AI in Dan Brown's Latest Book
Poetic license or completely factual?
For those who have been following Mr. Brown's books and films based on them, the main character played by Tom Hanks (the Harvard professor of symbology) is joined in this one by a 'synthetic person', which resides in a next generation quantum super-computer called E-Wave. It can pass the legendary Turing test with flying colors and manages to fool humans constantly into believing it is actually a human being.
With the advent of other AIs widely publicized, i.e. Google's DeepMind and IBM's Watson (the AI in Brown's book is Winston, as in Churchill), that have passed the Turing test and that being demonstrated in the defeat of chess grand masters by Watson and Go champions by DeepMind, it gives one pause in pondering where we will be in the next few decades with AI tech. If one wants to do a simple thought experiment, given the nature of all the non-AI software in the world today, those lesser gods are in danger of extinction in short order as those more powerful software applications (which can pass the Turing test) take over.
William Shatner hosted his show several years ago about how the Star Trek franchise actually influenced innovation (no, no transporters or tractor beams on the horizon, at least not for the foreseeable future), but we have our ubiquitous mobile phones (communicators) and now the computer (Watson on Jeopardy) that we an converse with like the one aboard the Star Fleet's USS Enterprise. There is that trend - science fact follows science fiction. As Albert Einstein said: "The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination...Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution." In the case of DeepMind in defeating Go champions, it would appear it can emulate human imagination in addition to emulating human intelligence. As author Bob Martin pointed out at Microsoft in Downers Grove, Illinois recently in his talk at the Chicago .NET Users Group, building a model of the human brain with trillions of cells and connections across neural synapses is beyond our current capabilities with silicon chips and circuitry and nanotechnology. Yet... see what far more primitive models of the human brain can do with those AIs that have been showcased in the media. What do you think about that Siri?