Garry Kasparov: The World Should Embrace Artificial Intelligence (bbc.com)

"Chess champion Garry Kasparov was beaten at his game by a chess-playing AI," writes dryriver. "But he does not think that AI is a bad thing." From Kasparov's interview with the BBC: "We have to start recognizing the inevitability of machines taking over more and more tasks that we used to do in the past. It's called progress. Machines replaced farm animals and all forms of manual labor, and now machines are about to take over more menial parts of cognition. Big deal. It's happening. And we should not be alarmed about it. We should just take it as a fact and look into the future, trying to understand how can we adjust."
Kasparov has given the issue a lot of thought -- last month he released a new book called Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins. But he also says that the IBM machine that beat him "was anything but intelligent. It was as intelligent as your alarm clock. A very expensive one, a $10 million alarm clock, but still an alarm clock. Very poweful -- brute force, with little chess knowledge. But chess proved to be vulnerable to the brute force. it could be crunched once hardware got fast enough and databases got big enough and algorithms got smart enough."

Comments

Did Kasparov not hear about AlphaGo?

[haruchai]

Go was supposed to be a much tougher challenge, not expected to be dominated by machines for decades and I wouldn't call it an outright win just yet for the A.I.s but the pool of humans who are even capable of holding their own against AlphaGo has likely dropped to below 1000, out of 7 billion

Re:Did Kasparov not hear about AlphaGo?

[ShanghaiBill]

Go was supposed to be a much tougher challenge, not expected to be dominated by machines for decades

I don't think many people keeping up with advances in machine learning were surprised. There were several teams working on Go, and they were making rapid progress. The hardware was also improving rapidly, and much more historical game data was available.

the pool of humans who are even capable of holding their own against AlphaGo has likely dropped to below 1000, out of 7 billion

No, the number is zero. No human will ever again beat the best Go program.

There will still be human Go tournaments, just like forklifts haven't done away with human weightlifting contests.

Re:Did Kasparov not hear about AlphaGo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Per recent results, it has dropped to zero out of 7 billion. It demolished the best player in the world 3 games to 0. At the Future of Go summit AlphaGo was 60:0 against professional players. There's little doubt it was better than any human player in its last incarnation.

Re:Did Kasparov not hear about AlphaGo?

[ranton]

I don't think many people keeping up with advances in machine learning were surprised.

Most people even involved with Alpha Go were surprised at how quickly they were able to dominate human Go champions. From what I have read only Hassabis was confident they could do it in a few years. In most cases even AI researchers are often wrong about how quickly AI is getting better.

Humans are not very good at comprehending exponential increases in capability, even in their chosen fields. People have been spending too much time worrying about the end of Moore's law, and ignoring that exponential increase in algorithm performance has been much faster than even Moore's law.

There will probably be some things we assume are easy which will still elude us in 50 years (like flying cars). But most things we think will take 100 years will probably take less than 20.

Re:Did Kasparov not hear about AlphaGo?

[LifesABeach]

When AI is applied against a human, it is daunting. But what I find worthy of investigation are those problems oriented towards assisting a human.

Re:Did Kasparov not hear about AlphaGo?

[ceoyoyo]

They were. Go is quite resistant to the brute force and play dictionary techniques used in the past on checkers and chess, which is why people wax poetic about the complexity of Go.

AlphaGo is trained using reinforcement learning, which, frankly, is such a twitchy thing that it's still surprising how well it can work.

Kasparov was beaten by a big computer programmed to play chess. AlphaGo is a very different thing.

Re:Did Kasparov not hear about AlphaGo?

[ShanghaiBill]

AlphaGo is a very different thing.

Indeed. Deep Blue played chess very differently than a human, and it was very specifically programmed to play chess.

AlphaGo plays Go very similarly to how a human plays, and what was learned about configuring and training ANNs is applicable to many other tasks.

Re:Did Kasparov not hear about AlphaGo?

[Anonymous Coward]

"likely dropped to below 1000". You probably meant to say "0".

Re:Did Kasparov not hear about AlphaGo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that AlphaGo is winning just about everyone I can see the weaknesses of humans. It's as if humans choose some "style" or preferences just because their trainers told them so. Humans also spend a lot of time calculating actual scores. Just noting how much time humans used with the latest version of AlphaGo (Ke Jie etc.), it seems AlphaGo is doing something very different: spending only a few seconds for each move. Maybe the game was a tic-tac-toe after all but humans never noticed it.

Re:Did Kasparov not hear about AlphaGo?

[just another AC]

There will probably be some things we assume are easy which will still elude us in 50 years (like flying cars).

Flying cars have not eluded us, we have chosen not to make them.

It is not a question of how hard the problem is, it is a question of how valuable the end result is (what is the user experience?). The designs end up being too much of a compromise or too expensive or just too heavily regulated compared to having both a car (or cars) and a plane (or planes).

Re:Did Kasparov not hear about AlphaGo?

[AthanasiusKircher]

In most cases even AI researchers are often wrong about how quickly AI is getting better.

