6 hours ago by Tony Prescott, The Conversation Is artificial super-intelligence lurking nearby, under wraps? eugenia_loli, CC BY

The possibility that advanced artificial intelligence (AI) might one day turn against its human creators has been repeatedly raised of late. Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, for instance, surprised by the ability of his newly-upgraded speech synthesis system to anticipate what he was trying to say, has suggested that, in the future, AI could surpass human intelligence and ultimately bring about the end of humankind.

Hawking is not alone in worrying about superintelligent AI. A growing number of futurologists, philosophers and AI researchers have expressed concerns that artificial intelligence could leave humans outsmarted and outmanoeuvred. My view is that this is unlikely, as humans will always use an improved AI to improve themselves. A malevolent AI will have to outwit not only raw human brainpower but the combination of humans and whatever loyal AI-tech we are able to command a combination that will best either on their own.

There are many examples already: Clive Thompson, in his book Smarter Than You Think describes how in world championship chess, where AIs surpassed human grandmasters some time ago, the best chess players in the world are not humans or AIs working alone, but human-computer teams.

While I don't believe that surpassing raw (unaided) human intelligence will be the trigger for an apocalypse, it does provide an interesting benchmark. Unfortunately, there is no agreement on how we would know when this point has been reached.

Beyond the Turing Test

An established benchmark for AI is the Turing Test, developed from a thought experiment described by the late, great mathematician and AI pioneer Alan Turing. Turing's practical solution to the question: "Can a machine think?" was an imitation game, where the challenge is for a machine to converse on any topic sufficiently convincingly that a human cannot tell whether they are communicating with man or machine.

In 1991 the inventor Hugh Loebner instituted an annual competition, the Loebner Prize, to create an AI or what we would now call a chatbot that could pass Turing's test. One of the judges at this year's competition, Ian Hocking, reported in his blog that if the competition entrants represent our best shot at human-like intelligence, then success is still decades away; AI can only match the tip of the human intelligence iceberg.

I'm not overly impressed either by the University of Reading's recent claim to have matched the conversational capability of a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy speaking English Imitating child-like intelligence, and the linguistic capacity of a non-native speaker, falls well short of meeting the full Turing Test requirements.

Indeed, AI systems equipped with pattern-matching, rather than language understanding, algorithms have been able to superficially emulate human conversation for decades. For instance, in the 1960s the Eliza program was able to give a passable impression of a psychotherapist. Eliza showed that you can fool some people some of the time, but the fact that Loebner's US$25,000 prize has never been won demonstrates that, performed correctly, the Turing test is a demanding measure of human-level intelligence.

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No need to panic artificial intelligence has yet to create a doomsday machine