You cannot get from the intelligence of a rock to Einstein in one step. The long term objective of DeepMind is to solve intelligence. Their work on AlphaGo, as well as their earlier work on unsupervised learning and optimal play of Nintendo games, are steps along this road, important steps. Games are an excellent medium for examining approaches to AI. It is as well if fundamental approaches are tested there before applying them to cancer diagnosis, drug research, electric network optimization and other areas where AIs designed by DeepMind are now being applied. Are we at the point yet where any AI can replicate all the intellectual capabilities of an intelligent human? Absolutely not. That remains decades away, but recent progress has actually surpassed the most optimistic expectations of experts 3 or 4 years ago.
All I have been able to glean so far is that the rewritten version uses around 10% of the computing power (both to train its neural networks, and during actual play) to achieve much improved play compared with the original AlphaGo used to beat Lee Sedol. Thus far, although promised, the architecture behind the rewritten version is unpublished. Later this week, some insight is going to be provided.
The old version was based on a combination of techniques (primarily multiple neural networks, combined with Monte Carlo techniques). The interesting thing about the way it operated was that it could tell you which move was likely best, but could not explain why. The same is actually true of human Go players. While locally best moves can be identified, the human selects the globally best move based to a large extent on feel. The game is too complex (both for humans and AIs) to use calculation on a board wide basis. Both the old and new AlphaGo systems appear to demonstrate characteristics we would refer to as "intuition" and "creativity" if seen in humans. How similar is it to human instinct and creativity? We really do not know.
I am extremely interested in learning how the rewritten system works. I think the twinning matches (between two teams each with one human expert and AlphaGo collaborating with each other) will also be extremely significant. The short to medium term promise of AI involves humans and AIs working together. As the AIs become increasingly complex, and the manner in which it comes up with recommendations ever harder to comprehend, this is a critical challenge to be addressed.
While FastMail is based on Cyrus IMAP, and is providing resources for its development and documentation, I think it is to early to declare Cyrus completely finished. In terms of collaboration features, the addition of CardDAV and CalDAV support a few years ago helped somewhat. Lack of its own file sharing tools is a serious limitation, but FastMail has managed a degree of integration with Dropbox.
Hold off on a variation of the dead parrot sketch for the time being!!
It is unsurprising that there is resistance to this idea.The implications (more on that below) are horrific.The fact, though, is that robots and AIs are becoming rapidly more capable, and denial is not going to prevent organizations from selecting the most cost effective way to get jobs done. Even if the robot/AI solution has some limitations, the profit motive will win out (as anyone who has used call centers staffed by people who cannot communicate effectively in your language should recognize).
What are the implications? The most obvious is mass unemployment/under employment. This is going to create a huge disadvantaged class in rich countries. Proposals for a national basic income are well meaning, but unrealistic. It might happen in a very limited number of smaller countries, like Finland, but the elites in most countries who decide such matters will never willingly allow some of their wealth to be given to "non productive" members of society.
The BBC ran an interesting opinion piece recently (http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170418-how-western-civilisation-could-collapse) that predicted a breakdown of Western civilization if gross and increasing levels of inequality continue to occur. I think those predictions ring true. Further, the piece does not even consider the problems introduced by huge segments of the population becoming completely surplus to the elite's needs.
There will be valuable jobs those displaced by robots and AIs could do, but they will be of no economic benefit to the elites to would have to put up the money to finance them.
Ever since I was a child, I have been reading about how automation would create more leisure time, and the challenge being how that leisure time will be used. The reality of the last 40 years is that those with jobs work harder than ever for the same or less money in real terms. Total wealth has increased, but (the predictions of trickle down economics notwithstanding) virtually all the increase has gone to the already wealthy.
It has become politicized, because strong business interests are resisting acceptance of scientific consensus. This is nothing unusual. Business will always dispute facts that can lead to regulation costing them money. They will even claim that their cynical twisting of the facts is mandatory, because they have a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value.
Climate change is complicated, and no serious scientist will claim they know exactly where it is leading. What is universal among climate scientists is that human induced climate change has and is occurring. There are tentative conclusions about some of its effects, and warnings that failing to act to reduce human induced climate change risks truly catastrophic consequences. If the worst happens, it may not be for 100 years, but the earlier action is taken, the lower the cost of remediation is likely to be. The commonly held view is that it is irresponsible, and totally unfair to future generations, to dodge taking prudent steps because it will cost some businesses money.