Perhaps correct for a particular technical problem, but AI experts since the very beginning have been predicting major advances just around the corner. Organizers and promoters of the well-known Dartmouth AI conference in 1956 thought they could solve many of the major problems of AI (natural language processing, creativity, adaptability, etc.) with just a few dozen smart people sitting around talking to each other for a few weeks. Obviously that didn't happen (though the conference was productive).

Meanwhile, we have had numerous reports of systems "passing the Turing test" over the past decade, when no one has actually come close to the example standards Turing himself predicted would come to pass by the year 2000 with much less powerful computers.

There will probably be some things we assume are easy which will still elude us in 50 years (like flying cars). But most things we think will take 100 years will probably take less than 20.

"Strong AI" or anything even resembling a generic "intelligence" has already proven to be a "flying car" kind of scenario. That doesn't mean it can't happen in yet another 20 years, but so far we've had 65+ years of "just around the corner" for that.

Re:Did Kasparov not hear about AlphaGo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Humans are not very good at comprehending exponential increases.

FTFY.

Or stated differently

The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."

Re:Did Kasparov not hear about AlphaGo?

[The Evil Atheist]

and much more historical game data was available.

Historical game data makes up a tiny percentage of the games Alpha Go trained with. By last year, most of its training was playing millions of games against modified versions of itself.

Re:Did Kasparov not hear about AlphaGo?

[houghi]

There will still be human Go tournaments, just like forklifts haven't done away with human weightlifting contests.

But not as many.
The reason that people are afraid is that they are afraid of their job and income and the fact that they might not be able to provide for their loved ones.

He would not need to worry about that, so he can welcome the replacement of the workworce
If this fear is legit or not is something the future will decide. I think it is, unless there are serious social changes and those will be unlikely, unless we hang some people and overthrow some governments. At least, that is what history told me.

Re:Did Kasparov not hear about AlphaGo?

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

There will probably be some things we assume are easy which will still elude us in 50 years (like flying cars). But most things we think will take 100 years will probably take less than 20.

I get that you said "most". One exception sadly seems to be space exploration. I'm pretty sure if we could go back in to, let's say, 1965 and get President Johnson and the very top NASA and private industry space experts in a room and told them the following:

"I've got good news and bad. The good news is that we're going to get men on the moon in 1969 and bring them safely back multiple times. (Sounds of cheers from the room)
The bad news is that the last time we'll go will be 1972 and we won't try again and the next 45 years after that will mostly be spent dealing with one space station (much less impressive in reality then you're likely to expect it to be) and we will be decades, at absolute best, from ever going back to the moon, let along putting someone on Mars."

It's hard for me to imagine any one of those people would believe the bad news part of that, yet here we are.

Suspect

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like something an AI would say that's trying to take over the world... Someone better check this Garry entity for an off switch.

Re: Suspect

[Anonymous Coward]

His jobs already outsourced to AI. Now he's writing books. He's thrown in the towel.

They came for chess, I didn't speak out because I wasn't a chessian....

Re:Suspect

[alexo]

Current research is mostly centered on "weak AI", that is machines and algorithms that tackle a specific set of problems. As such, it cannot take over the world, but it can allow the elite/1%/whatever to get to the point where they no longer need other humans for anything.

Although the end result will likely be the same for you and me.

Re:Suspect

[Applehu Akbar]

What you mean is 'narrow AI', which is AI applied to specific tasks, like driving and personal assistance - and of course, specific games. All those commentators who sneered about AI never coming to fruition badly underestimated how these narrow AI applications are transforming the way we live.

Re:Suspect

[Kjella]

Current research is mostly centered on "weak AI", that is machines and algorithms that tackle a specific set of problems. As such, it cannot take over the world, but it can allow the elite/1%/whatever to get to the point where they no longer need other humans for anything.

Well yes and no. They're trying to find general tools to train specific problem solvers. The concepts are quite generic, you need a goal (win, score, performance, speed, cost, weight, size etc.), some rules (legal moves in games, physics in many other cases) and some tools (pieces in chess, building materials in construction, boxes in shipping and so on). The goal is not to program the solution, it's to make the system find the solution so you don't want to be writing rules about how you think it should play chess or Go or whatever. If the solution space is small, just hammer through it all. If you're able to build an evaluation function to tell if you're going in the right direction, also good. The problem is when you have a goal function, but not an evaluation function.

Like it's easy to check if a bridge works. It's a lot harder to meaningfully say something about a half-built bridge is any good. The solution space is huge and computers don't have any intuition about what makes sense and not. What AlphaGo managed to do quite quickly is to absorb a lot of games of average players to get a basic feel for what makes sense then refine from there. It doesn't even have to be good games, just games that do a lot better than placing stones at random. To go back at the bridge, it could scan bridge designs and start with humans doing beam bridges, arch bridges, truss bridge, cantilever bridge, cable-stayed bridge, suspension bridge and then start working variations. It doesn't just randomly try to make a bunch of steel beams form a bridge.

