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Google DeepMind Founder Demis Hassabis: Three Truths about AI
- paganel 8y agoTo be honest, I can't really understand how come there are still people who, when confronted to a world that has been irremediably changed by humans' use of technology (for worst, they say) still believe that an improved technology used by the same humans will make things better. I'm looking at these quotes from the article: > The reason I say that is that if you look at the challenges that confront society: climate change, sustainability, mass inequality — which is getting worse — diseases, and healthcare, we're not making progress anywhere near fast enough in any of these areas. followed by > Either we need an exponential improvement in human behavior — less selfishness, less short-termism, more collaboration, more generosity — or we need an exponential improvement in technology.
- blauditore 8y agoI don't think the world has only been made worse because of technology. But good and bad are always a question of perspective.
- kilpikaarna 8y agoYep. Been following this guy since he was at Lionhead, and while he's obviously a very very smart guy, it's disappointing that he puts his hope in techno-fixes. To me it seems fairly obvious that the problems our society faces stem from continuous exponential growth (primarily of energy use), and while technology can be used to tweak the parameters of the growth curve, as it were, the eventual outcome stays more or less the same. This was already shown in the The Limits to Growth model back in the early 70s. To me "new technology will fix it" is essentially a statement of faith, the numbers don't back it up, nor does thinking about or situation honestly.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago> To me it seems fairly obvious that the problems our society faces stem from continuous exponential growth (primarily of energy use) This may be. But then, you have two choices: let humans hit the growth ceiling, which will result in mass starvation and death, or lift the ceiling. Technology is the very thing that allows us to continuously lift the ceiling, so it's obvious that any solution not involving mass murder will have to come from technology.
- kilpikaarna 8y agoYes, but: a) the lifting of the ceiling is subject to diminishing returns on resources invested b) once the ceiling has been lifted it will require some continuous expenditure of resources to stay suspended c) the higher the ceiling and the more people there are under it, the worse the crashing down will be if/when that happens.
- pas 8y agoI don't think he advocates mindless consumption, and blind hope that technology will front run this all-burning-rage of human hubris and reckless hedonism. We have pretty good predictions about world population. So anyone screaming about exponential growth should STFU and bring real counterarguments to those predictive models (and their results). And second, the ceiling doesn't have to reach the heavens (and once technologies have been "unlocked" they don't really require any expenditure to keep them around), it has to cover those predicted 10-12 billion people. The solar system has enough resources for trillions of humans. Earth can sustain ~12 billion people almost indefinitely. That said, yes, without cooperation and foresight there will be a crash. And a next one, and a next one, as long as we are here and we are dumb. Once one of that changes, the crashes will be very much complete black swans. (And we can - to a certain degree - try to buffer reserves to meet those future challenges. But we're unable to keep CO2equiv emissions low enough to reverse warming, so it's a bit too early to worry about black swans.)
- fallingfrog 8y agoI don't think that a stable population level requires mass starvation or some such thing. Most of the developed world is already at zero or slightly negative population growth, all it required was birth control. (A technology, to your point).
- fsloth 8y agoHumans are a technological species. Hence, to modify our parameters of existence from the materialistic point of view the solutions are technology based. Technology is not just something someone invented - it's an inherent manifestation of the psychology of our species. Hunting patterns? Technology. Better stone tools? Technology. The wheel? Technology. The key to this, is the rare capability among some individuals to device new solutions to a problem, and the en masse capability of everyone else to copy the solution once implemented and explained.
- toupeira 8y agoYou forgot the part where we should be able to customize those solutions to our own unique needs and environments, otherwise we're sacrificing personal agency and responsibility to the whims of organizations who very clearly don't always have our best interests in mind. Hoping technology will save us is as foolish as believing Jesus will, both extremes are bad and missing the larger point that humans are far more complicated than we like to admit.
