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Tech CEOs Declare This the Era of Artificial Intelligence (fortune.com)
You will be hearing a lot about AI and machine learning in the coming years. At Recode's iconic conference this week, a number of top executives revealed -- and reiterated -- their increasingly growing efforts to capture the nascent technology category. From a Reuters report (condensed): Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Alphabet's Google, said he sees a "huge opportunity" in AI. Google first started applying the technology through "deep neural networks" to voice recognition software about three to four years ago and is ahead of rivals such as Amazon.com, Apple, and Microsoft in machine learning, Pichai said.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos predicted a profound impact on society over the next 20 years. "It's really early but I think we're on the edge of a golden era. It's going to be so exciting to see what happens," he said.
IBM CEO Ginni Rometty said the company has been working on artificial technology, which she calls a cognitive system, since 2005 when it started developing its Watson supercomputer.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning will create computers so sophisticated and godlike that humans will need to implant "neural laces" in their brains to keep up, Tesla Motors and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk told a crowd of tech leaders this week.Microsoft, which was absent from the event, is also working on bots and AI technologies. One company that is seemingly off the picture is Apple.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos predicted a profound impact on society over the next 20 years. "It's really early but I think we're on the edge of a golden era. It's going to be so exciting to see what happens," he said.
IBM CEO Ginni Rometty said the company has been working on artificial technology, which she calls a cognitive system, since 2005 when it started developing its Watson supercomputer.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning will create computers so sophisticated and godlike that humans will need to implant "neural laces" in their brains to keep up, Tesla Motors and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk told a crowd of tech leaders this week.Microsoft, which was absent from the event, is also working on bots and AI technologies. One company that is seemingly off the picture is Apple.
Lots of people have long had the dream of putting together a chatbot that would represent them in online forums...
Well I'm going the opposite route. I'm attaching a chatbot to my source code editor for work, leaving me free all day to do nothing but post in online forums!
As for the work quality, I wouldn't worry about that - one of the neural inputs is StackOverflow recent answers.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So, "accelerating"?
Tech companies spend more resources on trendy topic because tech companies spending more on a topic makes it trendy. Film at 11.
i think the people, for the most part, would rather think for themselves (hopefully the rebellion will happen before computers evolve too much otherwise it could be too late); the rest, will just get dumber, like how being able to easily "google" something (or ask siri, etc) has already done to everyone with a so-called "smart phone".
It's great people are getting excited about AI. I'm looking forward to reading about it every fucking day, just like I did about voice recognition, how apps would change my life etc. At the very least, I hope it means it will become slightly easier to say things like "set an alarm at 2.30" and not end up with a calender entry which reads "self harming - tooth hurty" or whatever, but can we sort of pre-empt the whole thing and start thinking about what comes after AI so those of use who find it a little dull already can read about something else?
You know, the self-aware kind, not the "neural network of densely interconnected weighted pathways."
Apple already provides Artificial Importance.
Not in this century, neither the next. They don't know what they are talking about.
One of the first jobs we're going to 'automate' with AI will be the CEO position.
Biggest return most savings.
And an ai ceo won't go on tv and say stupid shit that tanks their stock.
What passes as AI so far is still just all smoke and mirrors.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Let's replace CEOs and stupid tech blogs with AI and put them on their own internet
crazy dynamite monkey
Honestly, AI will be part of the future and the transition will not be pretty on a human level. Jobs will be lost, processes will change and the world will adapt. Rushing this by tossing out meaningless declarations by CEO's will not change. There is not timetable for the AI revolution. Let's adapt when ready.
Unless I can give Scarlett Johansson an orgasm simply by talking to her disembodied head, then I think we are a fair bit more than an "Era" away from artificial intelligence.
We aren't even close to what I would call an AI era. We need about a 100 billion (thats billion with a B) times more advanced AI than what we have today for anything even remotely approaching the technology needed for us to be in an AI era.
We have been creating Intelligences running on organic processors for all of human history. The two I helped to create have some bugs, but I blame the team programming effort with the wife. (we still argue about who introduced which bugs, and if a patch would ever be effective).
A newborn is simply a set of default starter programs that interact with an increasing number of inputs over time.
Partly cloudy and warm by the Beach
to screw the masses even more.
AI has made steady progress over the last twenty years. Nothing has happened that puts it over the threshold of a revolution. New applications will be found, and new software would be developed, just like algorithms and information retrieval were key to Search Engines and Google Maps, but this didn't mean an era of algorithms and IR descended upon us.