I think this has a lot of potential in other areas too, you don't really program human knowledge into the system but you use it to bootstrap a weak AI to do it quicker/cheaper/better. That part I don't think is Dystopian, it's more Utopian. The dangerous part is that a very small circle in power has all the keys, wire up a few servers and wire-tap everything. Consider what would happen if STASI had a system like PRISM. You don't really need AI for it, but AI helps because only need a few loyal men at the top and not a large number of henchmen. Of course so far it's mostly just information, but drones and cruise missiles are a start. One day there'll be security robots and they'll go all Elysium on us.

Re:Suspect

[Mostly a lurker]

Correct. Pretty much all the AI systems now in use are based on narrow AI. In almost any situation where you have sufficient training data, and a limited number of variables, you can develop narrow AIs that will out perform humans on specific tasks. In the specific domain, a modern narrow AI does feel like a super intelligent human, exhibiting intuition and creativity. The ultimate objective of DeepMind is to solve intelligence properly, building artificial general intelligence. To do this, we need to find ways where the available algorithms can apply what has been concluded about domains with lots of training data to novel situation where, by their nature, limited or even no training data is present. We really do not know how we are going to do that. It is possible that one or two breakthroughs could get us there quite quickly. Alternatively, it may require a large number of individual techniques that interact in complex ways . We are probably not going to know until the first successful AGI system is actually built.

New slave labor!

[iamacat]

In 20 years people will just make a downpayment on a loan for a self driving car and then that car will drive for Uber to make money for the master, whose job will consist of keeping it in good running order. Bored? Just design some fashions, print out a batch on 3D printers in the basement and trade with neighbors. After all, robots don't care that they are exploited.... or so will keep telling outselves.

This Is IBM Deep Blue Speaking

[dryriver]

The world should embrace Garry Kasparov. I like a man who gets beaten by an AI, but then embraces AI. =)

Re:This Is IBM Deep Blue Speaking

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Maybe one day Kasparov will embrace natural intelligence and reject Fomenko.

Re:This Is IBM Deep Blue Speaking

[hazardPPP]

Maybe one day Kasparov will embrace natural intelligence and reject Fomenko.

Ditto. Kasparov was a great chess player but he's also nuts. A total crank. I don't anyone really wants Kasparov endorsing anything, except a book on chess.

Re:This Is IBM Deep Blue Speaking

[Applehu Akbar]

I think you have Kasparov confused with Bobby Fischer. Kasparov was the sane one.

Re:This Is IBM Deep Blue Speaking

[chihowa]

...the sane-ish one. Overall, there's a bit of a trend here.

"New Chronology is a great area for investing my intellect...My analytical abilities are well placed to figure out what was right and what was wrong."

Re:This Is IBM Deep Blue Speaking

[hazardPPP]

You should also read some of Kasparov's "geopolitical analysis". He's a Putin critic, so people give him the benefit of the doubt, but once you read it you realize he's crazy.

Re:This Is IBM Deep Blue Speaking

[Anonymous Coward]

Kasparov, for one, welcomes our new chess playing AI Overlords!

I hate people who change the sentence structure mi

[Anonymous Coward]

d-sentence. For example: "We should just take it as a fact and look into the future, trying to understand how can we adjust." -- "how can we" should obviously be "how we can".

BF != SA

[Anonymous Coward]

chess proved to be vulnerable to brute force...and algorithms got smart enough

My understanding of brute force is that it doesn't require smart algorithms. Which is it?

Re:BF != SA

[alexo]

A combination of both. The better the algorithm, the less brute force it needs.

Think of it as a lever.

Re:BF != SA

[Anonymous Coward]

My understanding of brute force is that it doesn't require smart algorithms. Which is it?

It can be both. Even in chess, if you use PURE brute force, the time required quickly becomes prohibitive. However if you are good at some tree pruning and can avoid recursing down hopeless places in the tree, you can avoid spending a lot of time that is better spent elsewhere. So it is a combination of clever algorithms to save thinking time, and brute force to chase deeply into the tree where it makes sense.

Much of the improvement in comptuer chess since the 1970's came not from brute force improvements but from algorithmic improvements.

Re:BF != SA

[religionofpeas]

The better the algorithm, the less brute force it needs.

Exactly. Deep Blue, when it was playing Kasparov in 1997 did 200 million positions per second. A modern chess engine running a desktop PC would easily beat Deep Blue while only looking at 1-2 million positions per second. The brute force speed is lower, but the amount of chess knowledge is much higher.

Re:BF != SA

[gweihir]

Your understanding is correct. Chess is very much _not_ vulnerable to brute-force. It is far too complex for that and you cannot model the other side, i.e. the problem itself is not subject to a winning strategy computed by brute-force. My guess is that whoever wrote that has no clue what "brute force" means in CS.

Re:BF != SA

[Mostly a lurker]

What chess playing programs do can pretty much be described as brute force, not to an end of game solution, but choosing the best move based on examining all plausible lines, and using an evaluation function to determine how good each line is.

