Artificial Intelligence

Physicist Stephen Hawking warned humanity that “the development of artificial intelligence (AI) could spell the end of the human race… Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.” To meet the challenge of AI, Hawking urged the creation of “some form of world government.” But will AI really spell the doom of the human race? Is it truly capable of making humans obsolete? Or could it provide an opportunity for greater creativity and productivity based on a renewed understanding of human uniqueness? Join us in Seattle on Wednesday, July 11 for a fascinating evening exploring these questions as part of the launch of Discovery Institute’s new Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence, Read More ›

A 2018 book by political scientist Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor, tackles the effects of AI on social issues. From editorial reviews: “[A] must read…On par with Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed or Matthew Desmond’s Evicted. It’s rigorously researched, phenomenally accessible, and utterly humbling. While there are a lot of important books that touch on the costs and consequences of technology through case studies and well-reasoned logic, this book is the first one that I’ve read that really pulls you into the world of algorithmic decision-making and inequality, like a good ethnography should.” ―danah boyd, author of It’s Complicated “Eubanks argues that automated systems separate people from resources, classify and criminalize people, Read More ›

From Jay Richards at ENST: On a new episode of ID the Future, Jay Richards talks with host Mike Keas about a recent Atlantic article from former National Security Advisor Henry A. Kissinger on “How the Enlightenment Ends” with the rise of artificial intelligence. Richards … explains that AI is about statistical processing, not budding consciousness; and the ethical concerns it raises are both important yet in some ways not so new. More. Podcast: Jay Richards is the author of a forthcoming book (June 19), The Human Advantage: The Future of American Work in an Age of Smart Machines. In other news, Chicken Little is said to be having a nervous breakdown over his advance copy.  It is wrecking the  a-shock-alypse industry. Read More ›

From a new paper by AI researcher Gary Marcus at ArXiv: Although deep learning has historical roots going back decades, neither the term “deep learning” nor the approach was popular just over five years ago, when the field was reignited by papers such as Krizhevsky, Sutskever and Hinton’s now classic (2012) deep network model of Imagenet. What has the field discovered in the five subsequent years? Against a background of considerable progress in areas such as speech recognition, image recognition, and game playing, and considerable enthusiasm in the popular press, I present ten concerns for deep learning, and suggest that deep learning must be supplemented by other techniques if we are to reach artificial general intelligence. From the Conclusion: As Read More ›

From Bill Dembski at Freedom, Technology, Education: Artificial Intelligence’s Homunculus Problem: Why AI Is Unlikely Ever to Match Human Intelligence So how can we see that AI is not, and will likely never be, a match for human intelligence? The argument is simple and straightforward. AI, and that includes everything from classical expert systems to contemporary machine learning, always comes down to solving specific problems. This can be readily reconceptualized in terms of search (for the reconceptualization, see here): There’s a well-defined search space and a target to be found and the task of AI is to find that target efficiently and reliably. … If intelligence were simply a matter of finding targets in well-defined search spaces, then AI could, Read More ›

Software developer Brendan Dixon writes in response to physicist Rob Sheldon who was recently heard to scoff at the idea that self-driving cars will catch on. Rob Sheldon: The guys building the technology, like the fellow in Florida who died in a Tesla doing 75mph on Autopilot, are “first adopters”. They really want the future to be now. Most of us just want to get to work without the hassle of fighting the traffic. And honestly, it takes a lot of brainpower to shave 5 minutes off the commute. Why would I use a safety conscious computer that will never bend the traffic rules? The car is a tool, not an end in itself. And now, Brendan Dixon: I do not Read More ›

Further to them being oversold, from researcher Filip Piekniewski at his blog: When the software fails and e.g. the control system of the vehicle hangs, it is more than likely that the end result of such situation would not be good (anyone working with robots knows how rapidly things escalate when something goes wrong – robots don’t have the natural ability to recover from a deteriorating situation). If that happened on a freeway at high speed, it would easily have lead to a serious crash with either another car or a barrier. If it happened in a dense urban area at small speed it could lead to injuring pedestrians. Either way, note that Waymo only reports the events that fulfill the Read More ›

In the Eugene Wigner thread, frequent objector Sev argues to BA77: Sev, 23: >>Yes, the hard problem of consciousness is explaining what it is and how it arises from the physical brain and we don’t have such an explanation as yet. The evidence for consciousness arising from the brain lies in the strong correlation between the two, the observation that when the brain is destroyed the consciousness disappears permanently and the challenge of explaining why else would we commit such a large percentage of our physical resources to support such an organ unless it provided us with something of great value.>> This is, of course after decades of unfulfilled promises, and it neatly rhetorically side-steps J B S Haldane’s longstanding Read More ›