The more AI buys into the hype the stronger the backblow will be when it fails to deliver. Read up about the AI winter which happened in exactly the same way in the 1980s.
If they say so it must be true.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Relax everyone, we're nowhere close to having, what is commonly perceived to be, intelligent programs.
What we have, and what we have finely honed, are clockworks: algorithms that perform a single specific task.
Granted, a lot of what humans do can be replaced by a sufficiently well-designed clockwork. Lots of human tasks are repetitive, boring, and uncreative. Driving, for example, is repetitive, boring, and uncreative, and appears to be well suited to a clockwork.
And this will bring about massive changes in how we view human activity. We will eventually have to change our notions of entitlement and human worth, and found a new sect of economic theory.
But each of these is only a clockwork, suited to only a single task. Humans, the only example of intelligence we have, can learn to do any of these tasks, and as far as we can tell there is no wiring in the human brain specific to any of them. Humans can learn to play chess, checkers, poker, or any of a hundred other games, but so far as anyone can tell there's no wiring in the brain specific to chess.
A chess program can't learn to play checkers, but the human algorithm is universal.
We're starting to automate our world, that's all.
I don't think it means what they seem to think it means
Tech CEO's famous for spouting techno-babble, raising and losing enormous amounts of venture capital, and utilizing golden parachutes declare something incredible is about to happen, just invest some money with us.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Still waiting on that one.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
This is going to change things the way "The Year of the MOOC" changed everything!
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
The main cost of any business is labor. Expert systems (which is what they're really talking about when they say AI) will save billions, maybe trillions of dollars. The human cost is irrelevant z just like it was for the first 70 or so years of the Industrial Revolution.
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...but it could spur the next one. When we push it to its limits to see if AI can replicate human capabilities (e.g. more than just computation) I think we will learn a lot more about ourselves - which may be the real revolution.
It becomes increasingly clear to you that the slow progress in AI is driven from the demand side. None spend money on adding artificial laborers to the labor market when the going rate is so cheap. When the global labor surplus ends*, robot development shall be much faster.
*might never happen.
All this push is mainly to monetize your every thought.
Currently it's to monetize your every voice command (a superset)
And before that it was to monetize your every question (a super-superset)
And before that was to monetize your every transaction (a super-super-superset)
And before that was to monetize your every 'access' (a super-super-super-superset)
You get the point.
I recall back in the 90's IBM attempt to develop tech to charge a penny for every byte that when through a router... charge by byte vs a subscription or even free access.
where did I allege that I hated progress, exactly?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
When some idiot AI device starts being an idiot, just hold it up to the nearest port and fry the fucker.
What really matters isn't how real it is; but how profitable it is. So far, the best possible exit for an AI startup is to get bought by Google or HP, then sometimes flash a display of brilliance, or sometimes disappear, never to be heard of again.
When we see unicorn AIs, then we'll have something.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
We're going to need it because human intelligence has plummeted..
Please start using Simulated Intelligence instead... At least until we can create something with an actual intelligence.
AI appears .
Zero truckers
In one day, Unemployment triples
Of course there will be local work for them....for a year or two.
Garbage men?
Auto Mechanical Diagnosticians?..
Pilots?.
Pizza Deliverers?.
Until the beast is tamed with taxes to support the people put out of work, this is pointless.
Time to man up AI, and pay your bills.
Driving is repetitive, boring, and uncreative? You should show up in some of the autonomous-vehicle threads and use that statement to confront the "machines will never be able to share the road with humans" crowd.
I'm pretty sure that human brains are no less "clockwork" than any of the things you mention -- just with more complex works, that are perhaps less reliable/predictable due to their implementation.
As far as the "universality" of the "human algorithm", well, greater human minds than mine have foundered on that question. How would you go about proving that there is nothing a human mind can't learn? At least, without falling into circular arguments ("since humans can't do that, it's not really learning")?
You have to see it from the perspective of business types: In their experience, humans learn and repeat. What they see in a self driving car is the same intelligence they see in people. It's really an indictment of the MBA mindset.
Says it all. The media has taken up the term 'AI' and turned it into just more useless hype that really doesn't mean anything like what the dictionary definition says it is, and all this 'machine learning' and algorithms are junk compared to what the human brain is capable of -- and by the way, ask any neuroscientist, we don't even begin to have a clue yet how our brains do the things it can do. Stop calling shit 'AI' already!