- fsloth 8y agoSorry, I think we are using the term 'technology' in a different ontological context. I like the brief description "Technology: the methods for using scientific discoveries for practical purposes". I.e. how to apply accrued knowledge practically. The opposites to technology-based problem solving would be trial-and-error, political or ideology based mandates, etc. This does not exclude adaption, nor does it mandate a hierarchical organization to implement the technolgy.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoFrankly, I can't really understand how come people believe what you just wrote. Yes, technology created many problems, but we can't solve them by doing less technology, without reintroducing problems we've already solved. We can either not solve them, or try to solve it with more progress (likely introducing new problems as well). In other words: we dug a hole for ourselves with technology, but the only way we can dig ourselves out of it is with more technology. This is pretty much obvious.
- PakG1 8y agoI believe parent lacks faith in humanity and basic human nature to use that new tech properly to properly solve the new problems.
- paganel 8y ago> In other words: we dug a hole for ourselves with technology, but the only way we can dig ourselves out of it is with more technology I used to be a technofile, at least an internet-ofile, that's for sure, but I kept reading the same and same discourses about how this time things will be different while in reality things were becoming worse and as such I've started changing my mind. > This is pretty much obvious. Honestly, I don't see the obvious in that, quite the contrary, what you're basically saying is that we have used thing A (technology) to dig ourselves into a very big hole but we will dig ourselves out if only we would keep using the same thing A (albeit in a changed, improved form?). I can't really understand this type of reasoning.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago> how this time things will be different while in reality things were becoming worse and as such I've started changing my mind Care to give any examples? Things are almost universally becoming better for most of humanity. Of course, we know a lot of this is unsustainable and will come back to bite us later (unless we develop new techology to cope), but if you compare this year to pretty much any year in the past, things are better. > what you're basically saying is that we have used thing A (technology) to dig ourselves into a very big hole but we will dig ourselves out if only we would keep using the same thing A (albeit in a changed, improved form?) Yes, because if you're willing to talk about a single "thing A", then this "thing A", or "technology", is literally human capability of solving problems and adapting environments. Viewed like that, there's no other solution by definition. And yes, I'm sort of saying that. It's easy to think "technology" is just smartphones and cat memes and bullshit SaaS startups. But technology is much more than that. An Internet company isn't going to save us. But small & safe nuclear reactors just might. Breakthroughs in carbon sequestration just might. New farming methods, new fertilizers, new GMOs. Better batteries, better renewables, improved recyclers, might be just enough to stave off the next disaster, to relieve the pressure we've been putting on the environment for the past couple centuries, and start to repair the damage. Ultimately, what are the alternatives? Doing nothing? Prayer? Mass depopulation (which is also a likely consequence of the prior two)?
- PakG1 8y ago"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Upton Sinclair
- oerpli 8y agoI think the argument is pretty straightforward: You take the following things as premises: a.) Humans tend to reproduce, often above-reproduction level b.) Humans usually tend to optimize their well-being c.) Well-being of individuals of your own species is more important than well-being of other species The first two should be uncontroversial. The third one is not uncontroversial but still the foundation of most legal systems worldwide. The argument goes: More humans need more resources. Each generation uses more resources than the previous generation, due to (b). Even if you could educate everyone to use less, due to (a) you would still have to provide more resources. Better technology allows more efficient generation of resources with less impact on the environment. Thus if you care about the environment/whatever, technical advances are a good thing. You could also try to kill humans/don't allow them to reproduce but this clashes with (c) and basic decency. Also: You will never convince a non-marginal amount of humans to give up pleasure for some greater good. - Cruelty of meat production will be solved by artificial meat, not by a tiny percentage of vegetarians. - Global warming will also be solved by clean energy, not by using less energy. What Hassabis is hinting at is the possibility of using AI to advance crops (GMOs) and materials in way that allows efficient provision of more stuff for more people. It is far more likely that these efforts yield fruits than that you convince 8B people to constrain their consumption (we've tried the latter for many years now: If you're aware of any progress made so far I, please share).
- wnkrshm 8y agoI wouldn't say that your premise a) is uncontroversial - it's estimated that the global population will become stationary by 2050 or 2040, not limited by simply lots of people being born and even more dieing from starvation but a globally decreasing birth rate. I.e. people adapt to the environment by having fewer children, because they don't need as many for their family to survive.
