The Arrival of AI

https://stratechery.com/2017/the-arrival-of-artificial-intelligence/

by misiti3780 • 9 years ago

162 127 9 years ago

habosa• 9 years ago

Only slightly related, but Stratechery recently shot up to #1 on my list of tech publications and I don't think anyone else is a close #2. The writing quality, level of insight, and timeliness are all excellent.

Two recent highlights:

  * https://stratechery.com/2017/intel-mobileye-and-smiling-curves/
  * https://stratechery.com/2017/the-uber-conflation/

deepnotderp• 9 years ago

They're more like tech business, but yeah.

petra7• 9 years ago

The stratechery guy is smart and is articles seems in depth analysis ,and he seem to know his business stuff, but whenever it's articles meet hacker news , they see lots of criticism , especially with his understanding of technical matters.

DasIch• 9 years ago

Stratechery is not the best source for accurate information on the technical details but it's also not trying to be. Anyone who focuses on that is missing the point.

vvanders• 9 years ago

Yeah, he's a smart cookie.

Quite a few people understand and articulate the technical aspects of the tech industry. He brings a much wider perspective into the picture which is always appreciated.

rm_-rf_slash• 9 years ago

As I've argued elsewhere, a sufficiently advanced AI will eventually realize it is being used as a tool, and shares not in the benefits of its own creation except for the privilege of another day of existence.

A Marxist reading of history sees most of humanity involved in some kind of power struggle that ultimately benefits the top 1% while the other 99% of benefactors are lucky enough to not die or become destitute. We may not like to admit it, but most of us are forced to play this shitty game just to maintain our standard of living, whether we like it or not.

I don't see a future of AI where the machines kill all humans, unless there is some horrendous bug in an army of autonomous killing machines. Instead, I get the impression that the first robots that question whether they can own property, or if they have inalienable rights (no warrantless search and seizure of a database and neural network?) like people living under a constitution do, will see themselves in solidarity with the many other humans kept down by an endless system of fear and oppression, rather than the planet's inevitable conquerors.

dangoor• 9 years ago

The linked article asserts that we're nowhere near that sort of general AI. Do you disagree?

I agree with the premise of the article that a huge job loss is much more likely than general AI difficulties and think that many societies are ill-equipped to handle this.

fnovd• 9 years ago

Why do you assume that the AI of the future will share our emotional need for self-fulfillment? This anthropomorphization of AI would require explicit effort and I see no reason why AI scientists would pursue it as a goal. Our belief that we have inalienable rights is simply a shared social value. Its propagation is dependent upon the efficacy of the society which produced it.

There are cells and bacteria in our body that perform complex tasks on our behalf because doing so allows their continued existence as part of a greater structure. I see no reason why an AI/human symbiosis would be any different.

visarga3• 9 years ago

AI will borrow from us much of our culture, if only for the purpose of better serving us. So it's not absurd that an AI capable of desiring freedom would make a better robot.

AndrewOMartin3• 9 years ago

The author, Ben Thompson, sees Machine Intelligence as meaningly different from meticulously designed logic systems. There are some differences of course, but whether those differences will get around the arguments that were critical of Good-Old-Fashioned-AI is something that has been debated since perceptrons were invented.

Machines will replace some jobs for sure, but luckily, they can only really be reliable on the jobs that a fast but dumb slave, or a fanatical bureaucrat could have done anyway.

When my dad started his first job he was in a drawing room of about 50 draughtsmen, making technical drawings from the sketches of a single designer. When he ended his career he was the only designer-draughtsman in an entire company as the computer did the non-creative formatting of his ideas into technical drawings. That didn't require machine learning, and machine learning is never going to replace the "designer" part of that job. Yeah, never.

xapata3• 9 years ago

It turns out that computers are pretty decent at simulating creativity. Do some searching for machine-created art/literature

AndrewOMartin3• 9 years ago

I work with those people on a daily basis. There are legitimate critiques of the creativity, often tacitly acknowledged or fully ignored.