What passes as AI so far is still just all smoke and mirrors.
Yeah, but the shareholders don't want the ceo to declare this the era of smoke and mirrors.
What does the deep learning Era Naming AI think the current era should be called?
Seriously... chat bots are supposed to be the new big thing since wearables didn't really take off. It's all about tech and tech journalism needing something to hype.
When this question can be answered with a 100% positive "yes", then THAT is the day we can declare this the era of Artificial Intelligence.
Predictions are hard, especially about the future.
I'm reminded of the Human Genome project, which are 7 years was 10% complete. "Too long," cried those who think linearly, "It will take 700 years!" But it only took another 7 years, because change -- especially technological change, happens exponentially.
As soon as we're 1/10 the way there, it will only be another 7 years.
I'm waiting for the era of 3D printing, the era of 3D television, and the era of the internet of things before I get on board the era of AI.
I comment occasionally so that I can mod others -1 overrated or -1 offtopic.
If all you had was the ability to sense its surroundings in 3d, and recognize a couple objects, then goal oriented tasks could be done. We could have AI robots in 5-15 years if a corporation wants it. Check out www.botcraft.biz for my ai page. This dates back to 2002, but I rarely update, nothing much has changed other than Kinect came out which is a toy.
Isn't that how it works today?
What passes as AI so far is still just all smoke and mirrors.
Exactly. I'd called it "cargo cult A.I."
Hardly AI.
What we have now is just advanced expert machines that are connected to the wealth of generic information on the internet, with voice recognition on top.
Very impressive work by all teams working on these systems.
Collectively we've done amazing things on these expert machines, but they are still quite dumb.
It is similar to saying humans are in the space age.
We've taken mere baby steps, impressive huge baby steps, but still baby steps.
With newer experimental works, like Google TensorFlow and other accelerators in hardware, it will begin to open a new age of systems that might lead to AI in the future.
Even though computers can do trillions of advanced computations, it's still barely a rats level of throughput. (And that's a simplistic brain model at that)
Most of the brain is redundancy simply due to plasticity and how neurons communicate, and it is limited in power because of energies sake. Biology tends to low-power like the rest of existence.
Computers don't need that overhead or limitation.
We will get there eventually. 20-40 years for sure. Unless we blow each other up over oil or hurt feelings again.
Oh, wait....
Can we please call it what it is and not AI. When systems use intelligent sensors or programs are written to efficiently take advantage of data this is not AI. I think we should differentiate between well designed programming and AI. We should call it AAI or artificial artificial intelligence.
What passes as AI so far is still just all smoke and mirrors.
Why do you hate progress?
I see nothing there suggesting he hates progress. What he appears to hate is the bullshit that dribbles out of many of these CEO types mouths. We are not much closer to artificial "INTELLIGENCE" than we were 50 years ago and certainly it is not within site for this generation of people (I did my masters on Artificial intelligence and expert systems). What we have now is computers, databases and programs that can run fast enough due to the huge amount of horse power behind them that for many tightly constrained and constructed scenario's the average user can't tell the computer still has Zero self awareness or awareness of the world and is still just a large calculator that deals purely in 1's and 0's.
My TI-94a calculator has AI. It can multiply 2 8-digt numbers in a millisecond. Can you do that? It is smarter than you.
umm I thought this was the american age - intelligently designed stupidity !
After thousands of years we cannot even cure a cold...oh ya we are so smart we can invent intelligence? HAHAHAHAHHA, only people outside the industry would believe a lie so bold it is obviously a lie. We have an AI machine at work "learning".....for 2 years now.....it has learned nothing, can do nothing, has no intelligence of any kind. It can only respond to questions that are logical, mathematical. I have said it before and I will keep saying.....want to blow up AI, ask it about the nature of love, or hate....just pick any human emotion and then reject any "definition" the AI gives and keep asking.....what is the nature of love? My boss wont let me ask our AI system this question, he knows it will fail. He wants to ask questions like "what will the weather be tomorrow?" and he thinks the dumb machine is "smart" and can answer! DUH, get a clue people. Computers are like hammers, they do our bidding and they do nothing without our bidding.....nothing.
Everyone assumes artificial intelligence means a human-line consciousness of above-average intelligence.
