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There are two different types of discussions that happen about AI. They are very different but often confused for each other. The first is the very near future

There are two different types of discussions that happen about AI. They are very different but often confused for each other. The first is the very near future, 10-20 years or so. Machine learning is rapidly advancing and we are getting all kinds of cool toys. Automating things that previously weren't automatable. 90% of jobs probably could be automated soon, and there will be huge societal consequences. That's what this article is about, mostly. The second is far more interesting. Strong AI. The distant future of 30 years, and maybe sooner. I think it's very likely this will happen in our lifetime, though obviously it's impossible to know for sure. This isn't just replacing a few jobs with machines. This is replacing all humans with machines. When we get AIs that are just as smart as humans. And eventually far smarter than humans. AIs which are so far beyond us that we look like chimps. We would not be able to compete with the AIs. They would be able to get whatever they want. Humans would no longer be in control. It's very, very important that we make sure the AIs we build want what we want. Then we can get a utopia so advanced we can't even imagine it. But if we get it wrong we will just be replaced or destroyed. And we haven't the slightest idea how to do this, or even if it's possible. Creating an AI which wants to do what it's human creator wants it to do is a remarkably hard problem. Especially if that AI is much more intelligent than it's human creator. This is the so called "control problem".

jahnu 11y ago
> The second is far more interesting. Strong AI. The distant future of 30 years, and maybe sooner. I think it's very likely this will happen in our lifetime Why? I'd genuinely like to know. I've yet to read anything to convince me this is true.
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago
  Pro: We see things like chess and go. We see more areas that we thought computers could never tackle being solved. So we seem to be getting closer. Con: We don't actually understand what intelligence is, except by human example. We don't actually have any idea of how far we have to go to create something similar.
- maaku 11y ago
  Some would argue that we're finally at the place where most of the pieces necessary for strong AI are known, it's just a massive engineering challenge to put them all together. Like going to the moon in 1958, or nuclear energy in 1938. We can draw smooth exponential lines like Kurzweil does and see when the level of complexity of our AI servants reaches the same level as the human brain (~30 years), or we can hope for a concerted human effort as was seen in both the 40's and the 60's. Either way it looks to be in our near future.
- sapphireblue 11y ago
  The progress in machine learning/deep learning for last 5 years has been literally staggering. Read about new state of art results. There is already superhuman visual object recognition, voice recognition, good machine translation, description of scenes in natural language, question answering (facebook babi dataset), visual question answering, algorithm learning (neural turing machines, neural GPUs), and finally really strong reinforcement learning (deepmind's DQN, A3C algorithms). The last one, reinforcement learning, is really important because it's a basis for general intelligence. By rewarding/punishing a reinforcement learning agent you can train it to execute very complex tasks, for example navigating a maze with pixel input or controlling a robot body to do some tasks. DeepMind is on the cutting edge of this kind of research, you can read about their latest agent here http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.01783 http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.01783 With such rate of progress it's not inconceivable if a sub-human but general intelligence could be developed in 10-20 years, or even sooner.
  - visarga 11y ago
    It would have a lot to do with dialogue systems (chat bots). I am very interested in this domain but the news seem to be slow. Siri didn't improve, Google Now is no conversationalist, and the Microsoft's Tay disappeared within 24 hours of being put online. I tried some other chat bots but they seem incapable of bouncing back ideas and forming a proper conversation. Maybe they could apply reinforcement learning to training a chatbot how to direct the flow of a conversation in order to make it interesting. I think it could be huge if only the dialogue was a little better.
    - Houshalter 11y ago
      The best chatbots are not open to the public. Because the current RNN tech is just way too computationally expensive to have on the public internet. Watson was able to answer most the questions on Jeopardy, but it required a room full of servers. Google published some promising results of an RNN chatbot that was trained on movie scripts, but as far as I know it was never released publicly. Microsoft supposedly has an AI chatbot that is really incredible in China. Tay was supposed to be the start of something like that for the English world, but had that stupid scandal.
arethuza 11y ago
"we can get a utopia so advanced we can't even imagine it" I think one possible vision for that utopia is the Culture - the "post scarcity" part of it is obviously based on fantasy physics but way it portrays humans (OK engineered humans-like beings) human level AIs and godlike Minds running things is quite satisfying. Particularly that the only thing that a godlike AI is likely to worry about is the opinion of other godlike AIs - and fiddling with the impossibly slow, stupid, but still loveable, meat beasties is definitely frowned on (see the reputation of the Grey Area).
mirceal 11y ago
I would place Strong AI at least 100+ years in the future. There is also a 3rd possibility that I think is more likely than StrongAI taking control. We get better AI that allow us, humans, to improve ourselves (ie basically hack our generic code and/or augment what we can do with additional hardware). That will lead to humans working and building even stronger AI that will lead to even better humans. Cycle continues until StrongAI and humans are basically the same thing.
- Houshalter 11y ago
  100+ years is way too far in the future. Progress is rapid in AI, and in computer technology in general. Improving humans is the least likely possibility. We are evolutionary spaghetti code constructed out of meat. There are limits to what you can do with biology, and it's always going to be thousands of times slower than silicon. And much more difficult to work with, or reverse engineer.
exit 11y ago
> It's very, very important that we make sure the AIs we build want what we want. is it really? from a universal perspective, you want the less intelligent of two agents to get what it wants? > But if we get it wrong we will just be replaced or destroyed. children replace their parents, yes.
- Moshe_Silnorin 11y ago
  Values and intelligence are orthogonal. You want the agent that shares your values to get what it wants. Do you truly value personal extinction?
- Houshalter 11y ago
  Intelligence isn't inherently good. I don't want to be replaced by a sociopathic murder bot. One that may not even be sentient. It wouldn't experience emotions like love, or joy, or fun, or anything. What a sad way for the universe to end, as cold emotionless metal. The child analogy breaks down quickly. My biological children would share 99.99...% of my DNA and most of my cultural values. An AI "child" need not share anything in common with it's creator, and they might totally detest each other. And lastly my children don't murder me and replace me. I would be pretty upset at such a child, and would probably disown them and try to defend myself. I would have known I screwed up producing them and be sad. Lastly see Value is Fragile: http://lesswrong.com/lw/y3/value_is_fragile/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/y3/value_is_fragile/ >My friend, I have no problem with the thought of a galactic civilization vastly unlike our own... full of strange beings who look nothing like me even in their own imaginations... pursuing pleasures and experiences I can't begin to empathize with... trading in a marketplace of unimaginable goods... allying to pursue incomprehensible objectives... people whose life-stories I could never understand. >That's what the Future looks like if things go right. >If the chain of inheritance from human (meta)morals is broken, the Future does not look like this. It does not end up magically, delightfully incomprehensible. >With very high probability, it ends up looking dull. Pointless. Something whose loss you wouldn't mourn.
visarga 11y ago
I think the human race will evolve too, at an artificial rate, with the advancement of genetics. Also, human cognition evolves with the network and hand in hand with the AI. The most probable outcome will be a fusion. We are cheap capable computers, if the AI could redesign the brain to make it 1000 times more powerful without making it larger, then the next step in AI could be humans.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
erikpukinskis 11y ago
The second is only more interesting if you are in power. For you, life is good, and the interesting thing is pondering the nature of the future. If you are not in power, if someone has a boot to your neck, then an AI of the first sort, which can automate the work of removing a boot from your neck, looks very interesting.