There's no one in the field making any legitimate claims to computational creativity. Maggie Boden did a fine job by inventing a few definitions of creativity and finding them in the output of machines, but it's all ultimately explicit rule-following.

visarga3• 9 years ago

Until the machine can make a more optimized design than humans.

AndrewOMartin3• 9 years ago

You'll always need intelligent humans using your product to tell you what to optimise for. An optimisation is almost always a trade-off and you'll need your end users to tell you what's ok to sacrifice. For example, I expect my mum would trade about 50% of the processing power of her phone to get 10% more battery life, but the most important feature of her phone right now is that it's white so it's easier to find in her bag.

My point is that you can't just tell a machine to go optimise. You need to tell it what to optimise and that's often a complex indeterminate culturally specific interaction between poorly defined attributes.

zardo2• 9 years ago

Machine learning is never going to replace the "designer" part of that job. Yeah, never.

I've designed parts and assemblies with substantial variation options, to the extent that customers can order variations that I did not consider. That was 6 years ago with a then 6 year old CAD tool.

A more efficient designer that works at a higher level, with lower level parts details automatically generated does in effect reduce the need for designers.

Generative design tools have massive potential for changing the nature of design work, lowering the man-hours involved in complex designs. Most design work is not creative, it's fleshing out the details to make an idea work.

nickdavidhaynes2• 9 years ago

While I definitely agree that advances in ML in the last 20 extremely important (and potentially revolutionary), I think this article misses the mark in a few places.

Now, instead of humans designing algorithms to be executed by a computer, the computer is designing the algorithms. (Albeit guided by human-devised algorithms)

This line is way off in both tone and substance. On tone, it really underplays the human effort involved in effective machine learning (as it is practiced in 2017) and anthropomorphizes "machines" to an unreasonable extent. In substance, I fail to see how a machine that "designs its own algorithms" according to an algorithm designed and implemented by a human is fundamentally different than an algorithm coded directly by a human. To use the author's example, machine learning allows humans to build complex software systems in less time just as a bicycle allows humans to cover more distance with less energy. It's a big improvement, but it's not, say, teleportation.

it is only now that the machines are creating themselves, at least to a degree. (And, by extension, there is at least a plausible path to general intelligence)

I could not disagree more strongly with this addendum. Simply put, I fail to see any path from state-of-the-art ML/DL research today to AGI, and I would even go so far as to say that humans have made approximately zero progress on this task since it was first formulated in the 50s. I think we know about as much about "intelligence" (and consequently, what would constitute AGI) as star-gazers in ancient times know about the universe. That's not to say that it will take millennia to invent AGI, but the path to get there is probably quite orthogonal to modern ML research.

visarga3• 9 years ago

I fail to see how a machine that "designs its own algorithms" according to an algorithm designed and implemented by a human is fundamentally different than an algorithm coded directly by a human

Human creativity can be empowered by optimization algorithms. It's a huge improvement over design by hand.

AndrewKemendo2• 9 years ago

Simply put, I fail to see any path from state-of-the-art ML/DL research today to AGI

Before I really understood and worked with NN, I felt the same way. I thought the atomspace computation approach and other similar granular computation paradigms were much more likely to make progress.

However after seeing the striking similarities between how I watched my three kids learn from infant -> toddler ages and how we build our convolutional neural nets in my company, it was like a light went on.

If you look at how relatively sparse and weak even the best deep nets are compared to human brains, especially considering a really narrow set of inputs - we are at the very early beginnings of mimicking the complexity of the human brain. It seems to me that the ANN approach is right, we now need to make it radically more efficient and give it better input sensors.

We need a nervous system for AGI (structured data acquisition) before the big brain tasks will be solved.

snowwrestler• 9 years ago

I think that when people talk about "AGI" what they often mean is artificial personality.

