The A.I. Revolution Is On

Is it being televised?

A.I. is probably one of the most exciting concepts I know of, yet if you think about it the somewhat disappointing utilitarian "reality" of A.I. is what makes sense. For example why are no other species as intelligent as humans? Are they just slow evolvers, or suck at evolving? Are humans just blessed evolvers to achieve intelligence before everybody else? No, survival is a purely utilitarian exercise. You find a stable niche and fill it, or die. In other words humans and their brains have just stumbled upon a particular pattern of living (what with language and societies and "intelligence") that is currently "stable". What if in 500 years all humans are extinct, yet bacteria still happily do their thing. Would we still consider humans so 'intelligent'? The same rule applies to processes embodied in silicon as to processes embodied in carbon. And for as intelligent as we humans think we are, we are very bad at predicting where the next stable niche will be (otherwise we'd all be millionaire entrepreneurs). This is why when "A.I." finds a stable niche in areas like search engines and warehouse management, we are both surprised and a bit disappointed.

Agreed. The mystification of what computers do is a worrying trend.

For now, at least, computers can't do anything at all interesting or remarkable. They can, however, do boring things really really fast. And lots of boring things, done really really fast, can yield some pretty impressive results.

But it doesn't change the fact that what computers actually do is utterly trivial. Anything interesting they achieve is the result of algorithms programmed by very intelligent and sophisticated human beings.

That's a clear, qualitative difference from any real AI. When computers are creative, when they start doing things that haven't been done before, without the direct programming of any human, then a computer can truly be said to be "in control."

Has A.I. figured out how to simulate humility yet?

It certainly has a lot to be humble about...

-A Systems Guy

I read and enjoyed the article. Was not boring to me. I am extremely interested in machine learing and get excited about things like graphical models, MCMC, hybrid monte carlo, online learning, reinforcement learning, deep learners, sparse learners, co-evolution, ensembles etc.

I found this article interesting and actually very well informed as such things go. It does not focus on Human like AI but practical approaches currently being used that are able to do the most basic type of learning at a complex level - ability to infer albeit on restricted spaces. For example, its 9 AM someone is at the door, given my past experience on situations like this (data) who is it most likely to be? I have a best guess based on what I have learned about who tends to come knocking when.

They can also pick out basic patterns whose details are very intricate, sometimes nuanced. What is interesting is that in these small spaces they can account for and infer on and recommend basic actions on vast number of parameters so accurately that they blow away any human attempt to match them to smitherings. This is why they are used as they are. Creativity, abstraction, self aware introspection,emotions, exploration for exploration's sake etc. are nice to think of as AI but that would be a waste of the type of niche intelligence computers are particularly well suited to based on their architecture. They do need to handle nuanced ambiguity better though. As well as transfering learning and dealing with situations far outside their training. The logic overflow of the 1960s movies is quite apt sometimes.

I do believe though that when (if) AI arrives it will be sudden as a unifying framework, a Standard Model of ML if you will is created. But in the mean time there is a lot of very interesting things going on and the combined explotion of introspection in the field (of Statistical Inference/Learning), data and processing power means very interesting times are ahead.