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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."
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."
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
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
The world should embrace Garry Kasparov. I like a man who gets beaten by an AI, but then embraces AI. =)
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
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.
Table-ized A.I.
A combination of both. The better the algorithm, the less brute force it needs.
Think of it as a lever.
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.
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.
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.....
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
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."
Table-ized A.I.
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.
What we desperately need is wisdom. There's very little of it in the world, and I doubt a machine will ever be wise.
will it be able to edit?
What would he know about AI, outside of chess? I suppose he's got opinions about economics next.
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?
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.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Sorry, I typed the parent too fast and made at least two typos. I'd correct them if I could.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Headlines with the phrase "The World Should Embrace Artificial Intelligence" seem a little... surreal...to put it mildly...
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -Dennis Ritchie
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?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
I'll happily embrace AI when it has been neutralized.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
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.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
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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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
E Proelio Veritas.
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.
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.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.