What’s hot.what’s not. And what’s rot. From David Klinghoffer at ENST: — The Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence will focus on the profound concerns stirred by the mystery of minds. Join us in Seattle on Wednesday, July 11, as we launch the Bradley Center with a special public conversation at Seattle’s William Allen Theater at the Museum of Flight. It’s FREE, from 7:30 to 9:30 pm. We require that you register here to save your place. The topic for the evening: “Will the Machines Take Over? Human Uniqueness in the Age of Smart Machines.” Computers vastly outperform humans in executing calculations. But in any meaningful sense, can they host minds? Has technology revealed the emptiness of the Read More ›

From AI researcher Filip Piekniewski at VentureBeat: Deep learning has been at the forefront of the so-called AI revolution for years now, and many people believed that it would take us to the world of the technological singularity. Many companies talked big in 2014, 2015, and 2016 when technologies such as Alpha Go were pushing new boundaries. For example, Tesla announced that its fully self-driving cars were very close, even selling that option to customers — to be enabled later via a software update. We are now in the middle of 2018 and things have changed. Not on the surface yet — the NIPS conference is still oversold, corporate PR still has AI all over its press releases, Elon Musk Read More ›

From Matthew Hutson at Science: Computer science was born of a rebellious, hacker culture, a spirit that lives on in the publishing culture of artificial intelligence (AI). The burgeoning field is increasingly turning to conference publications and free, open-review websites while shunning traditional outlets—sentiments dramatically expressed in a growing boycott of a high-profile AI journal. As of 15 May, about 3000 people, mostly academic computer scientists, had signed a petition promising not to submit, review, or edit articles for Nature Machine Intelligence (NMI), a new journal from the publisher Springer Nature set to begin publication in January 2019. The petition, signed by many prominent researchers in AI, is more than just a call for open access. It decries not only Read More ›

From Kevin Hartnett at the Atlantic, interviewing, for Quanta Magazine, Judea Pearl, author (along with Dana Mackenzie) of The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect In his new book, Pearl, now 81, elaborates a vision for how truly intelligent machines would think. The key, he argues, is to replace reasoning by association with causal reasoning. Instead of the mere ability to correlate fever and malaria, machines need the capacity to reason that malaria causes fever. Once this kind of causal framework is in place, it becomes possible for machines to ask counterfactual questions—to inquire how the causal relationships would change given some kind of intervention—which Pearl views as the cornerstone of scientific thought. Pearl also proposes Read More ›

Readers may remember Henry Kissinger, a 70s-era American diplomat (“U.S. secretary of state under Richard Nixon, winning the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for the Vietnam War accords”). From Kissinger at The Atlantic: How the Enlightenment Ends: Philosophically, intellectually—in every way—human society is unprepared for the rise of artificial intelligence. As the internet and increased computing power have facilitated the accumulation and analysis of vast data, unprecedented vistas for human understanding have emerged. Perhaps most significant is the project of producing artificial intelligence—a technology capable of inventing and solving complex, seemingly abstract problems by processes that seem to replicate those of the human mind. This goes far beyond automation as we have known it. Automation deals with means; it achieves prescribed Read More ›

From Matthew Hutson at Science: Ali Rahimi, a researcher in artificial intelligence (AI) at Google in San Francisco, California, has charged that machine learning algorithms, in which computers learn through trial and error, have become a form of “alchemy.” Researchers, he says, do not know why some algorithms work and others don’t, nor do they have rigorous criteria for choosing one AI architecture over another. Now, in a paper presented on 30 April at the International Conference on Learning Representations in Vancouver, Canada, Rahimi and his collaborators document examples of what they see as the alchemy problem and offer prescriptions for bolstering AI’s rigor. … (paywall) Science 04 May 2018: Vol. 360, Issue 6388, pp. 478 DOI: 10.1126/science.360.6388.478More. AI, meaning Read More ›

From professor of electrical engineering Karl J. Stephan at MercatorNet: “For one low price,” the magician said, “I can give you the power to change your servants into perfectly obedient machines. They’ll look just like they do now, but you won’t have to feed them or let them sleep or rest. And they will do your every bidding exactly the way you want.” “Hmm,” said the king. “Sounds too good to be true.” “I have references!” said the magician. And he pulled out a sheaf of letters written by kings of nearby kingdoms, some of whom King Minsky even knew. They all swore by the magician’s abilities and said they were delighted with what he was offering. “Well, all right, Read More ›