Innovation is our new column featuring the latest emerging technological ideas
When I attended the last year, I couldn鈥檛 help wondering if I was wasting my time. Many of the speakers were preparing for a world in which machines could think like humans, yet it seemed obvious that even if we ever could create such machines it wouldn鈥檛 be any time soon.
Today鈥檚 AI software may beat or compete with humans at very narrow tasks like playing chess or . But an AGI able to think, reason and remember, and tackle any subject like a human is nowhere near a reality.
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And yet now one of that conference鈥檚 most intriguing attendees, , says his company has launched the world鈥檚 first commercial artificial general intelligence.
鈥楴atural conversation鈥�
is an 鈥渋nteractive voice response system 鈥� a telephone robot like those you may have battled with in an effort to pay a bill or find your bank balance.
Voss freely admits his creation is far short of a human鈥檚 abilities, but it is much smarter than other 鈥渄umb鈥� phonebots, he says.
You can talk to SmartAction almost as naturally as you would to a real person.
For example, Voss says the system can use its ability to track the flow and sense of the conversation to work out who a pronoun 鈥� such as she or you 鈥� is referring to.
The system will also infer if the line goes dead mid-conversation, and phone the caller back, rewinding to the 鈥渕ental state鈥� it was before the disconnection.
What鈥檚 more, this brain is for sale with a tag of $30,000. It can also be rented for about 20 cents a minute.
First steps
You may think the world doesn鈥檛 need more phonebots, but improving automated phone calls can鈥檛 be a bad thing. And, if Voss鈥檚 system proves itself an AGI, it will soon move on to greater things.
The defining feature of an AGI is that you don鈥檛 have to program it to do specific tasks 鈥� instead it is capable of taking on a wide range of very different problems and learning as it goes.
AGIs are typically built on a 鈥渒nowledge base鈥� of information about the world that most humans take for granted: for example, the fact that the physical world is filled with objects and living things, and that all people have a known age and name, but that objects often do not.
Software able to reason about, and make connections between, those facts, with a memory to store them, completes the artificial brain. In principle an AGI can deal with almost any situation you throw at it, without being specifically prepared.
No easy task
Other AGI researchers are wary of Voss鈥檚 claims. at the University of Memphis says they are 鈥渁n exaggeration鈥� because it still only performs a very specific task.
But Ben Goertzel, whose company is using humans to train AGIs in virtual reality, says answering phones is a task worthy of an AGI.
Until he speaks with SmartAction, though, Goertzel is reserving judgement on whether he would call it an AGI. Voss says he hopes to be ready for public trials of the system in the next few weeks.
Read previous Innovations: Software that finishes your sentences, The cellphone economy, Sick traveller detectors, and Magnetic blood detox.
