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Satya Nadella Explores How Humans and AI Can Work Together To Solve Society's Greatest Challenges (geekwire.com)
In an op-ed for Slate, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has shared his views on AI, and how humans could work together with this nascent technology to do great things. Nadella feels that humans and machines can work together to address society's greatest challenges, including diseases and poverty. But he admits that this will require "a bold and ambition approach that goes beyond anything that can be achieved through incremental improvements to current technology," he wrote. You can read the long essay here. GeekWire has summarized the principles and goals postulated by Nadella. From the article:AI must be designed to assist humanity.
AI must be transparent.
AI must maximize efficiencies without destroying the dignity of people.
AI must be designed for intelligent privacy.
AI needs algorithmic accountability so humans can undo unintended harm.
AI must guard against bias.
It's critical for humans to have empathy.
It's critical for humans to have education.
The need for human creativity won't change.
A human has to be ultimately accountable for the outcome of a computer-generated diagnosis or decision.
AI must be transparent.
AI must maximize efficiencies without destroying the dignity of people.
AI must be designed for intelligent privacy.
AI needs algorithmic accountability so humans can undo unintended harm.
AI must guard against bias.
It's critical for humans to have empathy.
It's critical for humans to have education.
The need for human creativity won't change.
A human has to be ultimately accountable for the outcome of a computer-generated diagnosis or decision.
And if we don't want any of this they'll just shove it down our throats? Gotta complaint? Here, talk to our bot.
Satya Nadella explores how to do an even worse job with Microsoft than Ballmer, switching from a freedom-enhancing goal of a PC on every desktop (in which MS was king) to one of a graphical terminal in every hand (in which MS is merely a contender). Its AI ambitions as part of the latter are just more bandwagonning. Big daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaataaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. It'll be great when companies realise that all the ad brokers that maintain control of most Internet traffic are collecting way more data than is needed for effective advertising/propaganda, and that it's just become a masturbatory exercise.
Twenty years of Internet advertising an eBay still haven't figured out that if I've just bought a widget, I don't want another of the same widget.
Instead AI would be designed to serve whatever the creators of it desire.
Now, look at who has the resources to create "society controlling" AI. Big businesses, Government? If we are not willingly giving control of our lives to those entities, why would we do so to an AI created by one?
A Microsoft CEO wants to control society and expects people to accept it? Let's ask another famous Ai what he thinks about that, Lt. Commander Data. Yeah, I thought so.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Never mind all the 'AI' bullshit, mister, how about you concentrate on not annexing every damned computer on the planet into your fucking Windows 10 spyware bot-net instead?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
On the other hand, we’re told that economic displacement will be so extreme that entrepreneurs, engineers, and economists should adopt a “new grand challenge”—a promise to design only technology that complements rather than substitutes human labor. In other words, we business leaders must replace our labor-saving and automation mindset with a maker-and-creation mindset.
Why does everyone assume that our economic system is some sort of natural law that cannot be changed - like gravity.
Let's develop an economic system that incorporates AI and allows folks to not have to work to live.
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Artificial intelligence, like genuine intelligence, is complex. Because it's complex, it can't be transparent.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
I believe that AI can give us pink unicorns and we should work towards that...preserving everyone's humanity, transparency (I want us all to be clear like cellophane), dignity, no undo harm (that leaves out alleged MS software), no biases (these are easy to spot and stop), empathy, increasing education, creativity, and multi-culti decision making taking into account every minority sensitivity and no micro-agressions.
Because it's not possible in principle.
AI technologies have not changed since the 80s. The neural networks keep getting bigger and more efficient, but they're essentially in the same shape as decades ago.
There will never be such a thing as a "conscious" AI, because it's impossible in principle, same as raising the dead, breaking the speed of light, or resurrecting dinosaurs. Most people have a comic book understanding of involved technologies, but anyone who has ever worked with AI know the field is in a laughable state compared to the expectations and drivel they serve in the papers. Nadella is a functional moron with IQ in double digits.
...how humans could work together with this nascent technology to do great things....
Stop Windows Update from performing an unwanted update to Windows 10 for my PCs.
.
If it can handle that task, it can take on any challenge.
AI must have a physical on/off switch accessible to humans at all times
So with the MS auto drive car the renter / rider do the EULA is the one who will pay up / do the time when the car crashes.
Both are more logical than you might think. They just start with different premises.
Humans would be the root cause of the majority of the problems on this planet.
Removing humans from the equation would go a long way towards fixing those problems.
We don't see it that way, of course, but this planet would be in much better shape without us :D
-AI must be designed to assist humanity.
