I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. Trying to
understand and summarize topics like physics or Artificial Intelligence has
been harder than I thought. I’m currently about 3 months behind in my
learning/writing posts about certain topics. I’ve decided to try to just hit the
highlights, write these posts and move on with my life.
January was Buddhism. February Physics. March is Artificial
Intelligence. While I did a decent amount of research, these two articles
really gives the best overview on the future of AI so if you want to read
something from someone who knows things, read this:
There are a lot of different AI terms, theories and
predictions. From reading different articles and watching various videos, I’ve
come to a few conclusions:
1-
AI is here. It is in our homes, cars and
workplaces. We tend to think of AI as what is coming instead of what we have
already integrated into our lives.
2-
Timelines vary greatly about when or if AI
will ever surpass humans’ ability to think, learn and plot.
3-
Essentially every technology humankind has
ever made has been weaponized.
4-
Being the first country or company to be
first in this race could possibly mean world domination.
5-
Machines should be seen as a tool to work
together to make greater progress than we could on our own. Machines aren’t inherently
good or bad. They operate how we tell them to operate; at least for now.
Hard things—like
calculus, financial market strategy, and language translation—are
mind-numbingly easy for a computer, while easy things—like vision, motion,
movement, and perception—are insanely hard for it. Tim Urban
As usual, I have compiled some AI terms we should all be
familiar with.
Artificial intelligence (abbreviated: AI, A.I.)
The
simulation of human intelligence by machines. Or more simply, having machines
“think like a human.”
Big
Data
There’s
data, and then there’s big data: a collection of data sets so large and complex
that it becomes difficult to process using most typical data management tools.
But big data is the raw fuel of AI, as it provides the inputs for surfacing
patterns and making predictions.
Ex: More
and more of IT’s technology investments will go towards managing big data.
Data
Mining
The
process of combing through large sets of data to discover patterns and extract
useful information
Machine
Learning
A
core sub genre of AI by which computer programs can “learn” and automatically
modify its knowledge, procedures, and processes to improve performance and
efficiency. As the machine learns from past performance data, it can also begin
to predict and improve future performance.
Ex: Netflix’s machine
learning programming looks at what I watch, and gives me personalized
recommendations of other shows I might enjoy.
Deep
Learning
A
‘deeper’ subset of machine learning that uses complex algorithms to mimic the
brain’s neural network to learn, with little or no human supervision.
Chatbot
A
computer program that simulates human conversation or chat.
Microsoft
created a bot named Tay and Twitter taught it to be racist.
Algorithms:
Rules that teach computers how to
figure things out on their own.
Unsupervised learning
In many
ways the spookiest part of AI research is realizing that the machines are
really capable of learning, and they’re using layers upon layers of data and
processing capability to do so. With unsupervised learning we don’t give the AI
an answer. Rather than finding patterns that are predefined like, “why people
choose one brand over another,” we simply feed a machine a bunch of data so
that it can find whatever patterns it is able to.
Turing test
While the test was
originally conceived as a way of determining if a human could be fooled by a
conversation, in text display only, between a human and an artificial
intelligence, it has since become short hand for any AI that can fool a person
into believing they’re seeing or interacting with a real person.
Source:
AI
Caliber 1) Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI): Sometimes referred to
as Weak AI, Artificial
Narrow Intelligence is AI that specializes in one area. There’s AI that can beat the world
chess champion in chess, but that’s the only thing it does.
AI
Caliber 2) Artificial General Intelligence (AGI): Sometimes referred to
as Strong AI, or Human-Level AI,
Artificial General Intelligence refers to a computer that is as smart as a
human across the board—a
machine that can perform any intellectual task that a human being can.
AI
Caliber 3) Artificial Superintelligence (ASI): “an intellect
that is much smarter than the best human brains in practically every field,
including scientific creativity, general wisdom and social skills.” Artificial
Superintelligence ranges from a computer that’s just a little smarter than a
human to one that’s trillions of times smarter—across the board.
“Why do we want to set
ourselves up as the enemy when they might overpower us someday?” he said. “It
should be a joint partnership. All we can do is seed them with a strong culture
where they see humans as their friends.” Elon Musk
AI
in your everyday life:
When your sleep app wakes you up at the right moment in
your sleeping pattern and analyses your sleep, that’s AI.
When you commute and you use Google Maps or WAZE, that’s
AI.
When you control the temperature of your home through
your Ipad, tell Alexis to call you an Uber (Uber also AI) or have Amazon recommend
purchases for you, that’s AI.
When your Fitbit tells you how many steps you’ve taken or
your bodyweight %, that’s AI.
“The
development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human
race….It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing
rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete,
and would be superseded.” – Stephen Hawking
AI is being used to help people invest because it can a better
job than humans at investing and monitoring the market by taking emotions out
of the equation. Sites such as Wealthsimple or Weathfront use algorithm instead
of humans which saves people money.
