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The hysteria about the future of artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere. There seems to be no shortage of sensationalist news about how AI could cure diseases, accelerate human innovation and improve human creativity. Just looking at the media headlines, you might think that we are already living in a future where AI has infiltrated every aspect of society.
While it is undeniable that AI has opened up a wealth of promising opportunities, it has also led to the emergence of a mindset that can be best described as "AI solutionism". This is the philosophy that, given enough data, machine learning algorithms can solve all of humanity's problems.
But there's a big problem with this idea. Instead of supporting AI progress, it actually jeopardises the value of machine intelligence by disregarding important AI safety principles and setting unrealistic expectations about what AI can really do for humanity.
In only a few years, the pendulum has swung from the dystopian notion that AI will destroy humanity to the utopian belief that our algorithmic saviour is here.
[...] Examples demonstrate that there is no AI solution for everything. Using AI simply for the sake of AI may not always be productive or useful. Not every problem is best addressed by applying machine intelligence to it. This is the crucial lesson for everyone aiming to boost investments in national AI programmes: all solutions come with a cost and not everything that can be automated should be.
What is your take on this? Do you think AI (as currently defined), can solve any of the problems, man-made and otherwise, of this world?
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday May 29 2018, @01:56PM (5 children)
I agree. This is one of the things I want to write about in a journal entry. There are almost no truly original ideas. Most are, at best, random mash-ups of what came before, if not outright repetitions of those things. It's just that no one pays attention to the crappiest art or music or inventions (for various values of "crappiest"). An expanding world population and greater sharing and recording of information greatly accentuates this effect as well as making it much more obvious. Just google (or duckduck) your great idea and most of the time, if you look hard enough, you'll find someone online that already thought of it.
As more and more billions come online, the human race is effectively becoming those infinite monkeys.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday May 29 2018, @09:48PM
Just to add to the above; I think it's only part of the picture and something of a glass-half-empty point of view. Yes, there are only a finite number of popular ideas, familiar concepts, objects and conventions in the creative arts and yes each work of art will doubtless include or rely heavily upon themes that have come before; but on the other hand no two works of art are identical. Each artist puts their own unique spin on those previous ideas. So perhaps I was being a little too cynical. I still think there's a problem of diminishing returns when artists want to keep churning out works that fit strictly within established genre. Just look at what's happening to Hollywood with stale remake after remake and the same tired plots, stunts and one liners getting trotted out ad nauseam. The remaining new fertile ground for creativity I suppose lies in the more unconventional, the abstract and the surreal. But that doesn't always bring in the big bucks, unfortunately (if you care about big bucks).
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 29 2018, @10:06PM (1 child)
This was the message of Planet of the Apes (The book, not the movies).
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday May 30 2018, @01:32AM
Thanks, I might check it out.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Wednesday May 30 2018, @09:07AM (1 child)
Not really. When Turing 'invented' the Turing Machine, he was the first to think it up. Hence 'invented'.
You might be able to nitpick about how it 'combined existing ideas' and how 'all ideas exist timelessly in idea space, and we can only really discover, never invent', but that isn't what people mean when they talk about the originality of an idea.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday May 30 2018, @11:09AM
That's true. I was mainly thinking of art rather than science. With science there's a more clearly defined, objective measurement of what constitutes a new scientific theorem. It needs to be logically consistent, builds upon what has gone before and provides a means of answering new questions. It's arguably therefore much harder for someone to come up with a new, useful scientific theorem that will gain acceptance, than for someone to generate a piece of art. Because ideas in art are more easily generated, the likelihood that other humans have had similar ideas is that much greater.
Yes I think I had that sort of thing in mind as well. New ideas are collections of older ideas. I suppose what really counts is whether humanity gains anything from the existence of the new idea, above and beyond the idea itself. In the scientific case, they gain new understanding and may gain an increase in efficiency when doing physical work. In the artistic case, I don't know, people might gain elevations in mood, or it might serve as an improved communication medium. The test for newness there I suppose is whether it does that any better than an exact copy of another work of art that has come before. Although that's a bit strange because people will still seek to consume "new" works of art even if they consider them worse than their predecessors, I suppose because the novelty itself adds to the perceived value and elevation of mood.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?