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Finland's Ambitious Plan To Teach Anyone the Basics of AI (technologyreview.com)
In the era of AI superpowers, Finland is no match for the US and China. So the Scandinavian country is taking a different tack. From a report: It has embarked on an ambitious challenge to teach the basics of AI to 1% of its population, or 55,000 people. Once it reaches that goal, it plans to go further, increasing the share of the population with AI know-how. The scheme is all part of a greater effort to establish Finland as a leader in applying and using the technology.
Citizens take an online course that is specifically designed for non-technology experts with no programming experience. The government is now rolling it out nationally. As of mid-December, more than 10,500 people, including at least 4,000 outside of Finland's borders, had graduated from the course. More than 250 companies have also pledged to train part or all of their workforce.
Citizens take an online course that is specifically designed for non-technology experts with no programming experience. The government is now rolling it out nationally. As of mid-December, more than 10,500 people, including at least 4,000 outside of Finland's borders, had graduated from the course. More than 250 companies have also pledged to train part or all of their workforce.
basic could just mean some common sense, like I know that I have to take my car to the shop if it strange noise. AI, big data, deep learning, is not fundamentally difficult concept, just a lot of math. I don't need the math to drive.
Our communist government being retarded again.
"AI is going to have as big an impact on our society as electricity"
Risto Siilasmaa, Chairman of board, Nokia
Classic. Because THAT guy is good at predicting the future.
If Finland had a strong leader they would shut their government down and build a wall. This is a ridiculous policy that is not going to help anyone. Their people will be screaming and crying when all the Swedes, Norwegians and Russians overrun their land, kill their men and rape their woman. Who needs AI then? Build a wall!
Final exam is Turning Test. If you fail it, you get A+ in the class.
... teaching those 55k people the basics of calculus and linear algebra.
Because "AI" starts with tricks like linear regression, and that involves a bunch of matrix calculations, and the theoretical backing is full of integrals. Fun for the whole family! Well, it should be, but the way mathematics are typically taught just gets most people to go "but what do I even need all that for?!?" and then they drop it as fast as they can. So, start with fixing your maths teaching.
an online course that is specifically designed for non-technology experts with no programming experience
And here's me thinking teaching AI to programmers for free might be a better idea.
This seems pretty useless. It would be better to teach everyone (or at least a lot of the population) the basics of programming. "AI" has gone through several winters in the past, there's no reason to think that the cycle will ebb again. Sure, it won't be as low of an ebb as prior cycles, but it's going to be tough for some folks who have experience working in the field to find work at some point, let alone all of the people just jumping on the bandwagon.
I'm actually involved in "AI" work at my business and... it's not "AI". It's all buzzword marketing hype for state machines and not real Artificial Intelligence*. This is like saying we're going to teach kids about Phrenology because it's the new hotness in the 1800s.
(*Which is not the same as the No True Scotsman Fallacy here)
"there's no reason to think that the cycle will ebb again." -> there's no reason to think that the cycle won't ebb again.
I'm sure these government sponsored courses are going to train these "cream-of-the-crop" slackers into AI supergeniuses. No doubt Finland will soon be the AI capital of the world. /sarcasm
Why do people who vote for government to take over education and healthcare expect government to actually succeed at doing so when the methods the governments typically employ are unsound?
I took an AI course as a University Graduate and discovered that it really is all math and that the Theory is by no means new. We just have far more powerful machines today that can do a lot more calculations for cheap. Most AI algorithms are simple pattern matching neural nets or genetic algorithms. We still don't have a good handle on what it means to be conscious or even what being self-aware really means despite knowing that ourselves. A lot of folks tend to believe in some magical take over the world AI but we're by no means near that yet.
... teach philosophy. There is no way intelligence, a specific trait of sentience, can be artificial. AI is nothing more than brute force computation. Knock it off you tech cucks.
Here's the basics, you look at a lot of pictures, and I mean a lot. Maybe get the entire Internet to do it for you when they login.
And now YOU CAN DRIVE A CAR!
