Mark Zuckerberg’s mission for 2016 is to bring the world an AI like Iron Man’s JARVIS. This virtual assistant would help run homes, offices and even find the cure to cancer. The Facebook CEO made a post to his social network expressing that he will log his progress on the JARVIS project every month.
The State of AI Through Mark Zuckerberg’s Eyes
In our everyday life, people are already making avid use of AI technology. Whenever people run a voice search on their phones, whenever they put a check through an ATM or use a fitness tracker, they’re using AI. This technology is not super advanced. It’s just pattern recognition and basic artificial intelligence. However, it’s already had a huge impact on our lives.
Other forms of the technology are doing even greater things: diagnosing diseases like cancer. Others are driving cars and roaming in space and in other planets. Artificial intelligence can essentially do anything. It can act as a tangible extension of the human mind and body.
Artificial Intelligence Has No Common Sense
Mark Zuckerberg very plainly stated that AI is good at acknowledging patterns, but it’s unskilled at common sense. This is what science fiction has used to make artificial intelligence the stuff of dreams. JARVIS, for example, has quite a bit of common sense.
The essence of the technology right now is supervised learning. Systems are shown thousands of pictures so it can start recognizing the objects within the pictures. This is how the Facebook AI recognizes friends’ faces and suggest tags for pictures uploaded. AI has also been used to recognize speech, by running the system through thousands of hours of historical speeches. They are also shown transcripts of what they’re listening to.
Facebook Wants to Develop an AI To Cure Cancer, But They’re Starting Small
Artificial intelligence can be taught to find melanoma by showing it thousands of pictures of melanoma tumors. By showing it examples of people and obstacles, AI can be taught to drive a car and brake. This is the technology in any car with automated park assist and automatic lane switching.
This means that AI can do many things across many different industries. Mark Zuckerberg is hoping to train the Facebook AI and M to do all of this and more. He expressed that it’s not all smooth sailing – the process is slower than can be considered ideal. There is still no way to teach artificial intelligence common sense either.
The Facebook CEO will be documenting his progress throughout all of 2016. We can expect many surprises from him. There could even be exciting partnerships with other giants toward this great effort.
