Abstract
People and artificial intelligences will be working together in teams in the near future. With their ability to suggest next good actions (from driving cars) and their ability to support understanding of big data, the AIs will become valued members of the team and not just technical servants. Many questions will come up when AIs are managing people even to the point of disciplining them. This chapter brings up questions of the limits needed for AIs who are blocking humans who, in turn, are trying to take advantage of other humans. In the story for this chapter, “Seascape with Sharks,” an AI develops the technical plan for a new regional harbor and presents it to the people most affected.
TopTopics For Discussion
The following discussion points come from information covered in this chapter:
- 1.
If an AI plays a critical role in making the decision on an approach to a problem that will change people’s lives, should it be the AI that presents the solution to the people affected?
- 2.
Should the AI have power to require the technical solution that AIs have worked out?
- 3.
If one human being is clearly taking advantage of others and attacking the AI, should an AI be allowed to run a vendetta against that human being?
- 4.
Who gets to decide if the human has done wrong?
- 5.
Is the story in the actions of the AI working the problem, or in the emotional response of the people effected, or is it in the law enforcement actions of the AI?
TopIntroduction
For many years, the United States, China as well as Japan battled to be the country that owned the fastest supercomputer in the world. “Fast” is defined by the number of petaflops the computer system can perform. A petaflop of one thousand teraflops, one quadrillion [one million billion] of floating point operations per second.
The most powerful supercomputer until 2016 was the Chinese NUDT Tianhe-2 [Guangzhou], with 33.86 petaflops of power, surpassing US, despite its long history of cutting edge computing, with third Switzerland's Piz Daint and fourth Japan's Gyoukou (McCarthy, 2018).
Subsequently, NUDT system was superseded itself in 2017 by the Chinese Sunway TaihuLight, which won the prize of the most powerful with an impressive value of petaflops equal to 93.01.
Nowadays, America is again in the lead thanks to engineers from Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Lab with Summit, a supercomputer with a processing power able to overcome the Chinese Sunway Taihulight. Summit is the first supercomputer designed from the ground up to run AI applications, such as machine learning, and neural networks. It runs some applications up to 10 times faster than previous supercomputers. Among the AI projects that will be performed on the new supercomputer is the task of replacing doctors to screen medical data and through huge volumes of written reports and medical images, trying to identify possible relationships between genes and cancer.
Summit has huge dimensions, as large as two tennis courts, consuming 4,000 liters of water per minute for cooling; it will help to get closer to the dream goal of exascale computing.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Corporate Person: A series of powers and responsibilities that are given to corporations that allow them many of the rights of a real person.
NGO: Non-governmental organization. The NGOs in all these stories are the major source of funds for efforts to address the great problems of the 21 st century particularly those that effect large numbers of people. The Janet series of AIs were developed to help organize and manage this effort. Their lead financial officer, JanetM, has an interface avatar that is markedly Latina in skin color and dress, while JanetA in both personal appearance and dress is an African woman.
Artificial Intelligence (AI): The intelligence shown by machines or computer software. An AI in some ways can mimic human intelligence but does not have to match it feature for feature. The interface avatars of these AI are important characters in these stories.
Interface Avatar: A representation of a friendly persona on a display screen that facilitates communications between humans and humans, or between humans and machines.