Perhaps, whether one considers "one" to be very "formal and impersonal" depends on which of the many dialects of English one grew up using. As you can tell from the previous sentence, I consider its use perfectly natural in some situations. Yes, I know many would replace "one" with "you", but that in a literal sense changes the meaning.
If the construction costs cited are true, even given the small size of the demonstration house, this seems a very viable approach. One would imagine most of the human labor could ultimately be replaced by robots, and (although 24 hour completion is impressive) taking a whole week would not alter the economics significantly. (I guess that might not be true if the capital cost of the printer makes the investment uneconomic at, say, 20 to 30 houses a year, but I doubt that is the case.)
It is even worse than the summary suggested. The BBC did not originally send the evidence to FB. They did so when FB asked them to ahead of an interview arranged with FB's director of policy Simon Milner. Reporting them to the police for providing what they were requested to beggars belief.
Everything involving space is so complex and expensive right now. Perhaps, the idea is to simplify it down to a one-click ordering service with the option to return it within 30 days if it is not as described on delivery.
In the current political climate, a computer that can simultaneously deal with facts and unfacts may have useful applications. In the past, we only needed to keep track of real data. Going forward, it seems we need to simultaneously handle both actual data and what the user wants to be the actual data. Being able to draw conclusions from the superposition of both versions of reality needs to be extended from social media into practical applications.
Unlike with games like Chess (best moves can be precisely calculated) and Backgammon (simple probabilities), Poker requires adapting to human behavior, indeed varying your play depending on what you learn about your opponent. The techniques are going to be applicable to a wide range of situations. For instance, I will go so far as to claim that we will shortly be wise to use an AI to advise us on investment decisions. (In the past, the computer has been used for speed, and reacting to subtle market signals, but not so much for long term investment planning.)
The next challenge is going to be independent learning. I believe human experts still supervise the learning process of all the best AIs. Once the need for the human adviser goes away, AIs are literally going to be everywhere. Your phone AI will recognize and react to your current mental state, as well as help you overcome everyday problems. The AI in your fridge could become a huge help in keeping you compliant with your diet plans.
I guess your point is that artificial intelligence can never exist. Even when, as now, the final trained system operates in ways we do not fully understand, we still know the algorithms that underlie the learning process. Only something mysterious and not properly understood in its entirety could be regarded as "intelligent". As a corollary, scientists who rely on computer simulations to predict climate change are not showing intelligence. Only climate deniers who use their intuition, unbiased by stupid computer models are showing creativity and intelligence. In fairness, intelligence is a difficult thing to define. However, dissing everything involving algorithms and processing power as inherently unable ever to be considered as "artificial" intelligence appears to me misguided.
I can remember when/. attracted some of the best informed and intelligent people you could find anywhere on the Internet. Now, all we have are members who inform us that we do not need computers, and their ability to find correlations in huge data sets. All we need is the intuition of smart people.
Look back at the early proposed tests for artificial intelligence. When supervised deep learning systems can use the immense processing capabilities of modern computers, to not only match, but to exceed the capabilities of humans in a wide range of problem spaces, it is appropriate to describe the result as "artificial intelligence". We do not mean literally that we have an intelligent bunch of integrated circuits and harddrives. But, the overall system can produce results that we would until recently have considered only achievable by human experts. Indeed, our AIs, in many situations, exceed the capabilities of the best human minds.
I am used to the idea of the general public feeling threatened by the capabilities of modern technology. I just wish sites supposedly intended for intelligent, scientifically-informed individuals could be exempted from such lack of reason.
As I understand it, the Giant Impact Hypothesis has Theia's impact creating debris that gradually coalesced into the moon. That this debris formed several smaller moons before they joined up seems plausible, but I am not sure what is really different about what they are proposing.
The term used for the popular recent solutions is "deep learning". To be more specific, the most effective solutions are "guided deep learning". The term "guided" means that the important inputs and outputs are partly chosen by humans trying to tune the learning process. Progress has been rapid in just the last two or three years. Image recognition, for instance, an extremely tough area until very recently, is now pretty much solved. In this area, the next frontier to be cracked is totally independent learning without any need for humans to be involved. Such a breakthrough may or may not be achieved quickly.
Another very interesting area of research is how to deal with imperfect information. Where large amounts of data is available, and that data can unambiguously be used to determine a correct solution (such as moves in chess, or analysis of MRI scans for tumor analysis) artificial intelligence can already surpass the performance of any human if the AI system is given sufficient training. With AIs that must deal with imperfect information (especially prediction of what humans or other AIs might do) progress is being made, but the best humans are generally still superior to the best AIs. Examples are playing poker, and stock market decisions (though the latter is still heavily AI assisted).
