Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence

https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2016/05/03/preparing-future-artificial-intelligence

by apsec112 • 10 years ago

174 90 10 years ago

whitehouse.gov

clarkmoody• 10 years ago

How wonderful would it be to replace many government jobs with AI ;-)

ryanx435• 10 years ago

*all jobs

chubot2• 10 years ago

I suspect we've already replaced 100,000+ jobs in call centers with AI -- you know the menu system that you get before you talk to somebody. (You might not think of that as AI now, but that's "success" -- 20 years ago it undoubtedly was AI.)

I'm not all that excited about interacting with more AI.

taneq2• 10 years ago

You might not think of that as AI now, but that's "success" -- 20 years ago it undoubtedly was AI.

As Dijkstra said, asking whether a machine can think is like asking whether a submarine can swim. And in the real world, nobody cares whether it's swimming or not, they just care whether it's solving their problem. Which all of these little bits and pieces of human-replacing technology most certainly are doing.

bogomipz3• 10 years ago

Nah, we just outsourced those jobs to cheaper labor.

varjag• 10 years ago

We had phone menu systems 20 years ago and they most certainly weren't "AI". I'm actually not sure they were considered as such at any point since DTMF was devised.

mtgx• 10 years ago

Don't worry, we'll still pay 50%+ of the budget to defense contractors somehow.

stephenhess• 10 years ago

Love this but they're really not holding one of these in the Bay Area? -_-

desireco42• 10 years ago

With all the people scared from AI, I can imagine if they would replace politicians and government officials with AI in just small part of the country, after the initial surprise, within weeks satisfaction would be through the roof and we would have AI running the country.

kordless6• 10 years ago

For software based AI to be successful at what it does, it must compete. If it does not compete well, it will suck, and the government will suck just as bad. Government, at least the way we've been thinking about it thus far, will have to change for AI to be good at it.

CuriouslyC• 10 years ago

Competition isn't necessary. In fact, competition is really just an instance of optimizing an objective function that is defined in terms of "relative advantage". If the objective function is some measure of citizen well-being AI would be just as successful.

SapphireSun• 10 years ago

For a software based AI to be successful, it must be good at convincing people to go along with it and balancing sometimes paradoxical concerns from the public. I think efficiency is the least of its worries.

Tsagadai• 10 years ago

Competition is unnecessarily burdensome. It just has to converge in less than polynomial time.

jcfrei• 10 years ago

Even the best AI in the world can't overcome the fact that different interest groups in a country often have orthogonal demands. It might just become better at lying than current politicians.

paulsutter• 10 years ago

This level of hype reminds me of the AI winter. Concerned that public interest hits a peak and then a few months later disillusion sets in and AI becomes a discredited failure in the public's eye, since even rapid progress moves slower than an election or typical news cycle.

kordless6• 10 years ago

At this point, I really don't think our government has any idea how to deal with what is coming.

Aelinsaar3• 10 years ago

Our government doesn't know how to deal with what happened a couple of decades ago, technologically speaking; a couple of decades at least.

npx• 10 years ago

Frankly, I don't think our government really has any idea how to deal with what is actually happening right now.

eli_gottlieb• 10 years ago

Yes they do: shoot, jail, or coerce everyone capable of producing advanced AI. Problem solved, if you're assuming that advanced AI is sufficiently dangerous that not making any at all is a better idea than taking a risk.

And governments will always want to avoid risks, especially risks that knock them out of their monopolies on force and economic power.

eva19842• 10 years ago

I am optimistic, AI winter is no longer the case this time.

We almost solved image/speech recognition in the past 5 years. Once those works went out of academia to real application, the amount of disruption to the current society is pretty hard to imagine.

hellofunk3• 10 years ago

Siri mis-hears about every other sentence I send her, so I'd say speech recognition is far from solved.

