B U S I N E S S
TECHNOLOGY
In the depths of the mind Text Jonas Mercier — Illustration Myriam Heinzel
Creating artificial intelligence means first understanding its most subtle mechanisms. This is the task German researcher Jürgen Schmidhuber has set himself for over 30 years.
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rtificial intelligence is here. Thanks to the algorithms of deep learning, it is even beginning to learn from itself. Jürgen Schmidhuber is a guru in the field, or, according to some, the father of AI. The scientific director of the Swiss Institute for the Study of Artificial Intelligence Dalle Molle (IDSA) has researched it since the 1990s and is slowly but surely getting close to fulfilling a promise he made to himself at 15: developing artificial intelligence that is more intelligent than he is. In recent years people have spoken of artificial intelligence as an inevitable process that is potentially dangerous for humanity. Can we stop it? Yes... if there was a nuclear war or an enormous disaster such as the spread of a powerful virus that could decimate civilisation, something of that sort. But these are the only contingencies that, in my opinion, could put an end to its development. Can one say that man is controlling its development? Today 95% of research done in this field focuses on ways of making people happier, healthier and ever more dependent on their smartphones. It is true that some technologies allow machines to learn without a teacher or guide, much in the same way that babies find out about the laws of gravity
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by playing with certain objects. But it is still us who decide whether or not to give them the freedom to conduct these experiments. When did we start to take an interest in artificial intelligence? The laws of artificial intelligence as we know them today go back to last century. Most of them were developed in Europe as a matter of fact. It all started 50 years ago in Ukraine when the mathematician Alexey Grigorevich Ivakhnenko and his students published a study on how to train a computer network to learn certain things. This was the birth of deep learning. In the early 1990s we were able to go even further and allow a network of artificial neurons to make complex connections on its own, in the same way that a human brain memorises what it has seen. What is deep learning? Deep learning is only one area of artificial intelligence and concerns automatic learning methods based on artificial neural networks. Many applications, such as speech recognition or image recognition, are based on this methodology and in particular on the ‘long shortterm memory’ (LSTM) system that we developed here in Europe (and not in the US) with my students. The LSTM principle has become the basis of many of the sequen-
11/05/17 15:13