SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the but-will-it-stop-for-coffee++? dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Udacity President Sebastian Thrun speaking at Vanity Fair's New Establishment Summit.
Prepare for your car to become an intellectual giant -- and for you to like it.
In a highly optimistic forecast at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit in San Francisco, computer scientist Sebastian Thrun said artificial intelligence will radically reshape our lives for the better.
"In the last 200 or 300 years, we have made ourselves into superhumans," able to plow a field a thousand times faster than our ancestors, fly across the Atlantic Ocean and talk to a person in Australia, he said. Artificial intelligence will take us to the next step: "Rather than replacing our muscles, we're going to be making our brains stronger."
That'll start with artificially intelligent cars, said Thrun, who rose to Silicon Valley fame in his former job leading Google's self-driving car project.
"All the unborn cars get born with the full wisdom of their forefathers. AI cars will outpace all of us because they can learn faster," said Thrun, still a Stanford professor and now president of online learning site Udacity.
Artificial intelligence is spreading like wildfire across the technology industry, screening out junk email, labeling our photos, translating foreign languages and helping us type faster. But not everybody is so sanguine about the possibility of AI machines taking over high-skilled jobs.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday October 24 2016, @11:54AM
AI ... will outpace all of us because they can learn faster
Why? Its a religious belief so it can't be questioned or reasoned with, but "why?" as usual kicks religious questions right in the balls.
If you're familiar with the jargon, for centuries everything from individuals to enormous voting collectives and everything in between have tried to implement Chinese Rooms (an AI term relating to philosophy of composition in programming) that implement business and government. They have been more effective than random dice rolling yet have often implemented amazing stupidity and evilness. Also they are legendarily slow, and the bigger and more "powerful" they are, the less agile and effective they always have been. Your five man town council can repave main street on time and under budget as a small weak Chinese Room AI where the participants act out their parts, but only the giant DoD can deploy a fighter plane that costs ten times too much and took three times longer than estimate to R+D.
Its an especially big problem for AI because no body is going to deploy a supercomputer cluster to project manage the repaving of main street in my little suburban city but naturally it'll be deployed against "cancer" or "poverty" or some damn thing where the largest and best managed Chinese Rooms in history are currently failing, so we'll give it a bigger Chinese Room than ever to totally F things up.
So if we can't even implement a human powered Chinese Room AI implementation of "dig uranium out of ground; make electricity" without repeatedly fucking up and working infinitely slowly and semi-incompetently, then why would a bunch on non-subject matter experts using generic instead of specialized tools be expected to do any better? On a small product run, who makes better horseshoes, a village blacksmith who's been horseshoeing since he was an apprentice or some jackass with a really fast computer and nothing else relevant to the problem?
I don't know how to emphasize this more strongly. We have "Chinese Room" style AI for centuries and it generally sucks ass and is called corporations and governments. We don't know how to organize a better "Chinese Room" so using fast transistors instead of neurons isn't likely to change anything, especially when the biggest historical F ups have never been caused by a processor speed limitation.
Its an evangelical christian idealization to imagine AI as heaven when its more likely to resemble GM in the 70s or the Reich in the early 40s or Genghis Khan's travel adventures. Just be straight with us that Jesus is coming and Thrun is his apostle and AI isn't going to bring heaven to earth it'll probably look a hell of a lot more like the Guinness corporation, Zimbabwe, or Exxon. With Guinness as the absolute best case irrational belief and a thousand year Reich more likely.