Gaming receives real benefits
One very big business in which AI plays a key role is the video-game industry, comparable to the film business in size. Unlike in the movies, it's often up to a computer or game console to create a sense of reality for the gamer, and standards of realism are going up all the time.
"It's important for a game to make people feel that the characters who are inside the game are kind of real," says Jez San, chief executive of Argonaut Games and a major figure in the UK's world-leading game design business.
Some games use neural networking technology to create characters who can learn as they go along. Characters in a fighting game, for example, might be taught combat skills in much the same way as a human.
A new genre of games has even emerged around interacting with simple AI personalities -- something like the Tamagotchi phenomenon. The best known example so far is probably Black & White, still in development by Peter Molyneux and Lionhead Studios, which will allow players to nurture a creature through its life and help build up its behaviour patterns.
Demand for realistic AI entities may be about to emerge from an unexpected source: online multiplayer games, which link thousands of people together in role-playing or strategy extravaganzas. "The problem is that people have to eat and go to the bathroom etc," says San. "Wouldn't it be nice if you could send in an artificially intelligent agent, and your character could keep on playing while you did that? It's all theoretically possible."
But San admits truly intelligent, autonomous AIs aren't on the cards for gaming -- and won't be, until there is a clear demand. "When games exist that need that intelligence, it will come," he says.
In the mean time, the same intelligence that lets a video-game fighter predict your next move is also helping antihacker security systems better protect sensitive computer networks. The idea is that a smarter system will be better able to recognise hacker threats -- such as an intruder gently probing defences over a long period of time -- and take action.
One such project, spearheaded by Sandia National Labs in Albuquerque, will use AI agents to pool the forces of as many Internet-connected computers as possible into one vast, collective security force. The Linux-based system will require no specialised security computers and will be able to share information and form a consensus about the nature of any irregularity it spots.
The system can take action by closing data ports, rejecting viruses and cutting a hijacked computer off from the network.
No industry so far has found a need to come up with a "true" artificial intelligence -- the sort of conscious artificial being imagined by Isaac Asimov or Arthur C Clarke. It's a question of usefulness, say experts. "A lot of AI companies are evangelical about their vision, but what they evangelise about doesn't necessarily turn into a practical or useful product at the end of the day," points out Brown.
And there's no guarantee the ends of scientists and businesspeople will get any closer together than they have ever been. "Creating something conscious, there isn't necessarily a business case for that," says HP's Cliff. "There might be a Nobel Prize in it, but it's more of a scientific goal, rather than engineering. The question we have to ask is, can we create products which do useful things?"
In ZDNet's Artificial Intelligence Special, ZDNet charts the road to sentience, examines the technologies that will take us from sci-fi to sci-fact, and asks if machines should have rights.
