Despite the performance capabilities that many AI systems already have today, they are still classed as “weak”. Only when they are no longer designed to perform just a single specific task are they classed
as “strong AI”.
Artificial Intelligence is currently a real buzzword, even – or especially – beyond the high-tech industries. But all AI is not the same. Experts classify Artificial Intelligence in three different forms:
- Weak Artificial Intelligence
- Strong Artificial Intelligence
- Artificial Supertintelligence
First, there is weak AI (also known as narrow AI). This type of Artificial Intelligence is only able to perform a single, specific, clearly defined task. It employs mathematical and computer science methodology; its approach to problem-solving is not varied, and it gains no deeper understanding of the problem at hand. This means weak AI is quite capable of performing tasks better than a human, but it can’t be used to solve any problems other than the original defined task. Familiar examples of weak AI are Siri, some robots used in industrial manufacturing, and autonomous vehicles.
Same intellectual abilities as a human
When most people think of AI, they think of machines that are more intelligent than humans and can do anything a human can. That type of Artificial Intelligence is termed strong AI (also known as general AI). Machines with strong AI can attain the same intellectual abilities as a human or even surpass them. AI of this type is able to solve more than just one specific problem, act on its own initiative, plan, learn, and communicate in natural language. It has not yet been possible to develop strong AI to date, however. But scientists do consider it a realistic prospect within the next 20 to 40 years.
When machines become more intelligent than their creators
The third category of AI is Artificial Superintelligence (ASI). It will have been attained when machines surpass the intelligence of the most intelligent minds in human history. The fear is that a stage will then have been reached where humans are no longer the dominant species. Super-intelligent machines would be capable of building still better machines; AI would advance explosively, leaving human intelligence far behind. This scenario has become known as the “technological singularity”. Although it was first coined back in the 1960s, the term became particularly popular in 1998 through a book titled “The Singularity is Near” by Raymond Kurzweil. In his book, Kurzweil predicts that the technological singularity will be reached in the year 2045. That is when he estimates that the computing power of AI will have surpassed the intelligence of all of humanity by a factor of a billion. Different time-scales have repeatedly been mooted since Kurzweil’s book appeared, however. There is currently no sign of Artificial Superintelligence on the horizon. Yet we should not forget that computing power is advancing at a rapid rate; the performance of computer chips has doubled every 18 months in the past. So computers are advancing much more rapidly than human consciousness. Whereas humans have taken millennia to develop, computers have done so in less than 100 years. So, it seems only a matter of time before Artificial Superintelligence arrives…