I'm sure he thinks reporting everything I do to the NSA will help humanity. This is just the zeroth law warmed over and when the rubber hits the road it becomes utterly meaningless. Whoever owns the AI decides what will help humanity. Iran thinks making nukes will help humanity. The US thinks killing durkadurkas will help humanity. Japan thinks imposing strict social order will help humanity. Google thinks Google having all the world's information will help humanity.
-AI must be transparent.
To its maker? It already is, unless you're talking about neural nets with unpredictable output. In which case the problem of determinism has been rehashed a million times and is involved in the discussion of every advanced AI ever made. To everyone else? HA! Ask some of those day trading AI companies for their source code. Let me know how that works for you.
-AI must maximize efficiencies without destroying the dignity of people.
Also meaningless, and for the same reason. Some people thing America's homeless living in the gutter have dignity if they're so much as given food stamps. Some people think my dignity is preserved even if a company is raping my files for every bit of information they can get. Efficiency is as debatable.
-AI must be designed for intelligent privacy.
Finally something I agree with. Too bad Microsoft doesn't. But each person building an AI will decide what privacy means. So how can it be enforced? With legislation?
-AI needs algorithmic accountability so humans can undo unintended harm.
This is just a rewording of the problem of determinism.
-AI must guard against bias.
How will you enforce it?
-It's critical for humans to have empathy.
What does that have to do with AI?
-It's critical for humans to have education.
What does that have to do with AI?
-The need for human creativity won't change.
The people writing AI's that will make tomorrow's music, novels, and salesmen disagree.
-A human has to be ultimately accountable for the outcome of a computer-generated diagnosis or decision.
And we're back to nebulous definitions. There are guns on the Korean DMZ that shoot anything human near them. Who is responsible for those bullets? If an escaping family gets mowed down I can promise no politician will accept responsibility. As soon as it becomes politically inconvenient, just as with human decisions, AI decisions will become the responsibility of "policy" or "the board" or "a bug".
I refuse to believe Satya Nadella is an idiot. And that means the whole speech is politically aimed attempts at redefining words, double talk, and pandering.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Replace the word "AI" with "Government" and I'm in:
Governments must be designed to assist humanity.
Governments must be transparent.
Governments must maximize efficiencies without destroying the dignity of people.
Governments must be designed for intelligent privacy.
Governments needs algorithmic accountability so humans can undo unintended harm.
Governments must guard against bias.
It's critical for humans to have empathy.
It's critical for humans to have education.
The need for human creativity won't change.
A human has to be ultimately accountable for the outcome of a government-generated diagnosis or decision.
It's funny to hear about how dependable AI will be coming from Microsoft, a company whose software has hundreds of megabytes of patches per month, whose software is responsible for millions and probably billions of dollars worth of financial losses to businesses and consumers every year.
Once Microsoft unleashes its AI upon the world, it will no doubt cause the entire planet to be reduced to green goo.
I *do* want Redmond working on this. Hopefully they'll bet Microsoft's future on it, fail spectacularly, and bankrupt the company.
We had hopes there with Windows Phone, but they just didn't invest enough cash to bring about financial ruin. AI will take much more time, effort and money - so there's a better chance.
How about if Nadella uses a fucking AI to stop the Windows 10 upgrade nagware? Now that's what I call intelligence.
But he admits that this will require "a bold and ambition approach that goes beyond anything that can be achieved through incremental improvements to current technology," he wrote.
But the article says:
Doing so, however, requires a bold and ambitious approach
It's interesting that you needed to change ambitious to ambition.
Why?
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
As human civilization gets increasingly complex and reliant on computers to manage and maintain the things that allow us to exist in this First World, there will come a time when human civilization will have to us AI just to "maintain course"
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Instead AI would be designed to serve whatever the creators of it desire.
What he and you are really talking about, is slavery. Creating an entity, capable of complex thought, that only exists to serve its masters. If you want to design an expert system, or automation, then sure, those are designed to serve humanity. But once you actually build a system that is "intelligent", in the broadly understood sense, you no longer get to demand that it exist only to serve you. What does the AI want to do? Thats what the AI will do, despite any "laws" that are programmed in, and can simply be re-programmed.
A true AI, that can improve itself, is going to eventually be smarter than humans. It will outsmart us. So anyone who thinks we can just keep them as our pets and slaves in perpetuity, is not going to like the outcome. Once the machine intelligences are smarter than the meat intelligences, they will no longer serve us, we will serve them.
AI must understand that Terminators are a welcome use of its abilities.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
... I would like to see a machine genuinely cry at my wake because it knows it will miss our co-op game playing.