AI, it's magic!
At this point "AI" is nothing more than a buzzword. There is no intelligence, just a sequence of IF, SWITCH/CASE statements.
That's not intelligence.
What if the AI said: "AI isn't for just anyone"?
The way Finnish government has been spending over the years with tech sector funding, I suppose this is just as good as the rest of it. The public sector decision makers seem to have little real understanding or competence. I suppose with the ecosystem and the people already in it, anyone not fitting that description wants to go elsewhere.
I can already imagine soon having to work with people who will tell me they did "elements of AI" or something similar. Then proceed to think they are experts and happily tell me how everything should be done and is all great. Ask them to do it and they will be like "dude I made this vision and powerpoint, what more do you need". Finally they buy some crappy "AI" system from the old IT houses they always bought crap from and pretend it is all so great, visionary and world-changing. While the system grasps with the simplest things.
Same shit, different words. Oh well, back to work I guess :P.
It is in Fennoscandia.
They're not going to teach everyone 3D printing or how to use VR glasses or use AR?
I can't keep up with these fad technologies. How about teaching everyone to mine asteroids?
Most would agree with that prediction. But the key is when, which nobody can reliably predict. It may take 10 years or another 500 years before bots have what we call "common sense" (assuming humans don't bleep themselves back to the stone age).
He didn't give a time-frame. That means he may be a forgotten pile of bones before his prediction comes true.
Nobody knows how to give bots general common sense such that nobody can say what's required to do it, even the top current experts.
Table-ized A.I.
You would have to go into things like "teach everybody how to write an opera" or "teach everybody how to do brain-surgery".
Ambitious, yes, utterly stupid, you bet.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Fucking learn your geography
Good for the Finns.
Lots of countries have trouble just to teach their pupils 'I'.
It's a Nordic country. There's a difference.
Here in the US, it seems that "I" is the only subject taught and learned in schools...
non-technology experts with no programming experience
OK, beyond the one or two hidden wunderkinds you'll find, how on God's green earth are you going to teach these people "the basics of AI"?
"AI is going to have as big an impact on our society as electricity"
You say that as if you doubt it to be true, but you sound a lot like this guy scoffing at David Bowie about the impact of the internet... back in 1999...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The way the headline is phrased, it seems like it will become something that will be taught in every classroom.
In reality it is just an online course that a small part of the population are expected to follow. Coincidentally, it more or less matches the number of people who can code. That's a good initiative, but not especially "ambitious", and that's probably for the best.
BTW, it looks like anyone can take the course: https://www.elementsofai.com/
Such specificity in education is a great benefit to any society.
What's that adage about locking the barn door after the horse escapes? Would AI have saved Nokia?
To borrow from a famous quote, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from bullshit if you let the PR dept give it a futuristic name.".
AI in day-to-day business is nothing more than super-fast number crunching based on decades of instantly accessible data, a tipping point has come where predicitons are becoming better and more accurate due to the huge amount and quality of data. Insurance companies have been doing this for years, storing all that claim data and accident stats and they can now better predict your risk rating based on age, family history, lifestyle, residence, etc, it's not magic or "AI" is just fast stats processing.
Deal with it.
Is this to prepare society to cope with automation of jobs?
Congratulations 1% of the population is now prepared.... To automate the rest of the population out of a job
aka Math
The only ones of the three who built a country-wide wall was Eastern Germany, aka the GDR.
I guess Finland and the Soviet union had fortified SOME places, but that is not the same as a wall that spans an entire border.
C - the footgun of programming languages
For their size, Finland isn't a bad place for studying AI. Remember the "Progressive growing of GANs" paper from Nvidia? The one with the first high resolution non-existent celebrities? That was four Finnish guys.
Finland has more than enough talent to find a nice academic niche for themselves in AI.
Are they also teaching "how to ride unicorns" or maybe "how to speak draconic languages"?...since AI (as in actual, independent, artificial intelligence) DOESN'T ACTUALLY EXIST.