But we are getting closer.

obmelvin• 10 years ago

We've made impressive progress but even with computer vision there is still a lot to do. For example, it's great that we can recognize certain objects are in a picture, but a lot of real-world applications depend on the exact location, e.g. image segmentation. Current state of the art models generate hundreds of similar object proposals which cannot realistically narrowed down to a single one to present to a user in an application.

roel_v2• 10 years ago

It's a self-fulfilling prophecy - we're now at the 6th season of hearing "winter is coming", it's bound to happen any time now.

dfsegoat2• 10 years ago

Gambler's fallacy.

studentrob• 10 years ago

Yes. Where was the White House tech group (OSTP) during the Apple & FBI encryption debate? Silent!

I won't hold my breath for them to produce anything of value here.

nabla9• 10 years ago

AI Winter was not the result of changing public interest.

It was lost interest from investors and government.

All that money poured into AI research produced little rewards. There were expert systems that worked well and they became profitable businesses, but othervice there was little to show. In retrospect I think it was good idea to adjust the money to match the results and wait until computer scientist come up with new ideas.

Current Ai boom is result from 'Canadian mafia' diligently working and actually producing results and faster computing, especially GPCPU.

Unless we get constant stream of new ideas that build up on the current ones, there should reduced interest and investments once most benefits have been materialized.

romaniv2• 10 years ago

There were expert systems that worked well and they became profitable businesses, but othervice there was little to show.

One could similarly say about our time: "there were neural network applications that worked well, but otherwise there was little to show". What is the fundamental difference between what is going on now and what was happening before the previous AI winter?

I feel that people constantly misrepresent how impressive expert systems seemed back in their heyday. They had a lot of practical applications and they could do some very cool tricks.

Interestingly, the highly impressive accomplishments of SVMs, random forests and boosting went mostly unnoticed, precisely because of the AI Winter.

erubin• 10 years ago

The folks here commenting about entrenched power structures should remember that Ed Felten (who put his name on the release) is not a career bureaucrat at all.

randcraw• 10 years ago

True. As FTC CTO, his able past work in privacy and data security was certainly relevant to traditional FTC interests. As Deputy US CTO, I think his agenda has broadened.

There's already a ton of gov't interest/activity on surveillance and security issues, mostly via the military services and adjuncts. I assume this initiative ain't more of that.

This announcement seems to presage greater federal gov't interest and involvement in how computing might be used toward less defensive/clandestine ends, especially in governance (social good), control, and safety, as well as legal implications -- adding AI as the means to serving gov't ends, so to speak.

If so, great. I'd love to see greater OPEN use of computing in government, especially in gathering unbiased metrics and making better use of them to evaluate the outcome of changes in policy.

bogomipz3• 10 years ago

I really hate politico speak. What does this really mean?

"to spur public dialogue on artificial intelligence and machine learning and identify challenges and opportunities related to this emerging technology."

ProAm• 10 years ago

It means nothing. The government (21st century US gov.) is so poorly structured to accomplish or influence anything regarding growth it should be taken as an ROI/sales pitch invitation. They are saying, in the future we will have a bucket of money to give to our friends.... please be our friends so you can try to build something. The first implementation of Obama-care should be a clear indication of this. However, Im sure there is true investment in interesting technology on the defense side of the fence. Probably more money, and way more interesting problems.

PeterisP• 10 years ago

It's a quite clear statement (though in a niche jargon) - such language means that they intend to dedicate resources to organize some events/discussion panels about the topic, and possibly even to some research grants.

The only unclear thing about politico speak generally is that is not clear if they will do X or if they just wanted to publicly claim that they'll do X for some PR or voter support, with no intention to actually do it.

Animats• 10 years ago

From the press release: "In education, AI has the potential to help teachers customize instruction for each student’s needs."

Does anybody actually do that? Most "online education" still seems to be canned lectures. There was work on this from the 1960s to the 1990s, but efforts seem to have stalled.[1] There are drill-and-practice systems, but they're really just workbooks with automatic scoring.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_tutoring_system

ap22213• 10 years ago

Yes, it's happening, but inexpensive tools aren't widely available or integrated into a lot of content, and content isn't yet being widely developed with dynamic content in mind. There needs to be work in how 'teachers customize instruction' that challenge widely used instructional design models.