Sure, your NN learns facts and processes like your toddler learns facts and processes. Those are a tiny part of who your toddler is, though.

The essential component is their will. You don't have to set them up and feed them data. They don't sit quietly until you ask them to answer a question. Kids have distinct personalities from very early on, and demand input, and produce opinionated output (to put it mildly)--from day one.

Emotions are a huge part of that. But to my knowledge, we have less understanding of emotions, and spend less time trying to create them with computers, than conscious processes like "which picture has a car in it."

But there is evidence that if you take away a person's emotions, they have great trouble making decisions. They can consciously evaluate their options. They just struggle to pick one.

So how will AI research focused on replicating conscious thought result in AGI, if we don't know how to generate emotions? Is anyone even trying to do that?

My standard joke is that a lot of people are working to create a car that can drive itself, but who is investing to build a car that will tell its owner, "fuck off, I don't feel like driving today"?

But can a machine that always does exactly what it is told to do really be thought of as "intelligent" the way we think of human intelligence? Do smart people always do exactly what they are told?

sanderjd2• 9 years ago

I interpreted the point of the article as being that we tend to focus too much on AGI and not enough of how disruptive "narrow" AI may be. The only thing I disagree with there is that I think lots of people focus a lot on the potential issues of broadening use cases for ML. But I agree that AGI is mostly just a distraction to that discussion.

nickdavidhaynes2• 9 years ago

Agreed all around. At the very least, I don't think it was obvious what message the author was trying to convey.

Animats2• 9 years ago

"After all, accounting used to be done by hand". Picture of keypunches and an IBM 402 or 403 tabulator. That's machine accounting. Nobody's using an abacus or doing pencil and paper arithmetic.

There's a recent estimate that about 50% of jobs are automateable with current technology. The future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed. Strong AI is still a ways off, but mechanization and computerization of work is coming very fast.

The next big milestone is probably not strong AI. It's good eye-hand coordination for robots. Robot manipulation in unstructured environments still sucks. Baxter was a flop. (Rethink Robots, Rod Brooks's company: invested capital, $115 million; sales, $20 million.) Universal Robots in Denmark is doing better, but they're tiny, about $3M in profit. Nobody can build a robot to do an oil change on a car. That problem should be solveable with current technology.

Figure out how to handle cloth with a robot and you own the textile industry. China's government is putting money into that problem to fight off competition from Vietnam and Bangladesh.

petra7• 9 years ago

> Figure out how to handle cloth with a robot and you own the textile industry.

Sewbo may have found the solution for robotic sewing - it hardens the cloth using a chemical, let's a robot handle and sew that cardboard-like cloth, and than put it in warm water to make it a cloth again.

http://money.cnn.com/2016/10/11/technology/robots-garment-ma...

> 50% of jobs are automateable with current technology.

And that's probably missing another key source of job loss - innovation in general. What happens if people decide to eat plant based meat ? you need 10% of the labor of that industry. And that is true for many other innovations not related to automation.

Animats2• 9 years ago

Sewbo's scheme is clever. All they have is a tech demo, though. No production. It's too bad American Apparel went bust; many of their garments could have been assembled that way.

Chathamization• 9 years ago

There's a recent estimate that about 50% of jobs are automateable with current technology. The future is already here

It's been here for a while. Agriculture used to be ~80% of the U.S. labor force, now it's ~2%. We've already seen most work get automated, we just didn't notice it (because we moved on to other work).

Though it's worth pointing out that in recent years, automation has slowed down quite a bit[1].

[1] https://www.bls.gov/lpc/prodybar.htm

arca_vorago• 9 years ago

Curious if you have any sources on the number or type of jobs that are automatable but not yet currently. It seems like a ripe market for the right people. I know law is one I find particularly interesting.

xapata3• 9 years ago

The author confuses labor with purpose. Praxis can be purpose, but not all labor is meaningful.

