Smart computers could soon manage our cars, homes, forests and power grids, say panellists at an upcoming conference — but should they?
Local tech-fans will get to hear about the future of artificial intelligence next week at a conference organized by the Alberta Council of Technologies.
This is the council's second forum on machine intelligence this year, says organizer and St. Albert resident Perry Kinkaide. It features nine panels on how smart computers are being used in the world.
"This is an emerging technology that's already having significant impacts on where we live and how we work," Kinkaide says. Semi-automated drones now fight in wars, for example, while construction firms use complex software to improve building maintenance.
Auto architects
The latter is called building information monitoring and is a specialty of Klaas Rodenburg, sustainable design co-ordinator with Stantec and Alberta Council of Technologies member. "It adds intelligence to our design."
If you wanted to find out the effects of adding another floor to a home in the old days, he says you'd have to draw new blueprints and crunch the numbers by hand. Now, you can find out by modelling the home in the computer.
"It's a lot easier for me to make a change in the computer than it is to make a change to the building once they've started construction," Rodenburg says. Models can show builders how to make homes more energy efficient, schedule construction and track down mechanical problems.
This will require designers to learn a whole new set of skills, he notes, and not all of them will make the cut. "There are hundreds of thousands of elements that go into a large building," he says, and all of them have to be coded for the model to work. His company is now using such a model to design an expansion to the Edmonton International Airport.
Auto cars
Engineers are also building self-driving cars, notes Nathan Armstrong, the president of Calgary's Motive Industries and a speaker at the conference. Google, for example, announced this month that it had driven seven robotic cars around California for some 225,000 kilometres without any problems — and without telling anyone.
Automatic cars could make lives safer and more productive, Armstrong says. Imagine getting work done while your car navigates a traffic jam, for example, or texting all you want without crashing into a wall.
GPS and sensor technology make it relatively easy for a car to drive itself, Armstrong says. The big challenge is to teach them to drive safely. Cars can react at super-fast speeds, but can injure people if they do so at the wrong time. "If a squirrel [runs out into the road], is [the car] going to brake super-hard and get into an accident?"
There are also legal obstacles. "If an autonomous vehicle gets into an accident with a regular vehicle, who's to blame?" he asks. The driver? The programmer? No one? "That's going to be an area that's very, very difficult to cross."
It will be about five years before self-driving cars become common, Armstrong predicts, although some versions are already available. Certain high-end cars can park themselves, for example, and Mercedes has a cruise control that keeps you a set distance from other cars.
His company has proposed using automatic cars as a taxi service in a redeveloped Edmonton Municipal Airport. "The goal is to have a vehicle that can pick you up at your house and take you where you want to go." These small-scale tests would let companies test computer cars in Canada's icy conditions.
The conference runs from 1:30 to 6:30 p.m. Nov. 3 at the Shaw Conference Centre. Tickets are $75 but students get in free. For details, visit www.abctech.ca.
