James Barrat and Gary Marcus on Artificial Intelligence

 Artificial Intelligence  

Recently on CBS This morning, author of Our Final Invention, James Barrat and New Yorker contributor Gary Marcus discussed some of the potential threats of artificial intelligence.

James Barrat author of a new book, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era€and Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist at New York University who blogs about artificial intelligence for The New Yorker, joined CBS This Morning recently to discuss the reality of the research.

In Our Final Invention, Barrat looks in depth at what can go wrong with the development and application of advanced AI.  Examining AI's catastrophic downside, the book looks at research at Google, Apple, IBM, and DARPA.

Along with Barrat, Marcus notes that the development of artificial intelligence is growing into the most important conversation of our time.

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Marcus, in a few articles recently however has pointed out that, while AI developments are impressive and the threat of super-human intelligence is a great threat, the current status of the field does not match up to the media hype.  Quoting Yann Le Cun, who was just appointed to run Facebook’s new A.I. lab, who wrote in a kind of open letter to the media, “AI [has] ‘died’ about four times in five decades because of hype: people made wild claims (often to impress potential investors or funding agencies) and could not deliver. Backlash ensued. It happened twice with neural nets already: once in the late 60’s and again in the mid-90’s.”

In the discussion above, much of AI's current shortcomings revolve around the lack of common sense algorithms and the failures of Big Data to resolve some of what Marcus calls "Long Tail" problems.

According to Marcus, "Overhyped stories about new technologies create short-term enthusiasm, but they also often lead to long-term disappointment." That said, when reviewing Our Final Invention, he also wrote, " the only real difference between enthusiasts and skeptics is a time frame."

What do you think?  Is artificial general intelligence close to reality, or still a product of the far future or just plain science fiction?


SOURCE  CBS News

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