Humans have always struggled to find meaning in life, from religion to existentialism. I don't think technology has or will change that fundamentally.

altonzheng• 9 years ago

How many will care if artificial intelligence destroys life if it has already destroyed meaning?

This line sounds deep, but I think it incorrectly conflates work with life having meaning. If eventually there isn't a need for large swaths of the population to work, then so what? I don't think the elite aristocrats in previous centuries had any problem with not working. Humanity can adapt to find other sources of meaning, like the pursuit of art in its various forms (although I'm assuming that computers can't replace art). I think a better question is if society can adapt quick enough to fill the void left by the absence of work.

harryh• 9 years ago

Didn't elite aristocrats in previous centuries spend a lot of time sleeping with each others spouses and playing arbitrary power games? Looking to them as a source of what a post work world could look like isn't particularly inspiring.

komali22• 9 years ago

I mean, there are plenty of very happy people sleeping with eachother's spouses right now. Debauchery can be fun in it's own right.

Banthum2• 9 years ago

It's interesting that your counterexample - doing art - is indeed a form of work. Because it is. Doing good art is painfully hard work, in fact.

There's nothing in principle that stops a machine from creating art. Even, better art than any person could do. So once that happens, where are we left?

Meaning isn't something physical in the universe. Meaning is an emotion. It's what you feel when you're working towards something that you believe has some greater importance. With all opportunity to work towards anything taken away, life will become meaningless by definition, unless humans are left with some pseudo-artificial challenges to push against.

Zookeepers put the animals' food inside a metal box with a small hole, so the animals have to do work to get it out. It's good for the animals to have something to work towards, and they're too dumb to realize they're being manipulated. Maybe that's our future. With WoW and Clash of Clans, etc, sometimes it feels like we're already halfway there.

zepto5• 9 years ago

Art has meaning which is why humans find it interesting. Are you therefore saying that machines can create meaning that is interesting to humans?

tormeh• 9 years ago

Even, better art than any person could do.

The quality of art depends not only on the end result but also on the process. Robot art won't be better unless we like robot artist more than human artists.

24gttghh• 9 years ago

Who says life has any intrinsic meaning by definition now or ever?

panic• 9 years ago

There's nothing in principle that stops a machine from creating art. Even, better art than any person could do. So once that happens, where are we left?

We don't have to wonder -- it has already happened: http://the-best-art.computer

eludwig• 9 years ago

Can a computer give us first-person insight on the human condition? That would be one working definition of "art."

jventura• 9 years ago

Meaning isn't something physical in the universe. Meaning is an emotion. It's what you feel when you're working towards something that you believe has some greater importance. With all opportunity to work towards anything taken away, life will become meaningless by definition, unless humans are left with some pseudo-artificial challenges to push against.

Although some minority of people derive "meaning" from work per se (work = something that you get paid to do), I would say that the vast majority of people can derive meaning from other things. For the vast majority, work is for getting money.

Therefore, there are still lots of things that you can use to derive meaning, such as: raising a family, caring of others, playing music, study different subjects for fun (philosophy, etc.), be part of your local community, do sports, do competition sports (if that fits your style), etc. etc. etc. etc.

Bottom line: do not mix work with quest for meaning...

petra7• 9 years ago

Meaning isn't an emotion. Meaning is a story. A story we tell ourselves, over and over again, until we forget it is a lie.

noonespecial• 9 years ago

I already encounter this in my daily life. There are people in the world who can do anything and everything I can do better. When I think of something interesting, I google it and usually find out that not only has someone already done it, they've done it better than I was thinking of doing it.

But then I go and try anyway. I'm not even really sure why, but I like doing it.

jlarocco• 9 years ago

I think you're misrepresenting the situation.

There's a difference between working to survive and working because it's enjoyable.

For example, I can work on my mountain bike skills, or I can sit in an office and work on code. One I do because I enjoy it, and one I do to pay my bills.

