning about the threat of AI. The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race," Hawking told the BBC, in response to a question about his new voice recognition system, which uses artificial intelligence to predict intended words. Hawking has a form of the neurological disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease, and communicates using specialized speech software.).

And Hawking isn't alone. Musk told an audience at MIT that AI is humanity's "biggest existential threat." He also once tweeted, "We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes.". In March, Musk, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and actor Ashton Kutcher jointly invested $4. Vicarious FPC, which aims to create a working artificial brain. At the time, Musk told CNBC that he'd like to "keep an eye on what's going on with artificial intelligence," adding, "I think there's potentially a dangerous outcome there."Fears of AI turning into sinister killing machines, like Arnold Schwarzenegger's character from the "Terminator" films, are nothing new.

Credit: Warner Bros. But despite the fears of high- profile technology leaders, the rise of conscious machines — known as "strong AI" or "general artificial intelligence" — is likely a long way off, many researchers argue. I don't see any reason to think that as machines become more intelligent … which is not going to happen tomorrow — they would want to destroy us or do harm," said Charlie Ortiz, head of AI at the Burlington, Massachusetts- based software company Nuance Communications."Lots of work needs to be done before computers are anywhere near that level," he said. Machines with benefits. Artificial intelligence is a broad and active area of research, but it's no longer the sole province of academics; increasingly, companies are incorporating AI into their products. And there's one name that keeps cropping up in the field: Google.

From smartphone assistants to driverless cars, the Bay Area- based tech giant is gearing up to be a major player in the future of artificial intelligence. Google has been a pioneer in the use of machine learning — computer systems that can learn from data, as opposed to blindly following instructions. In particular, the company uses a set of machine- learning algorithms, collectively referred to as "deep learning," that allow a computer to do things such as recognize patterns from massive amounts of data. For example, in June 2. Google created a neural network of 1. You. Tube videos, The New York Times reported. After all, what could be more uniquely human than watching cat videos?).

The project, called Google Brain, was led by Andrew Ng, an artificial intelligence researcher at Stanford University who is now the chief scientist for the Chinese search engine Baidu, which is sometimes referred to as "China's Google.". Today, deep learning is a part of many products at Google and at Baidu, including speech recognition, Web search and advertising, Ng told Live Science in an email. Current computers can already complete many tasks typically performed by humans.

But possessing humanlike intelligence remains a long way off, Ng said. I think we're still very far from the singularity. This isn't a subject that most AI researchers are working toward.".