Researchers have developed an artificial intelligence that can, in certain situations, predict the future. Although not as effective as you may think, it is a step toward psychic robots.

A team of researchers has developed an artificial intelligence system that can allegedly peer into the future.

The artificial intelligence system was developed by researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany. According to reports, it can accurately predict what a person will do next within the next few minutes. That is if the past and the next few minutes will involve cooking.

According to the study that will be presented at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition later this month, the researchers trained their machine learning algorithm for hours using videos of people cooking breakfast foods and preparing salads. This led the AI system to predict the next steps in preparing salad recipes when it sees a person doing one.

“Accuracy was over 40 percent for short forecast periods, but then dropped the more the algorithm had to look into the future,” Dr. Jürgen Gall, one of the researchers, said. “We want to predict the timing and duration of activities – minutes or even hours before they happen.”

With their AI system, the Bonn researchers hope to improve smart home devices by giving them the capability to recognize what people are doing or what they would do next. For instance, smart speakers could one day remind us if we missed a recipe step while cooking or if we should adjust the stove heat while putting ingredients on the casserole.

Nevertheless, this latest development in the field of artificial intelligence doesn’t mean that the researchers have given their machine the ability to predict people’s intentions like conscious beings. Instead, it can only anticipate the next steps in a process, which at the moment is only limited to making breakfast and salads, depending on what the person has done in the past minutes.

As cool as a psychic robot would be, we may have to settle for a breakfast-based psychic robot for now. Although, having Alexa let me know when I’m burning my eggs is a start.

Do you believe that artificial intelligence systems could one day think like human beings?