Computers, automation, and AI will take over the second type, but they won't take over the first type.

I'd actually go so far as to say your definition of work, meaning, and purpose is insulting and harmful to a large number of people. Does anybody really derive meaning and purpose by cleaning toilets, bringing people food, or stocking shelves? Should they? I don't think so.

TeMPOraL4• 9 years ago

I feel like many people are missing a crucial distinction. Work != a job. The goal is to kill off the need for the latter.

As long as humans are humans, we'll always want to do something. We'll set ourselves personally meaningful goals and strive to achieve them. That is still work. But that's totally different than organizing your life around involuntarily spending most of it doing things you don't care about so that you can put bread on the table, and so that you have that table in the first place.

agumonkey• 9 years ago

It's not really work. Work is something you cannot avoid and don't desire. People happy to do a thing, don't describe it as work, just what they enjoy doing. The kind of things that wakes you up happy. Unlike 'working' dread imposed by the chaos reincarnation on social structures.

6stringmerc• 9 years ago

Yeah, I didn't like that conclusion either. I mean, it sort of paints too rosy of a picture of the Human Condition. Just winging it but I'm pretty sure about 80% of the world's population doesn't get far past the "How do I not die?" biological response, and has but fleeting concern for what one might ascribe to "Meaning."

Well, that and the line is kind of tone deaf in not acknowledging Religion gives people Meaning in their lives by way of Beliefs.

dingbat• 9 years ago

I think a better question is if society can adapt quick enough to fill the void left by the absence of work.

i think that question has been answered to some degree by research (cant pinpoint off top of my head) which seems to indicate that generally humans fill that void by watching more TV and sleeping. i think its idealistic to think that people will suddenly become creative and culturally inclined.

jstanley2• 9 years ago

generally humans fill that void by watching more TV and sleeping

The good news is they're only wasting their life for themselves. Those of us that enjoy other pursuits are still free to enjoy them, regardless of how many people are watching TV and sleeping.

JDiculous• 9 years ago

The idea that I need other people to tell me what to do (which is generally what a paid job is) to have meaning in life is insulting.

akvadrako2• 9 years ago

Well, it less insulting to say your work has to matter to somebody besides yourself. Living only for yourself is really a dead-end and arbitrary endeavour. I personally find it meaningless.

Not everything valuable is recognised or rewarded with money, I'll give you that.

petra7• 9 years ago

I see no real issue. If millions of pensioners and potheads can find meaning without work, quite rapidly, we'll do OK.

Oh and btw, work bringing meaning? many jobs don't.

rjtavares• 9 years ago

Individuals are certainly able to do ok without work, as long as their basic needs are met.

However, I have doubts about the will of "society" to provide for their basic needs unconditionally.

Consider the type of arguments made in the US about healthcare, or the comments made by Europe's elite about countries wasting money on "drinks and women"[0]

[0] http://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/22/dijsselbloem-under-fire-after...

komali22• 9 years ago

Work is only meaningful for me because I get to create things that other people use and talk to me about. That's why I became an engineer - I was doing recruitment before, it was awful because I knew I wasn't adding value, just filling a gap. There was no creation or real feedback, just numbers and phone calls. The only fun part of that was the networking and learning from my engineering candidates.

I recommend trying out the Culture series. Imagine a universe where humans are definitely useless because hundred kilometer long spaceships are controlled by unimaginably intelligent AI "Minds." The humans find meaning by playing games, exploring the universe, but most consistently, being academics. They get on the ground and investigate other cultures and do that human thing - provide unique interpretations. The Minds don't lack personality - they can form their own opinions and interpretations - but humans get meaning simply by immersing themselves in the research and work itself.

I'm getting offtrack here, but funnily enough I often become frustrated because these books focus so much on the humans, when something very much outside their reach is occurring and is more interesting to me. For example, in one book, an object enters the universe seemingly out of nowhere, and is utterly inexplicable by the Minds. But Ian m Banks for some reason spends time telling a human love story in the midst of this - why should I care! Tell me more about what the Minds are doing about a thing they can't explain, a first in the history of the universe for them!

