Barack Obama on A.I., Autonomous Cars, and the Future of Humanity

https://www.wired.com/2016/10/president-obama-mit-joi-ito-interview

by gflandre • 10 years ago

317 229 10 years ago

"But it also has some downsides that we’re gonna have to figure out in terms of not eliminating jobs. It could increase inequality. It could suppress wages."

No doubt that advances in technology have always done away with jobs. We're almost to the point at which the biggest blue collar industry (truck drivers) is about to be wiped out by self driving trucks. What I'm concerned about is the government stifling innovation such as driverless trucks to retain those jobs, or some sort of regulation that stifles the technology's potential. What is the alternative?

eric_h4• 10 years ago

I'm more and more convinced that a UBI is the only way to deal with this problem, so the unemployed have a buffer to retrain to a new skillset.

Of course, replacing the current social safety net (food stamps, et. al.) with a UBI would likely result in the trimming of government bureaucratic jobs. Everything's a trade off.

ronald_raygun• 10 years ago

I would take a look at this argument done by Obama's main economist. He basically argues that UBI isn't actually that good because it doesn't shrink the gap as much as current systems (progressive taxes and the like). Plus it is a good read anyways because it is a much longer detailed analysis.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/page/files/20...

mtgx• 10 years ago

"Choosing" (even if you have a choice at that point) UBI when only 10% of the population is employed anymore is easy.

The question is when do you start implementing UBI? When only 80% of the population have jobs anymore? 60%? 40%?

Because when you do implement it, the money that goes to the unemployed people is going to have to come from those that still make money. And they will probably be pretty pissed off about it, too.

Also, in a two-party system country like the U.S., the party you vote for may literally decide this outcome. Like say 70% of the people still have jobs and they don't want UBI, and the Democrats support switching to UBI after the election. It's very likely that the Democrats will not win an election again until a majority of the population supports implementing UBI, no matter what other terrible things the Republican party promises to do, while also promising not to implement UBI.

nickff• 10 years ago

The alternatives are mostly the pointless gestures we see when the government tries to protect jobs from progress, such as the regions where self-serve gas is illegal. I don't see any viable regulation of AI, other than some attempt to tax it.

tnecniv• 10 years ago

I don't even see a practical scheme to tax AI. What counts as AI? Are A* and Sudoku solvers AI, or are we just talking about machine learning? If the latter, am I taxed for doing a linear regression, or only for the "cool" stuff like deep networks? If so, how deep? Am I charged per computation? How are you going to keep me honest?

pmyjavec4• 10 years ago

Why aren't you "concerned" about people losing their jobs?

The alternatives are tech companies start to pay their taxes and humans start to use tech to care for one another, genuinely, not just wealthy Silicon Valley types trying to make buckets because their "entitled" to do so and pretend it's all in the name of progress.

The idea of the Internet and Automation were exciting to me as it was about liberation and decentralisation, from where I'm sitting it's turning into a bit of a joke, it's just empowering those who own the tech and their not giving a whole lot back right now.

Not attacking you personally, but this, attitude of "don't worry, those people who will be made redundant will be fine" thing is a myth, they will suffer and so will their families.

golergka7• 10 years ago

A lot of comments like yours are based on the assumption of "giving back". I don't quite understand it.

Let's suppose I've founded booking.com and put a LOT of travel agents out of business. At what point did I assume the responsibility of giving back to those travel agents?

I agree that they are miserable because of my actions. However, in real life, nothing happens because of a single reason. They are also miserable because of free choice of their former customers, who abandoned them. Those customers have profited from the change too: after all, they chose me because of lower prices and better service. Why am I, and not the customers that left them, have this responsibility?

zaroth4• 10 years ago

Consider a broader timeline. It used to take humans over 500 hours of labor spinning, weaving, and sewing to produce a single shirt.

Automating textile production has "put more people out of work" than computers ever will. Do you think for a second we would ever want to go back to how it was? Do you ask the inventor of the sewing machine how they will start giving back?

These inventions free humanity for more worthwhile endeavors. Nobody will look back after the next great transition and wish we just had more humans driving trucks around the country. It would be utter lunacy. And the people who created the self-driving machines will be seen as liberators of human potential and ushers of a new era of productivity.