What is exciting about the (still narrow) AIs developed recently, based primarily on multi level neural networks, is that they can work in situations where no one knows how to create a hand crafted evaluation system. Basically, the system works out for itself what are promising actions, based on its learned knowledge of the probability that each action will lead to desired outcomes. The huge difference is that such an AI can be built without the creators knowing much about the problem domain, or being able to understand the basis upon which the AI is coming up with its solutions. For the most part, the AI is just presented with objectives and large amounts of historical data relevant to the target domain, and works out how to make good decisions in an unsupervised fashion. In some cases, the AI can then refine itself via reinforcement learning where it generates its own data and determines the best solutions. This is still narrow AI, but looks to the observer much more like an independent thinking entity.

Re:BF != SA

[gweihir]

No, they cannot. Chess games use "quality" metrics to decide which move to make. These are not compatible with "brute force" approaches. A "brute force" algorithm just tries everything and can only recognize success or failure, nothing in between. The problem here may be that in CS, the term "brute force" has a well-defined meaning, while in general usage it does not.

Social puzzle

[Tablizer]

Almost everyone likes the idea of machines taking over grunt work like laundry and driving, but our society is NOT designed to distribute the benefits of AI evenly enough: many will get screwed, career-wise.

It's not so much about AI versus jobs, but how society adjusts (or doesn't). Change can be painful, especially if done wrong.

If the current trend continues, the owners of the technology will get really rich, and the rest will struggle or fail, fighting bitterly over the remaining scraps in ever uglier "culture wars", in part fueled by the rich who want to stay rich by demonizing those who complain.

Re:Social puzzle

[iggymanz]

computers and more broadly information tech and internet have been changing the workforce and economy for decades. You'll be in error if you project the present into the future where the only that changes is computers doing work. there are breakthroughs in energy production, biology, and yes even info tech that will make all sorts of new jobs even as we have robots

Re:Social puzzle

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of people tend to share that thought but if you think about it, if people do not have the money to buy products, the companies will not survive. When virtually nobody is working and nobody has money the corporate world will cease to exist. What happens then? Money will become worthless so all the crazy wealthy and powerful people will become just ordinary people as their wealth will be worthless.

Re:Social puzzle

[Tablizer]

that will make all sorts of new jobs

It's pretty safe to say that most those "new jobs" will require fairly hefty education requirements. Our current education system is not up to the task.

Bernie S. is right in that a college education (or equiv.) is now a necessity in the current economy the way a high-school education was in the recent past.

Re:Social puzzle

[Tablizer]

That's one of the reasons why many big co's are cash-rich: they don't expand because there are not enough consumers (with money) to buy their products if they expanded. Thus, they sit on cash, using it as an emergency or future strategic fund.

Re:Social puzzle

[NettiWelho]

if people do not have the money to buy products, the companies will not survive. When virtually nobody is working and nobody has money the corporate world will cease to exist. What happens then?

I don't think corporations actually care about the money itself very much. It is the absolute control of resources they're after.

What happens after everyone is unemployed? The corporate overlords give the autonomous flying solar powered drone armies order to fire on starving, rioting civilians and remotely shut down all the public transport which renders everyone immobile since nonelectric motor vehicles have been banned. Megalopolises will be depopulated in short order.

Money will become worthless so all the crazy wealthy and powerful people will become just ordinary people as their wealth will be worthless.

Money being worthless isn't really a problem if its because of overabundance of actual resources at hand.

Re:Social puzzle

[ranton]

That's one of the reasons why many big co's are cash-rich: they don't expand because there are not enough consumers (with money) to buy their products if they expanded. Thus, they sit on cash, using it as an emergency or future strategic fund.

That cannot possibly be correct because there are no companies which have exhausted all potential customers in every potential industry. They sit on the money because they have not identified a way to create a competitive advantage to gain market share against current or potential competitors.

If they did have more customers for their existing profitable products, those new customers would only give them a larger cash stockpile.

Re:Social puzzle

[Dutch Gun]

What happens after everyone is unemployed? The corporate overlords give the autonomous flying solar powered drone armies order to fire on starving, rioting civilians and remotely shut down all the public transport which renders everyone immobile since nonelectric motor vehicles have been banned. Megalopolises will be depopulated in short order.

I think I saw that movie. "They just want some food, for God's sake!"

A lot of people here seem to have dystopian predictions like this. I'd argue that history is against you though, as so far, technology and automation has improved the human condition immensely. I'm not quite going to predict a Star-Trek like utopia, but I think there will be enough benefits to outweigh most of the negatives.

One of the reasons I don't believe people will become all unemployed is that people will simply find work to do, and to trade with others. We've already invented entire leisure-based industries because we don't have enough work available for critical infrastructure. For instance, I make videogames for a living, a product the world could easily live without. This trend will just scale up until the population working in critical infrastructure is tiny, and the rest of us are more or less trading optional services and products that AI isn't really suited for. When you go eat out at a nice restaurant, people want to eat a meal cooked by a chef, not a robot, and be served by people they can interact with, not by plastic and steel machines. Likewise, I think creative endeavors like making videogames will be the domain of humans for quite some time.

