One example the programmers offered of this type of gaming the system was a walking digital robot that moved more quickly by somersaulting than by using a normal walking gait.
Read More ›
Sometimes the results are unexpected and even surprising. But they follow directly from the program doing exactly what the programmer programmed it to do. It’s all program, no creativity.
Read More ›
Some think computers could greatly exceed human intelligence if only we added more computing power. That reminds me of an old story…
Read More ›
A headline from the UK Telegraph reads “DeepMind’s AlphaZero now showing human-like intuition in historical ‘turning point’ for AI” Don’t worry if you missed it.
Read More ›
Communications is intended as a discussion forum for fresh ideas in a variety of areas, including philosophy of mind as seen from a computer science perspective.
Read More ›
One thing a celebrity pundit can usually count on is an audience of media professionals who haven’t considered the problems carefully either and don’t want to. It is much easier and more profitable to market Doomsday than Levin’s Law. As always, the fact that laws governing the universe will eventually triumph is true but not news.
Read More ›
Recently, Robert J. Marks, director of the Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence, sat down with radio host and author Michael Medved to help sort through the confusion about what artificial intelligence can and can’t do, now and in the future.
Read More ›
Nearly all of AI’s recent gains have been realized due to massive increases in data and computing power that enable old algorithms to suddenly become useful. For example, researchers first conceived neural networks—the core idea powering much machine learning and AI’s notable advances—in the late 1950s. The worries of an impending winter arise because we’re approaching the limits of what massive data combined with hordes of computers can do.
Read More ›
As long as computers simply get faster and use more memory, there is no reason to worry about a self-aware Skynet.
Read More ›
Eric Holloway: The likely way this will turn out is they’ll realize human-in-the-loop is unavoidable for any useful system, so it’ll spin off into something like the existing field of human computation.
Read More ›
A neuroscientist offers an example of the kind of thing that can go wrong, while the AI system is still small and focused enough to be easily understood:
Read More ›
Readers familiar with The Two Towers will recall that that’s precisely what Worm-Tongue did to Theoden King: The king heard nothing but what was conveyed to him from his would-be overlord by Worm-tongue, until someone separated him, rather forcibly, from his “social medium.”
Read More ›
The robotic news readers of China serve a quite different purpose from the independent news outlets and commentators of the West; the robots help disseminate controlled information rather than finding and developing information.
Read More ›
I largely agree with what François Chollet said last year as to why there will be no explosion of general artificial intelligence. But when he challenged the fear of an AI-driven “intelligence explosion,” he, perhaps unwittingly, said more than he meant.
Read More ›
Life forms exist in a dance with their environment (homeostasis) that requires constant adjustment, an adjustment generated by the inner drive to continue in existence. How does the drive come to be there? The analogy between life forms and machines like computers is not particularly convincing, on close examination.
Read More ›
François Chollet, author of Keras, for the Python deep learning language, cites the No Free Lunch theorem as one of the reasons.
Read More ›
Human understanding is grounded, as Prof. Mitchell says, in common-sense knowledge about how the world works and why things matter. Researchers have not been able to transfer this understanding to AI but she worries that many teams are moving ahead with projects that require such ability for safety.
Read More ›
In an adapted excerpt from Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech (2018), titled “Mr. Robot goes to Washington: How AI will change democracy,” lawyer and tech writer Jamie Susskind: envisions AI as not only fighting “fake news” but voting for us and helping to draft legislation. It’s a sobering thought, how far some tech analysts would be prepared to go in order to impose their own vision of order on an unruly but stable political system.
Read More ›
In traditional fairy tales, an explanatory gap can be addressed by magic. After all, most readers will grant a writer one impossibility (for example, that a boy’s horse has human intelligence) just to get the story moving. Unfortunately, science fiction is one genre that doesn’t work that way. The author must make the claim sound like science, a problem Tegmark vaults right over.
Read More ›
Serious literature will always be written, to borrow a phrase from Winston Churchill, in “blood, toil, tears and sweat” because imaging the human condition accurately is part of its nature. And if the writer lives in an unfree society, serious literature will also be written in fear.
Read More ›