Re: What would be the practical applications of a true artificial intelligence?

This question has been asked (and answered) by science fiction writers for decades. Isaac Asimov's robot stories, for example, describe artificial intelligences being put to many uses. The driods in Star Wars and Commander Data in Star Trek also give us ideas about future uses for independent AI systems.

Today, research groups are developing independent AI systems for everything from space exploration to harvesting hay. The MIT mobile robots group and the CMU mobile robots group have a lot of information available.

NASA is researching artificial intelligence for use in space exploration. The Mars Pathfinder had no intelligence, and had to be controlled by scientists on Earth. Because it takes 11 minutes for commands from earth to reach Mars, scientists had to send a command to the rover and then wait to see if the command was successful before sending another. A more intelligent robot could navigate around Mars and perform its own experiments, sending the results to Earth when they were done.

Of course, the military keeps much of its research secret, but independent AI systems would be well suited to surveillance.

Some existing AI systems are already "independent" in the sense that they don't need human supervision, but they do very limited jobs. As our technology progresses, we will be able to test AI systems for various jobs. We can then determine which jobs can be left to machines and which still need to be done by humans.