Elon Musk was recently interviewed at an MIT Symposium. An audience asked his views on artificial intelligence (AI). Musk turned very serious, and urged extreme caution and national or international regulation to avoid "doing something stupid" he said.
"With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon", said Musk. "In all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it's like, 'Yeah, he's sure he can control the demon.' Doesn't work out."
Read the story and see the full interview here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 27 2014, @07:15PM
i was once a student of AI. it is nothing like the sci-fi portrayals. i was a bit disappointed with how mundane it is. there is nothing 'magical' or especially remarkable about AI versus regular old computer algorithms. AI is very knowledge-domain specific. it uses vast amounts of data and statistical analysis of that data to branch on a conditional. there's nothing more remarkably intelligent about it than normal computer code.
if (data_analysis), then ....
it should really be called ASS - artificial super-statistician. that's where the danger lies, damn lies, and statistics.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Monday October 27 2014, @10:45PM
There are some fuzzier versions of AI out there. Neural network being the big one. It would be more like: if (confidence(data_analysis)>threshHold) {/*do stuff*/}. Which can certainly look like magic at times because of the unexpected decisions it can make.
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(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday October 27 2014, @11:34PM
There's probably even more:
do(stuff_that_works_if_I'm_right in proportion to confidence(data_analysis)) +
do(stuff_that_works_if_I'm_wrong in proportion to 1-confidence(data_analysis))
(By which I mean to represent blended strategies for reaching Nash equilibria, it it wasn't clear.)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 28 2014, @08:50AM
There's nothing special about neural networks vs. other statistical machine learning techniques. Don't get me wrong, they've been quite successful in research, but people get excited because the word "neural" is in there when they are only very vaguely similar to a vastly oversimplified model of how the brain works. They're still just a clever way to store/learn a statistical summary of your data.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday October 28 2014, @01:25PM
I find neural networks that are "taught" using genetic algorithms and fitness functions to be way exciting (and organic) than computed answers. I threw in some more cool words to get people excited : )
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