So it is, same as it ever was.

imtringued6• 10 years ago

They are giving back.

If clothes used to cost $60 and now cost $20 that is equivalent to giving back $40.

The problem starts when their wages are falling faster than the cost of the goods.

If as a employee you earn $20 per hour you need to work 3 hours to afford your own clothes and now only earn $5 per hour you need to work 4 hours.

throwaway729• 10 years ago

Obama's answer to this seems to be training and education as opposed to regulating away progress. See: this article.

I'd expect the latter to come from the right in the US, ironically enough.

will_brown2• 10 years ago

What I'm concerned about is the government stifling innovation such as driverless trucks to retain those jobs...What is the alternative?

More likely the Government comes up with "innovative" ways to hide these people from the official unemployment numbers. Somehow unemployment is calculated at only 4.9% today...add 3.5 million newly unemployed commercial drivers tomorrow (>10% of US total population) and the new unemployment rate = 4.9%.

toomanybeersies2• 10 years ago

Unemployment is a very difficult number to define and calculate.

Do you count those that are not actively looking for work, and don't want to look for work? e.g. House(wife|husband)s, semi-retired people.

Do you count those that have given up looking for work?

Do you count those that are working part time, but looking for full time work (i.e. the underemployed)?

Do you count those that aren't really looking for work (for whatever reason), but occasionally look online at job listings (since it's a very low effort thing to do)? This is an interesting one, because Statistics New Zealand just recently decided that this doesn't count as actively seeking work, which seems right to me. I look at online job listings all the time, but am happily employed and not seeking other employment.

Do you count the self employed? Contractors? Are Uber drivers considered employed? What about Airbnb hosts?

sundarurfriend• 10 years ago

Relevant link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Obsolete_occupations

Many of these seem to have been victims of cultural and political change, but there's quite a few (for eg., Knocker-up, Lamplighter, and more recently, Switchboard operator) that became obsolete due to technological advancements.

cjbprime2• 10 years ago

OBAMA: The way I’ve been thinking about the regulatory structure as AI emerges is that, early in a technology, a thousand flowers should bloom.

I gotta say, I thought he'd be more familiar with that metaphor.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign

oldmanjay• 10 years ago

The way I've been thinking about AI is that it reduces the need for grasping administrators with a surface understanding of technology. I'm not too surprised that the head administrator would see it in terms of his office gaining manifold new powers, though.

will_pseudonym2• 10 years ago

Thank you for sharing. I hadn't heard the phrase before.

msvan3• 10 years ago

I also thought it was a slightly inappropriate metaphor, but it gets the point across.

jMyles• 10 years ago

By "the point," do you mean that the government intends to initially encourage innovation, only to later stifle, repress, and criminalize the elements it doesn't like?

I mean, that's the reasonable application of the metaphor, right?

golergka7• 10 years ago

Sounds like a perfect use for it. I'm understanding his use of it as that the thousand flowers should only bloom in the beginning, and later the field should be much tighter regulated. When you replace people's lives with different AIs, it becomes much less tragic, thankfully.

andirk5• 10 years ago

According to that wiki article, it is a BAD thing. People express themselves and then are imprisoned for it. That's bad.

Here's Ai Weiwei's interpretation of the phrase, that was a temporary installation in Alcatraz recently http://www.fubiz.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/blossomaiwei... (Cite: http://stefany-cordedoce.blogspot.com/2014/11/porcelain-bouq... )

petre• 10 years ago

Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.

-- Ronald Reagan

mbostleman• 10 years ago

Same as FDR's inversion of Sumner's Forgotten Man

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgotten_man

s_q_b2• 10 years ago

I think he knew the origin, but chose it anyway. It is an elegant phrase. Communists could be very eloquent.

How else do you think they managed to convince so many people to be communists?

ebfe• 10 years ago

The free stuff?

proteinbased• 10 years ago

I am not a communist, but I must point out, that it works exactly the same way with capitalism too. If you got some time, there is a great documentation called 'The Century of the Self', which shows (among other things) how modern marketing in western countries started and evolved.

MrZongle2• 10 years ago

"How else do you think they managed to convince so many people to be communists?"

