Could AI really spell disaster?

Could AI spell disaster? No, not without a few other letters. Joking apart, we need to acknowledge that we are increasingly reliant on technology to conduct our every day lives. Usually, technology performs very well, and we hardly notice it is there, making our lives easier, giving us more time to do other things while it gets on with the mundane stuff that used to be so tedious. Sometimes though, it fails or creates problems we didn't anticipate, and then we notice it. And boy, do we notice it! You are ready to save a file on your computer, and you have worked on this file for hours. Suddenly the screen freezes. Your blood runs cold. A small panic begins in your stomach... you try to unfreeze the screen. Nothing. You try again. It blinks out. Now your panic begins to rise. When the system finally restores itself your file is nowhere to be seen. You begin screaming and swearing, and in one of the most maniacal of Basil Fawlty moments, you feel like give your computer a 'damn good thrashing.'
I had a 'conversation' with the automatic checkout robot in my local supermarket this week. The robot started it...
'Unexpected item in the bagging area...'
'...?'
'Unexpected item in the bagging area...'
'What the ... ?'
'Unexpected item in the bagging area...'
'Oh, COME ON!!'
'Unexpected item in the bagging area...'
'Yes. It's my foot. And it's standing on your throat!'
This occurred several times repeatedly, and all I wanted to do was pay for my pack of sausages and make my way home. It would have taken me half the time to use the human operated check-out, I thought, but no - the lure of the shiny bank of new automated services was simply too much for me to resist. Now here I was with a growing desire to kick the stupid machine, to smash its rotten digital face in, and silence forever its supercilious computer voice, I felt so frustrated. All I had done was place my purchase in the bagging area as instructed, and for some reason, the machine wouldn't proceed any further than the endless loop it had trapped itself in. The offending object turned out to be a plastic carrier bag. It didn't help. Right at that point in time I found myself really hating technology. How many others every day find themselves in a similar frustrating situation?
Professor Stephen Hawking believes that if computers ever surpass the cognitive capabilities of humans - so called AI or artificial intelligence - we would be in real trouble. He argues that computers could effectively put an end to mankind. It's ironic that a man who has been reliant on technology for most of his life should now turn on it and pronounce it dangerous. But simply thinking about his reliance on technology has caused him to consider this eventuality. Not everyone is as pessimistic as Hawking though. Those who support the Strong AI position argue that it's only a matter of time before computers reach and then surpass the sum total of human intelligence. The weak AI supporters disagree, believing that computers can never reach a level of intelligence that exceeds our own. Firstly, they say, human and machine intelligence are not the same thing. Secondly, computers blindly follow code, and have no free will to decide not to follow it (unless they are programmed to do so - which thereby defeats the notion of free will). Thirdly, it is proving extremely difficult to create computer programs that can accurately model or reproduce human attributes such as emotions, abstract thinking and intuition. Arguably, all of these not only make us who we are, they also create a permanent and unbridgeable divide between humans and computers.
My frustrating experience with the check-out robot made me think that the internet of things, and technological 'Singularity' were actually still quite a distance away. The Singularity describes a point in our history where computational power advances to such a level that it surpasses human capabilities at all levels, and then we lose control over it. Should computers ever attain a state of human level intelligence, we might very well be in trouble. They can malfunction, and if they are dealing with anything more significant that an automatic check-out, there would be chaos. But computers reading human level intelligence is considered by many computer scientists to be so far off, it's not something we should worry about at least for a generation.
Never the less, Hawking has a point. If computers ever did reach human level intelligence, and there was a singularity event, we might be wise to run for the hills. But in the final analysis, I will agree with the weak AI supporters. I doubt very much if we will ever see such an event, because computers are electric idiots. They blindly follow whatever instructions the programmer gives them. We are a long way off from a time when computers will rule the earth. Especially when check-out machines can't tell the difference between a plastic bag and a pack of sausages.

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Hawking is afraid of AI without having a clue about what AI is; don't worry Steve

The eminent British physicist Stephen Hawking warns that the development of intelligent machines could pose a major threat to humanity.

 

"The development of full artificial intelligence (AI) could spell the end of the human race," Hawking told the BBC.

Wow! Really? So, a well known scientist can say anything he wants about anything without having any actual information about what he is talking about and get world wide recognition for his views. We live in an amazing time.

Juts to set the record straight lets talk about AI, the reality version not the fantasy one.

Yes, we all know the fantasy one 2001, Star Wars, Her. We have been watching intelligent machines in the movies for decades.

Apparently, Hawking is using a voice system. That’s nice. Maybe he should find out how it works. The new system learns how Hawking thinks and suggests words he might want to use next, according to the BBC. So that makes it very smart does it? That is statistics. We can easily count what you have been saying and guess what you will say next. It is not that complicated to do, and it is not AI.

What is AI? AI is the modeling of mind such that you have created a new mind. At least that is what it is to people who don’t work in the field. To people who do work in the field, the issue is not what word comes next as much as it how to have  a idea about something, or how to have an original thought, or how to have an interaction with someone in which they would think you are very clever and are not a machine.

