Overview

Fear of the future,
All things are born mutable,
Where will this change lead?

The prospect of where AI will go in the future is very exciting. With the steady increase of research in the field creating a wider scope for research to be displayed and created we can see exponential growth for this topic as displayed at IEEE CIG [2] and the AIIDE [3] conferences. AI is already used widely within video games for multiple purposes with the chance that many more are discovered.

There is not the only purpose for AI in video games though, an even greater array of possibilities exist for its use in the real-world application, such as improving educational learning [8] and working in the health sector [9]. Overall we can expect to see AI evolve at an increasingly quick rate, but should this cause plausible worry in how advanced AI can get? An example of this would be a computer program called AlphaGo which [11] "became the first computer Go program to beat a human professional Go player without handicaps on a full-sized 19×19 board". This example shows how a machine can learn to become better than the professionals over time through iterative learning. AlphaGo also uses the Monte Carlo Tree Search to [11] "find its moves based on knowledge previously "learned" by machine learning".

Seclusion of Research

A large amount of research into the use of AI has become locked into focusing on small enhances to existing algorithms or creating improvements which refer to only a specific game [1]. With so much research being restricted in this way it does lend itself to more reclusive improvements, does this research still push forward the current knowledge of AI? It is most likely that often it won't, but that is not to say that there will not be beneficial discoveries that come from this targeted research.

Should we fear AI?

With big names in the technology industry Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking stating the plausibility of AI being a dangerous factor in future [4][5], we shouldn't just shrug off these concerns. However, these issues have been stated openly in an effort to drive future work to have a consideration of how AI can be kept in check as it grows to be more advanced. To put a dampener on these worries Subbarao Kambhampati who heads the Association for the Advancement of AI [6] has stated that "concerns seem to focus on the rather far-fetched, super-intelligence take-over scenarios" [7].

Another aspect to bring this section back to the use of AI in video games, is that AI is created to play more complicated video games, although currently restricted to very specific use, are starting to be taught powerful resource management and how to beat the opponent at all costs, does this lead to a possibility where humans may one day been seen as a waste of resources and something unneeded in the world? Technological Singularity is a "is the hypothesis that the invention of artificial superintelligence (ASI) will abruptly trigger runaway technological growth, resulting in unfathomable changes to human civilization". Meaning that the machine may become fully sentient and be able to overcome the abilities of a normal human being which poses a threat if a machine were to turn evil.

References

[1] A. Nareyek, "Game AI is Dead. Long Live Game AI!", IEEE Intelligent Systems, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 9-11, 2007. Available: 10.1109/mis.2007.10 [Accessed 15 February 2019].
[2] "IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games | IEEE Computational Intelligence Society", Ieee-cig.org, 2019. [Online]. Available: http://www.ieee-cig.org/. [Accessed: 15- Feb- 2019].
[3] "The Artificial Intelligence for Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference (AIIDE)", Aaai.org, 2019. [Online]. Available: https://aaai.org/Conferences/AIIDE/aiide.php. [Accessed: 15- Feb- 2019].
[4] J. Medeiros, "Stephen Hawking: 'I fear AI may replace humans altogether'", Wired.co.uk, 2019. [Online]. Available: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/stephen-hawking-interview-alien-life-climate-change-donald-trump. [Accessed: 15- Feb- 2019].
[5] National Governors Association, Introducing the New Chair's Initiative "Ahead of the Curve". 2017.
[6] "Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence", Aaai.org, 2019. [Online]. Available: https://www.aaai.org/. [Accessed: 15- Feb- 2019].
[7] N. Patel, "A.I. Scientists to Elon Musk: Stop Saying Robots Will Kill Us All", Inverse, 2017. [Online]. Available: https://www.inverse.com/article/34343-a-i-scientists-react-to-elon-musk-ai-comments. [Accessed: 15- Feb- 2019].
[8] J. Beck, M. Stern and E. Haugsjaa, "Applications of AI in education", Crossroads, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 11-15, 1996. Available: 10.1145/332148.332153 [Accessed 15 February 2019].
[9] I. Maglogiannis, Emerging artificial intelligence applications in computer engineering. Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2007.
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity [11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo