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You can finish a CS undergrad without taking any AI course? Or just haven't taken one yet? It's very helpful to go through even a tiny bit of AI: A Modern Approach to cut through a lot of the hype. What annoys me is that when people say "Machine Learning" these days they almost invariably mean deep learning, ignoring all the rest of AI.

> I can't even skim through the news without hearing Elon Musk and Steven Hawking ignorantly claim AI could potentially takeover humanity.

Have you considered that their claims may not in fact be ignorant, just the reporting around them? For some details perhaps you would start with this primer from a decade ago, section 4 & 5 if you're in a hurry: http://intelligence.org/files/AIPosNegFactor.pdf

Or if you want a professor's opinion, from one of the co-authors to the previously mentioned AI:AMA check out some of the linked pointers on his home page: http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~russell/

I know right, the school I went to wasn't exactly the best.

I skimmed through sections 4 & 5, optimization processing was difficult to understand.

When I was in elementary school, I remember pitying the mentally disabled children, knowing their financial success was destined, so I connected with the g-factor definition. I really think general intelligence is more of a sense of all clusters awareness, whether it be social or cognitive. I've met tons of great students in Math courses who simply cannot converse with the general public. I've also met tons of people on the streets of my city who would have a difficult time understanding high school algebra.

As for Section 5, I do think the rise of AI over humanity is completely in our grasp. I really should take a course on the subject before I sound like the people that I'm criticizing for ignorance, but from a general perspective, I cannot see it outside of our control. As Eliezer said, we can make predictions, but only time will clear the fog.

> What annoys me is that when people say "Machine Learning" these days they almost invariably mean deep learning, ignoring all the rest of AI.

But that's not people's fault. Companies only say AI if they mean deep learning. I've yet to hear a company advertising AI if they accomplished it with a linear regression. Maybe experts should stop talking about AI and use specific terms instead (Deep Learning in the case of this article).

I hate it when people say deep learning instead of neural networks.

Your post has two different points, and I think they should be separated. Yes, there's an AI hype train, and it's pretty tiring. I'm starting to wonder when the first AI-enhanced shoes are going to come out. Or an AI enhanced blockchain, right?

That said, the rest of the rant about AI is less solid. Sure, AI today is fairly boring and run of the mill data processing / optimisation stuff (I sort of know, though I only have an MSc in the topic). Much of the promise of near-future AI is that we can go from human designed, or shall we say human-bootsrapped AI to self-bootstrapping kind. The fact that AlphaGo pretty much does this (in a very limited capacity), and accomplished something which classical programming and game "AI" couldn't, should show us that we're pretty close to this type of AI being highly effective. How exactly the future unfolds from there is anyone's guess, but outright calling it ignorant is... pretty ignorant, IMHO.

> I'm starting to wonder when the first AI-enhanced shoes are going to come out.

Wait no more:

The first connected cycling insole with artificial intelligence: https://www.digitsole.com/store/connected-insoles-cycling-ru...

The World's First Intelligent Sneaker: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/141658446/digitsole-sma...

I never claimed AI was boring or run of the mill, just that it's not in my current interest. It's when I hear Hawking make claims like this, I call ignorance.

"Computers can, in theory, emulate human intelligence, and exceed it,' he said. 'Success in creating effective AI, could be the biggest event in the history of our civilization. Or the worst. We just don't know. So we cannot know if we will be infinitely helped by AI, or ignored by it and side-lined, or conceivably destroyed by it.”

I feel like I'm in a high school stoner circle, yeeesh!

So, Hawking's preposition is that AI can surpass human intelligence. Is this the part you're disagreeing with? It's one thing to disagree, and it's another to call it ignorant. I for one agree that it can / will surpass human intelligence, it's just a question of when.

Unless natural disaster and/or war resets humanity, it seems inevitable. One only needs to concede that there is (probably) nothing special about the biological nature of the brain.

That's my reasoning as well, regarding the biological part. On the one hand, it seems to be an incredibly energy-efficient solution, but has several detractors as well (in a lighthearted fashion: lack of scalability and high-bandwidth networking, several billion years of legacy code, etc).

On the other hand, it's unclear whether computers will continue to get faster in the fashion that they are today for long enough. If not, then huge efficiency improvements would be necessary on the software side, though those do seem to be happening as well.

I think it's completely possible AI can surpass our intelligence. Whether it's outside of our awareness or control, not likely.

I'm in same boat, except now I have to deal with both this and blockchain.

It's pretty clear to everyone pushing this is being dishonest. Sometimes I wonder if they intentionally being dishonest or if they just don't know what they don't know. Very few people are doing useful true machine learning, and the applications are very specific with its own set of quirks. It's just to make some quick money and get out.

What somehow is never being said with all this hype is that you need to hire good software devs to make a great solution to a problem. All these buzzword driven ideas tend to confuse a bunch of people and die out after wasting everyone's money. In my region I keep seeing a bunch of business suits pushing X idea being solved with Y with no justification or engineers behind them.

Yesterday I have found out I have to have yet another meeting to explain why "blockchain" does not translate to a full solution given to a very superficial poorly thought out problem.

The only reason I've had a voice in my region with all this noise is because I've made things people see that actually work.