- oerpli 8y agoIndeed, that is correct. Though I think that most people enjoy having children but the economic circumstances and expectations make it hard to have them. I personally believe that fertility rates will go up again, due to two things: - YIMBYs (/reason) will prevail and at some point and living in constrained areas will get more affordable - Social expectations will change. Having children in school was a bad idea a few decades ago (when school was from 6-18/20). If the majority of people spend their 20s in some sort of school these social norms have less reason to exist and will likely fade at some point. And even if I'm wrong in both cases, I would assume that the rising population in southern countries will offset losses in the northern countries.
- puranjay 8y ago> Confronted to a world that has been irremediably changed by humans' use of technology (for worst, they say) Your perceptions seem to be colored by your experience in the first world. Statistically, technology-fueled development has helped lift literally billions of people out of acute poverty. When I was young in the 90s, my mom would ask me to give any spare food we had left to the homeless beggars we saw on the streets (in India). Today, when I try to do the same, they ask for money because they have plenty of food. How can eradicating hunger not be a good thing?
- pranau 8y agoIn my experience (as an Indian), they ask money primarily for alcohol, cigarettes or drugs and buy food from whatever's left over. They are still not what one would call "nourished" and are pretty malnourished in most instances.
- gdubs 8y agoWhich is why policy should be based on data and not anecdotes.
- gdubs 8y agoHumans are tool makers. Tools are present in some of our earliest known ancestors. They shaped us as much as we shaped them, evolutionarily. The problem we face is that, in general, people are scientifically illiterate — including, crucially, policy makers. Our way forward almost certainly depends on technological solutions — and at the same time they remain our greatest threat.
- empath75 8y ago> Either we need an exponential improvement in human behavior — less selfishness, less short-termism, more collaboration, more generosity — or we need an exponential improvement in technology. This isn't implying that he believes technology _will_ make it better. He's only saying that we have 3 choices: Better technology, better human behavior, or environmental catastrophe. Whether or not the first is even possible is an open question.
- tomp 8y ago> mass inequality — which is getting worse How can presumably smart people still keep saying this? Inequality is decreasing by all measures! And then I'm supposed to believe any other argument this person makes...
- vbuwivbiu 8y agoit's still an exponential distribution isn't it ?
- a008t 8y agoDistribution of assets or distribution of consumption? I would argue the former is a complete red herring and if one is to be concerned about any inequality, it's inequality of consumption.
- crc32 8y agoInequality is not decreasing by all measures, for example: "Income inequality in OECD countries is at its highest level for the past half century." [1] While it is true that global inequality might be decreasing, localised levels are important, especially when existing in regions which might be considered "economic drivers"; because it has important implications for the stability of those regions, and this is highly likely to affect the continuation of the global trend for reduced inequality. [1] http://www.oecd.org/social/inequality.htm http://www.oecd.org/social/inequality.htm
- MagnumOpus 8y agoWith globalisation, inequality _within_ countries has increased but inequality _globally_ is falling as the poorer half of the world is catching up. (Not nice for the unskilled Appalachian miner, but nice for the skilled Ukrainian coder or Indian engineer.)
- hrnnnnnn 8y agoLooks like it's getting better in some places, worse in others. I can't see any obvious patterns but you can play with the data here: http://bit.ly/2P5yNKy http://bit.ly/2P5yNKy
- lihaciudaniel 8y ago"Hippocampus as episodic memory" is that well known fact or just to reinforce about his thesis.
- drabiger 8y agoIt's sad that a well paid person and probably smart person like Demis Hassabis is so wrong in his view about how the world is. To quote the article quoting Hassabis, "The reason I say that is that if you look at the challenges that confront society: climate change, sustainability, mass inequality — which is getting worse — diseases, and healthcare, we're not making progress anywhere near fast enough in any of these areas." Fortunately, that's not true, as is shown in Factfulness: http://a.co/d/cau5vUv http://a.co/d/cau5vUv
- a008t 8y agoHe is primarily a salesman, is he not?
