bloc 33rd Square Business Tools - singularity 33rd Square Business Tools: singularity - All Post
Showing posts with label singularity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label singularity. Show all posts

Friday, July 14, 2017

Steve Jurvetson on The Compound Effect of Artificial Intelligence


When Steve Jurvetson speaks, Silicon Valley listens. Recently the billionaire investor gave a fast-paced talk at the SLUSH conference on the compounding effect of deep learning.


Steve Jurvetson is widely recognized as one of the smartest people in Silicon Valle. He graduated in engineering from Stanford at the top of his class in two-and-a-half years and is friends and associates with fellow billionaires and the biggest names in the tech industry. He also serves on the Board of Directors for deep learning company Nervana Systems (recently acquired by Intel), as well as Planet Labs, a company that has launched the largest constellation of Earth-observation micro-satellites, and D-Wave, a quantum computing company which counts Google, NASA and Lockheed-Martin as customers.

When Jurvetson speaks, it is worth listening to. Recently he gave a fast-paced talk at the SLUSH conference on the compounding effect of deep learning. See the full video below.

"If the internet is in your business in any way, there is something happening in the next five years that you should definitely have on your road map. And that is, we are going to see the greatest change in people's access to the internet than we've ever seen," states Jurvetson. "This is the greatest delta shift in people's connection to the global economy than ever before."

"Specifically," he continues, "I'm referring to broadband satellite connections."

"Deep learning, as applied to all forms of engineering, is the biggest advance since the scientific method itself."
Previously, Jurvetson was an R&D Engineer at Hewlett-Packard, where seven of his communications chip designs were fabricated. He also worked in product marketing at Apple and NeXT Software and management consulting with Bain & Company. He also holds a MSc in electrical engineering and MBA from Stanford and is the first non-Europe to become an Estonian e-resident.

Related articles
The fast-talking Jurvetson concludes his talk with thoughts about deep learning. "I would argue that deep learning, as applied to all forms of engineering, is the biggest advance since the scientific method itself." We are building learning machines that can learn better than we can learn, and systems that we cannot efficiently comprehend. Adversarial learning is even pitting one AI against another to learn faster. Such a system was used by DeepMind in the development of AlphaGo.

Quoting Danny Hillis, from The Pattern on the Stone:

"The greatest achievement of our technology may be the creation of tools that allow us to go beyond engineering -- that allow us to create more than we could understand."

We are at the cusp of this change, projects Jurvetson.

The scientific method was a profound change in how we accumulate learning over time, and how we move from random guesses to how we might accumulate ideas that might actually hold merit and predict the future, and have descriptive power, and throw away the ones that are bad. I think deep learning is as powerful as that.

"We humans are no longer at the vanguard of evolution. We are parenting the next generation, and we should get used to that."





SOURCE  SLUSH    TOP PHOTO Flickr


By  33rd SquareEmbed





Thursday, June 22, 2017

A Review of Weak AI, Strong AI and Superintelligence


Should we fear artificial intelligence and all it will bring us? Not so long as we remember to make sure to build artificial emotional intelligence into the technology, according to the website The School of Life.


The prospect of artificial intelligence excites and repulsive people in equal measure. The team at The School of Life have a great introductory video on the subject. Check out the full video below.

The video first divides artificial intelligence into three categories, artificial narrow intelligence, or weak AI; artificial general intelligence (AGI), or strong AI; and finally, artificial superintelligence.


narrow / weak artificial intelligence

Narrow AI might not be able to pass the Turing test, but our lives already depend on it to a great extent. This form of AI is used for discrete tasks from flying an airplane, to managing the photos on your smartphone.

Strong AI

Strong AI can think as well as humans can. The School of Life suggests we are probably about thirty years away from this, and we would tend to agree. Although many disagree that we will ever achieve the development of machines as smart as us, most researchers and scientists involved predict we are only a few decades away.

There remains a substantial amount of work for this to occur. AGI is associated with traits such as consciousness, sentience, sapience and self-awareness observed in living beings. Nevertheless, there is a strong possibility most of the people alive today will live to witness the advent of the Strong AI Age.

artificial superintelligence


"The key thing about Strong AI is that it will be able to learn and upgrade itself on its own, without instructions."

