Facebook is working to advance the development of artificial intelligence, better known as AI. The company stated its goals in a blog post today.
If you have seen the new HBO show “Westworld” or the British drama “Humans, ” then you know that robots who look and speak just like people are just around the corner. And you also know that there is a great deal of fear about what would happen if said robots were to achieve sentience and be able to think for themselves.
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Well AI tech does not even need to be in the form of a robot. It can just be a super smart computer like HAL in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.” And plenty of movies like the Terminator films have speculated as to what could happen to humanity should AI tech get out of control.
So do we need to be afraid? Are we going to end up making our own Cylons? Well probably not and Facebook is certainly not concerned.
Mark Zuckerberg and his partners are constantly looking for ways to expand Facebook’s operations from just a social network to a full high tech firm and this is just part of that effort.
Facebook boasts that it has been devoting resources to building new tech in the areas of connectivity, artificial intelligence and virtual reality.
The company stated on its blog, “Our work in AI is helping us move all these projects forward. We’re conducting industry-leading research to help drive advancements in AI disciplines like computer vision, language understanding and machine learning. We then use this research to build infrastructure that anyone at Facebook can use to build new products and services.”
“We’re also applying AI to help solve longer-term challenges as we push forward in the fields of connectivity and VR. And to accelerate the impact of AI, we’re tackling the furthest frontiers of research, such as teaching computers to learn like humans do — by observing the world.”
In the area of AI, Facebook has a platform called FBLearner. The company states that this platform is helping to make AI available to everyone at Facebook and will eventually bring AI tech to everyone. Facebook says that FBLearner is so easy to use that 70% of the people using the platform are not AI experts.
And Facebook says that its users are already benefiting from AI even if they do not know it. It helps the social media giant translate posts for people and organize their news feeds. And the company expects AI to aid in the expansion of its services in the coming years.
And Facebook is also expanding AI into mobile platforms. It will work with voice recognition technology and Facebook’s Oculus platform. And captions can be automatically added to photographs once AI allows for computers to be able to determine what is in a picture.
But Facebook acknowledges that we still have a really long way to go before we will see truly intelligent computers which can think for themselves.
So do not worry about the machine apocalypse like in “The Matrix” or a robot revolt like in “Battle Star Galactica.” Facebook is not a threat to human supremacy on Planet Earth — for now.