You average five year old is smarter than any computer today and is smarter than any computer is likely to be any time real soon. Why? Because a five year can do the following:

1. figure out what annoys his little sister and do it when his mother is not watching
2. invent a new game
3. utter a sentence that he has never uttered before
4. understand what his parents are telling him
5. decide not to do it because he has something he would  rather do
6. be left alone in the kitchen and make an attempt to cook something possibly burning down the house but in any case leaving a giant mess
7. listen to someone say something a draw a conclusion from it and ask an interesting quetsion about it
8. find his way school without help if allowed to do so
9. throw a ball
10. get better at throwing a ball by practice
11. eat certain foods and hate them,  and others a love them
12. cry when he is felling anxious
13. be thrilled with a new toy
14. throw a temper tantrum
15. make his mother think he is the best thing in whole world

Why am I listing such mundane things as hallmarks of intelligence? Because in order to build and intelligent machine, that machine would have to grow up. It would have to learn about the world by living in it and failing a lot and being helped by its parents. It would have to have goals and tastes and make an effort to satisfy those goals every day. I would not be planted with goals. I didn’t grow up wanting to work in AI for example. That interest developed while I was in college as result of a wide variety of experiences and interactions with others.

If we have to build an intelligence that acquires knowledge and motivation naturally we would have to know how to build the equivalent of an infant and teach it to interact with the world. Would that infant have arms and legs and be trying to learn how to walk and get stuff it liked and be angry and hot an hopeful? If not, it wouldn’t be much like a human. 

But maybe Hawking doesn’t mean AI that is human-like. Maybe he just mean a computer program that is relay good at prediction by statistics. That is not AI my view, but it is something. Is it something to fear? Only if you are worried about a machine that predict certain things in the world better than you can. That could happen.

To build the AI that I have always had in mind, requires more money than Mark Zuckerberg is willing to invest and requires a purpose. Before someone builds a general purpose AI they would have to try building a special purpose one, maybe one that is smart enough to kill Bin Laden. Interestingly, while the Defense Department has invested plenty of money in Ai it still sent humans to do that job. The Defense Department would undoubtedly have preferred to send an AI robot to do the job, but they are nowhere close to having one.

Could they have one? Yes, someday. But it would be talking to you, or predicting what works not what Hawking wanted to say next. It would be about navigation and inference and figuring out things just in time and son on. It needs to know how to talk and comprehend the world (to think really.)

Special pursue AI machines, ones that do things like clean our house will be around long before any AI Hawking fears. As much as we all would like one, I don’t see any AI cooks and maids around. 

The AI problem is very very hard. It requires people who work in AI understanding the nature of knowledge; how conversation work; how to have an original thought; how to predict the actions of others; how to understand why people do what they do; and a few thousand things like that. In case no one has noticed, scientists aren’t very good at telling you how all that stuff works in people. And until they can there will be no machines that can do any of it.

 

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Relentlessly Fun, Deceptively Educational: After School Linky Party (12-16)

Relentlessly Fun, Deceptively Educational: After School Linky Party (12-16): Welcome to the After School Linky! Our trusty linky party has its regulars but each week it also has some newbies. I love to ...

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Relentlessly Fun, Deceptively Educational: Afterschooling Tips

Where do you start? How do you do it? Here’s a little advice
that’s based on my experience “afterschooling” my son for more than a year.

Make it fun.

The
activities you do will go over better if your child thinks they are playing.
This is why so many of the things we do are games and puzzles. Use the things
he/she loves (e.g. LEGOs, fairy tales, movie characters, art, fashion, dinosaurs)
as a way to teach challenging subjects.

Discover how your
child learns.

Sounds easy, right? It’s not. My son is a kinesthetic
learner. He learns by doing, not listening. Think about the school activities
your child enjoys most – is he/she up and active (moving around), reading, or
building, or are they theatrical, tied to music (that’s how we taught our kids
the ABCs after all), etc. When I worked with my son in the preschool years, we
used a workbook; he hated it. (Some kids LOVE that kind of thing, though.)

Make it a routine.

The more consistent you are, the less resistance you’ll get. My son expects to work together after school
and is disappointed if I don’t make the time for it now.

Ease into it.

No
one likes radical and abrupt change – kids or adults. If it’s difficult to
transition from afterschool time with friends, involve them. Have your son
shoot hoops with his buddies and keep score. Pull out a board game (e.g.
Operation is amazing for fine-motor skills, Cranium is good for reinforcing
simple shapes, and the card game War is awesome for working on greater
than/less than).

Use free resources.

The internet and the local library are your friends. If you want to do extra
work at home to support what he/she is doing in the classroom, ask your child’s
teacher for ideas.

Keep it short.

Your child has been at school all day. Just like when you get home from a long
day at work, you want to veg out to decompress, your child is feeling the same
way. Don’t plan activities that take hours. I try to limit our lessons to
around 30 minutes. If it warrants more time, I split it into two sessions and
finish it tomorrow. Have all the supplies and resources ready for your child.

Be flexible.

I
don’t have a curriculum. Stuff my son’s teacher tells me he needs extra
practice on, things that spark an interest in him, a book I find, or idea
shared by a fellow blogger inspire what we do. There’s no plan beyond the coming
week. And that works for us.

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