Mind the Game! Computer Games driving AI and transforming Society

We are worried about a few autonomous cars running in supervised test conditions in California but we have gotten used to driving amongst thousands of autonomous cars in games like Grand Theft Auto. AI in games is a well-established technology that has huge impacts on the game playing community, both children and grown-ups – and the impact will materialise in non-gaming contexts as well. Ai is not a future technology, this is our hypothesis, but it has long since invaded the living rooms of gamers, users, children, and a huge segment of society. BIU’s estimate that 46% of German population play games, means that at least a high fraction of those “play AI” as well. It is no coincidence that the world’s leading graphic card producers for games (NVIDIA corporation) is now developing AI cards and is partnering with big “real world” automobile companies.

What we are looking at is a “socio-intelligent” space, not researched well at the moment, but of high relevance. In Germany alone, some 34 millions of players are in deep contact with AIs, with some of them being aware of what the nature of the opponents NPCs or environmental actors are,  most of them are probably not.

“Before Tensor Cores, this demo would not have been possible,” Catanzaro said.

The network operates on high-level descriptions of a scene, for example: segmentation maps or edge maps, that describe where objects are and their general characteristics, such as whether a particular part of the image contains a car or a building, or where the edges of an object are. The network then fills in the details based on what it learned from real life videos.

Funded by Volkswagen Stiftung, initiated by Markus Rautzenberg (Folkwang Universität der Künste,), Gabriele Gramelsberger (TU Aachen), Serjoscha Wiemer (Uni Paderborn) und Mathias Fuchs (Leuphana/ CDC).