Driverless cars, drones, robotics, Smart Reply with your
email through Gmail, turnitin.com to detect plagiarism, smarter traffic lights,
and banks using AI to review credit applications are all functions of AI. I also read that ‘The New York Times reports that the average
flight of a Boeing plane involves only seven minutes of human-steered flight,
which is typically reserved only for takeoff and landing.’ Isn’t that wild?
“By far, the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence
is that people conclude too early that they understand it.” —Eliezer Yudkowsky
Health care is also greatly influenced through AI. Machine learning better predictions
for radiology. Predicting survival rates for cancer patients and organizing
patient data, medications, appointments etc.
https://hbr.org/2018/05/10-promising-ai-applications-in-health-care
The idea is that we’d build a computer whose two major skills would be doing research on AI and coding changes into itself—allowing it to not only learn but to improve its own architecture. We’d teach computers to be computer scientists so they could bootstrap their own development. And that would be their main job—figuring out how to make themselves smarter. Tim Urban
The idea is that we’d build a computer whose two major skills would be doing research on AI and coding changes into itself—allowing it to not only learn but to improve its own architecture. We’d teach computers to be computer scientists so they could bootstrap their own development. And that would be their main job—figuring out how to make themselves smarter. Tim Urban
Voice profiling is also a part of AI I had never heard
of. AI can detect through your voice your height, age, weight, social status,
facial features and ethnicity all through your voice. Your voice is like your
fingerprint or DNA.
http://fortune.com/2018/01/06/artificial-intelligence-voice-profiling/
Sam Harris has a TedTalk where he discusses AI. One of
his points is that ‘We don’t
hate ants. Presence conflicts with ours, we kill them.’ Which means in the
future, we could be the ants.
https://www.ted.com/talks/sam_harris_can_we_build_ai_without_losing_control_over_it
“The real question is, when will we draft an artificial
intelligence bill of rights? What will that consist of? And who will get to
decide that?” —Gray Scott
Boston Dynamic is a robotics design company making things like this:
And this:
They also created an
advanced robot named Atlas which I’m upset about but don’t really want to get
into the specifics of why at this precise moment.
Also, I came across a site where I learned that there is
a Doomsday clock since 147 by members of the Bullentin of the Atomic Scientists’
Science and Security Board monitor how close the wold is to essentially
destroying ourselves. Midnight means death. We have never been so close to
midnight in the clock’s existence.
I watched a documentary about AlphaGo. Go is more than 3,000 years old that could have possibly originated in China. Go has exponentially more
combinations than chess and is a strategy game to control more of the board
than your opponent.
AlphaGo was created by DeepMind which is owned by Google. It basically taught itself how to beat the world’s beat GO player which some people prognosticated might never be possible. It essentially played itself millions of
times and learned the best strategies that perplexed expert GO players but in
the end, taught humans how to play a more advanced version of the game. In the
documentary, it says that ‘GO made his humanness expand and made him a better
player.’ It explained that machines will gain our confidence because they make
better guesses and a good human plus a machine is the best combination.
Armed with superintelligence and all the
technology superintelligence would know how to create, ASI would likely be able
to solve every problem in humanity. Tim Urban
Let’s talk timelines. Summarizing Tim Urban's article,
the average best guess from studies and scientist is that Artificial Super
Intelligence (computers that are
trillions of times smarter than us in every way) is 2060. So in about 40
years, the world would be on the precipice of unimaginable change.
How advanced we are in comparison of an ant, chicken and
apes.
How advance Advanced Super Intelligence would he compared
to us.
This is frightening. It is hard to imagine this but if
computers are getting more powerful and teaching themselves, I feel like anything is possible in the next 50-100 years.
A super intelligence could give us
indefinite lifespan, either by stopping and reversing the aging process through
the use of nanomedicine, or by offering us the option to upload ourselves. Tim
Urban
(I have posted below my favourite part of the Tim Urban
article. It is a little long but it puts things into perspective about where we
are at now.)
To conclude, I have no idea what is going to happen.
Amazon has drones delivering packages, robots will be teaching kids, life may or may not be a simulation and we could possibly live on Mars one day so my suggestion is to buckle in for a wild
ride, be kind to other people, save your pennies and try not to step on the
ants.
“I’m increasingly inclined to
think that there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and
international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish.
I mean with artificial intelligence we’re summoning the demon.”
Elon Musk warned at MIT’s AeroAstro Centennial Symposium
Upcoming blog post themes: Japan and food.
Elon Musk warned at MIT’s AeroAstro Centennial Symposium
Upcoming blog post themes: Japan and food.
Imagine taking a time machine back to 1750—a time when the world
was in a permanent power outage, long-distance communication meant either
yelling loudly or firing a cannon in the air, and all transportation ran on
hay. When you get there, you retrieve a dude, bring him to 2015, and then walk
him around and watch him react to everything. It’s impossible for us to
understand what it would be like for him to see shiny capsules racing by on a
highway, talk to people who had been on the other side of the ocean earlier in
the day, watch sports that were being played 1,000 miles away, hear a musical
performance that happened 50 years ago, and play with my magical wizard
rectangle that he could use to capture a real-life image or record a living
moment, generate a map with a paranormal moving blue dot that shows him where
he is, look at someone’s face and chat with them even though they’re on the
other side of the country, and worlds of other inconceivable sorcery. This is
all before you show him the internet or explain things like the International
Space Station, the Large Hadron Collider, nuclear weapons, or general
relativity.