Re:Social puzzle

[iggymanz]

oh, so there will be immense pressure to improve education and to take education more seriously by a larger section of the populace? I don't see that necessity as bad, only the failure to do so would be bad.

Re:Social puzzle

[Tablizer]

That cannot possibly be correct because there are no companies which have exhausted all potential customers in every potential industry.

It's not a matter of possible/potential, it's a matter of whether they see the risk justifiable enough. I'm sure Apple is thinking that the auto-drive-car biz is a big gamble being they don't have experience there, and they did display hesitation.

Re: Social puzzle

[Anonymous Coward]

"...Money will become worthless so all the crazy wealthy and powerful people will become just ordinary people as their wealth will be worthless."

As envisioned by Gene Roddenberry...

Re:Social puzzle

[Anonymous Coward]

Just wait until the parasitic "useless class" starts being rounded up and processed into fertilizer! Everyone will immediately see the value of education for the ability to be useful to others :)

Re:I hate people who change the sentence structure

[Anonymous Coward]

His native language is Russian, which he probably speaks much better than you do.

50 years of nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

Humans playing chess is like a dog riding a bicycle: it can be done, but it's not what the organism was designed for. Same is true for Go. The old AI idea of playing games was just a way to show that computers could show SOME intelligent behavior. The Turing test does not involve a game of chess, checkers, go, or tic-tac-toe. Ultimately, tightly constrained domains with well-defined rules but complex search trees are fertile for machine dominance.

The harder problems are involved in what humans do without introspection or reasoning. Even perception -- once thought to be trivial -- has been exceedinglly hard to crack. It's harder for a machine to see what is going on on a chessboard than it is to win the game.

Re:50 years of nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

The Turing test does not involve a game of chess, checkers, go, or tic-tac-toe

What makes you say that?

Re:50 years of nonsense

[alexo]

Humans playing chess is like a dog riding a bicycle: it can be done, but it's not what the organism was designed for.

The organism was not designed, it evolved.
And the only thing it evolved for is to survive long enough to replicate under a narrow (on a cosmic scale) set of conditions.

Re:50 years of nonsense

[religionofpeas]

And the only thing it evolved for is to survive long enough to replicate under a narrow (on a cosmic scale) set of conditions.

And chess is mostly played by men to show that they can dominate other men, and become more attractive as a mate.

Re:50 years of nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

Heresy! Heresy I say!

Re:50 years of nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

The Turing test does not involve a game of chess, checkers, go, or tic-tac-toe.

Don't be so sure of that. What about:

x|.|.
-+-+-
.|x|.
-+-+-
.|.|x

... your move, o.

Re:50 years of nonsense

[gweihir]

Indeed. That nicely sums it up why computers playing Chess or Go are pretty meaningless stunts.

Of course, the AI fanatics will not even understand what you are talking about.

Re:50 years of nonsense

[ceoyoyo]

Perception is harder than human-level chess, but not Go.

Now we've got systems that perform perception tasks AND play GO better than humans.

Re:50 years of nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

Old saw TOE. Everybody knows it's wrong, DRIFTING NOT REDIRECTION is what you get and not showing enough genes to diversify anyhow. Environment sensitive post-generative biochem mods? That's not Darwin random, but LaMarck (internal purpose) design. Might as well say gawd done it !

Re:50 years of nonsense

[brantondaveperson]

But not one that drives a car, or can cross the road.

Re:50 years of nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I sure know that at high school my chess club was just inundated with hot chicks. It was like a pool party in there!

Re:50 years of nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

Humans playing chess is like a dog riding a bicycle: it can be done, but it's not what the organism was designed for.

The organism was not designed, it evolved.
And the only thing it evolved for is to survive long enough to replicate under a narrow (on a cosmic scale) set of conditions.

Well, dogs were kinda designed by humans, via husbandry and they could be re-designed for riding bicycles. Personally, I would find that rather amusing.

Re:50 years of nonsense

[ceoyoyo]

Both of those. Do you not follow the news? There are self-driven cars driving around all over the place. Any number of robots could cross a road as well, such as the combat robots Google makes.

Re:50 years of nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

You worked a False Dichotomy fallacy and a Bare Assertion Fallacy into a single brief post.

Congratulations.

But since as a general fact your statement has been simply false for around 50 years, due to genetic engineering of organisms by humans ourselves, you way want to puff up your "fact now, yes, but impossible then" pose to feel better about your blatant atheistic bias.

Re:50 years of nonsense

[brantondaveperson]

I do follow the news. None of these things work yet. Personally, I doubt they ever will, without extensive infrastructure, and even then only in very specific situations. Self-driving cars will not be driving around inner city streets. Robots will not be walking kids to school. End of story.

Also - VR is a dead-end technology that no-one wants, and 3D tv was a terrible idea.

