It took months of effort and millions of pounds of effort and millions of pounds to crack the German Enigma military code, once thought impossible to break, by the group of British mathematicians led by Alan Turing at Bletchley Park during World War II. In 2018, at the Imperial War Museum in London, an artificial intelligence program did it in 12 minutes and 50 seconds through an operation that cost around $15. The program, created by Enigma Pattern, verified 41 million possible combinations per second, combining regular pattern identification technology and the brute force calculation of 2,000 virtual servers.
Artificial intelligence has multiple practical applications: in energy, finance, defense systems, computer games, virtual reality, medicine and autonomous vehicles, among other sectors that will lead what Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, calls the "fourth industrial revolution", after which steam, electricity and information technology were promoted. On this occasion, the revolution comes hand in hand with artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology and biotechnology.
Microsoft and Google are developing programs that will one day be able to chat with their users like Samantha, Joaquim Phoenix's virtual assistant in the movie Her. In Japan, Toyota uses artificial neural networks that replicate the functioning of the neurological system of living organisms so that its autonomous vehicles can obey traffic signs and regulations.
The new masters of the universe
During the cold war, the formidable technological and scientific effort of the space race allowed the United States to develop the Internet and satellite geolocation systems. According to Vladimir Putin, whoever masters artificial intelligence will become "the owner of the world".
China has announced a multi-billion dollar plan to lead innovation in this field by 2030, a “strategic goal” of President Xi Jinping's Made in China program. 40% of global e-commerce is already carried out in China thanks to technology giants such as Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu, which have few legal restrictions on their handling of the "mega-data" generated by their clients: credits, consumption habits, histories. clinical…
In online payments, visual recognition and voice software, China is already ahead of Silicon Valley. Unlike microprocessors, China's digital sector is self-sufficient. Thus, it is no coincidence that China has closed its market to Google, Facebook and Twitter. Russia, for its part, is developing the new generation of its MiG-24 fighters, which will fly at Match 6 speed, incorporating artificial intelligence into its navigation systems. The X-47B superdrone of the American Northrop Grumman, for its part, will be able to land and take off in just 90 seconds with similar instruments.
Humanoid robots are already being used as security guards and nursing assistants. A Facebook game, the Oculus Quest 2, so realistically imitates the experience of rock climbing that its users even say their hands hurt. Digital assistants are learning to recognize spoken words and grasp their meaning. Skype already translates phone conversations in multiple languages.
According to various estimates, there are only about 10,000 people in the world with the knowledge, experience and talent necessary to write the mathematical algorithms of artificial intelligence. A specialist can earn between $300,000 and $500,000 a year, which explains why universities like Stanford cannot retain their programming professors.
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In Life 3.0 (2018), MIT physics professor Max Tegmark predicts that sometime this century electronic intelligence will surpass human intelligence. A robot soldier equipped with a standard moral code, but devoid of emotion, would never pull the trigger out of fear, anger or panic, Tegmark argues. A more automated world would thus, ironically, be more humane. In medicine, after analyzing millions of photos of human retinas, an artificial intelligence program could detect early signs of lung cancer or blindness caused by diabetes.
The brain, the final frontier
Silicon Valley and Zhongguancun, Beijing's technology hub, have long wanted to download integrated circuits into human neural networks. Neuralink, created in 2016 by Musk, uses electroencephalography to measure the electrical activity of the cerebral cortex. Neurable, for its part, is developing a virtual reality game that will be controlled with the mind. And Facebook hopes its optical sensor technology will make it possible to type five times faster than using a mobile phone keyboard.
Eventually, a neural interface will transfer massive computing power to the brain, which could thus multiply its cognitive and computing power. Neuralink's technology uses wireless, battery-free microprocessors that capture neural activity and transfer it to a computer. In The Singularity is Bear (2003), Ray Kurzeweil, Google's engineering director, anticipated the possibility of capturing a person's entire personality –memories, talents, history…– to install it on a memory or external hard drive.
The last frontier is the creation of an artificial consciousness. Kurzeweil believes that in the early years of the next decade, cybernetics will be able to replicate a human consciousness endowed with free will and could think without biological support. Nectome, which originated at MIT, works on brain conservation techniques to reconstitute a personality in an external, biological or electronic support. The ethical debate that Nectome's plans generated forced MIT to withdraw from the project.
Pandora's Box
The big problem is that these technologies can also be used to distort and falsify reality. In 2015, an open letter from the Future of Life Institute signed by Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, among other science and technology figures, warned that “our artificial intelligence systems should do what we want them to do. If we don't make it, we'll open Pandora's box and let her demons escape."
They weren't exaggerating. The judicial and penal systems and immigration controls increasingly use artificial intelligence algorithms in facial recognition programs. These programs allow people and groups to be identified using cameras that surreptitiously photograph and then process the images in real time to compare them with police data banks. If their use is not regulated, these tools can threaten fundamental rights such as privacy. Few would want to participate in protest demonstrations if they know they can be easily identified.
There are no federal laws in the United States regulating intrusive artificial intelligence programs. Michelle Bachelet, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, warned on September 15 that the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence applications has outpaced efforts to regulate them, calling for an international moratorium until regulations are established. necessary safeguards.
According to the UN Commission on Human Rights report on artificial intelligence presented by Bachelet, the unrestrained proliferation of remote biometric recognition and machine learning programs could create a “digital dystopia” if used to automate decisions in the granting of credits or social benefits, for example.
In that regard, China is especially under suspicion for its use of systems that track travel records, criminal records and social media posts to build personal profiles. According to The Washington Post, the Chinese giant Huawei uses facial recognition programs to identify people of Uyghur ethnicity in Xinjiang, the only Chinese province with a Muslim majority.