Question: How would your research improve others lives?

Huma Shah answered on 9 Nov 2016:

Hello Izzy,

I hope that by the general public getting involved in my practical Turing tests they can think about artificial intelligence and how smart machines could make life easier. I have held open Turing test events, including in 2012 Bletchley Park, home of WWII codebreaking, and at The Royal Society in London in 2014, where children, teenagers and interested adults came to watch and take part (please see this link for pictures: http://turingtestsin2014.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/eugene-goostman-machine-convinced-3333.html ).

By attending visitors and participants become interested in Alan Turing’s ideas and understand them in the context of today’s technical world, please see comments in the link above.

Artificial Intelligences will improve business processes, but they could also lead to loss of some jobs such as bank clerks, receptionists, security guards, teachers even – computer programmes to mark your coursework and exams.

Making young people aware of this could help them to get involved by studying artificial intelligence and robotics and be part of designing and developing future and emerging technologies. Think of social robots, the kind that are built to care for and companion the sick and the elderly. These technologies already please the patients who come in contact with social robots.

Once these types of robots can talk like humans they will be even more engaged in our lives and I feel help to improve them, perhaps even by showing us how we are sometimes not very logical to our own detriment. Just today Trump has won the US Election, just think if he could surround himself by intelligent machines who showed him that sowing the seeds of division is actually not a good idea in the short or long term.

Anyway, now I’m getting political and this is supposed to be a science initiative 🙂

Huma
Huma