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Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence
- clarkmoody 11y agoHow wonderful would it be to replace many government jobs with AI ;-)
- ryanx435 11y ago*all jobs
- chubot 11y agoI suspect we've already replaced 100,000+ jobs in call centers with AI -- you know the menu system that you get before you talk to somebody. (You might not think of that as AI now, but that's "success" -- 20 years ago it undoubtedly was AI.) I'm not all that excited about interacting with more AI.
- taneq 11y ago> You might not think of that as AI now, but that's "success" -- 20 years ago it undoubtedly was AI. As Dijkstra said, asking whether a machine can think is like asking whether a submarine can swim. And in the real world, nobody cares whether it's swimming or not, they just care whether it's solving their problem. Which all of these little bits and pieces of human-replacing technology most certainly are doing.
- bogomipz 11y agoNah, we just outsourced those jobs to cheaper labor.
- varjag 11y agoWe had phone menu systems 20 years ago and they most certainly weren't "AI". I'm actually not sure they were considered as such at any point since DTMF was devised.
- chubot 11y agoI'm not talking about just a menu system; I'm talking about the system that asks you what you're calling about, does voice recognition, NLP, and then directs you do a part of the menu.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- mtgx 11y agoDon't worry, we'll still pay 50%+ of the budget to defense contractors somehow.
- stephenhess 11y agoLove this but they're really not holding one of these in the Bay Area? -_-
- desireco42 11y agoWith all the people scared from AI, I can imagine if they would replace politicians and government officials with AI in just small part of the country, after the initial surprise, within weeks satisfaction would be through the roof and we would have AI running the country.
- kordless 11y agoFor software based AI to be successful at what it does, it must compete. If it does not compete well, it will suck, and the government will suck just as bad. Government, at least the way we've been thinking about it thus far, will have to change for AI to be good at it.
- CuriouslyC 11y agoCompetition isn't necessary. In fact, competition is really just an instance of optimizing an objective function that is defined in terms of "relative advantage". If the objective function is some measure of citizen well-being AI would be just as successful.
- kordless 11y agoGovernment is governance of a society, which itself is alive and completely dynamic. Our idea of "well being" is constantly changing and growing. Unless the AI decides contrary, of course.
- jqm 11y agoMaybe not all governance is possible by algorithm but much of it is. For instance, where do we widen a road? Absolutely an algorithmic problem. But I suspect sometimes these types of decisions have more to do with contributions, political favors, relations, etc. Solving even part of this type of friction in society would go a long way toward improving life for the general population. Bring on the A.I. I'd rather be governed by a machine than a party boss and a lobbyist any day.
- paulsutter 11y agoThis level of hype reminds me of the AI winter. Concerned that public interest hits a peak and then a few months later disillusion sets in and AI becomes a discredited failure in the public's eye, since even rapid progress moves slower than an election or typical news cycle.
- kordless 11y agoAt this point, I really don't think our government has any idea how to deal with what is coming.
- Aelinsaar 11y agoOur government doesn't know how to deal with what happened a couple of decades ago, technologically speaking; a couple of decades at least.
- themartorana 11y agoWell, except for those pesky NSA and DARPA agencies, to name just two of many, that have access to technology you haven't even dreamed of yet. Congress might be full of idiots or smart people trying to make you believe they're idiots, but don't for a moment think the federal government as a whole is technologically stunted.
- zitterbewegung 11y agoIt's much harder to write laws when the state of technology keeps changing day by day and also be technoliterate to the changes.
- bogomipz 11y agoCertainly not but consider the level of dysfunction and complete lack of interdepartment cooperation. We have the NSA actively hacking other nation-states and our own private sector and then we have an FBI that resets an icloud password preventing them from getting a backup of data they desperately needed.
- erubin 11y agoThe folks here commenting about entrenched power structures should remember that Ed Felten (who put his name on the release) is not a career bureaucrat at all.
- randcraw 11y agoTrue. As FTC CTO, his able past work in privacy and data security was certainly relevant to traditional FTC interests. As Deputy US CTO, I think his agenda has broadened. There's already a ton of gov't interest/activity on surveillance and security issues, mostly via the military services and adjuncts. I assume this initiative ain't more of that. This announcement seems to presage greater federal gov't interest and involvement in how computing might be used toward less defensive/clandestine ends, especially in governance (social good), control, and safety, as well as legal implications -- adding AI as the means to serving gov't ends, so to speak. If so, great. I'd love to see greater OPEN use of computing in government, especially in gathering unbiased metrics and making better use of them to evaluate the outcome of changes in policy.
- bogomipz 11y agoI really hate politico speak. What does this really mean? "to spur public dialogue on artificial intelligence and machine learning and identify challenges and opportunities related to this emerging technology."