jahnu 11y ago

> The second is far more interesting. Strong AI. The distant future of 30 years, and maybe sooner. I think it's very likely this will happen in our lifetime Why? I'd genuinely like to know. I've yet to read anything to convince me this is true.

AnimalMuppet 11y ago
Pro: We see things like chess and go. We see more areas that we thought computers could never tackle being solved. So we seem to be getting closer. Con: We don't actually understand what intelligence is, except by human example. We don't actually have any idea of how far we have to go to create something similar.
maaku 11y ago
Some would argue that we're finally at the place where most of the pieces necessary for strong AI are known, it's just a massive engineering challenge to put them all together. Like going to the moon in 1958, or nuclear energy in 1938. We can draw smooth exponential lines like Kurzweil does and see when the level of complexity of our AI servants reaches the same level as the human brain (~30 years), or we can hope for a concerted human effort as was seen in both the 40's and the 60's. Either way it looks to be in our near future.
sapphireblue 11y ago
The progress in machine learning/deep learning for last 5 years has been literally staggering. Read about new state of art results. There is already superhuman visual object recognition, voice recognition, good machine translation, description of scenes in natural language, question answering (facebook babi dataset), visual question answering, algorithm learning (neural turing machines, neural GPUs), and finally really strong reinforcement learning (deepmind's DQN, A3C algorithms). The last one, reinforcement learning, is really important because it's a basis for general intelligence. By rewarding/punishing a reinforcement learning agent you can train it to execute very complex tasks, for example navigating a maze with pixel input or controlling a robot body to do some tasks. DeepMind is on the cutting edge of this kind of research, you can read about their latest agent here http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.01783 http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.01783 With such rate of progress it's not inconceivable if a sub-human but general intelligence could be developed in 10-20 years, or even sooner.
- visarga 11y ago
  It would have a lot to do with dialogue systems (chat bots). I am very interested in this domain but the news seem to be slow. Siri didn't improve, Google Now is no conversationalist, and the Microsoft's Tay disappeared within 24 hours of being put online. I tried some other chat bots but they seem incapable of bouncing back ideas and forming a proper conversation. Maybe they could apply reinforcement learning to training a chatbot how to direct the flow of a conversation in order to make it interesting. I think it could be huge if only the dialogue was a little better.
  - Houshalter 11y ago
    The best chatbots are not open to the public. Because the current RNN tech is just way too computationally expensive to have on the public internet. Watson was able to answer most the questions on Jeopardy, but it required a room full of servers. Google published some promising results of an RNN chatbot that was trained on movie scripts, but as far as I know it was never released publicly. Microsoft supposedly has an AI chatbot that is really incredible in China. Tay was supposed to be the start of something like that for the English world, but had that stupid scandal.