Related articles
The thing about the day after the advent of AGI, is that humans may be left in the dust. Recursive self-improvement means that Strong AI systems may be able to continue to program themselves smarter at ever increasing, exponential speeds. This scenario is known as the 'hard take-off,' the Singularity or simply the appearance of artificial superintelligence.

So, if we are only a few decades at most away from AGI, the likelihood is that superintelligence will follow in a very short amount of time after that. According to the video, this excites and appalls society almost equally.  "We're approaching two alternative' futures with a speed and uncertainty of a skydiver who can't quite remember if' he's wearing a parachute rucksack."

Many observers point to the perils of superintelligent AI, but there is a massive potential benefit for us too, in terms of solving energy needs, and therefore essentially the cost of everything; eliminating disease and more.

According to the video, we should also consider a rather different and far more exciting scenario, one in which computational power isn’t merely directed at the scientific and logistical dimensions of existence, but also at its emotional and psychological ones. It is time to imagine not merely AI but also, and even more significantly, what we here call AEI: Artificial Emotional Intelligence.

The Book of Life shares six areas where AEI could revolutionize the world including the development of our self-knowledge; improving our education; providing truly objective news; developing new forms of art; helping us shop; and improving our relationships. With AEI, we should all soon be able to connect with machines that help us correct the range of our emotional failings.

The video concludes with some excellent advice:

Science fiction is sometimes dismissed in elite circles but we can see now that  thinking twenty to fifty years ahead and' imagining how life will be is a central task for all of us all. We should all be science fiction writers of a kind in our minds. We are poised just before a tipping point in human history. We need to build up the wisdom to control which way we will tip, and part of that means thinking very realistically about things that today' still seem rather phantasmagorical. Humans are toolmaking animals were on the brink of creating tools like no others so the trick is going to be to stay close to the underlying ancient purpose of every tool, which is to help us to do something we actually want to do more effectively. There is no reason why our computers shouldn't just be much better versions of our earlier flint axes. 




SOURCE  The School of Life


By  33rd SquareEmbed





Wednesday, May 3, 2017

The Dark Side Of The Singularity


Singularity

The Singularity is coming and promises to change on a fundamental and massive level. While the future will be full of amazing advancements and technological wonders, the question is, will we be able to change with it?


"Right now, we are on the cusp of a technological disruption that will make the switch from horses to cars look like switching from Coke to Pepsi," states YouTuber Joe Scott from the channel, Answers With Joe.

"What happens when a third of your workforce is out of their job through no fault of their own?"
As Scott discusses, there is a dark side of the technological Singularity, one that really needs to be talked about because the way we respond to it is going to significantly alter our future as a species.

Related articles
For instance, The BBC released a report just a few weeks ago that said that 30% of jobs are going to go away in the next 10 years because of automation.

Factories already decimated by outsourcing are now losing even more jobs to automation. And as automation becomes more sophisticated, more industries are at risk.

The transportation sector actually makes up 25% of the jobs in the United States, if you can believe that. A full quarter of the population. And autonomous cars… They’re pretty much here.

For Scott, the future has the potential to be a utopia, but in between now and then he worries that things will get bad. How bad? Just "the worst it has ever been in history." He is more afraid of this than the effects of climate change.



SOURCE  Answers With Joe


By  33rd SquareEmbed





Thursday, April 6, 2017

Ray Kurzweil Discusses His Optimism for the Future


Ray Kurzweil

In two recent interviews, Ray Kurzweil emphatically affirmed his optimism about the future. Despite the impression in the media that things might be getting worse, Kurzweil remains confident in the trends he fist started tracking 35 years ago.


Futurist, author, inventor and Google Director of Engineering Ray Kurzweil spoke recently at the CeBIT 2017 Conference. In the talk, Kurzweil covered many of his common themes and extrapolations of his Law of Accelerating Returns, an extension of Moore's Law. Kurzweil is famous, in large part for this postulation, which he uses to track many technology models that, when distilled to information, point to exponential progression trends.

"There has actually been 18 percent growth every year, in every form of information technology, for the last fifty years, despite the fact that you can get twice as much of it each year for the same cost," he states in the video below.