I work for a consultancy and I was brought in to talk about ‘our blockchain strategy’, because I was one of the few people at the company who actually read the white papers and had been invested in it. This was towards the end of the last bull run. I think they expected me to tell them to go all in on it, but I essentially said it was a bunch of bullshit hype and a solution in search of a problem and then I didn’t get invited to any more meetings. A few weeks later they announce we’re going to start selling block chain solutions right as the crypto market crashes.

Meanwhile in the real world they can’t even figure out the basics like containers and Cicd which we’re actually dealing with in our actual contract.

> Very few people are doing useful true machine learning, and the applications are very specific with its own set of quirks.

I worked on nudity detector in 2017. Deep learning works, and is useful. Although you are right it's very specific and quirky.

I found "How HBO's Silicon Valley built Not Hotdog" article very interesting, because it's basically the same problem. They found MobileNet better than SqueezeNet and ELU better than ReLU. You know what? We found SqueezeNet better than MobileNet and ReLU better than ELU for our problem and data. Who know why.

https://medium.com/@timanglade/how-hbos-silicon-valley-built...

But this is normal with any new technology -- there used to be car movie places and people thought of putting miniature nuclear reactors in everyday appliances, it doesn't mean there's a car winter coming or a nuclear winter coming(pun intended).

It's absolutely human nature to think of crazy ways of using things in new ways, probably most of those ways don't work out in the end.

The history of humanity is full of examples of people using technology to prevail over other groups of people. Applications of AI and ML will be no exception: computer vision, game theory, autonomous systems, material design, espionage, cryptography... You name it.

Supraintelligent AI is not required to cause severe problems.

I'm sure they have, but none of those fields have been exploited for marketability, at least nowhere near this degree.

Not sure what you mean, but for the most part AI and ML is being integrated into systems where there's too much data to be processed manually... like satellite/aerial imagery, tapped internet backbones, security cameras, etc.

AI taking over is the biggest threat facing humanity, but I don't think Hawking ever claimed it was imminent; it's likely 1000+ years away.

It should be obvious why a superior intelligence is something dangerous.

"it's likely 1000+ years away."

That seems like a pretty high number when you consider the exponential rate of technological advancement.

1000 years in the future is probably going to be completely unrecognizable to us given the current rate of change in society/tech.

If the response to AI existential threats was "it's too far in the future" then you'd have a point. But usually it's just "AI will obey it's programming" or "AI will never be as smart as us".

True exponentials exist very rarely. What we are used to call exponential is often at most quadratic and even then the trend usually exists only for some limited time window.

I wouldn't dare to make prediction about mankind 1000 years from now based on a relatively short time window of technological growth. There are many huge obstacles in the way.

Even the present would be mostly unrecognizable to someone who lived 1000 years ago.

1000 years from now will certainly be even stranger to us.

The day we create a superior intelligence will be the greatest day of humanity. It will be fantastic if there's something beyond humanity. A logical, evolutionary conclusion to us.

All our Darwinian ancestors never had the capacity for intellectual fear of their superior successors...

Hopefully we as a species can get beyond our fear.

That's at least a logical belief, but it's still a threat, because we don't know how it will behave and we'll be helpless to control it.

It would be great if people feared climate change the same way they fear AI takeover.

Climate change is not an existential threat - primitive humans survived for 200+ kyrs when temps were 10°C cooler and thrived during warmer temps.

They weren’t reliant on agriculture to sustain their civilisation.

Sure, the human race is unlikely to die out unless we get to mass-exinction levels of climate change, but our civilisation is a lot more fragile.

If agriculture is the biggest worry, it’s no big deal. Not only will more land enter temperate zones, but I don’t doubt we’ll be able to breed heat resistant varieties fast enough to keep up with 0.05C annual changes. That’s nothing.

The biggest threat facing humanity is 1000+ years away?

AI is already taking over humanity. The news you read, the products you buy, the advice you take, the friends you meet are all partially or fully supported by machine-learned algorithms.

Personally, I do not doubt AI-based methods are changing our language, our communication patterns and our transport infrastructure.

The problem with the statement "AI will take over humanity" is actually in:

- What exactly is AI? There are many definitions. Most researchers adopt the weakest forms, whereas the general public adopts the strongest form.

- What exactly is 'take-over'? Does this mean: in control? Like a dictator is in control over a country? Or: adopting us as slaves? As a gradual change, when does it 'take-over'? At 50%? Does this need to be a conscious action by an AI actor, or would an evolutionary transition suffice?

- What exactly is humanity? I would go for the definition: "the quality or state of being human", but most people probably read in it: "the human race". In the former case, technology is a part of the quality of being human. In Heideggerian fashion, we become the technology and the technology becomes us. Technology, and AI as part of it, has been taking over humanity since we started permanently adjusting our environments.

> People believe them because of their credentials, when professors who actually teach AI will say otherwise

While some experts like Andrew Ng are sceptical of AI risk, there are lots of others like Stuart Russell who are concerned.

Here is a big list of quotes from AI experts concerned about AI risk: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/22/ai-researchers-on-ai-ri...

I mean at least you don't have to worry about Steven Hawking bothering you any more...

>I get triggered

You should be more considerate than to be throwing around this term.