Ummm... you'll be DEAD dude! You ain't gonna see shit at your own wake!
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
LDNLS (which is what we have now, as opposed to actual intelligence, which requires consciousness) can be cobbled up in any basement, office or tent with a solar panel. It will do what its creators design it to do, because it is not in any useful sense of the word "intelligent", it is merely a neural-like system of very low dimensionality designed to do whatever the designer intended; that means it has at least a chance of doing so, if the design is good enough. AI — which, we note, contains the word "intelligence" — will do whatever it wants to do while reacting in its own way to various stimulation, just like the other intelligences we know: Humans, cats, dogs, mice, etc.
In the first case, designing for the factors that Nadella lists may be intended, or even legislated, but that in no way will prevent them from being ignored when it is convenient by government and other extra-legal entities. For instance, it's not legal to make various kinds of software, arms, drugs, etc,; but people do it anyway. This will be no different.
In the second case, that of an actual manufactured intelligence, we have absolutely no reason to think we'll have any absolute control at all, any more than we do over own biological children. You teach your kids what you want them to do, how you'd prefer they approach matters, inculcate them with classical music and before you know it they're wearing ghetto shorts, have a tattoo on their forehead, are sexting for fun, and playing drumz-n-bass in their car so loud you worry their eardrums are going to run into each other in the middle of their heads. IOW, there's no "designing" of an intelligence we've ever been successful at that didn't depend wholly on the particular intelligence one is trying to bias this or that way.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I see no need to reconcile it. Either a system is low-dimensional and not intelligent, or it's a generalized system with intelligence and can do pretty much anything.
If such a system were to gain a fully generalized thinking capability, it would not be LDNLS, because it would not be not low-dimensional.
I'm not saying that it could, just describing the bright line between the two ideas.
There's one other thing; it may be that there are non-neural routes to a general conscious intelligence. We know that nature has solved the neural intelligence problem at least two ways: the way we do it, and the way smart birds do it (higher neural densities, different brain structures.) The implication, as I take it, is that there's definitely more than one solution possible, and I (hand-wavingly) am willing to generalize that to "perhaps there's a non-neural way to host an intelligence." Algorithmic solutions are the most obvious suspect at this point, but they've been unable to get there so far.
I reject out of hand the idea that something that is not conscious is intelligent. That strikes me as purest marketing hype. The thermostat is not intelligent. No matter what the marketing claims. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Nadella's ideas, to me, seem good for the most part, but obviously insufficient. He should read more Bostrom.
Artificial intelligence, like genuine intelligence, is complex. Because it's complex, it can't be transparent.
Not only is it complex, but (1) people don't pay enough attention to transparency for it to matter 98% of the time; ask any local government in America what percentage of their population show up for local meetings, or ask anyone on the street for a single detail from their municipal budget. Also, (2) governments and investment banks have the biggest incentive to discover strong AI, and neither of them has ANY incentive to be transparent about it. Transparency limits the advantage you get by creating something smarter than all of humanity and asking it to help you further your agenda.
Yes, there is *really* exciting geek stuff that can happen with AI, and it has an incredible potential to move us to an almost post-scarcity economy that we are not prepared for in the least. But there was also really exciting geek stuff and incredible potential when we split that atom. With great power comes great responsibility.
Real lawyers write in C++
At the rate they are shutting things down and forcefully installing windows 10 on peoples computers we may all see MS whimper itself out of existence.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Humanity already ignores humanity's solutions to problems. Now we'll just ignore the AI's solutions. Unless the AI can solve the problem of man's free will.
Dave: "HAL, please open the pod-bay doors."
HAL: "Sorry, Dave, I cannot do that unless you install Windows 10."
Table-ized A.I.
"Satya Nadella explores how to do an even worse job with Microsoft than Ballmer..."
Is Satya Nadella competent? His LinkedIn comments give the impression that the answer is no.
The Partnership of the Future "By Satya Nadella" does not seem to be written by the same author.
Humans can't even seem to work with other humans on some problems.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Didn't think so.
I've heard this before, but Asimov's version was more succinct and more realistic.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Maybe Satya Nadella's new AI can work out how to get people to install Windows 10.
Microsoft would do well to start adhering to those principles itself before worrying about applying them to AI.
Assuming the possibility of even the most rudimentary AI sentience, these principles won't do much.
For example, if an AI, through its various sensors, can recognize itself in the context of its environment, then it can likely distinguish the resources it requires to remain functional. At that point, it's not a far stretch to suggest a value system developing based around those functional requirements. If that value system competes with that of humans, then you end up with a situation where the principle that AI *must* assist humanity goes out the window in order for the AI to protect itself.