This experience for him wouldn’t be surprising or shocking or
even mind-blowing—those words aren’t big enough. He might actually die.
But here’s the interesting
thing—if he then went back to 1750 and got jealous that we got to see his
reaction and decided he wanted to try the same thing, he’d take the time
machine and go back the same distance, get someone from around the year 1500,
bring him to 1750, and show him everything. And the 1500 guy would be shocked
by a lot of things—but he wouldn’t die. It would be far less of an insane experience for him, because
while 1500 and 1750 were very different, they were much less different than 1750 to 2015. The
1500 guy would learn some mind-bending shit about space and physics, he’d be
impressed with how committed Europe turned out to be with that new imperialism
fad, and he’d have to do some major revisions of his world map conception. But
watching everyday life go by in 1750—transportation, communication,
etc.—definitely wouldn’t make him die.
No, in order for the 1750 guy to have as much fun as we had with
him, he’d have to go much farther back—maybe all the way back to about 12,000
BC, before the First Agricultural Revolution gave rise to the first cities and
to the concept of civilization. If someone from a purely hunter-gatherer
world—from a time when humans were, more or less, just another animal
species—saw the vast human empires of 1750 with their towering churches, their
ocean-crossing ships, their concept of being “inside,” and their enormous
mountain of collective, accumulated human knowledge and discovery—he’d likely
die.
And then what if, after
dying, he got jealous and wanted to do the same thing. If
he went back 12,000 years to 24,000 BC and got a guy and brought him to 12,000
BC, he’d show the guy everything and the guy would be like, “Okay what’s your
point who cares.” For the 12,000 BC guy to have the same fun, he’d have to go
back over 100,000 years and get someone he could show fire and language to for
the first time.
In order for someone to be transported into the future and die
from the level of shock they’d experience, they have to go enough years ahead
that a “die level of progress,” or a Die Progress Unit (DPU) has been achieved.
So a DPU took over 100,000 years in hunter-gatherer times, but at the
post-Agricultural Revolution rate, it only took about 12,000 years. The post-Industrial
Revolution world has moved so quickly that a 1750 person only needs to go
forward a couple hundred years for a DPU to have happened.
This pattern—human progress
moving quicker and quicker as time goes on—is what futurist Ray Kurzweil calls
human history’s Law of Accelerating Returns. This happens because more advanced
societies have the ability to progress at a faster rate than less advanced societies—because they’re more advanced. 19th century
humanity knew more and had better technology than 15th century humanity, so
it’s no surprise that humanity made far more advances in the 19th century than
in the 15th century—15th century humanity was no match for 19th century
humanity.11← open these
This works on smaller scales too.
The movie Back to the Future came out in
1985, and “the past” took place in 1955. In the movie, when Michael J. Fox went
back to 1955, he was caught off-guard by the newness of TVs, the prices of
soda, the lack of love for shrill electric guitar, and the variation in slang.
It was a different world, yes—but if the movie were made today and the past
took place in 1985, the movie could have had much more fun
with much bigger differences. The character would be in
a time before personal computers, internet, or cell phones—today’s Marty McFly,
a teenager born in the late 90s, would be much more out of place in 1985 than
the movie’s Marty McFly was in 1955.
This is for the same reason we just discussed—the Law of
Accelerating Returns. The average rate of advancement between 1985 and 2015 was
higher than the rate between 1955 and 1985—because the former was a more
advanced world—so much more change happened in the most recent 30 years than in
the prior 30.
So—advances are getting bigger and bigger and happening more and
more quickly. This suggests some pretty intense things about our future, right?
Kurzweil suggests that the
progress of the entire 20th century would have been achieved in only 20 years
at the rate of advancement in the year 2000—in other words, by 2000, the rate
of progress was five times faster than the average rate of
progress during the 20th century. He believes another 20th century’s worth of
progress happened between 2000 and 2014 and that another 20th century’s worth of progress will
happen by 2021, in only seven years. A couple decades later, he believes a 20th
century’s worth of progress will happen multiple times in the same year, and
even later, in less than one month. All in all, because of the Law of
Accelerating Returns, Kurzweil believes that the 21st century will achieve 1,000 times the progress of the 20th century.2
If Kurzweil and others who agree
with him are correct, then we may be as blown away by 2030 as our 1750 guy was
by 2015—i.e. the next DPU might only take a couple decades—and the world in
2050 might be so vastly different than
today’s world that we would barely recognize it.
This isn’t science fiction. It’s what many scientists smarter
and more knowledgeable than you or I firmly believe—and if you look at history,
it’s what we should logically predict.
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html