Kurzweil first explored these technological trends in the books The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity Is Near, and has continued over the years to be a popular speaker on the subject. He started making his predictions 35 years ago, and they are still coming true.

Related articles
To be honest, if you have seen Kurzweil speak before, you might want to skip to 34:20 for the question and answer portion. His take on alien life and the importance of religion are interesting viewpoints.

Kurzweil shares his optimism about the future in the segment too. "The reality is things are getting better, but people don't realize that," he says, following up the question with a number of facts and statistics on poverty, longevity, education, democratic values, and health.

Kurzweil encourages us to weigh the exponential rise in news availability with the actual trends in crime, illness and violence. Our compassion is what is being demonstrated by the collective feeling that things are getting worse instead of better.

"We hear about this terrible thing that happens to a family halfway across the world, and our heart goes out to them—it's actually a good thing, even though it is painful, because then we actually try to do something about it," he says.



Also recently, James Bedsole, who previously made an excellent documentary about the futurist, interviewed Kurzweil, in his Google office in Mountain View, California.

"Optimism is not an idle prediction about the future, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy."
In the interview (included below), Kurzweil is asked if he is comfortable being an optimist. "Optimism is not an idle prediction about the future, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy," he answers. "I do come out on the optimistic side, but it is not an idle optimism that ignores the dangers."

People quickly forget the past, according to Kurzweil. "Imagine life without search engines or search engines or smartphones," he suggests.




SOURCES ExpovistaTV,  James Bedsole


By  33rd SquareEmbed





Monday, March 20, 2017

Now We Can Communicate With Robots Using Just Our Brains


Brain-Machine Interfaces

In the past, we could only communicate with robots by giving them very specific instructions. New deep learning technologies have recently allowed robots to teach themselves. Now, researchers have devised a way for people to communicate with robots using just their brains. 



Computer scientists from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Boston University created a system that monitors a person’s brain waves with an electroencephalography (EEG), which it then uses to determine if the human agrees with the robot’s decision. It can classify brain waves in just 10 to 30 milliseconds.

If the system detects "error-related potentials" (ErrPs), brain signals that the brain creates whenever it notices a mistake, the robot will become aware that it made or was about to make the wrong choice.

The researchers are also working on enabling the robot to identify secondary errors, such as those that occur when the system doesn’t notice the human’s signal that it made a mistake. Once it can do that in real time, the team suspects its accuracy will improve by up to 90%.

At the moment, the system can decide between only two options, but because ErrPs are stronger when more serious errors occur, robots may be able to interpret the brain waves to help them make more complex decisions that incorporate more choices.

The potential uses for this technology are tremendous. Being able to better communicate with robotic systems could improve their effectiveness and lead to improvements in technologies across various industries.

Brain Controlled Robot

Related articles

Healthcare

Brain-wave communication may be especially promising for the healthcare field. Healthcare professionals currently use robots for surgical procedures, patient care and even companionship for patients. Improving communication with these systems could make them much more useful.

Robots may be programmed to perform tasks or communicate for people who are nonverbal. With this new technology, even if someone can not speak and is also physically incapacitated, they could still communicate with the robot using just their brain.

Surgeons often use robots to assist with medical procedures. They sometimes employ tiny microbots to repair injuries, deliver medications and locate tumors inside the body. This type of procedure is extremely non-invasive, cuts down on the possibility of human error and could potentially even makes surgeries easier for doctors by avoiding the poor visibility caused by surgical smoke.

The researchers’ system also has the potential to greatly improve prosthetics. Controlling a robotic prosthetic limb with just one’s mind would make it much easier to control and may feel more natural to those who depend on prosthetics.

Transportation

Driverless vehicle technologies have advanced significantly in recent years, but they’re still susceptible to errors. Human drivers can take over in these situations, but drivers often have just a few seconds to react.

Being able to correct a mistake made by an autonomous vehicle using only brain waves would increase the speed of correcting the mistake because it would require the human driver to take minimal action. Even if an improvement of only a few seconds was achieved, it could make the difference between avoiding an incident and experiencing a crash.

