For better or worse many people only understand artificial intelligence as it is represented in popular culture and often those representations are inaccurate what is AI really the artificial part of AI is fairly straightforward. It refers to something human-made that doesn’t independently exist in nature. Intelligence is harder to define it could mean an exceptionally efficient capable computer or a program that can understand what makes a joke funny and then write its own jokes. It could mean a computer that can play jeopardy alongside human competitors so it’s more what AI can’t do that defines its present state of intelligence.

How are people using AI right now? It is being used in healthcare to help detect disease in meteorology to more accurately predict the weather. In warfare to make autonomous weapon systems. AI can identify your face and photos and estimate your age, emotions or even your creditworthiness. Essentially AI perceives its environment and then uses that data to state actions that maximize its chances of achieving its goals learning and adapting as it goes.

As AI is quietly being integrated into our lives it’s useful to understand how it works and what comes next. One way to identify different types of AI is based on the way that AI functions in the world. When it’s diagnosing disease IBM’s Watson computer operates very differently from Siri or Alexa. In the AI at Facebook or other companies used for facial recognition is yet another type of AI. Narrow AI is the type of AI system that can perform a single task in real-time like playing chess. The information that it uses to do that task is limited to a specific data set like all the possible moves in the chess game. This type of AI can’t perform outside of the single task that it is designed for.

Artificial general intelligence is also known as a strong IA. This form of intelligence would be able to tackle multiple complex problems without guidance or training. Ultimately being able to think and reason as well as a human being. Beyond this milestone is something even more mind-blowing, artificial superintelligence the idea is that once AI achieves general intelligence it would have all the tools it needs to make itself smarter. This AI self-improvement could result in an exponential explosion of intelligence some called the singularity.

Where the AI quickly grows to surpass the combined minds of all of humanity and beyond some say this technological singularity could happen as soon as 2045. A future as mind-boggling and unknowable as the singularities namesake. Learn more about the future of AI at futureoftech.org

Transcript

NASA has big hopes for virtual reality technology. The agency is developing a suite of virtual reality environments at Goddard Spaceflight Center in Maryland, that could be used for everything from geological research to repairing orbiting satellites.

One displays fiery ejections from the Sun. In another, scientists can watch magnetic fields pulse around the earth. A virtual rendering of an ancient lava tube in Idaho makes scientists feel like they’re standing at the bottom of an actual cave.

“I think, and I hope, this can be extremely useful for NASA scientists,” explains NASA engineer Thomas Grubb, who manages the program.

The goal, he says, is to scale up the use of virtual reality technology in NASA labs, and go beyond public applications like the Mars immersion program that allows users to explore the Martian surface. For example, NASA volcanologist Brent Garry is hoping that virtual visits to a rock formation in Idaho can help him plan research trips in real life. That same VR environment also allows users to measure distances and leave notes in the landscape.

“You know, it’s cheaper to have people go to a lava tube in VR than to actually fly them out there for two weeks,” says Grubb.

Another application in development could allow technicians to repair satellites. People on earth could watch in real-time as they manipulate actual tools in space. If the repairs are successful, satellites that would have died when their batteries did could keep working instead. “All of these things can save a lot of money or time, or just enable new things,” says Grubb.

And Grubb has stumbled upon a new talent source to help develop the pilot programs: young students, some of them still in high school.

“I went into this [thinking] ‘I’ll take a couple of interns or whatever,'” he says, imagining he’d get a single college student to help with some coding. But he says when he posted the job, “I got all these amazing students coming back. And I was like ‘I want more than this.’ I ended up with five [interns].”

One of them was a high school senior Jackson Ames. In addition to taking some computer science classes in school, Ames plays video games. “A lot of the games require strategy and teamwork. One of my favourites is called ‘Onward’,” he explains. Onward is a war simulation game. It’s supposed to make players feel like they’re soldiers fighting a battle. You play with a VR headset covering your eyes and a controller in each hand.

“It’s much more realistic than anything else,” says Ames. “It adds a whole new layer.”

Ames plays the game many times a week, which gives him an intuitive sense of what works, and what doesn’t, in VR.

Young people also bring certain ease with learning new technologies. Stewy Slocum, a 17-year-old college freshman who worked on the lava tube simulation, says video games got him interested in virtual reality programming too. But he’s not that into gaming anymore — that was more of a high school thing — and he hadn’t had much experience with VR technology before he arrived at NASA.

Still, he quickly learned how to use the VR system he was working with. That is often not the case for some more experienced researchers.

“There were definitely some older people who tried [the virtual reality system] and struggled at first, because they’re not used to having all ten fingers working at once,” says Garry. “They’re like ‘Am I going to fall? Am I going to trip on something?”

Once people navigate the initial learning curve, exploring virtual reality can go from alarming to fun pretty quickly. The growing popularity of virtual reality systems like the HTC Vibe and Oculus Rift for video games and education has made virtual reality technology more mainstream, but that can actually act as an obstacle to using VR technology for research, Grubb says.

“People think ‘This is too cool and too much fun. How can this be work?’,” he laughs. “We’re trying to show scientists that, ‘Hey, this technology has a lot to offer.'”