Artificial Intelligence

I was doing some reading about artificial intelligence (AI) in conjunction with my reading of Neuromancer, and I stumbled across some really interesting (although arguably frivolous) creations. The first of which, designed by a Vietnamese robotics firms called TOSY, is a ping pong playing robot. Apparently, the robot has undergone two remodels and is now in its third form, TOPIO 3.0. This robot played against humans at a robotics fair in Tokyo recently, and is said to have held its own. This is absolutely amazing. Ping pong is (and I speak from experience) one of those sports that requires insane amounts of coordination, and TOPIO 3.0 was able to return 10 shots in a row playing against a human. One might say this is a waste of money, or a waste of robotics expertise, but if you ask me, this is astounding.

                                                                            

Another such artificially intelligent creation is the famous Jeopardy-playing robot Watson. As we all know, Watson dominated its competition in each and every game of Jeopardy it played, beating out even the stars Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter by large amounts of money. Again, I find this truly fascinating. Upon doing some research, I found that Watson contains 90 IBM servers and 16 TB ram (for those of us who aren’t computer savvy, that’s about 2000 times the amount found in the average high end NC State laptop (most 2011 era laptops have 4 or 8 GB ram standard). This is ridiculous. Apparently Watson can process the data of roughly a million books in a second.

I think that if you consider how much raw data can be interpreted and used by supercomputers in a short amount of time, it will appear inevitable that at some point, computing technology will reach the point where it can interpret things on its own. I have no idea how or when this will happen, but I am interested to see how long it takes for Neuromancer to become even more accurate. I don’t really think that improving artificial intelligence to unheard of levels is that far off; I think it will be sooner than later. Hopefully our version of Turing keeps a strong hold on it, if it turns out to be selfish or malicious. This is one of those things that is really interesting just because no one knows what exactly will happen.

Green Versus Green

As a chemical engineering major, I had previously assumed that members of my prospective profession just create things without having to worry about environmental consequences. Surprisingly, and perhaps disturbingly, this assumption was somewhat correct up until recently. It seems that when chemistry first became a large trade, in which many products were produced more cheaply and efficiently than ever before, environmental concerns were next to none. However, starting in the nineties, some scientists began conducting their chemical analyses and experiments with green motivations. Rather than creating things at any cost, be it mercury tainted water supplies, smoggy atmospheric conditions, or some other pollution, chemists are more and more beginning to go green.

This “green revolution” in the fields of chemistry and chemical engineering makes me wonder what exactly we are sacrificing when we concentrate on one green over the other. Some companies are typically green in the sense that they operate for pure profit and disregard the environment as much as possible; that is, they meet industry requirements, and that’s it. However, the trending thing is to be green in the environmental sense of the word, to take responsibility for their emissions, effluents, and wastes as they are dangerous to the fragile ecosystems in which they are released.

If we were to focus purely on efficiency and profit and completely ignore environmental concerns, would the extra quality of products warrant this decision? Would the products we produced under this mindset even be better than those manufactured under different conditions? These are the questions that will have to be answered in the near future by those of us who make things, and as far as I can tell, every one of us Franklins will have to deal with this dilemma once we reach the workforce in 4 or 5 years. I personally am looking forward to being on the crest of a wave of green. Where that wave eventually breaks I am eager to find out.