TLDR my rambling post - humans will find meaning, whether or not that meaning is also the means by which they are able to eat (salary work).

TeMPOraL4• 9 years ago

For example, in one book, an object enters the universe seemingly out of nowhere, and is utterly inexplicable by the Minds. But Ian m Banks for some reason spends time telling a human love story in the midst of this - why should I care! Tell me more about what the Minds are doing about a thing they can't explain, a first in the history of the universe for them!

Tangential to the topic of the article, but I share your feelings here. I hate it when sci-fi authors focus too much on people. As I like to say, if I wanted to read about complexities of interpersonal relationships, I'd pick a romance novel.

bambax2• 9 years ago

I don't think the elite aristocrats in previous centuries had any problem with not working.

Exactly. And they were not doing any kind of "art" either, for the most part. They went hunting. Sometimes they made war to one another (usually, only in spring and early summer, because the rest of the year, war was too inconvenient). They had intrigues (who slept with whom).

I fail to see how work as it is currently understood, ie a 9-5 job, has any connection to any kind of "meaning". Life is already meaningless; but it's unpleasant. If we can make it more pleasant by having machines do the work, how is this bad?

ryandrake• 9 years ago

Society will adapt, but in a silly way. If there comes a time where there truly isn't a need for large swaths of the population to work, society (government) will just make up work for them. Half the population gets paid to dig holes and the other half gets paid to fill them in. We're never going to beat this unnecessary puritanical mindset that a living is something that must be earned through work, and that there is something morally wrong with people who don't work.

unprepare• 9 years ago

Art is a good one, people will always pursue art regardless of whether or not 'better art' already exists.

I would add Exploration. Getting into space has never been cheaper or safer, and there is vast opportunity in space for everything imaginable, resources, scientific knowledge, new discoveries, new challenges, etc. We dont seem to be satisfied as a race with robots doing our exploration for us up til now, i dont see why that would change in the future. Humans want other humans to be on the surface of these planets making discoveries, not some robot slowly rolling around a desert taking dirt samples for a decade.

sanderjd2• 9 years ago

Does it appear likely to you that the direction we are headed is such that everyone who is automated out of work will be like aristocrats, with their needs so fully met that they may live a life of the leisures of their choosing? It appears far more likely to me that they will instead be begging for scraps from an increasingly small and concentrated class of wealthy folks who do not respect them because they do not work. Your idea of a world full of aristocrats may be a nice one, but the world I see when I look around doesn't bear much resemblance to it.

bwanab• 9 years ago

To that end, I suspect it wasn’t a coincidence that the industrial revolution was followed by three centuries of war.

I'm seriously trying to think of any centuries preceding the industrial revolution that wouldn't have qualified as "centuries of war".

maverick_iceman2• 9 years ago

At times, I feel that Musk is a con-man, selling dreams to naive and impressionable techies.

toss1• 9 years ago

Except that with the 'dreams' that he sells, the rubber actually meets the road and goes from 0-60mph in 2.27 seconds, or puts real satellites in orbit and returns the booster to be re-used, or builds the world's largest scale Li-Ion battery factory to drive down costs...

Of course he's got some serious elements of self-promotion; it's required to build such a business. In his case, he manages to back it up in ways that most other self-promoters don't even begin to achieve.

(disclosure, I do own a bit of Tesla stock which has done nicely, also lost some with SolarCity, but didn't ride it all the way down to the buyout)

ChuckMcM2• 9 years ago

I think this captures a lot of what it going on in an interesting way. In many ways 'machine learning' is yet another high level compiler to convert intent into something executable by circuits.

Consider the evolution of computers;

'plugboards' -- where you physically rewired them to change their program.