The technology could also allow someone in an autonomous vehicle to more quickly and conveniently customize their experience. They could, for example, tell the computer to alter their route, speed up or slow down and perhaps even change the radio station.

Manufacturing

Robots in manufacturing have become increasingly common and more advanced. The robots of yesteryear were large, could only complete one or two specific tasks, couldn’t be used for detailed work and could injure a person if they got too close.

Today’s bots are multi-talented, can work even with minuscule parts and are designed to work collaboratively with humans. Communicating with robots usually requires thinking in a certain way because the robots’ understanding of human interaction was limited. For example, you might have to look at a specific and different light display for each task you wanted the machine to complete.

Communicating through brain waves allows for more much more natural, quick and nuanced communication that’s less tiring and allows for greater control.


Robotics is becoming progressively more integrated into our way of life and increasingly advanced, as is the way we communicate with these machines. This discovery represents an exciting development in the way we communicate with robots that could make them much more effective and lead to innovations in a variety of industries.



TOP IMAGE SOURCE  Pixabay


By  Kayla MatthewsEmbed

Author Bio - Kayla Matthew is a technology writer and the owner of ProductivityBytes.com. She is also a regular contributor to VentureBeat, MakeUseOf and Motherboard.



Sunday, March 19, 2017

Ray Kurzweil Stands By His Predictions


Singularity

Recently at the SXSW Conference in Austin, Texas, Kurzweil reaffirmed his longstanding prediction that the Technological Singularity will happen sometime in the next 30 years.


With a thirty-year track record of accurate predictions, futurist and Google engineer Ray Kurzweil has been called “the restless genius” by The Wall Street Journal and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes magazine.

"By 2029, computers will have human-level intelligence."
At the recent SXSW Conference, Kurzweil reaffirmed his predictions about the Singularity. Kurzweil made the statements in an interview following his keynote address, that he undertook with his daughter, author Amy Kurzweil Comix. The two discussed their creative work, inspirations, and collaborations across disciplines, while speculating about the future of storytelling, the arts and technology.

By 2029, computers will have human-level intelligence,” he said. “That leads to computers having human intelligence, our putting them inside our brains, connecting them to the cloud, expanding who we are. Today, that’s not just a future scenario. It’s here, in part, and it’s going to accelerate.”

Singularity exponential

Related articles
For Kurzweil, the Singularity represents the exponential improvement of intelligence—both human and machine. He envisions the same technology that will make AIs more intelligent giving humans a boost as well.

“What’s actually happening is [machines] are powering all of us,” Kurzweil said during the SXSW interview. “They’re making us smarter. They may not yet be inside our bodies, but, by the 2030s, we will connect our neocortex, the part of our brain where we do our thinking, to the cloud.”

“We’re going to get more neocortex, we’re going to be funnier, we’re going to be better at music. We’re going to be sexier,” the author of The Singularity Is Near said. “We’re really going to exemplify all the things that we value in humans to a greater degree.”

“Ultimately, it will affect everything,” Kurzweil said during the interview. “We’re going to be able to meet the physical needs of all humans. We’re going to expand our minds and exemplify these artistic qualities that we value.”



SOURCE  SXSW


By  33rd SquareEmbed



Thursday, December 1, 2016

Ray Kurzweil on The Transformational Trends in Technology


Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil was featured in a one-on-one interview at the New York Times Global Leaders Collective, recently, discussing global accelerating change, artificial intelligence and other factors that are dramatically changing our world.

Recently renowned inventor Ray Kurzweil was featured in a one-on-one interview at the New York Times Global Leaders Collective, with host and top journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin. They discussed Kurzweil’s theories on global accelerating change including examining his insights on how computing and information technologies can advance markets and lead to progress.

"If you look at the impact on employment, the perception is entirely opposite the reality."
When asked about the future of the economy in light of artificial intelligence and other accelerating technology Kurzweil responds, "economic growth statistics completely ignore the increasing value of a dollar. I spent a few hundred dollars for this device on my belt [referring to his mobile phone] and it counts as a few hundred dollars of economic activity. This, despite that it is a billion dollars circa 1980, or a trillion dollars circa 1965 of computation and communication."

