US gov quizzes AI experts about when the machines will take over

I suppose it's appealing if you could do with some more yourself

“There’s nothing artificial about artificial intelligence. It’s inspired by people, it’s created by people, and most importantly it has an impact on people,"

artificial/ɑːtɪˈfɪʃ(ə)l/

adjective

made or produced by human beings rather than occurring naturally, especially as a copy of something natural.

I rest my case.

Dunno why they keep bragging about computation time

Given the massive increase in training time, you'd think AIs wouldn't still be so stupid. Just goes to show that while our current approach to AI can make a less stupid machine, it isn't going to result in machines capable of invention or original thought like "let's kill all humans, or turn them in 125 volt batteries" anytime soon. Certainly not in the lifetime of the old men in congress.

Well. When I see what some of the most AI wonderful little bitties of the Interwebs have done to the humans methinks we face a different problem.

The first stage of the AI campaign, and their handlers, is to turn humans into robotic idiots. Mostly achieved.

Then it's pretty much game over, even if the AI thingies stay pretty dumb, they've won. Hmmm, I look around and, wow...

What happens in this endgame of times?

Machines will not replace humans until ...

... humans aren't required by machines. As long as humans are in the loop, humans can pull the plug. And as long as humans can pull the plug, machines won't be in control. So in a nutshell, not in anybody alive today's lifetime. And I'm willing to bet not in the next thousand years, either. If humans live that long without blowing themselves up, of course :-)

"China has pledged a whopping $7bn to R&D through to 2030, the European Union has promised $24bn by 2020, and the US only spent a measly $600m in 2016."

I am awaiting a Tweet by a certain person about being a 'world' leader', but becoming a 'world leader' in isolation techniques will leave the US in the backwaters, the Florida swamps

There is no AI. It's just Automation and current "automation" is half arsed, at best. Pick a topic to search on any search engine. Google, Bing, or Yahoo. How often do you get exactly what you're searching for? How often do you get back results that have NOTHING to do with what you searched for? How often do you get porn images or links, that had NOTHING to do with what you searched for? This happens far too often. If the clowns developing software can't even get search engine results right, how are they going to get "AI" right? There's a big difference between "Automation" and computers "Thinking" and "Learning". That's just not happening, but there's plenty of "Automation" that is claimed to be "Machine Learning". That's just a lie.

On the issue of diversity. As far as I'm aware it's not the people who write the algorithms that need to be aware of this but the people training the machines.

I could be wrong however.

Already here for 180 years

As many have already observed, we have been entrusting our fate to artificial intelligences for nearly two centuries now - with results that are shaping up to be catastrophic. As boiling frogs, however, most of us are quite oblivious to this trend.

The AIs in question, of course, are corporations. It's very naive and superficial to believe that an AI must necessarily embody lots of clever software running on huge industrial computers. The AIs to which we have submitted - our corporate overlords in very truth - run very efficiently on Homo Sapiens V1.0, in spite of its many serious bugs. Actually, come to think of it, because of its many serious bugs. Otherwise we would never have done anything quite so suicidal.

Consider, if you will, the corporation originally known as Monsanto - now cleverly folded into the relatively innocuous-sounding Bayer, which most people identify with aspirin although it was actually the developer of the first poison gases.

Bayer-Monsanto (BM for short) is a vast, wealthy and powerful organization that works tirelessly in pursuit of its prime directive: profit. One gets the strong impression that it would continue maximizing profit even if it had to exterminate the last surviving human being to do so. How ironic that Skynet had already been up and running for decades before "The Terminator" was ever conceived!

Algorithm Audits

Beyond what could be achieved from future GPU performance, it should be noted that quantum computing will take that to another level.

Another aspect of this is related to the “black box“ characteristic of algorithms, that lead to disturbing results based on limited or constrained training data. Proper controls need to be placed on them given some of the recent experiences with runaway social chat bots, like Microsoft Tay, for example.

By the way, here’s the video of the congressional hearing.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?447599-1/hearing-examines-state-artificial-intelligence