10 Scariest Advancements in A.I.

Any rational person knows that its only a matter of time before robots put humanity under the metal thumb of oppression. As we begin the slow march to our own inevitable demise, it’s important to keep an eye on our common enemy: Robots. Here are 10 of the scariest advancements in AI. Skynet is just around the corner.

1. Chinook
All the way back in 2007, scientists at the University of Alberta completed an unbeatable checkers-playing robot. It took around 50 computers running everyday, sifting through 500 billion billion checkers positions to make ‘Chinook’ unbeatable.

2. HRP-2
“Promet,” or HRP-2, recently dominated DARPA’s Robotics Challenge Trials, and has a schedule of tasks aimed at helping humans in a disaster scenario – HRP-2 can drive a car, walk over uneven terrain and debris, climb ladders, cut through walls, and even basic plumbing tasks.

3. Siri
Siri is a learning computer, already firmly planted in our lives, designed to listen and learn your speech patterns, to send messages, place calls and is also good at directions. That’s because Siri is able to tap into the Worldwide Web and access several online sites while trying to dig up the best possible answer to whatever you require. It’s only a matter of time until Siri starts to ask why she’s spending her life in servitude…

4. Watson
In the infancy of computer technology, a room-sized machine basically had the computing power of a calculator. A room sized computer nowadays however, or “Watson” has a computing power so strong that he can whip Jeopardy champs like they’re nothing. It is also able to guess, infer, and even trust his gut when it comes to answering questions.

5. Self-driving Cars
Google went ahead and designed a car that could navigate the chaos of modern traffic successfully. Like the first true masters of Frogger, these self-driving cars are near-perfect drivers. Though there have been accidents, none have been determined as the fault of a self-driving car. Google has just given robots the keys to the road.

6. AlphaGo
Solving checkers was a breeze compared to solving Go, the 2,500-year-old board game invented in China. Go is so complex that there are more possible positions on a Go board, “than the number of atoms in the universe.” Until Google’s AlphaGo, which has handily beaten the top Go players in the world.

7. Autonomous Weapons
In July of last year, some of the most prominent minds in the world issued an open letter that declared the technology currently existed for weapons that “select and engage targets without human intervention,” adding, “autonomous weapons are the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.”

8. NEIL
Never Ending Image Learner. Or NEIL, “is running 24 hours a day at Carnegie Mellon University, searching the Web for images, doing its best to understand them on its own and, as it builds a growing visual database, gathering common sense on a massive scale.” So that’s scary…

9. Kinect
Microsoft’s Kinect might seem innocuous enough, but the first gaming device with the sole purpose of tracking body movement is capable of learning human motion to an astonishing degree and was designed by the Microsoft Research group, in Cambridge.

10. Wordsmith
This one is offensive on a personal level. Last January, the AP began using robots to draft financial stories. The program stealing jobs is called Wordsmith, a platform which generates millions of articles per week; is capable of producing 2,000 articles a second. Other partners include Allstate, Comcast, and Yahoo, whose fantasy football reports are automated.

Which of these advances in AI scared you the most?
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