Technical Quadrants depicting AI’s growth- Mr. Kanu Ratan Butani, Software Application Manager

‘When we think of Artificial Intelligence many things pop up in your mind about it. This article gives some insight along with the quadrant depicting where the AI lies in this real world. lets read along and get some thought provoking points about it.’

Very often nowadays we have been seeing that the Automation and Robotics are becoming more prominent and getting in the way of most of the computer related processes, that are currently handled by the humans. How far this is right and how far this automation process is going to be free of any risk/or will it double-up the risk of the accuracy of the end to end processes can only be judged on the case to case basis. These processes can be as simple as sending an email and receiving it, or it can involve some complex domain related processes and flows, that require human interaction and thinking at every step, along with the most important security aspects involved in every domain.

When I spoke to my wife regarding this, she had many questions like; how will the robotic system do your work? Who will rectify it if anything goes wrong?  There should be someone to monitor? etc. I think what all questions posed by her are right, as she is looking from the end user point of view, who is not much involved in the technical aspects of it. But these are the questions to ponder the technologists also and sometimes I also wonder that how is it possible to entirely imitate the human thinking and human processes and make such an intelligent system that can suffice the completion of all the tasks.

It is very important to note here that there are many things to it and since the today’s human is the result of the long process of evolution, and so are their thought-processes evolved from time to time, so certainly a computer would take much time to pass through those many evolutions before it can imitate that human thinking.

But yes, in some cases, when I see the technological improvements, the few things that have become automatic, does leave me thinking as to where we are heading. For eg:  one day when I was going to office and I was travelling in the bus, I was awe-struck by the technology and the vehicles that people were driving. The trains running at the lightning speed, the buses with automatic systems, the high-end cars on the highway and the bikers with helmets. This entire scene looked as if the robots are plying on the roads. But alas! In every robotic machine inside there were humans. They all were just trying to act and be like robots.

But the question here is, that how easy is to achieve all this or difficult?  Since the humans will be humans attached to their emotions, their behaviour, their thinking, their cognitive powers which can’t be suddenly and easily imitated by these non-living things.

Based on the above discussion I have created a quadrant called Real v/s Artificial quadrant below where on X-Axis I have put “degree of is real/is artificial” and on Y-Axis I have put “degree of looks real/looks artificial. The four quadrants show this in a more descriptive way of explaining today’s scenario and how this can be changed and how much time will it take to change and is more obvious than what can just be imagined.

The above diagram depicts the scenario of Real v/s Artificial quadrant

Quadrant I : What is real and also looks real : The real world, the nature, the things, and everything else that is as it is.

Quadrant II: What is Artificial But looks real : For eg: The plastic flowers, made in such an artistic way that they appear real.

Quadrant III: What is real but looks artificial: The Painting for eg: Is real but the flower in it is painted and is artificial. Also the Robots, they are made from steel and are real with computer wires and all, but based on their work or understanding they are artificial.

Quadrant IV: What is artificial and looks artificial: This is where the Robots will come in. They are made by people and works on the artificial intelligence. But there is lot of research going on to make this artificial thing turn real.  To make this Robots look real and converse just like human beings is a big task and won’t be achieved so easily.

So the race here is to make fourth quadrant look like first quadrant, for which it has to first pass through two more quadrants and then only it can reach there.

I remember a quote by famous scientist Stephen Hawking : Artificial intelligence ‘could be the worst thing to happen to humanity’: Stephen Hawking warns that rise of robots may be disastrous for mankind.

Before we leap to the other higher levels of the AI and Auto-Robo combination, we already check the warning signs posed for mankind. For eg take a very simple chatbot application, where a robot is getting the input and based on the question that is asked it provides the answer. I have found following two issues in this:

1. The chatbot replies are very superficial and monotonous. For eg: If we tell “thankyou” , the reply that I will get is mostly, “You are welcome” , just plain as this.

2. The chatbot has some set of answers for questions asked, so any one can confuse it. For eg: If the weather today is not good, it’s too cold and raining, and we can’t go outside, but still if I type, “weather is awesome” and the reply is “Yes, enjoy”, where as if there was a human interaction then certainly we would have got proper reply on the actual condition of weather.

This is just one example of how evolved human brain is and the automation and robots are just getting evolved. 
The IVR machine developed with chatbot is more than enough, to give us some information on how to get the information by clicking few buttons. If we try to make this IVR a machine to understand human emotions and give appropriate replies, it will certainly be a failure. 
Again as stated by Stephen Howkins we should know the limit of The AI and robots invention could also be the last unless we learn how to avoid the risks.’ We need to know where to stop the artificial work.
Conclusion: let the humans remain humans. Let the machines do what is assigned to them. Let’s not change it. Let’s not forget, humans are full of emotions, nonetheless a machine.  Let’s not expect more from a machine, and face more failures and disasters. Today if we give anything to the mankind they will first try to misuse it , take undue advantage and can cause unexpected disasters.