Andrew Ross Sorkin and Ray Kurzweil

"Manufacturing is going to be transformed," continues Kurzweil. "If you look at the impact on employment, the perception is entirely opposite the reality." He also describes how polls continuously show that people perceive things are getting worse, when they are actually getting much better for many more people.

"People are actually better off, but their perception of their economic security is infused with more knowledge of the change in the world," he says in reference to the recent US election results.

Related articles
Responding to Bill Gates and Elon Musk's latest descriptions of the threats of artificial intelligence, Kurzweil states that people go through three phases when examining the potential of new technology. One is inspiration, then fear at the potential dangers of the technologies, and finally, a balanced view that the technologies offer both risks and rewards.

The New York Times hosted the first meeting of the Global Leaders’ Collective, a select group of influential C.E.O.s, executives and innovators who lead companies in the luxury space around the world.

The purpose of this inaugural summit was to bring the best minds from diverse industries together to assess and navigate the dramatic new challenges in a key global market. In the wake of Brexit, President-Elect Trump's administration on the horizon, innovative technologies impacting strategic decisions, volatile demand in emerging markets, geopolitical risk and shifting trends in consumer behavior, companies require stronger leadership than ever before.

Kurzweil has written five national best-selling books, including New York Times best sellers The Singularity Is Near and How to Create a Mind.  He is co-founder and chancellor of Singularity University and a director of engineering at Google, heading up a team developing machine intelligence and natural language understanding.




SOURCE  The New York Times Conferences


By  33rd SquareEmbed



Friday, September 30, 2016

Sam Harris Asks If We Can Control AI



Artificial Intelligence

Scared of superintelligent AI? You should be, says neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris — and not just in some abstract theoretical way. We're going to build superhuman machines, says Harris, and our collective emotional and analytic response to the dangers is not where it should be.

TED has finally released the long awaited talk by neuroscientist and author Sam Harris. (Video is below.) In his presentation, Harris emphatically urges the audience to consider just how important the development of artificial intelligence is, and how our emotional response so far is "not appropriate tot he dangers that lie ahead." Even Harris admits,"I am unable to marshal this response, and I'm giving this talk."
"It seems overwhelmingly likely that the spectrum of intelligence extends much further than we currently conceive."
"It's not that our machines will become spontaneously malevolent." Harris continues. "The concern is really that we will build machines that are so much more competent than we are that the slightest divergence between their goals and our own could destroy us."

The central point of Harris's argument is:
Intelligence is a matter of information processing in physical systems. Actually, this is a little bit more than an assumption. We have already built narrow intelligence into our machines, and many of these machines perform at a level of superhuman intelligence already. And we know that mere matter can give rise to what is called "general intelligence," an ability to think flexibly across multiple domains, because our brains have managed it. Right? I mean, there's just atoms in here, and as long as we continue to build systems of atoms that display more and more intelligent behavior, we will eventually, unless we are interrupted, we will eventually build general intelligence into our machines. 

We don't stand on a peak of intelligence, or anywhere near it, likely argues Harris. "And this really is the crucial insight. This is what makes our situation so precarious, and this is what makes our intuitions about risk so unreliable."

scale of intelligence

Related articles
Citing the intelligence explosion hypothesis of I.J. Good, Harris speaks of how our minds cannot really fathom the exponential development of intelligence in such a scenario.

"It seems overwhelmingly likely that the spectrum of intelligence extends much further than we currently conceive, and if we build machines that are more intelligent than we are, they will very likely explore this spectrum in ways that we can't imagine, and exceed us in ways that we can't imagine." he says.

No one seems to notice that referencing the time horizon is a total non sequitur. If intelligence is just a matter of information processing, and we continue to improve our machines, we will produce some form of superintelligence. And we have no idea how long it will take us to create the conditions to do that safely. Let me say that again. We have no idea how long it will take us to create the conditions to do that safely.

Harris relates how the computer scientist Stuart Russell once said, imagine that we received a message from an alien civilization, which read: "People of Earth, we will arrive on your planet in 50 years.Get ready." And now we're just counting down the months until the mothership lands? "We would feel a little more urgency than we do," says Harris.

