Fear of AI is based on fiction and not on facts.
Addressing HyperCat’s IoT Summit Nigel Shadbolt, chairman of the Open Data Institute, said: "The problem we have in AI is that people are convinced we are trying to build computers like the ones in the movies that are mad, bad and dangerous to know, the Terminators and the like who are looking to overthrow mankind."
Experts in the room called upon people’s good sense to distinguish between reality and fiction.
Duncan Anderson, CTO of Watson Europe at IBM said: "We’re building systems to make people’s life’s better. Computers help and assist rather than trying to compete with humans."
Baroness Susan Greenfield, Neuroscientist at Oxford University, added: "No computer has yet passed the Turing test. A human has however failed it."
She said approaches to non-biological subjectivity included modelling in a synthetic system, building an ever more sophisticated robot and developing a computer that passes the Turing Test.
Greenfield said: "There’s more in a brain than mere computation."
Shadbolt said AI is everywhere, is embedded and commercially exploited talking about a "Nouvelle AI" [New AI] in which the industry "needs to have serious thoughts about security".
He added: "Artificial Intelligence is now tackling very hard problems and has gone largely unremarked.
"It’s not Terminator and it is not plotting to overcome the human race. Machines shall not, through intention, harm a human."
Shadbolt believes that the key to human intelligence is it can do task transfer which artificial intelligence finds difficult.
Claire Taylor, from QinetiQ, said AI will "work towards a collaborative role between the human and the machine" and that in order to trust a system, "the system needs to do what is expected to do".
