The phrase “” might conjure robotic uprisings led by malevolent, self-aware androids.
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But in reality, computers are too busy offering movie recommendations , studying famous works of art , and creating fake faces to bother taking over the world.
During the past few years, has become an integral part of modern life, shaping everything from online shopping habits to disease diagnosis. Yet despite the field’s explosive growth, there are still many misconceptions about what, exactly, is, and how computers and machines might shape future society.
Part of this misconception stems from the phrase “” itself. “True” , or artificial general intelligence, refers to a machine that has the ability to learn and understand in the same way that humans do. In most instances and applications, however, actually refers to , computer programs that are trained to identify patterns using large datasets.
“For many decades, was viewed as an important subfield of . One of the reasons they are becoming synonymous, both in the technical communities and in the general population, is because as more data has become available, and methods have become more powerful, the most competitive way to get to some goal is through ,” says Michael Kearns , founding director of the Warren Center for Network and Data Sciences . “These are not what we would call ‘cognitive abilities,’” adds computer scientist Shivani Agarwal . “It doesn’t mean that the computer is able to reason.”
“These are not what we would call ‘cognitive abilities,’” adds computer scientist Shivani Agarwal. “It doesn’t mean that the computer is able to reason.”
If isn’t an intelligent machine per se, what, exactly, does research look like, and is there a limit to how “intelligent” machines can become? By clarifying what is and delving into research happening at Penn that impacts how computers see, understand, and interact with the world, one can better see how progress in computer science will shape the future of and the ever-changing relationship between humans and technology.
Intelligent machines?
All programs are made of algorithms, “recipes” that tell the computer how to complete a task. Machine learning programs are unique: Instead of detailed step-by-step instructions, algorithms are “trained” on large datasets, such as 100,000 pictures of cats. Machine learning programs then “learn” which features of the image make up a cat, like pointed ears or orange-colored fur. The program can use what it learned to decide whether a new image contains a cat.
Computers excel at these pattern-recognition tasks, with programs able to beat human experts at games like chess or the Chinese board game GO, because they can search an enormous number of possible solutions. “We aren’t designed to look at 1,000 examples of 10,000 dimensional vectors and figure out patterns, but computers are terrific at this,” says Agarwal.[…]
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