Towards the technological singularity?
Alan Turing, father of Artificial Intelligence, already in 1937 asked himself: «but can machines think?».
The phenomenon of AI, which is nothing more than the simulation of human intelligence through computer systems, is constantly growing, also because of the infinite patrimony of data collected, which we have at our disposal in the present age, and which was missing in the studies of previous decades.
According to Ray Kurzweil, world-renowned scientist and Google guru, as well as author of the book “The singularity is near“, machines in 2029 will be like human minds, in 2045 we should reach the technological singularity, entering by right into what he calls the era of development of the evolutionary history of humanity.
Prophecies or predictions of little importance, the fact is that research is making giant strides in the evolution of Artificial Intelligence.
What is “brainsourcing”?
“Brainsourcing” is a technique developed, in these days, by researchers at the University of Helsinky, which uses Artificial Intelligence to analyze opinions, and draw conclusions from the brain activity of groups of people, in order to improve the classification of images and advice on content.
Thanks to the crowdsourcing business methodology, a group of people can actively participate in the development process of a project, working, in practice, as an “open call“, involving a multitude of actors to act as a statistical and opinion parameter. In image recognition, for example, you can ask them if they can see an object in an image, creating a “comparative form“, useful to understand how much the algorithm “perceives“, in machine learning and automated recognition.
Well, researchers at the University of Helsinky used crowdsourcing to directly read people’s electroencephalograms (EEGs) using Artificial Intelligence techniques, bypassing the need to interview the public and ask for opinions, «using people’s natural reactions, without them having to perform manual tasks with a keyboard or a mouse», as Tuukka Ruotsalo of the University says.
Imaging Recognition
The study works, specifically, in the following way: thirty volunteers were called to look at human faces and to “label” them in their minds, men, women, smiling, sad, blond, dark, and the activity of the brain, at the passage of the type of image represented, showing a high percentage of reliability.
The potential applications of this new technique would be many, even using wearable devices, so popular and trendy for the Big Four: «…these methods capture only a very small percentage of total brain activity. As brain imaging technologies improve, it may become possible to acquire preference information directly from the brain,» says a student at the university campus.
We’re looking at new frontiers.