arethuza 11y ago

"we can get a utopia so advanced we can't even imagine it" I think one possible vision for that utopia is the Culture - the "post scarcity" part of it is obviously based on fantasy physics but way it portrays humans (OK engineered humans-like beings) human level AIs and godlike Minds running things is quite satisfying. Particularly that the only thing that a godlike AI is likely to worry about is the opinion of other godlike AIs - and fiddling with the impossibly slow, stupid, but still loveable, meat beasties is definitely frowned on (see the reputation of the Grey Area).

mirceal 11y ago

I would place Strong AI at least 100+ years in the future. There is also a 3rd possibility that I think is more likely than StrongAI taking control. We get better AI that allow us, humans, to improve ourselves (ie basically hack our generic code and/or augment what we can do with additional hardware). That will lead to humans working and building even stronger AI that will lead to even better humans. Cycle continues until StrongAI and humans are basically the same thing.

Houshalter 11y ago
100+ years is way too far in the future. Progress is rapid in AI, and in computer technology in general. Improving humans is the least likely possibility. We are evolutionary spaghetti code constructed out of meat. There are limits to what you can do with biology, and it's always going to be thousands of times slower than silicon. And much more difficult to work with, or reverse engineer.

exit 11y ago

> It's very, very important that we make sure the AIs we build want what we want. is it really? from a universal perspective, you want the less intelligent of two agents to get what it wants? > But if we get it wrong we will just be replaced or destroyed. children replace their parents, yes.

Moshe_Silnorin 11y ago
Values and intelligence are orthogonal. You want the agent that shares your values to get what it wants. Do you truly value personal extinction?
Houshalter 11y ago
Intelligence isn't inherently good. I don't want to be replaced by a sociopathic murder bot. One that may not even be sentient. It wouldn't experience emotions like love, or joy, or fun, or anything. What a sad way for the universe to end, as cold emotionless metal. The child analogy breaks down quickly. My biological children would share 99.99...% of my DNA and most of my cultural values. An AI "child" need not share anything in common with it's creator, and they might totally detest each other. And lastly my children don't murder me and replace me. I would be pretty upset at such a child, and would probably disown them and try to defend myself. I would have known I screwed up producing them and be sad. Lastly see Value is Fragile: http://lesswrong.com/lw/y3/value_is_fragile/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/y3/value_is_fragile/ >My friend, I have no problem with the thought of a galactic civilization vastly unlike our own... full of strange beings who look nothing like me even in their own imaginations... pursuing pleasures and experiences I can't begin to empathize with... trading in a marketplace of unimaginable goods... allying to pursue incomprehensible objectives... people whose life-stories I could never understand. >That's what the Future looks like if things go right. >If the chain of inheritance from human (meta)morals is broken, the Future does not look like this. It does not end up magically, delightfully incomprehensible. >With very high probability, it ends up looking dull. Pointless. Something whose loss you wouldn't mourn.

visarga 11y ago

I think the human race will evolve too, at an artificial rate, with the advancement of genetics. Also, human cognition evolves with the network and hand in hand with the AI. The most probable outcome will be a fusion. We are cheap capable computers, if the AI could redesign the brain to make it 1000 times more powerful without making it larger, then the next step in AI could be humans.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

erikpukinskis 11y ago

The second is only more interesting if you are in power. For you, life is good, and the interesting thing is pondering the nature of the future. If you are not in power, if someone has a boot to your neck, then an AI of the first sort, which can automate the work of removing a boot from your neck, looks very interesting.