- tomd 8y ago> 'probably smart', 'primarily a salesman' "A child prodigy in chess, Hassabis reached master standard at the age of 13" "graduating in 1997 with a Double First[13] from the University of Cambridge" "obtain[ed] his PhD in cognitive neuroscience from University College London" "[his] theoretical account of the episodic memory system [...] was listed in the top 10 scientific breakthroughs of the year in any field by the journal Science" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demis_Hassabis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demis_Hassabis
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- mattnewport 8y agoWhat I'm most excited for is Demis using his AI to finally finish his Infinite Polygon Engine. I expect he'll get to that right after solving mass inequality and creating world peace.
- 706f6f70 8y agoAI also means we may finally get to ask the last question[1]. Reading that first sentence, it looks like we may actually be ahead of schedule. --- http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
- cpeterso 8y agoWhat is the Infinite Polygon Engine?
- mattnewport 8y agoBefore Demis Hassabis was a master of AI hype he was a master of video game hype. The misleadingly named Infinite Polygon engine was one over hyped aspect of the over hyped and much delayed game Republic the Revolution. I think it actually turned out an ok game but is a notorious example of over promising and under delivering in the games industry.
- ohopton 8y agoI remember reading about the Infinite Polygon Engine in Edge (UK video games mag). Pleasantly described as twaddle on Eurogamer in 2003. https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/r_republic_pc https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/r_republic_pc Still disappointed!
- cpeterso 8y agoInteresting. Thanks! There is so little information about the Infinite Polygon Engine that my comment above is now the #1 Google search result for "Infinite Polygon Engine" (with quotes), even above that Eurogamer article. Without quotes, my comment is only #2. :)
- davidhyde 8y agoReplace AI with cake :) "Either we need an exponential improvement in human behavior — less selfishness, less short-termism, more collaboration, more generosity — or we need more cake. "If you look at current geopolitics, I don't think we're going to be getting an exponential improvement in human behavior any time soon. "That's why we need more cake"
- adwhit 8y agoI always find it strange to hear people talk about climate change as if it is some sort of tricky challenge we need to solve, like improving education or curing cancer. It is a 'problem' of completely different magnitude. It is on track to end civilization as we know it within two generations. A rational society would think about nothing else. Our children will be astonished and mystified - and furious - to see all the things we got up to instead of dealing with this thing that is the only thing that matters.
- lixtra 8y agoEach generation faces annihilation. Just because humans survived so far - and it has been close [1] - doesn't mean it was a lot of luck involved. [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/how-human-beings-almost-vanished-from-earth-in-70-000-b-c https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/h...
- freethemullet 8y agoA non-zero probability that probability is involved.
- adwhit 8y agoWell that's OK then (???)
- lixtra 8y agoYes, learn to accept your mortality. Long term the human race will die. Some think by robots taking over. Some think by earth getting as warm as it has not been a long time much faster than ever (although live was thriving at that time). Some think a bit meteor might hit us or a super volcano could erupt and cause 100 years of darkness. Some think a global nuclear war will end us. Some think humans will just procreate till they overuse the resources of the planet and people just starve. And so on. Accidentally I ordered above by most likely end of the human life as we know it.
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- skryshtafovych 8y agoso awesome these guys participated in CASP
- dmreedy 8y agoGreat, I hope he's right. However, the AI that has panned out so far (whatever subset of the Hard Problem of Consciousness we've been able to...I don't really want to say solve. Address? Attempt?) in the current summer has done very little to further any of these goals, and has done quite a bit to advance many of the aspects he's worrying about. So when are we going to start seeing evidence that these kinds of lofty prophecies will pan out? Or is the idea that it's going to arrive all at once like the Messiah, and save us from ourselves. I'm very excited about and deeply interested in Artificial Intelligence the discipline. Artificial Intelligence the Religion, I could do without.