Still a major problem for AIs is where limited clearly relevant data to guide decision making is available. Clearly, humans rely on a lot of peripheral experience to suggest a plan of action. The actions taken may be imperfect, but at least there is a basis for the decision. Before AIs can be made equally (or hopefully more) adept, the process needs to be better understood.
If you want to eliminate neural nets as a form of artificial intelligence, you are going to need to conclude that most human "reasoning" is similarly not really intelligent behavior. Plenty of research shows that humans make most decisions in a manner highly analogous to those in neural nets (and you can predict the result of this "reasoning" by brain monitoring before the subject knows which decision he is going to make). It is true that humans, if challenged, will attempt to justify their decisions, but their justifications are often pretty nonsensical. Meanwhile, while complex neural nets, trained by large volumes of empirical data, indeed cannot simply explain how decisions are reached, we at least can control the data used for that training. Human "decision making" is based on data that is often highly dubious, and (although subject to attempted justification) similarly shaped by complex training from large data sets that cannot be explained simply.
Most of these publications are only a Google search away from a free download. To worry about people buying it (presumably, thus, being easily identifiable) when people can anonymously acquire it for free, strikes me as truly ridiculous.
If it really does work (and extraordinary claims do require extraordinary proof) we have absolutely no idea how. The current explanations do not make any sense within known science. Who knows, maybe we have stumbled onto a way of directing dark energy. At this stage, I am not dismissing the possibility that it is the science discovery of the century, though I still consider it more likely than not that further study will debunk it.
... but even IS confiscating all phones and computers has failed to cut the population completely from the outside world. The actions of the Turkish authorities are leading them down a slippery slope to a total, hated police-state.
With the claim of suitability as a private cloud to store your photos, video, and code all in a maximum of 16 MB of flash storage, the compression tools they provide must be impressive, indeed.
Slashdot Mirror
You cannot get from the intelligence of a rock to Einstein in one step. The long term objective of DeepMind is to solve intelligence. Their work on AlphaGo, as well as their earlier work on unsupervised learning and optimal play of Nintendo games, are steps along this road, important steps. Games are an excellent medium for examining approaches to AI. It is as well if fundamental approaches are tested there before applying them to cancer diagnosis, drug research, electric network optimization and other areas where AIs designed by DeepMind are now being applied. Are we at the point yet where any AI can replicate all the intellectual capabilities of an intelligent human? Absolutely not. That remains decades away, but recent progress has actually surpassed the most optimistic expectations of experts 3 or 4 years ago.
All I have been able to glean so far is that the rewritten version uses around 10% of the computing power (both to train its neural networks, and during actual play) to achieve much improved play compared with the original AlphaGo used to beat Lee Sedol. Thus far, although promised, the architecture behind the rewritten version is unpublished. Later this week, some insight is going to be provided.
The old version was based on a combination of techniques (primarily multiple neural networks, combined with Monte Carlo techniques). The interesting thing about the way it operated was that it could tell you which move was likely best, but could not explain why. The same is actually true of human Go players. While locally best moves can be identified, the human selects the globally best move based to a large extent on feel. The game is too complex (both for humans and AIs) to use calculation on a board wide basis. Both the old and new AlphaGo systems appear to demonstrate characteristics we would refer to as "intuition" and "creativity" if seen in humans. How similar is it to human instinct and creativity? We really do not know.
I am extremely interested in learning how the rewritten system works. I think the twinning matches (between two teams each with one human expert and AlphaGo collaborating with each other) will also be extremely significant. The short to medium term promise of AI involves humans and AIs working together. As the AIs become increasingly complex, and the manner in which it comes up with recommendations ever harder to comprehend, this is a critical challenge to be addressed.
While FastMail is based on Cyrus IMAP, and is providing resources for its development and documentation, I think it is to early to declare Cyrus completely finished. In terms of collaboration features, the addition of CardDAV and CalDAV support a few years ago helped somewhat. Lack of its own file sharing tools is a serious limitation, but FastMail has managed a degree of integration with Dropbox.
Hold off on a variation of the dead parrot sketch for the time being!!
I have heard this argument before, and it held true for the first half of the 20th century. Over the last 30 to 40 years, the poor have not benefited from the advances that make the things you mention possible. See, for instance, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/09/18/the-government-is-spending-more-to-help-rich-seniors-than-poor-ones/
It is unsurprising that there is resistance to this idea.The implications (more on that below) are horrific.The fact, though, is that robots and AIs are becoming rapidly more capable, and denial is not going to prevent organizations from selecting the most cost effective way to get jobs done. Even if the robot/AI solution has some limitations, the profit motive will win out (as anyone who has used call centers staffed by people who cannot communicate effectively in your language should recognize).
