Tag Archives: artificial intelligence

can/should machines run the world?

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From “futureoflife.org“, here is a short excerpt on future directions of artificial intelligence research.

What policies could help increasingly automated societies flourish? For example, Brynjolfsson and McAfee [12] explore various policies for incentivizing development of labor-intensive sectors and for using AI-generated wealth to support underemployed
populations. What are the pros and cons of interventions such as educational reform, apprenticeship programs, labor-demanding infrastructure projects, and changes to minimum wage law, tax structure, and the social safety net [26]? History provides many examples of subpopulations not needing to work for economic security, ranging from aristocrats in antiquity to many present-day citizens of Qatar. What societal structures and other factors determine whether such populations flourish? Unemployment is not the same as leisure, and there are deep links between unemployment and unhappiness, self-doubt, and isolation [34, 19]; understanding what policies and norms can break these links could signifi cantly improve the median quality of life. Empirical and theoretical research on topics such as the basic income proposal could clarify our options [83, 89].

Please follow the link if you would like to see the references.

Also see The Evitable Conflict, the last story in Asimov’s I, Robot. No, not the Will Smith movie! Just put that out of your head and read the book, it’s short. Anyway, in that story humans have handed control of the global economy over to “Machines”, artificial intelligences which are supposed to smooth everything out and keep everything perfectly balanced. Only it doesn’t work out exactly that way, and the humans are trying to figure out why not, and whether or not they should try to do anything about it. This story was written in 1950, so it should be in the public domain soon. Another great old story that is in the public domain is Forster’s The Machine Stops. In that story (from 1909!), a machine runs the entire world, and is supposed to smooth everything out and keep everything perfectly balanced. Only it doesn’t work out exactly that way. Or, it does for awhile, but then the machine… well, I don’t want to spoil it for you. It’s free and it’s short, so give it a read!

poker bots

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It never occurred to me before that there might be computers playing in online poker games, but it makes sense.

Bowling says the program isn’t much of a threat to online gamblers. Heads-up, Limit Hold’em is not the variety of poker most people play. But he does believe that “poker bots” are trying to win in online game rooms. “My guess is there are probably quite strong poker bots out there,” he says. “But you’re not going to hear a lot of talk about them.”

robots learning to use tools

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This article from KurzweilAI is about robots learning to use tools by watching videos on the internet.

This paper presents a system that learns manipulation
action plans by processing unconstrained videos from
the World Wide Web. Its goal is to robustly generate the sequence
of atomic actions of seen longer actions in video in
order to acquire knowledge for robots. The lower level of the
system consists of two convolutional neural network (CNN)
based recognition modules, one for classifying the hand grasp
type and the other for object recognition. The higher level
is a probabilistic manipulation action grammar based parsing
module that aims at generating visual sentences for robot
manipulation. Experiments conducted on a publicly available
unconstrained video dataset show that the system is able
to learn manipulation actions by “watching” unconstrained
videos with high accuracy

Robots, pay attention – I just Googled videos on “how to clean a bathroom” and got over 33 million results, so get to work!

December 2014 in Review

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At the end of November, my Hope for the Future Index stood at -2.  I’ll give December posts a score from -3 to +3 based on how negative or positive they are.

Negative trends and predictions (-12):

  • When you consider roads, streets, and parking, cars take up more space in cities than housing. (-2)
  • The latest on productivity and economic growth: Paul Krugman says there is risk of deflationary spirals in many countries, and the U.S. economy is nothing to right home about. (-1)
  • There are a few legitimate scientists out there warning of sudden, catastrophic climate change in the near future. (-1)
  • Automation (meaning robots and AI) is estimated to threaten 47% of all U.S. jobs. One area of active research into automation: weaponry. Only one negative point because there are also some positive implications. (-1)
  • Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood is a depressing but entertaining reminder that bio-apocalypse is possible. (-2)
  • Before the recent rains, the drought in California was estimated to be a once-in-1200-years event. Major droughts in major food growing regions are not good news, especially with depletion of groundwater, and loss of snowpack and glaciers also in the news. (-2)
  • William Lazonick argues provides evidence that the rise in the gospel of shareholder value correlated with the growth slowdown that started in the 1970s – his explanation is that before that, retained earnings were a cornerstone of R&D and innovation in the economy. Loss of a point because it’s good to hear a dissenting voice, but the economy is still run by disciples of the profits for now. (-1)
  • Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are warning that the U.S. financial system may still be dangerously unstable. (-2)

Positive trends and predictions (+6):

  • There are some new ideas out there for teaching computer programming, even to young children: Loco Robo, Scratch, and for-profit “programming boot camps”. (+1)
  • You can now get genetically customized probiotics for your vagina. (+1)
  • There are plenty of ideas and models out there for safe, walkable streets, some as simple as narrower lanes. But as I point out, the Dutch and Danish designs are pretty much perfect and should just be adopted everywhere. (+1)
  • I linked to a new video depicting Michael Graves’s idea for “linear cities“. These could be very sustainable ecological if they meant the rest of the landscape is left in a mostly natural condition. I am not as sure about social sustainability – done wrong, they could be like living in a mall or subway station. This was one of my all-time more popular posts. (+1)
  • There are new algorithms out there for aggregating and synthesizing large amounts of scientific literature. Maybe this can increase the returns to R&D and help boost innovation. (+1)
  • There will be several international conferences in 2015 with potential to make real progress on financial stability and sustainability. The phrase “deep decarbonization” has been uttered. (+1)
  • Some evidence suggests that the oceans have absorbed a lot of global warming over the past decade or so, preventing the more extreme range of land surface warming that had been predicted. This is a good short- to medium-term trend, but it may not continue in the long term. (+0)

change during December 2014: -12 + 6 = -6

Hope for the Future Index (end of December 2014): -2 -6 = -8

robots robots robots!