Once they had momentum? With rifles.

lelandbatey• 10 years ago

I'm reminded of another riff on that phrase from the book Nexus by Ramez Naam, which was also said in the context of AI and incredible (and potentially incredibly dangerous) technologies:

    Let a billion flowers bloom!

maverick_iceman• 10 years ago

Maybe that was a Freudian slip?

eksemplar• 10 years ago

The metaphor seems to fit perfectly with what he wanted to say.

First you give people the liberty to explore and then you crush most of them with thousands of pages of legislation.

A little dark perhaps, but it fits.

mistermumble• 10 years ago

Actually the "thousand flowers" metaphor is part of Silicon Valley culture going back 30 years.

At least I have heard this any number of times in relation to technology innovation, entrepreneurship, "lean startups", etc. I bet a lot of the people who use the term have no idea of its origins in Mao's China.

See for example, this article from Inc magazine in 1984, which begins as follows:

"Not too long ago, fortune 500 companies looked at small-scale entrepreneurial companies as fodder for acquisition -- if they were big enough to make the effort worthwhile -- and little more. The executive who dared to suggest that Goliath might learn from David was likely to be trampled by a herd of MBAs waving printouts on the economies of scale that flowed from a centralized and rationally managed organization... Then something happened...The micromillenium was born in a Cupertino, Calif., garage."

[excerpted from "Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom" http://www.inc.com/magazine/19840401/2895.html]

CPLX• 10 years ago

When some startup CEO says they are on a crusade to change customer service do you get visions of knights on horses riding through Asia Minor? When your girlfriend tells you not to put words in her mouth do you flash back to 2 Samuel 14:3?

Language is great at evolving and incorporating colorful and evocative phrases while stripping out the original connotations.

cjbprime2• 10 years ago

Yes, I expect this kind of reuse from most people. But it was surprising to hear one world leader using another world leader's most historic phrase from decades beforehand, where the phrase is historic precisely because it was murderous and insincere. So I mentioned it.

jnbiche• 10 years ago

Blooming flowers is a metaphor used by orators from practically every country and kingdom in the course of human history. I don't think this particular formula has anything to do with the hundred flowers campaign, in spirit or in origin. "Let a thousand flowers bloom" has been used by people opposed to heavy government regulation in the tech sector for decades. I even remember the head of FINRA using some variation of the phrase in the Senate hearings on Bitcoin (somewhat surprisingly).

EDIT: Actually, looking into the history of this particular phrase and its use in the West, I may be mistaken here.

msvan3• 10 years ago

What does Hacker News think about AI? Is it real this time, or are we in for another winter? I'm seeing a lot of grand claims, and it certainly seems like there are plenty of applications, but I'm still not totally convinced that it will turn the entire economy upside down.

Given the enormous amount of press, tweets, blog posts, conferences, degree programs, seminars and interviews popping up it seems like there has to be something more than just hot air here. Still, the most outrageous predictions are hinged on breakthroughs in unsupervised learning happening. Taking the pessimistic view on science, what if we don't get there?

Swizec• 10 years ago

Unlike 30, 20, or even 10 years ago, we have heaps upon heaps of labeled datasets now. So much human life happens through technology that we are doing an astounding job of producing labeled datasets.

And computers are fast now. And RAM is infinite. And GPUs are fast and plentiful. And all of this is cheap.

AI stuff is already real more than most of us realize on a day-to-day basis. While machines might not be "intelligent" per se, their cleverness has definitely started impacting desk jobs.

The desk job stuff is what most of those alarmist news items are worried about. Nobody seems to worry [too much] about reducing blue collar jobs through automation. Can you imagine how many people you'd need to unload a modern container ship without computers tracking stuff and optimizing storage? Or how much work it would take to harvest modern crops where automated harvesters are used?

pakl3• 10 years ago

There are some promising ideas out there based on unsupervised ("self-supervised") learning. There, the problem of needing big labeled datasets doesn't exist: just turn on a camera and have a motor point it at the surrounding world. Data of this kind is and always has been super abundant. But using it requires making a conceptual leap away from supervised pattern recognition -- which is pretty much what today's "AI" does...

imh3• 10 years ago

Like they say in the article, there's general AI (think sci-fi computers with minds) and specialized AI (think good old fashioned statistical models, but applied to more things and super effective).