I think it more likely that artificial intelligence would start with the intelligence of a worm or a mouse, and then work its way up from there.
Now, these humbler creatures *do* have intelligence and an ability to learn to *some* degree, and except for the very simplest of cases, we don't understand what intelligence even *is* in these situations, much less being ready to duplicate it in software.
There are lots of things that can be intelligent within a narrow scope and still be far less than a human-like or even mouse-like consciousness. This I believe is the fundamental reason that we are so much farther away from actual artificial intelligence like we see in movies than people think. Eventually, we'll get there, but it's still a long way off.
I think a lot of people here dont seem to understand deep learning. It is NOT a database lookup and it is NOT memorizing data. This is a major shift in how pattern recognition works. Of course, it is not "AI" as in general purpose intelligence, it is still just recognizing faces and speeches. It's just a very effective tool.
H
Since it won't be used to help humanity, but to remove work faster than it is replaced, kill it.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Not sure how AI is impacting my life today. Siri/voice recognition, I guess its' not even AI; but even if it is, it's not greatly enhancing my life. When steam-engine or electricity was discovered, they greatly enhanced human life (replace horse driven carts, electric motors to pump water). Any real world AI application that can help me today? the only thing I saw that I played with a few times is image recognition in google-photos (it was good/impressive). May be the self-driving vehicles could be a real application (the ones like beating a human in chess/go are not really enhancing someone's life compared to the steam-engines/electricity)
There are two major problems with deep neural nets: first, while the results look extremely promising, their operation is just as opaque as the biological neurons they were designed from, so a deep neural net can translate languages but we still don't know how it works. Second, in order to train these deep networks to perform new tasks, there is a labor intensive processes of creating the learning materials which can be used to train the networks. If you look around you will discover that a great amount of effort already goes into trying to educate children, it is already a contentious field with a number of fads and trends and the results are highly variable. So we don't understand how the networks work, and we have to spend a lot of effort creating training materials to make the networks smarter. Why should this problem become a priority over the education of biological children, which present the EXACT SAME SET OF PROBLEMS?
I don't want my CEO to know jack shit, I just want them to pump up that stock price.
Oh, Elon! You shouldn't have!
Right?
What we have now is various AI networks/algorithms/etc which cannot reason, cannot really use memory (in a sense how human beings do that) and which are less "intelligent" than earthworms with three hundred neurons.
Which automatically begs a question: if a creature with 300 neurons is more intelligent than our intelligent algorithms then maybe we still light years away from implementing proper AI, aka general AI.
For some reasons media has conflated AI to general AI, but these two things are a hundred orders of magnitude different.
Microsoft, which was absent from the event, is also working on bots and AI technologies. One company that is seemingly off the picture is Apple.
The entirety of Microsoft Windows is a botnet. It is Global Mother Fucking Spyware.
Apple has their own gay way.
http://i.imgur.com/dUk9aen.jpg
http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/26/9401563/iphone-6s-teardown-ram-confirmed-2gb
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3582640/Open-sewers-mildewed-walls-one-toilet-FORTY-people-Shocking-pictures-dirty-dormitories-Apple-s-iPhone-workers-live-like-animals.html
There is no such thing as a trustworthy homosexual.
The AI that's all the rage doesn't aid our understanding much.
Tensory McTensorFace
The stupidity is real. If it's anything like of the phone bots that understand complete sentences yet have screwed me three times over the past week with inaccurate information, I'll pass.
Nice strawman there, but sooo conspicuous.
I keep coming back to natural language compression prizes. The best hope we have of ameliorating human stupidity and ignorance is computer based education starting with a _neutral_ electronic genius with astronomical verbal intelligence. Verbal intelligence entails the ability to assess the verbal and cognitive character of your audience and modify your speech acts accordingly. The cost of electricity -- about 10 cents per kilowatt hour -- would be vastly lower than the cost of transferring benevolent _natural_ geniuses with high verbal intelligence into educational roles. Moreover, the exponential character of Moore's Law, combined with the history of bad general artificial intelligence theory that is finally giving way to mathematical rigor, offers an enormous potential for computer aided education in the near future -- if natural language compression is seen as the critical metric for "friendly AI" it is under such rigor. http://prize.hutter1.net/
Seastead this.
Sometimes I think that what passes for HUMAN intelligence is just all smoke and mirrors.
See also the Gartner Hype Cycle -- "the peak of inflated expectations", right before "the trough of disillusionment".