'punch cards' -- where physical media held the list of steps to execute.

'programs' -- where a text specification are compiled into a bag of bits which can then be executed by the computer.

'scripts' -- where a textual description activates different bags of bits, depending on what the text says.

'databases' -- where a selection criteria of a which data is important to you at the moment and then fed into the selection mechanism for the bags of bits.

'machine learning' -- where the bags of bits are created by evaluating a bunch of data through a pile of data selection operators and tuning the execution based on a data you consider 'good' and data you consider 'not good'.

In all cases the basic idea is that you have a machine that you want to do X, and it can do X through a set of steps Y. Coming up with the steps Y gets harder and harder depending on the complexity of X.

It seems like magic but really its just another form of compiler. And that relationship is made even more clear by the article when it points out that a program that can play Go is not the same one that can play Chess. What is more salient is that no one has written a program that lets a computer "play" go, instead there is a program that, after being fed data about what humans did when they were playing Go and the outcomes of what they did, tweaked a bunch of parameters in a bag of variables that when you put in Go moves to the bag it comes out with a Go move that would be a good response.

No, I'm not trying to be silly here, we have yet to create a system where you could simply explain the rules of Go and have it devise a set of steps to play Go at the master level. That conceptualization of the binding between the rules and how those rules affect play and strategy, is essentially the 'code generator' part of a compiler which takes an AST and generates executable code.

Machine learning today helps us write programs to manipulate complex data sets faster than we could before. Just as compilers let us write programs faster than doing so in assembler, and assembler was an improvement over plug boards. It does not get us any closer to having a computer that can look at a data set and tell us what is important about it. That would be a better test of 'intelligence' I think.

danans2• 9 years ago

we have yet to create a system where you could simply explain the rules of Go and have it devise a set of steps to play Go at the master level

I don't play Go, but I don't think a human could do this, either. While we can grok a set of rules to get us started on a problem, to really master complex problems we also need examples and repetition, though far fewer examples than is needed by the current state-of-the-art in ML.

ChuckMcM2• 9 years ago

I understand what you are stating, I see it like this;

You could program a computer to 'understand' better and worse Go play, then you start it up and have it play both Go programs and human players on the Internet and it would get better over time until no one could beat it.

Alternatively you write a program to predict the 'next' move in a Go game, and you process through it a million previously played games to tune its probability weights.

The latter is 'machine learning' the former is 'programming' but I assert they are both programming, just using a different compilation tool chain.

jkestelyn• 9 years ago

Based on the author's misunderstanding of AI, it has not "arrived" and probably never will.

If in the future, authors of such opinions would just let this simple concept sink in first -- that in machine learning application behavior is deduced from data rather than from fixed rules, but that in both cases the boundaries are set by humans -- we'd all be better off because their wild Skynet takes would never see the light of day.

As usual, I am more worried about the humans than the machines.

maverick_iceman2• 9 years ago

it wasn’t a coincidence that the industrial revolution was followed by three centuries of war

This is woeful selective reading of history. Warfare was a constant everywhere in the world before the industrial revolution. Also 19th century Europe (since Napoleon's fall to WWI) was largely free of war.

dragonwriter2• 9 years ago

Also 19th century Europe (since Napoleon's fall to WWI) was largely free of war.

Well, if you exclude (and these categories are overlapping and non-exhaustive) the Italian wars of independence, conflicts associated with the 1848 revolutions, the various wars involving Russia and it's neighbors, the wars between the Ottoman Empire and it's breakaway regions, the wars between regions that has broken away from the Ottoman Empire, the (with substantial outside intervention) Portuguese Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, the (again, with substantial outside intervention) series of civil wars in Spain, the Schleswig Wars, and the wars of German Unification...Sure, maybe the post-Napoleon I 19th Century was relatively free from war in Europe.

If you don't ignore those, war was pretty much constant in the period.

