Active Silicon’s AI series – part 2: Artificial Intelligence and machine vision: the good, the bad and the ugly

Plenty of books and movies have been created around the benefits and dangers of Artificial Intelligence (AI), since the first integrated chips were able to control complex systems back in the 1950s. Recently, Tesla and SpaceX entrepreneur Elon Musk and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg have engaged in a very public argument about the fundamental risks and opportunities of AI, triggered by Facebook reporting that they needed to stop an experiment where autonomous chatbots had developed their own inscrutable language by reinterpreting the meaning of English vocabulary.

The dark side was highlighted just last month by an open letter to the UN from Elon Musk and 115 other specialists across 26 countries, calling for an outright ban on autonomous weapons. The UK government, for one, appears to have listened and is adopting policies not to develop or use fully autonomous weapons.

Most essays on AI emphasize both its wonderful opportunities and its life-threatening risks. When IBM’s Deep Blue proved in 1997 that human intuition and experience from thousands of chess matches could no longer outperform a machine, it wasn’t only the philosophers who became anxious about the power of this technology. Today, software frameworks for machine learning are publicly available (e.g. https://www.tensorflow.org/), thus, each individual developer is in charge of the safety of their own experiments while political regulations are widely lacking, and probably ineffective.

However, at Active Silicon, we believe there are great opportunities being created by machine learning in conjunction with imaging; with new approaches in Deep Learning, known machine vision applications can be implemented much faster and previously insuperable problems can be solved. While following these developments closely, we expect engineers to take their responsibilities seriously and ensure the ethical utilization of any technological advancements.

Would you like to know more about the opportunities created by artificial intelligence in machine vision? Then please visit our blog regularly in the upcoming weeks as we publish more updates, or simply subscribe to our newsletter.