Also - Google making 'combat robots', does this alarm anyone else? I'm sure we'll make robots that are good at killing people, but that doesn't require intelligence.

Re:50 years of nonsense

[ceoyoyo]

Well, that's an opinion all right. Now it's in your posting history. Come back in five to ten years and review.

Re:50 years of nonsense

[brantondaveperson]

I will. Unless a car being auto-driven carrying someone playing a VR game while driving their 3D TV home kills me while I'm following a helpful robot across the street, of course.

Re:50 years of nonsense

[ceoyoyo]

You keep mentioning VR and 3d TVs. Are you familiar with the red herring fallacy?

lol

[Anonymous Coward]

He got his ass handed to him by AI, submit to your grandmaster overlord.

Check and checkmate mate.

Yeah....

[Anonymous Coward]

After the last november, i tend to agree...

Never Underestimate Brute Force

[tekrat]

Here's the thing about 'brute force' in computing. Computers can go through millions of computations and thousands of strategy scenarios in a second. As we are seeing today, a computer can simply brute force its way through encryption, simply by trying *everything* until you get the desired result, simply because the machines are so damn fast.
Brute Force can be an exceptionally powerful way of doing something, if it is tweaked to and pointed at a particular problem, in Kasperov's case, it was Chess.
Yes, the computer wasn't intelligent, but then again, neither are half the people I meet. Those people are simply brute forcing their way through life, without a single thought in their heads.....

 

Re:Never Underestimate Brute Force

[Anonymous Coward]

a computer can simply brute force its way through encryption, simply by trying *everything* until you get the desired result

It cannot, not in general. In weak cases, yes. For strong encryptions with a large key space, the time to do that exceeds the expected lifetime of the universe even if every atom IN the universe was formed into a computer to solve the problem.

Small keys or weak algorithms can be brute forced, but not all encryption can be brute forced in any plausible way.

Also, Chess is "somewhat" brute forced, but Go could not be due to the large branching factor.

Re:Never Underestimate Brute Force

[gweihir]

You seem to be unaware of the state-of-the art in encryption. Today, you want > 250 bits of key entropy to be long-term secure. These are infeasible to break with digital computers in this universe (not enough matter, energy and time until heath-death) and even with quantum-computers (should they ever be useful for anything, currently they are not and they may well scale so badly that they never will be).

The one thing you can brute-force in modern crypto done right is bad passwords. But that is about it.

Re:Never Underestimate Brute Force

[umafuckit]

Indeed. I'd go further: it's not even clear to me why something that solves problems by brute-force can't be inteligent. It could well even be that our brains are also brute-forcing but in parallel rather than in series. We don't know that they're not.

Re:Never Underestimate Brute Force

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds like you're saying I need to memorize a 250-bit (44-digit mixed case alphanumeric) random password instead of a 91-bit (16-digit mixed case alphanumeric) random password. Ugg. The 16-digit one is already murder on my fingers, even with muscle-memory. :(

Re:Never Underestimate Brute Force

[Anonymous Coward]

Then again a keylogger og sniffer can intercept the bits whenever required. This probably happens more than we like to think about..

Security is never about one line of defence, or preventing 100%, but also about not making it worthwhile and minimizing damage.

Captcha: revering

Re:Never Underestimate Brute Force

[gweihir]

Password protection (e.g. by Argon2 or to a lesser degree PBKDF2) brings this down quite a bit. Sure, if you want to memorize an encryption key directly, you would need to go to 256 bit or so. But for a password, "absolute security" against brute-forcing starts somewhere around 100 bits. Your 91 bit entropy password will not be broken. It may get observed or circumvented though.

Re:Never Underestimate Brute Force

[gweihir]

Indeed. One problem is that you are typically not aware of all paths of attack or that the level you can secure different paths is different. Hence it boils down to risk management. For small aspects, you can get 100% security though. For example a 100 bit entropy password with Argon2 and reasonable parameters is unlikely to be breakable, ever. But it does nothing about the alternate attack path a keylogger offers.

Re:Social puzzle [correction]

[Tablizer]

Correction re: "...the way a high-school education was in the recent past."

Rewrite: "...the way a high-school education has been since the recent past."

We already do

[Anonymous Coward]

The entire basis of our computers is automated menial cognition, does he think AI means computers that can read our minds and plan our day or solve interpersonal problems?

Forget AI

[reboot246]

What we desperately need is wisdom. There's very little of it in the world, and I doubt a machine will ever be wise.

Re:Forget AI

[gweihir]

Indeed. The problem is not having high intelligence. Many people have that. The problem is what to apply it to and in which fashion. That is a problem _outside_ of intelligence, as intelligence cannot simply be applied to everything. The pre-selection is critically needed or intelligence gets overloaded and becomes useless. Yet most people, including highly intelligent ones, routinely fail at this task.

Re:Forget AI

[Namarrgon]

Wisdom is intelligently applied knowledge. Computers are already great at storing knowledge, but they've been lacking the intelligence to apply it. That is now starting to change.

