Leading computer scientists have predicted that the future of artificial intelligence (AI) lies in Collective AI – a model utilising many separate units that are able to learn independently over a lifetime and share their knowledge with each other.
They compared the model to a number of science fiction concepts, including ‘the Borg’, a group of cybernetic organisms that share a hive mind in the Star Trek universe.
Unlike the Borg, however, who seek to aggressively ‘assimilate’ other beings into their consciousness, the researchers envision Collective AI bringing a number of benefits to humanity.
The researchers, including experts from Loughborough University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Yale, shared their vision in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.
Research lead Dr Andrea Soltoggio of Loughborough University called the potential applications of Collective AI “vast and exciting”.
He said that the instant sharing of knowledge across a network of AI units able to learn and adapt to new information would enable these systems to respond to new situations, opportunities and threats.
Soltoggio also said that this could be applied to developments in the medical field, such as disaster response robots that can adapt to the conditions in which they are dispatched, or personalised medical agents that can merge advanced medical knowledge and patient-specific information to improve health outcomes.
Security AI could provide a collective response like the human immune system
Giving an example, Soltoggio said that AI detecting a threat in a cybersecurity setting could instantly pass on that information and begin a collective response, in much the same way that individual elements of the human immune system come together to fight or repel invaders.
Disaster response robots could be powered by Collective AI to allow them to adapt to the unpredictable and changing conditions in which they are deployed.
The researchers acknowledged that there could be some risks involved with Collective AI, such as unethical or illicit knowledge being spread quickly throughout the network.
Unlike members of the Borg, however, individual AI units would retain their own independence and objectives away from the collective network.
Soltoggio said that this represented a built-in safety feature as the resultant “democracy of AI agents” would reduce the risks of AI becoming dominated by a few large, powerful systems.
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