Specialized AI (and I hate calling it AI) is coming along really quickly. We're getting better at it in existing fields and learning to apply it to new fields. More than anything, we just have so much data on everything now, and computers are pretty powerful now, so even old school models are finding tons of new applications.

Generalized AI is a different story. We are a few really major breakthroughs away. We aren't even 100% sure if they are possible, much less understanding how to do them. These aren't the normal slowly-chip-away-at-it breakthroughs, these are things we have no clue about. With something like that, who can really say how far we are? It could be 5 years, it could be never.

darawk• 10 years ago

Honest question: Why do you think that generalized and specialized AI are distinct things? Is it not possible that general AI is a specialized AI applied over the field of specialized AI generation?

robotresearcher• 10 years ago

This is not a problem because there is no such thing as generalized AI. There's just specialized AI for lots of things added together. Keep getting better at things and after a while you are good at lots of things, so appear to be general to an observer (until they see you outside your domain of expertise).

This theory compactly explains why no one knows how to do general AI.

I don't believe there is a special sauce waiting to be discovered.

Animats3• 10 years ago

We don't even have good generalized robot manipulation. Think of that as monkey-level AI. After half a century of hard work, robot manipulation in unstructured situations still sucks. Go watch DARPA Humanoid Challenge videos or old Willow Robotics towel-folding to see how badly it sucks. Factory robotics works because the work situation is highly structured.

On the other hand, once someone cracks that, a huge number of low-end jobs will be automated.

joe_the_user• 10 years ago

I think machine learning has a real ability to do certain things (image recognition especially) and do them in a way that isn't hype by itself.

I suspect that you'll encounter limits to the techniques before they do everything a person can do.

If there's a potential problem with machine learning that could sink the enthusiasm over time, I suspect it would come because machine learning applications are these black-boxes system which are the product of training with huge datasets and which use the very tuned-level of expertise of their creators (a common joke is talking of the "graduate school descent" algorithm, getting enough grad students to tune your app till it work). It may be that the deployers of these applications may find that when they have to train them again, in a year's time, that the geniuses have moved on to other things or that the geniuses now charge rates that look excessive for an application that works for just a year.

But that's just spinning possibilities. Currently things seem to be going great.

agentgt• 10 years ago

I have often wandered if there is some sort universe limitation to general AI singularities particularly if the current universe is actually a simulation. An intellectual singularity or extremely rampant aggressive intelligence might be an errant state that gets dealt with (aka universe circuit breaker / watchdog). This might also explain the Fermi Paradox.

The other idea I have doted on is that perhaps universes are the manufacturing tool to create super AI by some parent universe.

Taking the pessimistic view on science, what if we don't get there?

I have no interest in living forever but I really really wish I could be told what will happen or what did happen or what all is. I'm sure specialized intelligence will continue to improve but my gut says general intelligence is probably not in our lifetime (or is limited or capped from above mentioned pop-culture-probably-wrong reasons).

imtringued6• 10 years ago

The other idea I have doted on is that perhaps universes are the manufacturing tool to create super AI by some parent universe.

And perhaps our creators are long dead but the simulation keeps going...

erikpukinskis4• 10 years ago

I'm curious: how interested are you in understanding the Earth ecology? Because we understand very little about it, and we are very rapidly destroying the information it contains.

I ask because I wonder, if we did meet or make a creature which could learn everything, if it wouldn't say some variation on "99.9999% of everything there is to know is right there in your ecology and visible to the naked eye. Go look."

I also wonder if one of the first things the sentient AIs teach us is that yes, we are committing an egregious ongoing information Holocaust through habitat destruction.

pakl3• 10 years ago

I'm optimistic about what'll happen right after the upcoming AI winter. :)

So long as AI remains tasked with categorizing human-taken photos or playing human-created games (no matter how "complex"), AI will remain just that -- artificial -- and not "real".

Given the rate of hype that you point out, I suspect a winter of some kind will hit before enough folks realize this.