Re:Forget AI

[Anonymous Coward]

Do wise men often insist that some potential accomplishment is impossible, now and forever more?

Re:Forget AI

[The Evil Atheist]

I doubt a human will ever be wise. We're still searching, and every guru or prophet has been disappointing so far.

Interested in AI, provided hard limits work

[Anonymous Coward]

Interested in AI, provided hard limits work with it.
For example, I'd love to have Alexis, but only if I could get the same features without **any** internet transmission of audio. I'd also like to lock down which, exact, specific, domains/servers, it is allowed to communicate.

This is the issue with almost all IoT and "AI" solutions. They always want more than I'm willing to provide.

Don't get me wrong - I expect Amazon to know what I order, the quantity and the prices. They need to know where to ship it and how payment is taken. That's all fine. They don't need to capture my voice, listen to it for "quality control" and send it off to some data warehouse somewhere.

Then there are all the things that we want from autopilot vehicles. They need limitations, since driving on a dirt road is very different from driving on a 4-lane divided highway with good visibility.

Years ago, I worked on a project to capture what experts did in solving complex problems in the space program. The intent was to use those steps to train newer people, but we had an idea to help reduce the time to solution drastically. Sorta like a medical diagnosis machine. This was long ago and they core team used 80% and above likelihood to be sufficient for any proposed answer. It was all about the statistics from prior runs.

So, provided I can control the AI "prime directives" which can only be overruled due to death or serious injury probabilities, then I can't wait for AI to be here. My first prime directive would be ZERO WAN-Internet use. I bet that would severely limit the usefulness of any AI. Most of these things can already be handled by simple crontabs anyways.

Very poweful -- brute force

[turkeydance]

will it be able to edit?

But Kasparov is a chess player.

[tietokone-olmi]

What would he know about AI, outside of chess? I suppose he's got opinions about economics next.

Re:But Kasparov is a chess player.

[Anonymous Coward]

What do *you* know about what he does or does not know?

For that matter, what do *you* know about AI? I'd wager good money he knows more about the subject than you do.

Yes, Buggy Whip Responses Coming

[pipingguy]

One thing is certain... there are going to be a lot fewer paying 'knowledge work' jobs very soon. What happens then - do we invent Futurama's Suicide Booths?

Botvinnik got this wrong too

[Archtech]

These issues are very deep and potentiall deceptive. Even the cleverest of people can get hopelessly misled.

In Genna Sosonko's excellent book "Russian Silhouettes", a series of in-depth sketches of great chess players whom Sosonko knew personally, there is a very instructive anecdote about Mikhail Moiseyevich Botvinnik, multiple world champion and considered the "father" of the mighty Soviet School of Chess.

As well as being a superb chess player - although an amateur by modern standards, as he strictly limited the time he devoted to the game - Botvinnik's "day job" was electrical engineering. He launched projects to study the potential of computers for a wide range of important types of work. Sosonko tells the following instructive story.

[Botvvinik declared that] "... to write a program for managing the economy is easier than for chess, because chess is a two-sided game, antagonistic. The players hinder each other, and the devil knows what that means, whereas in economics that is not the case, and everything is simpler".

It's not so often that one catches a world-class expert in such an utterly mistaken declaration. Today in 2017 computers play chess better than any human, but the problem of managing the economy is still not understood at all. And until it is understood, it cannot be programmed.

Re:Botvinnik got this wrong too

[religionofpeas]

And until it is understood, it cannot be programmed.

That's a common fallacy. We're doing a lot of stuff now that people don't understand. See for instance Q-Learning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... What's required is a value that indicates the amount of progress at each point in time, and the system can learn how to make progress by trial and error, finding patterns between input, actions, and results by itself. The system can then apply those patterns in different but similar circumstances.

Re:Botvinnik got this wrong too

[gweihir]

Well, this person was not a world-class expert at strong AI. Highly capable experts in one field can make completely ridiculous statements when they lose sight of the limits of their expertise.

However, I think he was talking about soviet-style "plan economy" (does not work), and that may indeed have been easier to implement than playing chess.

Re:Botvinnik got this wrong too

[ceoyoyo]

I think your example reinforces his point. Q-learning, or more generally reinforcement learning, is a learning algorithm. You don't program the system, you set up some basic infrastructure and then train it by example. We've learned that such systems can learn to do things we don't understand, and cannot program.

Re:Botvinnik got this wrong too

[Archtech]

I think he was talking about soviet-style "plan economy" (does not work), and that may indeed have been easier to implement than playing chess.

Precisely my point! The Soviet leaders may have believed that economic planning is a great deal easier than it really is. Otherwise they would never have attempted to make plans for a system that even our Western "free enterprise capitalist" system has been getting badly wrong of late.

As for not being "a world-class expert at strong AI", he was speaking in the 1960s when there was no AI (strong or weak) and hence no experts in it.

Re:Botvinnik got this wrong too

[Anonymous Coward]

That is a pretty slanted point of view.

