Cyber Awareness - Stage 6 - Artificial Intelligence - Comprehension Pack.pdf

STAGE 6 Unit focus: Cyber Awareness Text focus: Information Text Artificial Intlligence Humans have been obsessed with the idea of other life forms for thousands of years. Ancient humans looke...

STAGE 6 Unit focus: Cyber Awareness Text focus: Information Text Artificial Intlligence Humans have been obsessed with the idea of other life forms for thousands of years. Ancient humans looked up to the stars and wondered if other living things would ever visit us. They invented devices called “automatons” that moved without any input from humans. These were only simply devices by today’s standards, but they were the first inclination that humans were thinking about forms of artificial intelligence, or AI. By the early 1900s, science fiction writers were in love with the idea of artificial humans. This was a golden age of stories centred around sentient beings created by humans to do their horrible jobs. O en, these new automatons would rise up and take over the world, enslaving humans. It was so exciting that scientists began to ask the question: could we really create an artificial mind that could think for itself? The birth of AI as we know it was the period between 1950 and 1956. A famous engineer called Alan Turing developed a test that he said would determine true artificial intelligence. The idea behind his test is that any artificial intelligence system can be tested to see if it can answer questions in the way a human would. To date, no system has ever passed the test. One of the main things that an AI system needs to be able to do is learn things. As computers get more powerful and have more memory, they can store more information and recall it more quickly, but this isn’t the same as learning. If you touch a flame and it hurts, you learn not to do it again. You might make the connection that the hot flame could be used to cook food, though. If a computer connected to a sensor touched a flame, it could detect that it was hot and store that information. It could call back that information later, but it wouldn’t make the link to use the flame for cooking food. If you programmed it to touch the flame again, it would. An AI system would learn what would happen if it did and refuse to do it, or at least try to argue against it. One of the first systems to “learn” was a program created by Arthur Samuel in 1952. His program A knew the rules of a game called draughts (also called checkers). It was ding ro Rea und all resources ©2023 Literacy Shed e um C u r r ic ul Th http://www.literacyshedplus.com able to play against humans and respond to their moves. This was groundbreaking - before then, computers could only play a set series of moves. Modern AI is moving at a tremendous speed. New systems such as ChatGPT and Midjourney are revolutionising how content is created. ChatGPT can write text in a matter of seconds, whereas Midjourney does the same with images. In the first few months of 2023, they advanced through several versions and exploded worldwide. One of the biggest barriers is getting a computer to understand what it sees. Is a bus a series of red blobs, a post box or a bus? If a system can’t work it out, it won’t know whether to get out of the way or post a letter. This could be fatal if it is in a self- driving car, for instance. Modern systems are getting much closer to being able to do this, so who knows what the future holds for artificial intelligence and its impact on our lives. RETRIEVAL FOCUS 1. When was the birth of modern artificial intelligence? 2. Is the idea of artificial intelligence a modern idea? 3. Who taught a computer to play draughts or checkers? 4. How was it better than previous versions? 5. Which modern AI systems are mentioned in the text? VIPERS QUESTIONS S Summarise the Turing Test. I Why might AI be worrying writers and illustrators? V Find and copy a phrase that means “to this day”. V Find and copy a word that describes something as being revolutionary. I Why might it be important that an AI system in a self-driving car can recognise things? all resources ©2023 Literacy Shed http://www.literacyshedplus.com