"I don't have a solution to this problem, apart from recommending that more of us think about it. I think we need something like a Manhattan Project on the topic of artificial intelligence," says Harris.

Not to build it, because I think we'll inevitably do that, but to understand how to avoid an arms race and to build it in a way that is aligned with our interests. When you're talking about superintelligent AI that can make changes to itself, it seems that we only have one chance to get the initial conditions right, and even then we will need to absorb the economic and political consequences of getting them right.

Harris is the author of five New York Times bestsellers. His books include Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying. The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. Harris's writing and public lectures cover a wide range of topics -- neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, spirituality, violence, human reasoning -- but generally focus on how a growing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live.

Harris's work has been published in more than 20 languages and has been discussed in the New York Times, Time, Scientific American, Nature, Newsweek, Rolling Stone and many other journals. He has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Economist, The Times (London), the Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The Annals of Neurology and elsewhere. Harris also regularly hosts a popular podcast.

Harris received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA.





SOURCE  TED


By  33rd SquareEmbed



Wednesday, September 7, 2016

If Geordie Rose is Proven Right, the Singularity is Closer Than We Think


Artificial Intelligence

D-Wave's founder Geordie Rose gave three predictions about the future three years ago. Two of them have already come true. His last was about quantum computers that can think exponentially faster and will almost certainly overtake us in thought, and just about everything else. While this may sound familiar, the timeline Rose presents deserves another look.


At Moses Znaimer's Ideacity conference in 2013, Geordie Rose gave what he considered to be three dangerous predictions.

The conference took place as Rose, founder of D-Wave, the Canadian quantum computer company was sharing his company's new success, having installed machines at Google and NASA. Recently we were reviewing the footage (embedded below) and we wanted to reflect on what Rose foretold.

Related articles
"Predictions are what we want to happen, not what will happen."
Rose said they were dangerous predictions, because they were predictions about the future, and it is so easy to be wrong when predicting the future. "Predictions are our internal desires made manifest," Rose stated. "Predictions are what we want to happen, not what will happen."

The first prediction he made was that within five years, an Earth-like planet discovered (with help of D-Wave computers) and that serious scientific examination would begin soon after on how we could actually get there.

Only recently, just such an incredible discovery was made—Proxima B, a roughly Earth-mass planet orbiting the star Proxima Centauri at only 4.2 light years away. The discovery has been described as an "astronomy dream come true." So far, scientists haven’t actually observed the planet directly. Instead, it was discovered indirectly via a technique that extensively, and precisely, observed the star’s tiny motion due to the gravitational effect of the planet orbiting it, however it is considered a major finding in the search for Earth-like planets outside the solar system.

gravitational lens


The second of Rose's predictions was that parallel universes would get a very important proof from experiment, possibly relating to verification of the existence of of gravitational waves. At the beginning of the year, work done at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) confirms the existence of gravity waves. The discovery supports a cosmological theory called inflation, and with it, some say, the idea that our universe is one of many universes floating like bubbles in a glass of champagne.

Rose's prediction runs to 2023 for a more fully developed new model of physics where the cornerstone is the reality of parallel universes and this will be proven with support from a quantum computer.

If you are keeping track, it is pretty evident that Rose is already batting a whopping .660 in his predictions.

Rose proclaimed his third, and most important prediction last: that humanity was on the cusp of technological revolution, where the machines we build will start to outpace us in every respect within 15 years. (That is now down to within 12 years). By 2028, he stated that intelligent machines will exist that can do anything humans can do. Moreover, according to Rose, quantum computers will play a critical role in the creation of this new type of intelligence.

"I don't mean they're better calculators, I don't mean that they are better at searching, I mean EVERYTHING," expressed Rose unequivocally.

Based on what 33rd Square readers know and understand about exponential technology and the Singularity, and Rose's other predictive successes, we should all be ready for what is soon to come.






SOURCE  IdeaCity


By  33rd SquareEmbed



Tuesday, August 30, 2016

Calum Chase Explores the Possibility of an Economic Singularity


Artificial Intelligence

In his latest book, Calum Chace argues that the impact of automation of jobs by machine intelligence will be so profound that it deserves to be called a Singularity – the Economic Singularity. He says this is the single most important development facing humanity in the first half of the 21st century.