[edited: reorder]

ktRolster2• 10 years ago

What should they focus on then?

asimuvPR2• 10 years ago

There is a real risk related to goal oriented AI. It does not need to feel or dream. Merely having survival as its goal is sufficient to make it dangerous to other life forms. Worse is that it can happen at any time (it may have happened already). Given the computing power, tools, and availability of knowledge we can assume that it can be done outside of a controlled lab environment by a non-scientist.

andirk5• 10 years ago

Huge point you make that it can be done by non-scientists now. Now we can all play with fire. That much power in idle hands controlled by mediocre minds is like everyone being magical.

erikpukinskis4• 10 years ago

I'm not too worried about it, because AIs will need to feel and dream and care and suffer and empathize to begin to be as intelligent as a human.

Imagine a human who lacks empathy entirely. That's a disability. They may be able to do some amount of destruction, but at some scale they simply lack the social intelligence necessary to compete with the entire species.

This is the most common mistake I think people make when reasoning about AI: they think human limitations are weaknesses. But they're not weaknesses they're tradeoffs. Natural selection has had a chance to reward all kinds of variations, including more cortex, and less empathy. But we ended up where we are because of tradeoffs.

Any AI which is intelligent in the same way humans are will also have our limitations. Any AI which doesn't have our limitations won't be as smart as us in those respects.

You have to really ask yourself what the difference is between a human with an AI simulator and an AI with a human simulator. In the limit of simulator quality there is none.

AJRF2• 10 years ago

"press, tweets, blog posts, conferences, degree programs, seminars and interviews"

That is the hot air

l33tbro• 10 years ago

As an Ai "hipster" (been into it before it was cool), it's certainly interesting seeing the mainstream culture now catching up to the implications it has. I'm glad this is happening, and I hope the discussion broadens and we hear from all people. I'm one of the whacky ones who believes it's a really important rung in our evolution as a species, so I think being collectively aware of where we're going can only be a good thing.

helthanatos4• 10 years ago

"we found that most people liked the idea that the driver and the passengers could be sacrificed to save many people" Understand morals? Probably not...

ericlavigne• 10 years ago

MIT's "moral machine" site presents a set of ethical dilemmas involving driving so you can explore your own perspective on morality.

http://jalopnik.com/this-mit-online-activity-lets-you-choose...

http://moralmachine.mit.edu/

helthanatos4• 10 years ago

Yeah. Anyone doing that should have kept alive whoever was not breaking the law. I noticed that it said I killed more women, but women broke the law more.

gefh• 10 years ago

I wish people would stop bringing up the trolley problem as somehow relevant to self driving cars. In any situation,a car is going to brake as hard as possible while maintaining control, and only serve if there's no way to stop and a clear space. Other than that, a good enough interview that I can't see taking place again next presidential term.

greeneggs• 10 years ago

The trolley problem is just an extreme example, that people can easily understand and think about. Less extreme versions of it occur all the time.

For example, say you are driving along a road, passing a bicyclist. You'd like to give the cyclist more room, but there's an oncoming car in the lane next to you. How much room do you give? At exactly what threshold do you decide to wait to pass the cyclist? What if the cyclist is a kid?

All the time, the driver has to make decisions that trade off the safety of multiple parties, from the car's occupants to other drivers, to bicyclists and pedestrians. In reality, these will almost always be statistical tradeoffs, and usually comparing very small probabilities of accidents, but they are still real ethical decisions that have to be made.

inimino4• 10 years ago

Exactly, and if a few high-profile accidents give a manufacturer a reputation as a public menace, lawsuits and legislation won't be far behind.

imtringued6• 10 years ago

If there is an oncoming car you don't overtake.

tdaltonc2• 10 years ago

This drives me crazy. It seems like the worst sort of sophomoric "philosophizing." Adults do not worry about weather or not to "pull the lever." They worry about better fencing and signage to keep people off of tracks. They worry about better ways to use alert people about approaching trains, or early warning systems for train drivers.