What are the implications? The most obvious is mass unemployment/under employment. This is going to create a huge disadvantaged class in rich countries. Proposals for a national basic income are well meaning, but unrealistic. It might happen in a very limited number of smaller countries, like Finland, but the elites in most countries who decide such matters will never willingly allow some of their wealth to be given to "non productive" members of society.
The BBC ran an interesting opinion piece recently (http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170418-how-western-civilisation-could-collapse) that predicted a breakdown of Western civilization if gross and increasing levels of inequality continue to occur. I think those predictions ring true. Further, the piece does not even consider the problems introduced by huge segments of the population becoming completely surplus to the elite's needs.
There will be valuable jobs those displaced by robots and AIs could do, but they will be of no economic benefit to the elites to would have to put up the money to finance them.
Ever since I was a child, I have been reading about how automation would create more leisure time, and the challenge being how that leisure time will be used. The reality of the last 40 years is that those with jobs work harder than ever for the same or less money in real terms. Total wealth has increased, but (the predictions of trickle down economics notwithstanding) virtually all the increase has gone to the already wealthy.
It has become politicized, because strong business interests are resisting acceptance of scientific consensus. This is nothing unusual. Business will always dispute facts that can lead to regulation costing them money. They will even claim that their cynical twisting of the facts is mandatory, because they have a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value.
Climate change is complicated, and no serious scientist will claim they know exactly where it is leading. What is universal among climate scientists is that human induced climate change has and is occurring. There are tentative conclusions about some of its effects, and warnings that failing to act to reduce human induced climate change risks truly catastrophic consequences. If the worst happens, it may not be for 100 years, but the earlier action is taken, the lower the cost of remediation is likely to be. The commonly held view is that it is irresponsible, and totally unfair to future generations, to dodge taking prudent steps because it will cost some businesses money.
Perhaps, whether one considers "one" to be very "formal and impersonal" depends on which of the many dialects of English one grew up using. As you can tell from the previous sentence, I consider its use perfectly natural in some situations. Yes, I know many would replace "one" with "you", but that in a literal sense changes the meaning.
If the construction costs cited are true, even given the small size of the demonstration house, this seems a very viable approach. One would imagine most of the human labor could ultimately be replaced by robots, and (although 24 hour completion is impressive) taking a whole week would not alter the economics significantly. (I guess that might not be true if the capital cost of the printer makes the investment uneconomic at, say, 20 to 30 houses a year, but I doubt that is the case.)
It is even worse than the summary suggested. The BBC did not originally send the evidence to FB. They did so when FB asked them to ahead of an interview arranged with FB's director of policy Simon Milner. Reporting them to the police for providing what they were requested to beggars belief.
Everything involving space is so complex and expensive right now. Perhaps, the idea is to simplify it down to a one-click ordering service with the option to return it within 30 days if it is not as described on delivery.
... they did this with a human cell stem line? Would those eating the end result be practicing cannibalism?
Are you sure he acted without the knowledge of Trump and/or Pence? I think the Democrats are going to attempt to disprove that assumption.
In the current political climate, a computer that can simultaneously deal with facts and unfacts may have useful applications. In the past, we only needed to keep track of real data. Going forward, it seems we need to simultaneously handle both actual data and what the user wants to be the actual data. Being able to draw conclusions from the superposition of both versions of reality needs to be extended from social media into practical applications.
Unlike with games like Chess (best moves can be precisely calculated) and Backgammon (simple probabilities), Poker requires adapting to human behavior, indeed varying your play depending on what you learn about your opponent. The techniques are going to be applicable to a wide range of situations. For instance, I will go so far as to claim that we will shortly be wise to use an AI to advise us on investment decisions. (In the past, the computer has been used for speed, and reacting to subtle market signals, but not so much for long term investment planning.)
The next challenge is going to be independent learning. I believe human experts still supervise the learning process of all the best AIs. Once the need for the human adviser goes away, AIs are literally going to be everywhere. Your phone AI will recognize and react to your current mental state, as well as help you overcome everyday problems. The AI in your fridge could become a huge help in keeping you compliant with your diet plans.