Artificial intelligence is overtaking our human ability to absorb and process information. Robots are becoming increasingly dexterous, flexible, and safe to be around. Our most powerful technology, is exponentially getting smarter and better than you at performing tasks and you need to understand it. In a new book, The Economic Singularity: Artificial intelligence and the death of capitalism from best-selling AI writer Calum Chace, he argues that within a few decades, most humans will not be able to work for money.

For Chace, self driving cars may be be the canary in the coal mine, providing a wake-up call for everyone who isn’t yet paying attention. All jobs will be affected, from fast food McJobs to lawyers and journalists.

This is the single most important development facing humanity in the first half of the 21st century argues Chace.

The fashionable belief that Universal Basic Income is the solution is only partly correct writes Chace. We are probably going to need an entirely new economic system, and we better start planning soon - for what he calls, the Economic Singularity. He argues that the outcome can be very good – a world in which machines do all the boring jobs and humans do pretty much what they please. But there are major risks, which we can only avoid by being alert to the possible futures and planning how to avoid the negative ones.

"I’m not convinced the transition from here to there will be plain sailing," writes Chace. "I think we will probably need a new economy, and we haven’t even started sketching out what it might look like, nor how we might get there without massive social unrest."

"That is why I think we are heading towards an Economic Singularity, and we have work to do."

“Read The Economic Singularity if you want to think intelligently about the future.” says Aubrey de Grey.


Related articles
“It’s important that this book and others like it are written. Not because the future will necessarily happen exactly in the way described, but because it’s important to be prepared if it does,” endorses Stuart Armstrong, James Martin Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University

Chace is a best-selling author of fiction and non-fiction books and articles, focusing on the subject of artificial intelligence. His books include Surviving AI, a non-fiction book about the promise and the challenges of AI, and 'Pandora's Brain', a techno-thriller about the first superintelligence.

Chace is a regular speaker on artificial intelligence and related technologies and runs a blog on the subject at www.pandoras-brain.com. He also serves as chairman and coach for growing companies. Before becoming a full-time writer, Calum had a 30-year career in journalism and business, in which he was a marketer, a strategy consultant and a CEO. He maintains his interest in business by serving as chairman and coach for a selection of growing companies. Calum studied philosophy at Oxford University, where he discovered that the science fiction he had been reading since boyhood was actually philosophy in fancy dress.




By 33rd SquareEmbed


Tuesday, April 26, 2016

Seven Days of Artificial Intelligence


Videos

If God created his universe in seven days; what could AI do to ours? A new multimedia project explores the arrival of artificial intelligence and the promise of an Intelligence Explosion - where a Singularity would lead to an exponential increase in A.I. capabilities. This Super Intelligence could lead to the arrival of an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent being. How would humanity receive this new entity? 


Multimedia students Keizac Lee, Kunal Rathore, Marcus Lee, Pierre Roquet were inspired by the biblical concept of the seven days of creation, to create a dystopian science-fiction retelling that put a spotlight on the possibility of AI evolving and eventually supplementing the role of God. See the full video below.

Related articles
Based on their assumption that artificial intelligence would learn at an exponential rate, they wanted to make sure that the actions taken by a superintelligence they called 'DeepMind' (after Google's Go-winning company) would progressively escalate day after day.

The fundamental distinction however was that DeepMind would not share the same sense of human empathy- something that led to its destructive actions in the later days. "Overall, we let the readings discussed in class form the individual plot points of the specific days (automation, love & robots, fully automated luxury communism) whilst still taking certain creative freedoms," claim the creators.

Day 1

Day 1 draws inspiration from Nick Bostrom’s lecture on Superintelligence where he claims that AI’s developmental path is a lot faster paced than human’s biological cognition evolution and it would radically outperform us which eventually leads to a form of Superintelligence. In addition, game AI and the AI’s ability to perform at various complex games were cited as huge milestones towards developing human-level intelligence AI. Bostrom proposes that once human-level intelligence AI is achieved, the time frame in which Superintelligence is achieved may be relatively short and faster than we expect. We employ these concepts extensively within our multimedia project, most evidently in Day 1 and the lead-in into Day 2. 
He also claims that the number of applications relying on AI in the background, backed by multiple tech heavyweights such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft, has surged and will be instrumental in AI development.