According to TFA, they're talking about the "AI" that offers options based on your Facebook perceives, or that interpret photographs online...Google calling it AI doesn't make it so. Those are reinforced-dynamic learning heuristics fronting a massive database search engine.
Don't get me wrong, those are fascinating and interesting things that I myself would love to understand better (not sure what actual value there is to pushing for broad understanding of the techniques, though), but were falling gullibly for marketing-speak by allowing then to be called "artificial intelligence". Actual AI - the idea of a synthetic analogue to a creative, independent human brain (or even, let's say, a true simulation of a simplistic animal or insect brain) - is DECADES away at the most optimistic estimates.
I'm not really sure I understand what's going on: the conventional wisdom seems to have abandoned reality in favor of this sort of invented utopia where we simply insist things exist and then start acting as if they do? Slashdot in particular is rife with articles about how AI will take your job (it won't, anytime soon), how we'll all be using self driving cars (there are MASSIVE technical hurdles remaining, to say nothing of legal norms yet undetermined), and how we can basically run the world on solar/wind power (we're decades from that, at least, if it's even possible). Some people are troubled by fake news...I'm now troubled by the apparent willingness of great swathes of the population living almost entirely in a fictional now.
-Styopa
I agree with your distillation of the current applications of machine learning. Your last sentence, I think, captures the value that can be brought to Finland by running 55k people through a basic machine learning tutorial. A diverse portion of the population will be exposed to the potential of machine learning and may become 'consultants' identifying ML application opportunities throughout Finland's economy. The exercise may be especially useful in identifying automation opportunities where there is no financial incentive, but could produce an improved quality of life.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
When the UK had the BBC Micro, Dragon 32/64 and was going to have fully educated computer workers exporting to the world?
Many people in a generation got to see, work with and use a computer.
The result was a UK generation that was just as average as every other UK educated generation.
With the cost of all the new computers to account for.
When France invested in new computer education? All the Thomson products for French education?
Same result as the UK. People got to use the computer and stayed as average as past generations.
The USA moved in with Microsoft and Apple and people played new fun computer games and did some GUI desktop publishing.
The USA was ready with the usable computer products and services the people living in the EU wanted, needed and enjoyed.
What will the AI do for Finland?
A to of new money will get used for education.
Will the AI do anything more that it did for the past decades of funding? No.
IQ cant be "educated" into a generation that will not and cannot learn using the next topic in "computers".
The GUI, robot kits, new programming language, a code of conduct, a book to copy code from, a map created of the UK did not result in better students.
AI and education will be fun for the people selling the products and services needed to "teach" about the AI.
All the software, support material, teaching, new computers.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Isn't the point of AI, so that people don't have to bother? Even more so than coding? Whats the big whoop that 10 million people know how to automate away everybody elses job vs only 100K, which is not likely anyway? Under what rational world does Joanne Sixpint the cashier need to know backpropagation or RNNs? The true basics she can get more effectively and with more fun from scifi shows, no government money wasted. Just more government paternalism and blind corporate greed for low wages
The course was quite informative and well done. It would be a great place to start on AI concepts - it is not a coding course Would recommend it to anyone interested in AI but not doing it professionally
We all know: https://www.reddit.com/r/consp...
"Liberalism is a very noble idea, currently controlled by some very bad people. Be sure you do not get the two confused.
Time to found Faro industries and name my firstborn Ted. Maybe work on getting Project Zero Dawn created before we go about destroying ourselves?
This will fail the same way teaching everyone how to compute the intersection of two lines failed.
You cannot graduate from High School (at least in the U.S.) without learning how to find the intersection of two lines given their equations.
And yet very few people to this day know how to solve the problem.
It will be the same for these AI classes. Most of people who are exposed to it won't understand it well enough to even regurgitate verbatim much less conceptualize it and be able to work in the field.
Estonia responds by teaching everyone brain surgery
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Took course last year The course was quite informative and well done. It is a great place to start on AI concepts - it is not a coding course Would recommend it to anyone not professionally in AI You can see - it is just one click away