- mindcrime 8y agoI've been spending a lot of time lately digging into "outdated" 80's era approaches to AI. Some people think I'm wasting my time and ask "why aren't you doing Deep Learning?" This is the reason why: "You can think about deep learning as it currently is today as the equivalent in the brain to our sensory cortices: our visual cortex or auditory cortex. But, of course, true intelligence is a lot more than just that, you have to recombine it into higher-level thinking and symbolic reasoning, a lot of the things classical AI tried to deal with in the 80s. One way you can think about our research program is [that it's investigating] 'Can we build out from our perception, using deep-learning systems and learning from first principles? Can we build out all the way to high-level thinking and symbolic thinking?'. In order to do that we need to crack problems like learning concepts, things that humans find effortless but our current learning systems can't do." I basically completely agree with Demis on this. A lot of the stuff that was being done in the 80's wasn't "wrong" so much as it was ahead of its time. And just like advances in data, algorithms, and compute power helped propel Neural Networks (which are actually a really old idea) to another level, I suspect some other "old" approaches will also experience a similar resurgence due to that same confluence of factors.
- dmreedy 8y agoYes, I like to separate, such as they can be separated, the tasks of 'parsing' and 'thinking' when it comes to AI. In the 80s (and really, all the way back to the 50s when we started trying computational AI), the tasks that we were attempting to solve were in the `thinking` category; solving tasks at a high level of abstraction with complex ontologies. The revolution in Deep Learning has been almost entirely on the parsing side of things. The conversion of unstructured data from sensors (an array of pixels, say) into semi-structured semantic units in the beginnings of an ontology. This makes sense, because some of the greatest success has come from modeling a part of the brain that we understand pretty well; the occipital lobe (specifically, V1), which is responsible for parsing the input from the eyes and feeding the resulting information in to the rest of the brain. This is the motivation behind the layered, columned CNN architecture. We've seen some success performing some tasks that exist in the (quite large) grey space between parsing and thinking (which are probably platonic ideals anyway, more than they are real things), but I get the feeling we're reaching the limit of how far we can reach into the grey starting from the left side of this continuum. So I don't think it's a waste of time at all to consider the deep, impressive work from the 80s and the 60s in Philosophy and logic and GOFAI.
- wsy 8y agoAI has been a marketing terms from its invention, and is very misleading. Whenever you read something about 'Artificial Intelligence', try to replace this term with an actual technology, such as 'Deep Learning'. If the sentence doesn't make sense with any such replacement, it is most probably just marketing bullshit.
- vinayms 8y agoThis seems to be a bit of oversell, similar to how a gifted musician might declare that music can cure all diseases, including cancer. We must take care to ensure that AI doesn't end up atrophying intelligence of humans, and make us its slave, like how technology seems to be doing. I mean, look at how people have lost capacity to do basic maths mentally, or follow a route based on landmarks only. Technology is useful as long as its our slave, like the slide rule or the compass. Same goes for AI. The combinatorial example about chemical compounds is poor because, if anything, it only reflects the imperfect methodology adopted rather than something inherently insurmountable. May be they need more insight to help prune the irrelevant combinations, and actually act like scientists instead of tinkering inventors. If scientists rely on technology or AI to solve these sort of problems, either through brute force or clever algorithms, instead of engaging their intelligence, it would begin the deterioration of humanity as a whole. Though most of the significant scientific discoveries have been accidental, our progress has been due to application of our minds to understanding and harnessing them. Same goes for evolution of society due to philosophy. AI induced atrophied intelligence will push us back to the dark ages, only this time the god would be the AI, the oracles would be the software, and the heretics would be those propounding reliance on innate human intelligence. Its ironic that a bunch of brilliant scientists creating a brilliant system, on par with human mind, risks destroying the collective brilliance of humans. We must tread carefully.
- jokoon 8y agoThe problem with current ai right now is that it's very complicated and recent work (meaning the tools required are not for everyone), so it's more research than anything else. Most programmers don't really have a clue of how machine learning works when it works well enough, so that's really few people. And so far, what applications in the real world are we seeing that are good enough and are actually useful to justify the investment? You cannot really trust self driving cars yet, and researchers don't have an insight on a deep neural network and how to use those results. I have the feeling deep learning is another excuse to justify selling hardware. I wish there was more research done at a higher level in Neuro sciences, to have a better definition of general intelligence.