If we find ourselves faced with "pulling the lever" everyone has already failed miserable.

inimino4• 10 years ago

The trolley problem is a simplification of a difficult ethical question. I wish people would stop dismissing it as though whatever simple answer they come up with makes the problem go away. In many situations, a car is going to have to choose between alternatives that each carry different risks. There simply are no universally acceptable simple rules to follow in such cases.

imtringued6• 10 years ago

There is one universally acceptable rule: Do not choose your victim. If they are unlucky, they are unlucky. That's all there is to it.

Choosing who should be "unlucky" doesn't solve the problem. By assuming unavoidable failure you effectively give up solving the underlying problem. The solution is to avoid the failure in the first place.

miles7• 10 years ago

Why are we holding computers to such higher standards than we hold ourselves? I wouldn't know what to do in the trolley situation either but I can still get a driver's license.

As long as the computer makes a decision where we can say "that was very reasonable, even if better decisions existed" then it seems ok to me.

zanny• 10 years ago

Rawr rah, mandatory link to Humans Need Not Apply:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

I wonder if President Obama has seen it yet, because while his wording obviously has to be steeped in establishment rhetoric, its not a matter of "if" the automation comes for our jobs, but that we are already dealing, will continue to deal, and how we will deal in the future with the reality that for decades now automation of varying degrees has been eroding the market for human mental labor.

It is exactly like climate change. It is not a future problem. It is a now problem, but the progress is so slow and the symptoms variable enough you don't obviously see the underlying trend already taking place, so nobody regards it with the urgency it deserves. Social stratification, growing wealth inequality, growing partisanship, growing radicalism, and growing unemployability is already expanding globally in response to the ongoing obsolescence of the human mind. The first step is to recognize that it is happening.

nohat• 10 years ago

Interesting that Obama is particularly concerned with specialized ai for cyber security/warfare applications. I thought he had a fairly balanced and knowledgeable viewpoint on these issues, though I think both he and Ito underestimate the impact and timeline.

Not much to say on the general AI question, but that's understandable.

haalcion2• 10 years ago

Ito: I generally agree. The only caveat is that there are a few people who believe that there is a fairly high-percentage chance that a generalized AI will happen in the next 10 years. But the way I look at it is that in order for that to happen, we’re going to need a dozen or two different breakthroughs. So you can monitor when you think these breakthroughs will happen.
Obama: And you just have to have somebody close to the power cord. [Laughs.] Right when you see it about to happen, you gotta yank that electricity out of the wall, man.

Do we seriously think that it would be that easy? I think an a "generalized" AI, if aware of the ability for a human to remove its power and so that as a bad thing, would not be stopped by unplugging it. By the point you realized you needed to unplug it, it would have already convinced a human that to help it spread and it would have found other sources of power.

GunboatDiplomat2• 10 years ago

That's kind of handwavy, don't you think? How does an AI, presumably requiring specialized (and expensive) hardware, simply escape? Further, this requires humans to be easily hackable by the AI, which is not obviously going to be the case. Why would human cognition have a built in flaw the AI can exploit to escape? Imagine a superintelligent person in a cage, a person as smart as an AI. No matter how clever he is, he's not going to be able to escape that cage given certain levels of precaution.

If you'd say that the AI will be super-persuasive, persuasive enough to make humans behave irrationally, I say, maybe, but it's possible to simply use already irrationally fearful humans as guards to prevent the AI from escaping.

tdaltonc2• 10 years ago

I find the scenario in 'Avogadro Corp' pretty reasonable.

themacguffinman• 10 years ago

It sounds like Obama was making a joke.

pashariger• 10 years ago

I don't know about you, but I'm very thankful that we have a president that can understand and intelligently talk about these issues (rather than thinking it's all just black magic).

ams6110• 10 years ago

I was wondering why the authors would chose to interview someone with no particular credentials or expertise in the subject.

inimino4• 10 years ago

What's "the subject"? I'm not sure if you are being sarcatic, but:

“ITO: I feel like this is the year that artificial intelligence becomes more than just a computer science problem. [...] the question is, how do we build societal values into AI?”

The point is that the subject is far broader than the CS department. If you think Obama doesn't have relevant expertise, your view of the subject is too narrow.

bduerst• 10 years ago

He signs-into-law or vetoes legislature affecting public policy and economics.

