Wired.co.uk speaks with DoC Professor about developments in real-world AI.

Wired.co.uk speaks with Professor Murray Shanahan about the biggest developments in real-world AI and just how scared we should be of a robot uprising

The Steven Spielberg-produced sci-fi drama Extant imagines a world where human-level artifical intelligence is on the cusp of reality, with terrifying implications. Wired.co.uk spoke with Professor Murray Shanahan, from the Department of Computing here at Imperial College London, and Nicole Carey,  from Humanoid Robot Research and Development at Engineered Arts, about the biggest developments in real-world AI and just how scared we should be of a robot uprising.

One of the things that has impressed Professor Shanahan most in robotics and AI recently has been self-driving cars.  Google has had cars driving around completely autonomously in California, with barely any accidents.

"I think we're going to gradually start to see those things on our streets over the next five to ten years," he says.

Nicole Carey -- who helped develop Craig, the "RoboThespian" used to help promote Extant in the UK -- says the reduced power consumption is "a huge step towards wider use of robots and the development of more intelligent and adaptable robot behaviours," it's the development of AI personalities that is key to their evolution.

"Over the last year we're starting to see a lot more research on what we call 'social hardware' -- robotic and ambient devices with strong 'EQ', or emotional intelligence,"

"Face recognition, expression recognition, vocal analysis and biomimetic hardware can all combine to create machines that can better understand people. Emotionally appropriate responsiveness, fed by interpretation of multimodal communication layers, is more vital in human-robot interactions than literal understanding of speech or textual input."

Nicole Carey points out that one of the "biggest and most obvious developments is Google's acquisition of eight robotics companies at the end of 2013". Not necessarily because of what it means in the long term, which is for now purely speculative, but because in the short term it led to such an explosion of public and investor interest in robotics."

Professor Shanahan's  picks for key developments are improvements in Apple's Siri and Google Now. These products use voice recognition as the basis of personal assistants and have been gradually getting better. Both recognise almost all speech, which is an amazing achievement.

He also highlights IBM's success in the American game show Jeopardy as a turning point for the advancement of robots understanding complicated human speech. The show makes it even more complicated by having players give their answers in the form of a question -- "this feathered barnyard animal is known for crossing the road", would be answered "what is a chicken?", for instance.

To answer this requires a huge amount of general knowledge yet IBM Watson, which played the game, managed to beat the reigning champion. A very impressive piece of technology.

To read more about this and how Steven Spielberg-produced sci-fi drama Extant could be predicting the future please see:

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-07/18/how-real-are-extants-robots/viewgallery/336877