There's a lot of work being done in places were the pockets are deeper (military, simulations, medicine). Recently, standards (xAPI, Caliper) have started to emerge to enable the decoupling of content, content delivery, and interaction (think MVC pattern) and to enable pervasive, multi-modal learning activity tracking.

dvanduzer2• 10 years ago

There's a hip startup downtown working on something just like that.[0]

Will these systems be any better than an automatic scoring system with spaced repetition? Well. More fundamentally, what are a student's needs? Sesame Street and other organizations[1] have known for a long time that the most "engaged" learners also happen to be having fun.

The only particularly controversial thing in that quote is the word teachers. Left relatively unsupervised, the kids today will voraciously seek youtube videos to teach themselves how to make a Turing machine in Minecraft. What an intelligent tutor really needs to be able to do, is pay attention to what a student is curious about. Ubiquitous sensors will probably play into some of the new efforts. But the biggest leaps will come from systems that help kids learn from each other, together.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lG4xBoEgZo

[1] http://www.instituteofplay.org

alphydan• 10 years ago

Left relatively unsupervised, the kids today will voraciously seek youtube videos to teach themselves how to make a Turing machine in Minecraft

I am currently teaching middle school and high school and I think nothing is further from the truth. A few kids do, maybe most children of HN's parents, ... but most kids don't care at all about programming, science or building anything.

It's a lot harder to do differentiation than it sounds. After 10 min of hour-of-code many are bored out of their mind, say they don't like video games and want to do something else (acting, paint _without code_, do sports, take selfies, gossip, read a novel, etc ...).

sixhobbits• 10 years ago

Siyavula [0] is making big advances in this area for maths and science high school education in South Africa. Their intelligent practice platform uses machine learning to pick the 'best' exercise for individuals when they practice to ensure that everyone gets the optimal difficulty practice question.

[0] http://www.siyavula.com/

Jach• 10 years ago

With Khan Academy I recall they tried exposing some measure of competencies on different aspects of a subject based on their testing, so as the interactive human / 'teacher' you could help the student more specifically and not waste time drilling on what they know, and especially not waste time on canned lectures done better elsewhere which everyone can watch as homework.

A fun if unrealistic alternative, have the professor move fast enough to give the illusion of individual clones for each student: https://youtu.be/ZJy8qH8Fw5s

exit• 10 years ago

they should discuss a universal basic income to counter the pervasive unemployment which ai will bring with it.

qaq• 10 years ago

Given election cycles and how expansive it will be to deal with this problem, none will address this until the effects are strongly felt by avg. voter.

bsbechtel2• 10 years ago

The idea of a computer deciding whether someone is guilty or not is a scary prospect. This is a bandwagon I'm not so sure the government should be so eager to jump on.

comboy• 10 years ago

Computer program makes a decision based on the set of rules it was programmed with.

We have a law to make humans work exactly the same way. Law is a set of rules that say who is guilty and who's not. Only that humans are bad at being objective: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/04/1...

bsbechtel2• 10 years ago

Not exactly. The real world is far too complex to cover all edge cases, which is why we have human judges to evaluate cases on an individual basis. Leaving these decisions up to a computer is essentially subjecting ourselves to rule by computers, which is incredibly concerning.

ajnin• 10 years ago

Laws are rules but they are not enough on their own to make decisions. They are written with the implicit cultural background and the intent of the humans who wrote them. Plenty of case law is around determining what the authors actually meant when they made a law.

As long as humans write the law, and that there is the notion of a sovereign people, human judges should decide how to interpret and apply the law.

w_t_payne• 10 years ago

AI is, at the end of the day, just software. We have the intellectual tools to enable us to make high quality software and systems, stemming from industrial experience stretching back three quarters of a century. We need to free that knowledge; ossified in dozens of mil-std and similar institutional documents: re-institutionalising it in the public domain, making free tools and systems available to support the (public) quality processes that a distributed, heterogeneous, partially open-source future AI requires.

Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence

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