I guess your point is that artificial intelligence can never exist. Even when, as now, the final trained system operates in ways we do not fully understand, we still know the algorithms that underlie the learning process. Only something mysterious and not properly understood in its entirety could be regarded as "intelligent". As a corollary, scientists who rely on computer simulations to predict climate change are not showing intelligence. Only climate deniers who use their intuition, unbiased by stupid computer models are showing creativity and intelligence. In fairness, intelligence is a difficult thing to define. However, dissing everything involving algorithms and processing power as inherently unable ever to be considered as "artificial" intelligence appears to me misguided.
I can remember when /. attracted some of the best informed and intelligent people you could find anywhere on the Internet. Now, all we have are members who inform us that we do not need computers, and their ability to find correlations in huge data sets. All we need is the intuition of smart people.
Look back at the early proposed tests for artificial intelligence. When supervised deep learning systems can use the immense processing capabilities of modern computers, to not only match, but to exceed the capabilities of humans in a wide range of problem spaces, it is appropriate to describe the result as "artificial intelligence". We do not mean literally that we have an intelligent bunch of integrated circuits and harddrives. But, the overall system can produce results that we would until recently have considered only achievable by human experts. Indeed, our AIs, in many situations, exceed the capabilities of the best human minds.
I am used to the idea of the general public feeling threatened by the capabilities of modern technology. I just wish sites supposedly intended for intelligent, scientifically-informed individuals could be exempted from such lack of reason.
As I understand it, the Giant Impact Hypothesis has Theia's impact creating debris that gradually coalesced into the moon. That this debris formed several smaller moons before they joined up seems plausible, but I am not sure what is really different about what they are proposing.
The term used for the popular recent solutions is "deep learning". To be more specific, the most effective solutions are "guided deep learning". The term "guided" means that the important inputs and outputs are partly chosen by humans trying to tune the learning process. Progress has been rapid in just the last two or three years. Image recognition, for instance, an extremely tough area until very recently, is now pretty much solved. In this area, the next frontier to be cracked is totally independent learning without any need for humans to be involved. Such a breakthrough may or may not be achieved quickly.
Another very interesting area of research is how to deal with imperfect information. Where large amounts of data is available, and that data can unambiguously be used to determine a correct solution (such as moves in chess, or analysis of MRI scans for tumor analysis) artificial intelligence can already surpass the performance of any human if the AI system is given sufficient training. With AIs that must deal with imperfect information (especially prediction of what humans or other AIs might do) progress is being made, but the best humans are generally still superior to the best AIs. Examples are playing poker, and stock market decisions (though the latter is still heavily AI assisted).
Still a major problem for AIs is where limited clearly relevant data to guide decision making is available. Clearly, humans rely on a lot of peripheral experience to suggest a plan of action. The actions taken may be imperfect, but at least there is a basis for the decision. Before AIs can be made equally (or hopefully more) adept, the process needs to be better understood.
If you want to eliminate neural nets as a form of artificial intelligence, you are going to need to conclude that most human "reasoning" is similarly not really intelligent behavior. Plenty of research shows that humans make most decisions in a manner highly analogous to those in neural nets (and you can predict the result of this "reasoning" by brain monitoring before the subject knows which decision he is going to make). It is true that humans, if challenged, will attempt to justify their decisions, but their justifications are often pretty nonsensical. Meanwhile, while complex neural nets, trained by large volumes of empirical data, indeed cannot simply explain how decisions are reached, we at least can control the data used for that training. Human "decision making" is based on data that is often highly dubious, and (although subject to attempted justification) similarly shaped by complex training from large data sets that cannot be explained simply.
I like the idea of a USB stick that can reveal my HIV status. However, I have two questions about how this works:
Inquiring minds want to know.
Most of these publications are only a Google search away from a free download. To worry about people buying it (presumably, thus, being easily identifiable) when people can anonymously acquire it for free, strikes me as truly ridiculous.
If it really does work (and extraordinary claims do require extraordinary proof) we have absolutely no idea how. The current explanations do not make any sense within known science. Who knows, maybe we have stumbled onto a way of directing dark energy. At this stage, I am not dismissing the possibility that it is the science discovery of the century, though I still consider it more likely than not that further study will debunk it.
... but even IS confiscating all phones and computers has failed to cut the population completely from the outside world. The actions of the Turkish authorities are leading them down a slippery slope to a total, hated police-state.
With the claim of suitability as a private cloud to store your photos, video, and code all in a maximum of 16 MB of flash storage, the compression tools they provide must be impressive, indeed.
Hurd comes from the same era. I think some people are still tinkering with it.