Communications of the ACM
The Age of the Sentient Machine Is Upon US
Credit: iStockPhoto.com
Man-made intelligent devices will eventually become sentient, according to IBM fellow Grady Booch. A pioneer in software engineering and collaborative development environments, Booch defines sentience as having human characteristics such as self-awareness, the ability to set goals, and a sense of creativity. "If we don't achieve that degree of sentience, I believe we're very close to achieving the illusion of sentience whereby we are in a place where we'll, on a large-scale basis, have to interact with these things," Booch says. He notes that systems such as Apple's Siri and IBM's Watson supercomputer already can respond to voice recognition and synthesize speech.
Booch cautions that pre-sentient machines can harm us, such as the intelligent drones used in warfare, and they are displacing humans from jobs. "We are slowly surrendering our intelligence, our choice, our responsibility, to devices such as this," he warns. Still, Booch believes humans will co-evolve with sentient machines.
From InfoWorld
View Full Article
Abstracts Copyright © 2013 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
No entries found