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Yes, there’s a robot bartender now.

No word on whether this is a bar where everybody knows your name. I suspect not. Here’s a much longer academic study on which occupations are likely to be most affected by computerization/automation in coming decades.

According to our estimates around 47 percent of total US employment is in the high risk category. We refer to these as jobs at risk – i.e. jobs we expect could be automated relatively soon, perhaps over the next decade or two. Our model predicts that most workers in transportation and logistics occupations, together with the bulk of office and administrative support workers, and labour in production occupations, are at risk. These findings are consistent with recent technological developments documented in the literature. More surprisingly, we find that a substantial share of employment in service occupations,where most US job growth has occurred over the past decades (Autor and Dorn, 2013), are highly susceptible to computerisation. Additional support for this finding is provided by the recent growth in the market for service robots (MGI, 2013) and the gradually diminishment of the comparative advantage of human labour in tasks involving mobility and dexterity (Robotics-VO, 2013).

The paper has a detailed appendix where you can look up your specific occupation if you are so inclined. In also has a detailed lesson on the history of technology and labor markets, if you are inclined to read that.

Finally, the Pentagon is also worried about falling behind the curve on automation:

Hagel and DOD officials have been discussing the so-called third offset strategy for months without giving up any specifics as to how they intend to achieve offset innovation. In his speech, Hagel provided a small glimpse into the fields that will attract special Defense Department attention as part of the strategy: “robotics, autonomous systems, miniaturization, big data, and advanced manufacturing, including 3-D printing.”

automated aggregation of scientific literature

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I am intrigued by this example from Stanford of computerized review and synthesis of scientific literature:

Over the last few years, we have built applications for both broad domains that read the Web and for specific domains like paleobiology. In collaboration with Shanan Peters (PaleobioDB), we built a system that reads documents with higher accuracy and from larger corpora than expert human volunteers. We find this very exciting as it demonstrates that trained systems may have the ability to change the way science is conducted.

In a number of research papers we demonstrated the power of DeepDive on NMR data and financial, oil, and gas documents. For example, we showed that DeepDive can understand tabular data. We are using DeepDive to support our own research, exploring how knowledge can be used to build the next generation of data processing systems.

Examples of DeepDive applications include:

  • PaleoDeepDive – A knowledge base for Paleobiologists
  • GeoDeepDive – Extracting dark data from geology journal articles
  • Wisci – Enriching Wikipedia with structured data

The complete code for these examples is available with DeepDive.

Let’s just say an organization is trying to be more innovative. First it needs to understand where its standard operating procedures are in relation to the leading edge. To do that, it needs to understand where the leading edge is. That means research, which can be very tedious, and time consuming. It means the organization is paying people to spend time reviewing large amounts of information, some or even most of which will not turn out to be useful. So a change in mindset is often necessary. But tools that could jump start the process and provide short cuts would be great.

This is my own developing theory of how an organization can become more innovative: First, figure out where the leading edge is. Second, figure out how far the various parts of your organization are from the leading edge. Third, figure out how you are going to bring a critical mass of your organization up to the leading edge – this is as much a human resource problem as an innovation problem. Fourth, then and only then, you are ready to try to advance the leading edge. I think a lot of organizations have a few people that do #1, but then they skip right to #4. Then that small group is way outside the leading edge while the bulk of the organization is nowhere near it. That’s not a recipe for success.

telepathy

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According to the BBC, telepathy is here, sort of. Human brain waves can be read by machines, then transmitted by machines to other human brains, which can perceive them. At the moment, they are perceived only as light, not the original thoughts that they were. Before we get too excited, the researchers say they think the technology will eventually allow perception of the original thoughts, but not in our current lifetime. I can see another implication though – if brain patterns are already being read into computers, we will eventually figure out how to have computers interpret them. Assuming progress in computing power continues to be exponential or super-exponential, I wouldn’t be so sure that we won’t see this relatively soon. Lots of exciting, and scary, implications, of course.

the cyborg moths are finally here!

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Well, they’re finally here – the cyborg moth slaves. First it was cockroaches and I didn’t say much because, well, they’re cockroaches. But moths – they’re just one step from butterflies, and it just doesn’t seem like you should do this to butterflies. From butterflies the obvious next step is Paul Mcauley’s cyborg baboon-human hybrids. If you read his book of short stories The Invisible Country, it is not until about the second page that you start to think this sort of technology could raise some ethical issues.