- ProAm 11y agoIt means nothing. The government (21st century US gov.) is so poorly structured to accomplish or influence anything regarding growth it should be taken as an ROI/sales pitch invitation. They are saying, in the future we will have a bucket of money to give to our friends.... please be our friends so you can try to build something. The first implementation of Obama-care should be a clear indication of this. However, Im sure there is true investment in interesting technology on the defense side of the fence. Probably more money, and way more interesting problems.
- PeterisP 11y agoIt's a quite clear statement (though in a niche jargon) - such language means that they intend to dedicate resources to organize some events/discussion panels about the topic, and possibly even to some research grants. The only unclear thing about politico speak generally is that is not clear if they will do X or if they just wanted to publicly claim that they'll do X for some PR or voter support, with no intention to actually do it.
- Animats 11y agoFrom the press release: "In education, AI has the potential to help teachers customize instruction for each student’s needs." Does anybody actually do that? Most "online education" still seems to be canned lectures. There was work on this from the 1960s to the 1990s, but efforts seem to have stalled.[1] There are drill-and-practice systems, but they're really just workbooks with automatic scoring. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_tutoring_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_tutoring_system
- ap22213 11y agoYes, it's happening, but inexpensive tools aren't widely available or integrated into a lot of content, and content isn't yet being widely developed with dynamic content in mind. There needs to be work in how 'teachers customize instruction' that challenge widely used instructional design models. There's a lot of work being done in places were the pockets are deeper (military, simulations, medicine). Recently, standards (xAPI, Caliper) have started to emerge to enable the decoupling of content, content delivery, and interaction (think MVC pattern) and to enable pervasive, multi-modal learning activity tracking.
- dvanduzer 11y agoThere's a hip startup downtown working on something just like that.[0] Will these systems be any better than an automatic scoring system with spaced repetition? Well. More fundamentally, what are a student's needs? Sesame Street and other organizations[1] have known for a long time that the most "engaged" learners also happen to be having fun. The only particularly controversial thing in that quote is the word teachers. Left relatively unsupervised, the kids today will voraciously seek youtube videos to teach themselves how to make a Turing machine in Minecraft. What an intelligent tutor really needs to be able to do, is pay attention to what a student is curious about. Ubiquitous sensors will probably play into some of the new efforts. But the biggest leaps will come from systems that help kids learn from each other, together. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lG4xBoEgZo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lG4xBoEgZo [1] http://www.instituteofplay.org http://www.instituteofplay.org
- 11y ago
- exit 11y agothey should discuss a universal basic income to counter the pervasive unemployment which ai will bring with it.
- qaq 11y agoGiven election cycles and how expansive it will be to deal with this problem, none will address this until the effects are strongly felt by avg. voter.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- amelius 11y agoAka the future of needing big expensive resources and large amounts of data to do computing. No more hobbying in the basement.
- nitroxxls 11y agoI would like to have a realistic looking robot-wife with IQ >= 160 (like Ex Machina), because I don't like women and their small talk. Women are SOOOO obsolete.
- bsbechtel 11y agoThe idea of a computer deciding whether someone is guilty or not is a scary prospect. This is a bandwagon I'm not so sure the government should be so eager to jump on.
- comboy 11y agoComputer program makes a decision based on the set of rules it was programmed with. We have a law to make humans work exactly the same way. Law is a set of rules that say who is guilty and who's not. Only that humans are bad at being objective: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/04/11/justice-is-served-but-more-so-after-lunch-how-food-breaks-sway-the-decisions-of-judges/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/04/1...
- bsbechtel 11y agoNot exactly. The real world is far too complex to cover all edge cases, which is why we have human judges to evaluate cases on an individual basis. Leaving these decisions up to a computer is essentially subjecting ourselves to rule by computers, which is incredibly concerning.
- reality_hacker 11y agoJudges don't do any deep analysis on million small claims, and can be replaced by automated rules.
- ajnin 11y agoLaws are rules but they are not enough on their own to make decisions. They are written with the implicit cultural background and the intent of the humans who wrote them. Plenty of case law is around determining what the authors actually meant when they made a law. As long as humans write the law, and that there is the notion of a sovereign people, human judges should decide how to interpret and apply the law.
- zardo 11y ago
- w_t_payne 11y agoAI is, at the end of the day, just software. We have the intellectual tools to enable us to make high quality software and systems, stemming from industrial experience stretching back three quarters of a century. We need to free that knowledge; ossified in dozens of mil-std and similar institutional documents: re-institutionalising it in the public domain, making free tools and systems available to support the (public) quality processes that a distributed, heterogeneous, partially open-source future AI requires.
- mikerichards 11y agoI don't what the White House to be "excited" about AI. The white house will inevitably use it for the wrong reason. Just go away Obama.