Garry Kasparov: Why the world should embrace AI [video]
bbc.com
bbc.com
If people are "pushing back against AI", it's not the progress of technology they're against -- it's the economic consequences. People are worried about joblessness and no financial security for retirement.
It's similar to saying "embrace outsourcing because you get cheaper products" or "embrace H1B because America was built on immigrants and their skills".
You can't just speak of those aspirations as general platitudes without being aware of what the real worries are. People aren't xenophobic -- they just want to keep their livelihoods.
If you don't address the commoner's concerns, you'll be perceived as disingenuous.
or just, quite rightly, ignorant to economic causation.
True but I argue that the current hype about AI replacing jobs has much more to do with media clickbait than any real issue we should be worrying about right now.
If your business is selling ads next to cheap content, it's a great story - scares people into clicks. That to me is a real issue here. How do we prevent the media pandering scare-content like this?
For those old enough remember the "Y2K bug" that was going to have planes falling from the sky on the stoke of midnight 2000 there's a great analysis of the press's role in this at http://www.flatearthnews.net/chapter-one-bug-ate-world ...
> "Encouraged by these stories, some governments had spent fortunes in public money (and secured no better result than those who spent next to nothing). Journalists reported that the British government had spent £396 million on Y2K protection. They also reported that it had spent £430 million. And that it had spent £788 million. The American government had spent far more, they said - $100 billion, or $200 billion, or $320 billion, or $600 billion, or $858 billion, depending on which journalist you were reading. Anyway, it was a lot. Beyond that, the private sector had spawned a mini-industry of companies selling millennium bug kits, while publishers turned out bug books and bug videos, and estate agents sold bug-resistant homes, and a few families sold their houses and fled to remote cabins in order to give themselves a chance to survive the coming bug-related chaos. But this was not a story."
> "The sun rose on January 1 2000 like the lights coming on at an orgy. Everybody who had been so busy - the journalists, the governments, the bug-related businesses and the computer experts - all picked themselves up, hoped nobody was looking and quietly tip-toed away."
Hype? For sure. But the current advances in autonomous vehicles will have a very real impact on the working life of the common truck driver (3.5 million in US alone), I think we all agree on that.
No, BBC. Gary Kasparov is not an AI authority. Please don't treat him like one.
Uh, no. You're simply favouring people who have dedicated their lives to studying and researching something, over people who had a spare month and thought "You know what? I'd love to write an article over something I know absolutely nothing about".
I love to read about amateurs and autodidacts as much as the next person on HN, but the simple truth is that most people talking about a field, who have not majored in it, are not going to be either of those people. Autodidacts who put the effort in are rare these days, what is significantly less rare are people who write articles about a subject, who haven't read even the basic texts on said subject.
This is true even for specialists who are majored in another field, such as: Stephen Hawking, Stephen Wolfram, Elon Musk (Although I admit it is dubious to think of a CEO as a specialist in this sense), and now Garry Kasparov. Rationalwiki has a list dedicated to people who are Nobel prize winners in on field, talking absolute bullshit about another field: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nobel_disease (That is, bullshit in the sense of nonsense, not in the insult sense).
Actually, I would probably go so far as to say that this attitude is strictly against autodidacticism, because where autodidacts favour knowledge about a subject, the other favours arguments from authority and complacence of thought.
Do you not think the people that have dedicated their lives to studying AI are likely to be more optimistic about its uses than the population at large?
I dislike the 'opinions as news' trend on the whole, but there is room in public debates for non-experts in a specific field. The knowledge required to develop the technology is different from the knowledge needed to be able to engage in debates about its uses.
AI has the power to take jobs away from humans. This is not a controversial view, mainly because it's already happened (such as in car manufacturing). In my opinion, there's not enough debate about the implications of the increasing sophistication of AI (not enough debate amongst the general population, there's plenty in tech circles).
I do think there is a general phenomenon of "smart people outside of AI saying dumb things about AI" -- I'm guessing it's because of the massive implications artificial intelligence is going to have on every part of society.
The ultimate test is playing in full table tournament against players with very uneven skillet. If there is one good player in the table, he will be able to recognize and exploit differences.
EDIT - Jokes of this calibre deserve downvotes.
IMHO the greatest uncertainty regarding AI, and in that sense the greatest risk, is what happens precisely when AI becomes so good that it can be made to have all those features. Intelligence probably is the toughest part of a more global objective that is to emulate whatever the human body and brain can do.
A world where machines can do whatever the human body does is vastly different from ours. It's hard to even imagine it, even though some authors are trying [1]. And some of the possibilities include the end of our biological lineage.
In any case even AI completely indistinguishable from ourselves is likely only to be as much of a threat as our children are. Everything depends on how it is managed. Apocalptic scenarios generally can only happen in a tightly connected, online society with no offline fallback mechanisms for control. If we are that careless/stupid, then perhaps AI taking over our systems (and hence us) is not so bad after all...?
AI needs creative intelligence, ability to learn and adapt the very process by which it learns, as well as links to the physical world enabling it to control and perpetuate its existence. The entire process is in our (human) control. Until the very end.
The other direction is frankly more scary. Augmented human beings and other existing living beings. That is much more prone to go haywire and pose a threat.
1) When AI is able to mimic humans in terms of creativity, passion, emotions, etc
2) When we are able to biologically integrate compute resources into the human body
Future scenarios might be vastly different depending on which of these two technical research projects wins the race.
I believe all those paths eventually lead to the same kind of difficulties in predicting what kind of world they would bring.
Perhaps relevant here is that "computer" was a term used to describe people who did computations.
The quotes I've heard coming out about Alpha Go (from Go players) seem to be more repectful - that it's actually teaching professional go players new ways of playing.
It mostly covers his experiences with Deep Blue. Wish it was a longer talk. He generally has pretty positive view on computer and AI.
One interesting bit is when Demis Hassabis questioned if a chess-trained AlphaGo can be stronger at chess against Stockfish. Would be fun if they really try it.
PS: Hassabis once reached master standard at the age of 13 with an Elo rating of 2300 (at the time the second highest rated player in the world Under-14 after Judit Polgár who had a rating of 2335) and captained many of the England junior chess teams.
Of course, discrimination has always been a problem but I'd like to believe we see some progress in "classical areas" (for instance sexism). The problem with AI is that it is always pigeonholing. As a result myriads of new classes of minorities which are so small that they neither have a name nor a voice will emerge. For instance, you get rated for creditworthiness and somehow you're not typical re: attributes x,y and z. You get a bad rating but you can't really complain as the algorithm probably didn't take things like sex or race (directly) into account. However, it could be that your FB posts are enjoying above-average amounts of likes from people with low education and this may raise red flags etc...
The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID). Feeling purposeful and not feeling purpose is just utility function giving feedback.
Is passion anything else than utility function configured so that the machine does not wander aimlessly and idle? If the machine has lots of freedom to choose its actions and it chooses to avoid 'side quests' and prefers one issue over all others, does it have passion?
How about curiosity? Consider phenomenon that is hard to predict and the machine can't recognize it. Is it curious if it has been programmed to investigate, poke around and learn. When boosting algorithm increases the weight for incorrectly classified instances, isn't that a primitive form of curiosity?
Kasparov also says that AI does not make us obsolete. I assume that obsolete means that if meat unit is removed from it's environment, others (society) don't miss it's contribution. What does 'us' mean? I interpret that as 'AI does not make all of use obsolete.' This is most likely true since for foreseeable future. If not for any other reason than comparative advantage. The oversupply of meat machines has already made many of them undesirable (overpopulation).