MIT Researchers Develop AI That Could Predict Future; Videos Created Makes “Alternative Futures”

It's not Minority Report just yet, but it is getting closer to the intersection where science fiction and reality meet. An Artificial Intelligence capable of predicting the future was recently developed by a group of researchers that could, if one stretches their imagination to an extent, bring a whole new meaning to what was before subject of movies and novels.

According to Engadget, a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) came up with a "deep learning algorithm" that could craft videos that could somewhat show what's going to happen in the future. An AI then creates a footage via "two neutral networks", or adversarial networks. One is responsible for generating a scene from moving objects while the other network makes sure that the video is real.

But before the AI can create its own output, it is bombarded by 2 million videos from Flickr, said New Scientist. These videos, the website added, included scenes from "beaches, golf courses, train stations and babies in hospitals." In addition, these footages are unlabeled, which means that the videos don't have specific tags. Its output is deemed "a success" if the checker network is fooled that the video is legitimate.

For now, the videos are not high quality. It only comes with 32 frames and lasts around 1 second. The AI still has a lot to learn, and it relies mainly on the 2 million videos the researchers crammed in its system "to understand how the world works." But if they can stretch the AI's capabilities, even self-driving cars can, in the near future, prohibit road accidents and foresee incoming vehicles and pedestrians. Closed-circuit televisions can also be enhanced to provide additional and important footages, while everyday safety can go from a mere jump to a leap.

MIT CSAIL team lead Carl Vondrick is now planning to make "larger, longer videos". Although he admitted that the AI may not be exact in predicting what's going to happen, it could, on the other hand, provide "alternative futures."