Photo: Nathaniel Welch
It turns out I’m not the only one who thinks AI alarmism is a bit out of hand. The ITIF Luddite Award nominations include “alarmists, even including respected luminaries such as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, touting an artificial intelligence apocalypse.” Opinions are stewing on both sides of the issue, with Gizmodo writer George Dvorsky saying it’s not right to be branded a Luddite for warning against potential perils. Like most controversies, the differences are smaller than the similarities, since both groups contend that they are promoting a better future for humanity.
The real question is from where does your faith in humanity stem? A recent prosaic example of banning AI is with the EU’s blocking of Facebook’s Moments application that has integrated facial recognition technology. Is this a case of Luddite regulators being alarmist about AI? It’s not so clear. The EFF’s open letter advocates that “people should be able to walk down a public street without fear that companies they’ve never heard of are tracking their every movement — and identifying them by name — using facial recognition technology”. Hence, the issue is our distrust of others use of AI, and not AI itself. Will that change when Strong AI becomes a reality?
Deep Learning
All the publicity around AI has motivated more than alarmism. As AI transitions to a marketing term, it’s easy to get lost in our own imagination as opposed to the science tied to the state-of-the-art. Mosaic Ventures provides a nice overview of different types of “AI” and the challenges these businesses face, while Re/Code gives a layman’s introduction to deep learning.
Digging deeper, it’s worth listening to Greg Corrado’s discussion of Google’s Smart Reply and a brief description of seq2seq learning. Most of the interview is actually about management, and how to create …read more
Source:: r-bloggers.com