I think it's a stretch to say he has "no particular credentials" or understanding of technological trends.

mc322• 10 years ago

We could have had Al Gore, but for Floridians, I mean the guy created the information superhighway --that's up there with the Tim Berners-Lee kind of stratum.

On the other hand, had he won, Obama would not have become president because we would not have had to "react" to the Bush years.

benchaney• 10 years ago

"We could have had Al Gore, but for Floridians, I mean the guy created the information superhighway --that's up there with the Tim Berners-Lee kind of stratum." Please tell me this is a joke.

random_upvoter• 10 years ago

Waffling vaguely about grand ideas has always been Obama's greatest skill. It's what got him in the White House in the first place.

enraged_camel• 10 years ago

He has to "waffle vaguely" about grand ideas when addressing the whole nation because going into details would alienate most of his audience.

This doesn't mean he doesn't know what he is talking about, as you seem to be implying (I don't want to read too much into your comment).

downandout3• 10 years ago

I'm curious...which President are you saying thought it was "all just black magic"? Let's also remember that Obama is the man that unapologetically expanded covert/illegal surveillance programs to an unprecedented scale, directly costing American technology companies billions of dollars in sales. I'd say his actions reflect neither intelligence nor understanding of the tech industry.

kweinber• 10 years ago

George W Bush proudly didn't use email and called the Internet the "Internets". Pretty big difference.

lsadam0• 10 years ago

One of the two major candidates for president responds to tech focused questions with some ramblings about 'the cyber part of security' being impossible and how good his ten year old son is with a computer. That's quite the contrast against someone like Obama.

alvaromuir• 10 years ago

Yes, Downandout, because as president He single-handedly did that. You do realize his political opposition LOVES that stuff, right?

AJRF2• 10 years ago

It was a lot of waffle, with the odd buzzword interspersed. I don't mind Obama, but I do mind when people attribute understanding to him when he talks at an extremely thin level about topics.

ap222133• 10 years ago

Many forget that 8 years ago Obama was highly criticized for being a 'technocrat' and populating his cabinet with 'technologist' outsiders.

Leaders don't always have to understand the tactical details that are required for executing their strategy. Obama led as a technologist from day one.

wildmusings5• 10 years ago

This is just hollow legacy-chasing. Just like how he crippled the space program during his 8 years in office, only to discover a passion for it in the last few days.

_andromeda_6• 10 years ago

I agree 100% with the hollow legacy-chasing you're talking about. Please do elaborate more on how he's crippled the space program. If you were to ask me, I'd recommend not having government involvement in such things anyway.

mslkmdf• 10 years ago

Why are you thankful for that? Does he add anything useful? Does his talking about these imply anything about his work as a president?

whamlastxmas• 10 years ago

Maybe I'm overly cynical, but I feel like a lot of the tech talks Obama gives are heavily scripted and he doesn't understand everything he's saying. He once made a joke about sorting algorithms, and I find it super hard to believe that someone who's never programmed before (outside of publicity stunts) would be capable of doing that.

However, I guess props are due for the effort even if he doesn't personally understand all of it.

andirk5• 10 years ago

What was that about "a friar... who is trying to understand Bitcoin encryption... from the perspective of the Catholics"?

ensiferum• 10 years ago

The future of humanity? The few and select Big Corp will own the infrastructure and technology and employ and sell it to reduce human labor as much as possible thereby creating massive value increases for the stock holders and displacing millions of blue collar workers into poverty. (In later stages also white collar workers). The execs will all be trillionaires and live off their own walled societies while the rest of us fight for our lives for tooth and nail. Eventually we can't even have a revolution since the goverments are owned by the Big Corp, which has manipulated and coerced the system into activities such as spying on their own citizens on the pretext of terrorism etc. Any act of revolution will be quickly and swiftly dealt with immediate force.

harry8• 10 years ago

I like Barack and this is not a party political statement when I say I am about as interested in what he thinks about tech as Jim Carter, George Bush Jnr & Snr or Bill Clinton. Now he's not likely to affect much in the way of policy there are just more insightful people to read and listen to so what we're left with is a bit of celebrity worship, which is fine with me as long as I acknowledge it as such.

What the two possible next presidents think is more interesting simply because they may affect policy, regardless of their being more or less insightful than B.O.