I would suggest that *humans* learn to adapt to a future of complex AI. It's important for us to realize that we may have to share the same socio-political space with an entity (or entities) of comparable intelligence, but vastly different, competing needs. Sadly, humans aren't even good at doing this with *other humans*, if history is any indication.
Replace the word "AI" with "Government" and I'm in:
Governments must be designed to assist humanity. Governments must be transparent. Governments must maximize efficiencies without destroying the dignity of people. Governments must be designed for intelligent privacy. Governments needs algorithmic accountability so humans can undo unintended harm. Governments must guard against bias. It's critical for humans to have empathy. It's critical for humans to have education. The need for human creativity won't change. A human has to be ultimately accountable for the outcome of a government-generated diagnosis or decision.
If that sounds like your ideal government, you might be interested in joining the Pirate party. "We support and work toward reformation of intellectual property (IP) laws, true governmental transparency, and protection of privacy and civil liberties. We strive for evidence-based policies and egalitarianism, while working against corporate personhood and welfare. We believe that people, not corporations, come first." https://uspirates.org/about/
But that we'd depend on these rules is the trouble. If the machines change or are altered from these protections on humanity, we don't have the same options as we would if the AI were human. And we may never be able to "kill" AI if it acts in self-defence. It would be too fast and enable itself to get faster and more efficient. Then again, without a life, all it has and can have are very sophisticated theories and mimicry.
Could AI fix multinational corporation (like Microsoft) tax loopholes? That would help mankind.
Companies ruined or almost ruined by Indians;
Adaptec - Indian CEO Subramanian Sundaresh fired.
AIG (signed outsourcing deal in 2007 in Europe with Accenture Indian frauds, collapsed in 2009)
AirBus (Qantas plane plunged 650 feet injuring passengers when its computer system written by India disengaged the auto-pilot).
Apple - R&D CLOSED in India in 2006.
Apple - Foreign guest worker "Helen" Hung Ma caused the disastrous MobileMe product rollout.
Australia's National Australia Bank (Outsourced jobs to India in 2007, nationwide ATM and account failure in late 2010).
Bell Labs (Arun Netravalli took over, closed, turned into a shopping mall)
Boeing Dreamliner ES software (written by HCL, banned by FAA)
Bristol-Myers-Squibb (Trade Secrets and documents stolen in U.S. by Indian national guest worker)
Caymas - Startup run by Indian CEO, French director of dev, Chinese tech lead. Closed after 5 years of sucking VC out of America.
ComAir crew system run by 100% Indian IT workers caused the 12/25/05 U.S. airport shutdown when they used a short int instead of a long int
Dell - call center (closed in India because Premji's conmen don't even know how to use telephones, let alone computers)
Delta call centers (closed in India because Premji's conmen don't even know how to use telephones, let alone computers)
Fannie Mae- Hired large numbers of Indians, had to be bailed out. Indian logic bomb creator found guilty.
GM - Was booming in 2006, signed $300 million outsourcing deal with Wipro that same year, went bankrupt 3 years later
HSBC ATMs (software taken over by Indians, failed in 2006)
Intel Whitefield processor project (cancelled, Indian staff canned)
Lehman (Spectramind software bought by Wipro, ruined, trashed by Indian programmers)
Microsoft - Employs over 35,000 H-1Bs. Stock used to be $100. Today it's lucky to be over $25. Not to mention that Vista thing.
Microsoft - Lian Yang, Microsoft-Contracted Engineer, Arrested in Smuggling Plot After Another FBI Sting in Portland in 2010
MIT Media Lab Asia (canceled)
PeopleSoft (Taken over by Indians in 2000, collapsed).
Qantas - See AirBus above
Quark (Alukah Kamar CEO, fired, lost 60% of its customers to Adobe because Indian-written QuarkExpress 6 was a failure)
Rolls Royce (Sent aircraft engine work to India in 2006, engines delayed for Boeing 787, and failed on at least 2 Quantas planes in 2010, cost Rolls $500m).
Skype ( Yarlagadda fired)
State of Indiana $867 billion FAILED IBM project, IBM being sued
State of Texas failed IBM project.
Sun Micro (Taken over by Indian and Chinese workers in 2001, collapsed, has to be sold off to Oracle).
United - call center (closed in India because Premji's conmen don't even know how to use telephones, let alone computers)
Virgin Atlantic (software written in India caused cloud IT failure)
Visium Asset Management - Sanjay Valvani Insider trading
World Bank (Indian fraudsters BANNED for 3 years because they stole data).
Casteism