Elon Musk is a good con artist. Welfare cars was absurd.
If you can hack a self driving car and kill someone then I guess sane people won't buy self driving cars. Cars don't need computer chips to work. Neither does a refrigerator. Build mechanical cars and make money.
I think the problem with AI is mostly everybody thinks that they are qualified to have an opinion on it, even when they know absolutely nothing about the field whatsoever. AI issues do not suddenly emerge when we have Hollywood AI - there already are major issues, and they're only going to get more substantive. The recent achievement of computers becoming the strongest players in the world at Go is very relevant, even though without any knowledge of what's going on AI it would not seem it. A few major points:
The developers have no clue how it works. This is probably the most important point. This isn't due to some magic or it taking on sentience or whatever, but because it utilized deep learning and recursive training (playing against itself to improve). So while the developers can explain how they taught it how to 'learn', they could never explain why it chose to play what it did on move 24, for instance. Its play is also so revolutionary that Google is publishing a highly anticipated book (among Go enthusiasts) filled with nothing but the machine playing against itself. In other words it did not simply apply human knowledge of the game with super-human capability, but rather it created new knowledge and ideas. And nobody can explain exactly how it did it. We're now applying deep learning to absolutely everything from profiling for employment, to military weaponry. What could go wrong?
It happened much faster than most anybody was expecting. This is a recurring theme in AI systems today. Most 'experts' felt we were decades away from having computers become dominant at Go, if it ever happened. I'll hit on why they thought this in a minute, but the point here is that technological progress in accelerating. A good way of figuring out where things are going to be in 'x' years when you're speaking of accelerating technology is that most people should think it sounds crazy. We're wired for linear progress - accelerating progress creates absurd sounding things like saying that in 40 years you'd go from computers the size of buildings, costing millions of dollars, to machines that fit in the palm of your hand, cost tens of dollars, and run millions of times faster. Crazy, right?
Go requires skills that computers are awful at and humans are excellent at. It is a strategic and "slow" (in the strategic and literal sense) game that emphasizes pretty much everything humans are great at: intuition, planning, 'understanding', and broad strategic goals. It's also practically infinite in depth. In Go each position has an average of about 250 possible moves. The average game lasts about 150 moves. Think about that for a minute. What that means is just 10 moves in Go (that would be 10 moves for each side) would result in 250^20 or 10^48 possible games. The fastest supercomputer in the world can currently do 18 quadrillion floating point operations a second. Let's just say that evaluating a Go position is no more complex than a simple floating point operation. It would take this computer 1,760,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years to evaluate all those 10 moves. That number is in turn about 127,300,000,000,000 times longer than the age of the universe. Exponents are complete mind fucks are they not? And of course just going 10 moves is a -really- terrible Go program. It's fun to mock experts, but in this case - those experts thinking Go was not getting solved anytime in the foreseeable future had every logical argument in their favor.
2 comments
1 u/gazillions 21 Sep 2017 12:42
Elon Musk is a good con artist. Welfare cars was absurd.
If you can hack a self driving car and kill someone then I guess sane people won't buy self driving cars. Cars don't need computer chips to work. Neither does a refrigerator. Build mechanical cars and make money.
0 u/rwbj 21 Sep 2017 18:04
I think the problem with AI is mostly everybody thinks that they are qualified to have an opinion on it, even when they know absolutely nothing about the field whatsoever. AI issues do not suddenly emerge when we have Hollywood AI - there already are major issues, and they're only going to get more substantive. The recent achievement of computers becoming the strongest players in the world at Go is very relevant, even though without any knowledge of what's going on AI it would not seem it. A few major points:
The developers have no clue how it works. This is probably the most important point. This isn't due to some magic or it taking on sentience or whatever, but because it utilized deep learning and recursive training (playing against itself to improve). So while the developers can explain how they taught it how to 'learn', they could never explain why it chose to play what it did on move 24, for instance. Its play is also so revolutionary that Google is publishing a highly anticipated book (among Go enthusiasts) filled with nothing but the machine playing against itself. In other words it did not simply apply human knowledge of the game with super-human capability, but rather it created new knowledge and ideas. And nobody can explain exactly how it did it. We're now applying deep learning to absolutely everything from profiling for employment, to military weaponry. What could go wrong?
It happened much faster than most anybody was expecting. This is a recurring theme in AI systems today. Most 'experts' felt we were decades away from having computers become dominant at Go, if it ever happened. I'll hit on why they thought this in a minute, but the point here is that technological progress in accelerating. A good way of figuring out where things are going to be in 'x' years when you're speaking of accelerating technology is that most people should think it sounds crazy. We're wired for linear progress - accelerating progress creates absurd sounding things like saying that in 40 years you'd go from computers the size of buildings, costing millions of dollars, to machines that fit in the palm of your hand, cost tens of dollars, and run millions of times faster. Crazy, right?
Go requires skills that computers are awful at and humans are excellent at. It is a strategic and "slow" (in the strategic and literal sense) game that emphasizes pretty much everything humans are great at: intuition, planning, 'understanding', and broad strategic goals. It's also practically infinite in depth. In Go each position has an average of about 250 possible moves. The average game lasts about 150 moves. Think about that for a minute. What that means is just 10 moves in Go (that would be 10 moves for each side) would result in 250^20 or 10^48 possible games. The fastest supercomputer in the world can currently do 18 quadrillion floating point operations a second. Let's just say that evaluating a Go position is no more complex than a simple floating point operation. It would take this computer 1,760,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years to evaluate all those 10 moves. That number is in turn about 127,300,000,000,000 times longer than the age of the universe. Exponents are complete mind fucks are they not? And of course just going 10 moves is a -really- terrible Go program. It's fun to mock experts, but in this case - those experts thinking Go was not getting solved anytime in the foreseeable future had every logical argument in their favor.