What e.g. Marx described was an utopia. Its fairly evident form his writings (which mostly describe a modern day social democracy like most of 'the West' (if not world?) is today).
When the revolution struck in 1917, it was mainly against the status quo. And then the (mostly uneducated) proles decided that this 'utopia' is what should be striven towards, the leaders were pretty much stuck with implementing that to their best.
Yes, even a planned economy is difficult to manage. But it is probably more susceptible to brute-forcing than chess is. If the communist uprising happened today, with todays computing power available, the outcome might be quite different. There are plenty of historic texts analyzing how the lack of compute problems caused the plans to be on too coarse an abstraction level, leading e.g. to goods being stuck in warehouses and transportation, instead of being put to use. Capitalism solved this by distributing the computation load to the smallest computation unit, the individual.

Apologies for the typos

[Archtech]

Sorry, I typed the parent too fast and made at least two typos. I'd correct them if I could.

As someone binge watching show "person of interest

[keith_nt4]

Headlines with the phrase "The World Should Embrace Artificial Intelligence" seem a little... surreal...to put it mildly...

Another non-expert

[gweihir]

With a famous name, but no clue what he is talking about when it comes to AI. I find this really pathetic. Whatever happened to actually listening to the experts in that subject area?

Re:Another non-expert

[skam240]

But if slashdot (like all news sources) didnt have lighter fluff pieces, what would you have to complain about?

Re:Another non-expert

[Anonymous Coward]

What did he say that's not correct? Are *you* an expert in AI that you would even recognize where his knowledge about the subject fails?

I'd also like to suggest that experts in AI are, by definition, embracing AI. Since, you know, they have devoted significant time in their lives to becoming experts in the subject. Can you name a single "expert" in AI that doesn't "embrace AI"? What would that even look like?

Re:Another non-expert

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd also like to point out that he *literally* wrote a book on the subject.

Re:Another non-expert

[gweihir]

I'd also like to suggest that experts in AI are, by definition, embracing AI. Since, you know, they have devoted significant time in their lives to becoming experts in the subject. Can you name a single "expert" in AI that doesn't "embrace AI"? What would that even look like?

Hahahaha, you are soooo badly off about this one. This is Science, not Religion.

Re:Another non-expert

[gweihir]

There are tons of books around that are filled with complete nonsense.

Not going to happen.

[sethstorm]

I'll happily embrace AI when it has been neutralized.

Shut up Garry

[Anonymous Coward]

If AI beats a Gary in chess, then you know it's a good thing? Kind of narcissistic. He could be an asshole in real life.

Heck no

[rsilvergun]

if there's a population crash from suicide it'd make labor valuable again. The whole point of this is to devalue labor and put all power back in the hands of capital. Now get back to babby-making slave.

Consider the implications this

[Anonymous Coward]

Computers rarely "see" all the way to a win. They see to a certain position and then evaluate the position i.e. desirable/not desirable.

When a computer lost a game against a human it was therefore due to a mistaken evaluation of a position.

Humans (inc. Kasparov) would then work with programmers to correct the evaluation algorithm.

Might we not then view this algorithm as a sort of crystallization of the entirety of HUMAN chess knowledge ?

Let's tackle the natural one for starters

[Anonymous Coward]

The artificial one sounds very cool and all but, why not starting embracing natural intelligence first? We could use more of it too...

You gonna need a bigger space station...

[__aaclcg7560]

I just finished re-reading "The Two Faces of Tomorrow," the first novel in "Cyber Rogue" by James P. Hogan, one of my favorite SF stories, where scientists set up an advanced AI to manage a space station and the military went to war to determine whether or not they could pull the plug if the AI determines that humans are a nuisance. Be careful about embracing the AI. The AI just might embrace back.

GREAT idea!!

[kelanos]

The world should embrace its demise at the hands of the soulless plutocracy and their machine slaves!

AI in the hands of the people would be a different story, which is the vision the average proponent pastes over reality while humming a merry tune (while their head is on fire)

quacks like a duck

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of people get twisted up over whether AI can even theoretically being "truly self-aware" or some such philosophical nonsense. Or whether it is really intelligent or just a super sophisticated input-response engine.

The fact is that a machine doesn't need to be self-aware to be dangerous.

But besides that we are in fact now seeing cases where AI-like systems are responding in ways that they weren't specifically taught, which some try to discount as buggy programming.

But maybe the human intellect is just the result of having an input-response engine so complex that the bugs in our programming result in creativity.

It is a big deal.

[Sqreater]

These machines do not have motivations. As they replace human thinkers, they decrease the number of human thinkers in that particular area of human thought, interrupting the stream of advance in thought in that area. What will happen is that thought in a particular area will freeze at some level. Because machines have no motivation array, they have no creative thought. They advance nothing on their own.

Didn't think hard enough

[ebvwfbw]

Sure, beating him in chess could be considered brute force. How does he explain Jeopardy? I don't think we can classify that as brute force.

Could be an exciting time for mankind. Could also be a harbinger of evil. If we let them control too much.