V-25• 10 years ago

JOI ITO: This may upset some of my students at MIT, but one of my concerns is that it’s been a predominately male gang of kids, mostly white, who are building the core computer science around AI, and they’re more comfortable talking to computers than to human beings. A lot of them feel that if they could just make that science-fiction, generalized AI, we wouldn’t have to worry about all the messy stuff like politics and society. They think machines will just figure it all out for us.

Why is that a problem that they're mostly white? The interviewer doesn't bother to elaborate, it's sort of mentioned in passing as if it were something obvious. To me (a non-American here, mind you) it isn't. Would the difficulties they mention be alleviated if that wasn't the case? Why? Couldn't - say - an Asian student fall into a misconception that machines will come up with answers to all questions? Is it less likely? What substantiates such a claim?

macns2• 10 years ago

They were both[Obama, Ito] focusing on AI's social effects and to how societal values can be built into AI.

So Ito's concern was probably that a group of people of similar characteristics(i.e white male geeks) is not diverse enough to address the world's social problems, especially when this group of people is not social enough; they're more comfortable talking to computers than to human beings.

This fits with what he says in the end Because the question is, how do we build societal values into AI? - he's more concerned about the builders themselves.

V-25• 10 years ago

I do understand that as far as the social aspect goes, still I think that a white computer geek has much more in common with an Asian or black computer geek than with - say - an average white truck driver, and obviously the same applies to the other geeks as well. Basically once we control for the cultural aspect (which is correlated with ethnicity, but we controlled this out already), I don't think ethnicity by itself should matter much

Red_Tarsius3• 10 years ago

I'm trying to stop reading news from US/UK sources. The depth of political discourse only goes as far as your self-appointed identity. Actions don't matter anymore.

White people are guilty of colonialism much like Catholic children inherit the Original Sin, that is, it's a means of control by anti-intellectuals.

I wouldn't support Trump, but the American Left is especially dangerous because it relies on gender / racial divide to get the most votes. In some twisted sense, the problem is not supposed to be solved.

Skin color does not make Obama an expert in race relations. If he had said "...but one of my concerns is that it’s been a predominately male gang of kids, mostly black, who are building the core computer science around AI..." there would have been riots in the streets. Tim Hunt's joke was taken out of context and almost ruined his career.

EDIT: To be clear, his white remark was fully intentional.

bcook• 10 years ago

Can you share a link to the Dawkins' out-of-context joke?

cheriot• 10 years ago

Skin color does not make Obama an expert in race relations.

Nor does your observation mean he's NOT an expert in race relations. You're making the same mistake as the people you criticize in applying generalities to specific cases.

macns2• 10 years ago

I was intrigued by this:

Part of what makes us human are the kinks. They’re the mutations, the outliers, the flaws that create art or the new invention, right? We have to assume that if a system is perfect, then it’s static. And part of what makes us who we are, and part of what makes us alive, is that we’re dynamic and we’re surprised.

And then he goes on: One of the challenges that we’ll have to think about is, where and when is it appropriate for us to have things work exactly the way they’re supposed to, without surprises?

One might argue that in software development things never work exactly the way they're supposed to.

throw2016• 10 years ago

I think their discussion on AI and implications was insightful. Their perspective is much wider, multifaceted and reflects a deeper and more nuanced perspective of technological and socio-political issues.

I think HN is best when its money or pure tech and tends to be dismissive or diminish the other stuff and you are left with a sterile unidimensional discussion.

Its like the gold rush, they can generate the wealth but the harder questions around politics, economics, social structures and humanity will have to be done in more 'distant' surroundings less touched by the frenzy of greed and profit.

gxs• 10 years ago

Somehow, someway, a discussion about AI has to touch on disadvantaged people and racism. Sigh. Can't wait for a new president.

rl12345• 10 years ago

Every time I listen or read Obama talk, I become a bigger fan of the guy.

jjtheblunt• 10 years ago

Barack Obama couldn't figure out how to take a selfie with Bear Grylls with an iPhone, but people are going to listen to his prognostications on AI? WTF!

Barack Obama on A.I., Autonomous Cars, and the Future of Humanity

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