Artificial Intelligence has been an independent research discipline for 60 years, and it originated at an academic conference at Dartmouth College in 1956, proposed by McCarthy, the famous father of artificial intelligence. Through ups and downs, persistence and hard work of researchers, AI is no longer a toy bound in a lab. Google's alphago and Lee Sedol's Go battle brought artificial intelligence to the public with great impact.

Machines give people the impression of being cold and emotionless. For example, in the Go battle, Lee Sedol will have emotions such as anxiety, but alphago will not have. The machine will not be affected by the environment and emotions to influence the decision. This is actually one of its advantages. For example, in the increasingly hot driverless field, the machine will not make some basic operational errors for subjective reasons. From this perspective, unmanned driving is a safer quality than human driving. In fact, as long as artificial intelligence technology breaks through the key points, driverless technology will change our future life travel mode. Imagine the future travel scenarios, in the car you only need to listen to music or deal with work things, the traffic is well organized, all the traffic decisions are made by the tireless, abide by the rules of the machine to complete. This is the goal of the development of science and technology to serve mankind and improve the safety and quality of human society.

There can be no doubt that driverless technology will change the way we travel in the future. But there are still a lot of scientific challenges to be solved in order to realize this goal. In fact, the idea of driverlessness appeared as early as the 1920s. In 1925, the radio company houdinaradio control installed a radio receiving device in a car, which, by accepting signals, compiled them, and then used an electric device to carry out basic maneuvers on the car. It was demonstrated live in New York at the time, traveling from Broadway through the crowds to Fifth Avenue. But this driverless technology, it's not intelligent, it still needs a human to control it. But this thing shows that the driverless is not a concept raised only today, just with the development of science and technology, it is back to the people's vision, and give people hope, is no longer unattainable sci-fi movie clips. Google has taken driverless technology into a leap forward, and it originated in a lab at Stanford University. With the development of computing hardware and the evolution of various artificial intelligence algorithms, smart cars, nowadays, have made great progress. Although the driverless has not yet entered the practical stage, however, some of the related technologies have been highly respected among car companies and have been realized in production one after another, such as automatic parking, automatic cruise control, etc. These technologies make the human driving experience better and safer. If one day, I believe is the near future, driverless technology through some technical bottlenecks and legal constraints, put into the actual application, will greatly improve people's travel safety coefficient and travel experience.

In the future, unmanned vehicles will be just like cell phones, which have become an indispensable necessity in our lives. There is a concept of "Telematics", which is the interconnection of all cars in a network, but in the era of driverless cars, this is not necessary. Of course, if all the cars can join together, decision-making and scheduling is a very meaningful thing, but when the computing power and algorithms are strong enough, a driverless car can fulfill the goal set by human beings.

Artificial intelligence has permeated every aspect of our lives, food, clothing and transportation. When we shop online and dine out, intelligent algorithms can make personalized recommendations for us; when we take a taxi to travel, intelligent technology has dispatched the nearest cab to us; when we are bored, we can chat with intelligent software; in our neighborhoods and shopping malls, image recognition and video recognition software protects our safety while reducing labor costs.

alphago's big defeat of Lee Sedol caused a part of the people to panic whether artificial intelligence will surpass and destroy human beings like in science fiction movies. At the technical level, AI technology will definitely surpass human beings. alphago is not the first case, and the previous Deep Blue and Watson, etc., are examples of AI technology defeating human players. But at the level of scientific nature, AI technology will be used to better serve human beings and create a safer and more convenient human living environment.

Edited by Zheng Nan

(Written by Li Changliang, Chinese Society of Artificial Intelligence, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, this article was originally published by the micro-platform of Science_China)

Follow us: search for the micro-signal "Science_China" (ID: Science_China)?

Please indicate the source ID and author of the reprinted article.