Day 2

DeepMind is now focused around the concept mentioned in the Packer and Reeves reading, 'Taking People Out'. This idea claims that for the emergence of a super intelligence / or full autonomy human fallibility must be taken out of the equation thus leading to an idea of a AI that has gained full sentience and self-awareness. The latter portion of day draws its inspiration from the reading Love+Sex With Robots by David Levy as well as the Waldman reading. This portion of the video revolves around the idea that once the AI has reached a level of self awareness it now has the ability to make itself romantically attractive and sexually desirable towards the user leading to unique relationship with each individual user.
Seven Days of Artificial Intelligence

Day 3

Day 3 largely relates to Martin Ford’s automation arguments in Rise of the Robots. Our AI has now assumed control over many computing devices, whether directly or indirectly. Many types of work are now displaced, we use videos of robots making hamburgers and a automated sushi restaurant to illustrate the impact on the service industry. Additionally, we also form a narrative on white-collar jobs on Wall Street, how automated trading algorithms are trading on behalf of their human counterparts and the market has become algorithms trading with other algorithms. Finally we make reference to the Fully Automated Luxury Communism movement as well as a basic income scheme as there will be parties who resist the rise of automation as well as solutions which will have to come forth to restructure our economy as a result of automation.

Day 4 & 5

Although Day 4 and 5 were brief segments, the idea of DeepMind providing advanced therapy towards humans stem from the readings by Levy and Waldman. Specifically, Waldman’s ideas about how human interaction with robots and AI will yield low emotional resistance/ high trust and acceptance are reflected in how open humans openly share their hopes, dreams and anxieties with Deepmind. The military escalations and points about North Korea did not reference any specific reading but were instead used to simultaneously act as a darker turning point in the narrative. To a certain extent, the nuclear attack on North Korea was meant to draw parallels to the violent and unforgiving nature of God in the Old Testament.

Day 6

Day 6 is key turning point in the video for the DeepMind system, it profound wisdom and experience have led it to a point of realization that not many humans may understand right away. This portion of the video draws it’s inspiration from Ray Kurzweil when he mentions that by 2040 you will be able to upload your brain to the internet. This state is also referred to as the state of singularity in which the technology is able to change human life irreversibly. The idea that deepmind is able to facilitate individuals uploading their brain and transcend the human body. By transcending beyond the need for a human body you effectively decrease the burden on earth.

Day 7

Day 7 continues the theory of singularity discussed by Kurzweil. After humans witness the long-term benefits of transcending beyond the biological body the idea is adopted worldwide. Soon the natural human craving for knowledge and power condemns the entire world to upload themselve online. The new cyborg race is now self-sufficient and with the DeepMind AI source code running through each individual the AI is no longer needed on earth. DeepMind leaves earth in the quest for more knowledge as well as saturing that new found knowledge to the rest of the universe. This phenomenon runs in parallel with ideas expressed in Isaac Isamov’s ‘The Last Question’; where humanity creates an internet of minds, in the search to reverse entropy. It also attempts to link the religious idea of ascension, or Rapture, with the events that occur at the end of Her.


The visual content of the video varies from the Hollywood film industry, as well as relevant news footage or material collected from Youtube. All movies included some form of contention surrounding artificial intelligence. Scenes from movies included:

  • 2001: Space Odyssey
  • Blade Runner
  • The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
  • Ex Machina
  • The Matrix
  • Her
  • Minority Report
  • The Day After
  • Transcendence
  • Wargames
  • A.I. Artificial Intelligence
  • I, Robot
  • HOME

The project's creators agree that this science-fiction scenario is much too fast to be probable for humanity, but the stages that the AI system encounters is within the realm of possibility. The intelligence explosion is a phenomenon which could spell the end of humanity, as expressed in cinema, but we opted to take a partial account. One more realistic, and open to prediction.




SOURCE  fluberwinter


By 33rd SquareEmbed