You would be surprised to learn how many areas of our lives use artificial intelligence (AI). AI is being widely used by voice assistants, smartphone apps, banks and online stores. It makes people's life easier.
Recently, the Saudi Arabia Ministry of Hajj and Umrah also joined the AI bandwagon. In a promotional video ahead of the hajj season, it revealed that the country will be using AI by 2030 to better manage the Islamic pilgrimage and streamline the process for millions of Muslims.
The Minister of Hajj and Umrah Mohammad Saleh bin Taher Benten announced that they will utilize AI and other advanced technology so that the faithful can perform their religious duties in a better environment.
The promotional video gave a vision of the future where Muslims who want to perform the Hajj in 2030 will be able to apply through a mobile application. After the application, the prospective pilgrims will receive a package including an electronic card, wristband and earphones. They will be directed with these devices during their visit. In addition, every pilgrim's luggage will be brought to their hotel rooms, without the need for them to carry it. When a person comes to their room, their luggage will already be there.
Language will not be a problem
The pilgrims will receive all information about the Hajj schedule through the smart wristband. They will be able to listen to important information with their earphones and the wristband will display notification like how many times they have how many times they have gone around the Kaaba. It will also display the specific prayers the pilgrims should say at specific stages of the hajj.
Missing friends or relatives will also not be a source of anxiety in the future. When the pilgrims download Hajj and Umrah application on their smartphones, their locations will be tracked using AI and GPS technologies. The host system will be able to see their locations at all times.
The language barrier will also become a thing of the past. The AI-powered headpieces will also double as a real-time translator, helping the pilgrims understand vital instructions.
Empathy with war-weary
Turkish AI expert Pınar Yanardağ and her MIT team have developed another interesting AI, known as Deep Empathy (deepempathy.mit.edu). Supported by the UNICEF innovation fund, Deep Empathy was created to make people empathize with the war-weary people who are thousands of kilometers away.
As part of this project that enables people to empathize with others, individuals are made to imagine their countries to be like Homs, Aleppo and Idlib. Technology experts aim to make people see the truths from a different perspective, using tools like AI.
Deep Empathy shows how different regions in the world would turn out if a war broke out. A kind of humanitarian assistance project, Deep Empathy turns images of a city, taken from online sources like Google and Flickr, and transform them into a picture of a war-hit city. This way citizens of those cities can empathize with the victims of the Syrian civil war.
The first psycho AI in the world
We have already mentioned the AI named Shelly (Shelley.ai), which writes horror film scripts and publishes it on her Twitter account. This AI, developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) last year, can write authentic horror stories. It uses deep learning to teach itself online.
Shelly, which has written more than 200 stories to date, now has a formidable adversary: Norman, the first AI psychopath in the world.
A team from MIT Media Laboratory, including Turkish AI expert Pınar Yanardağ, developed Norman (norman-ai.mit.edu) in order to show how it will end when malicious data is loaded into an AI.
While MIT describes it as an example study that shows the dangers of AI when biased information is used in machine learning algorithms.
Pınar Yanardağ said: "There is a thought in the center of machine learning. The data that you use in the algorithm of the machine learning is a determinant in its behaviors. Therefore, when we mention the AI algorithm is wrongly biased, mostly the algorithm is not guilty, rather it's the data that feeds the algorithm."
But why was it named Norman? The team of three researchers revealed that the name was inspired by Norman Bates, the lead character in Alfred Hitchcock's 1960-film "Psycho." The character was played by famous actor Anthony Perkins. Norman the AI also uses an illustrated version of one Perkins' iconic images from the film.
The AI was trained by the MIT team using a technic platform called image captioning; a popular deep learning method of generating a textual description of an image. They trained Norman on image captions from an infamous subreddit that is dedicated to document and observe the disturbing reality of death. Then, they compared Norman's responses with a standard image captioning neural network on Rorschach inkblots; a test that is used to detect underlying thought disorders. The results are quite frightening.