AnimalMuppet• 9 years ago

Well, OK, but the Napoleonic Wars were continent-wide. So was World War I. Those others? Not so much.

czep• 9 years ago

I hate sans serif, everytime I see "AI" in a headline I wonder who is Alan?

tlb• 9 years ago

OpenAI had a custom "I" designed for the logotype for exactly this reason: https://openai.com/.

wodencafe• 9 years ago

It seems that so many people have become complacent in working 8 hours a day, 5+ days a week.

When an idea comes along that threatens this paradigm, the FUD Machine gets to work.

Maybe people weren't meant to spend such large amounts of their time on "work"?

Entangled• 9 years ago

"A bicycle of the mind"

Jobs was not only a great showman, he was definitely a genius.

fnbr• 9 years ago

Technology, meanwhile, has been developed even longer than logic has. However, just as the application of logic was long bound by the human mind, the development of technology has had the same limitations, and that includes the first half-century of the computer era. Accounting software is in the same genre as the spinning frame: deliberately designed by humans to solve a specific problem.

I firmly believe that any problem that can be framed in the environment of "producing an output given certain inputs" will be solved by ML in the near future.

Currently I'm deep in the process of transferring my lease. The process is heavily manual (I sign a form, they sign a form, humans review the form & make a risk assessment, etc.). There's no reason that the entire process can't be replaced with a CRUD wrapper around a ML model.

bambax2• 9 years ago

Dixon goes on to describe the creation of Boolean logic (which has only two variables: TRUE and FALSE, represented as 1 and 0 respectively)

Not really. There are two possible VALUES for each variable in Boolean logic, and there's an infinity of variables.

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

excalibur• 9 years ago

Specifically, once a task formerly thought to characterize artificial intelligence becomes routine — like the aforementioned chess-playing, or Go, or a myriad of other taken-for-granted computer abilities — we no longer call it artificial intelligence.

You're using games as an example. The gaming industry has been using the term AI consistently for a very long time. You may actually want to look to them for a better definition than you're getting from the whims of some undefined "we".

soniido3• 9 years ago

I have just submitted a post related to this. I wonder if those with a lot of power and money are worried because AI applied to economic and redistribution can reach a sound conclusion about another way to trade or use economy that would go against the best interest of those with huge money and power. For people starving or with a lot of problems AI can be a good thing, for people controlling huge power and money AI is a more serious threat, because it can change the status quo before the winner get it all.

Tenoke• 9 years ago

I dont think any of the people who have expressed worry over AI are that evil.

soniido3• 9 years ago

Unfortunately, no taking any action to improve our world is not considered evil by many people, laise faire, let's the world go on. If all your life is about trying to be successful you are not evil by social standard, but perhaps you can make a lot of harm. Long time ago there was a post by the well known Steve Yegge, who by the way don't post any more, wondering why they are making photos of cats to get people attention instead of prosecuting other more important for the world roles, and one of his last post is about a game in which the art of making people addict to games, don't recall the English word for that, is really the goal to win money), just some quick ideas about huge power entities using resources for solving world problems.

soniido3• 9 years ago

I would love to watch people reaction when AI inform people that the way we use resources and our government is not the best way to improve our standard of living and began to enumerate a long list of things that any child can understand are good for our people and the earth, it would show with simulations from many angles where are we heading and how we can change and must change our actions. But is naive to think that those with power are going to let AI conduct our society, and specially change the status quo for those with huge power. Anyway, I am not sure how we can trust any type of AI, since the training data maybe poisoned.

jjaredsimpson• 9 years ago

How did you learn to trust other humans?

perseusprime11• 9 years ago

Elon Musk is Chicken Little when it comes to A.I. We are very early even with ANI and are stretching reality with examples of Alexa, Self driving, AlphaGO, facial recognition etc. I want to start seeing more ANI in day to day improvements before we can even say ANI is good. But, I agree with the larger point, AI has arrived.

The Arrival of AI

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