What you wanted to know about AI

Seems like it's a popular sentiment to think of Elon Musk as Tony Stark ;). I believe you mean to say "Gates, Hawking and Musk". Stark doesn't tend to talk about AI, he build them.

Nice article. I'd like to point out that in the Pacman example the agent is only receiving a partial picture of the environment (details are in the video description), so it's unfair to criticize it for lack of planning.

As to why this is the case you'd have to ask the researcher, but I think it's because the observation space would be too big for the machine running the agent (both memory and run time)

It depends on what you mean by self-consciousness. On the one hand it can be processes for understanding oneself and modifying oneself to better survive in the environment, on the other you have the illusory "qualia" / subjective experience. It seems possible to me to have a self-improving process and an active process to evaluate the world state and self state without consciousness, and that this could result in something life-like. In this sense, is AI far away? It doesn't have to be necessarily.

It doesn't make sense to me personally why we need subjective experience, nor what it is in a physical sense. We can have agency and variability of choice without it, but at the same time we know how powerful it is in humans. Until we know exactly how it functions, i don't think anyone can claim with any certainty if it will happen, or how far away it is.

A lot of respected AI researchers and practitioners are writing these "AIs are really stupid" articles to rebut superintelligence fearmongering in the popular press. That's a valuable service, and everything this article says is correct. Deepmind's Atari network is not going to kick off the singularity.

I worry that the flurry of articles like this, rational and well-reasoned all, will be seen as a "win" for the nothing-to-worry-about side of the argument and lead people to discount the entire issue. This article does a great job demonstrating the flaws in current AI techniques. It doesn't attempt to engage with the arguments of Stuart Russell, Nick Bostrom, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and others who are worried, not about current methods, but about what will happen when the time comes -- in ten, fifty, or a hundred years -- that AI does exceed general human intelligence. (refs: http://edge.org/conversation/the-myth-of-ai#26015, http://www.amazon.com/Superintelligence-Dangers-Strategies-N...)

This article rightly points out that advances like self-driving cars will have significant economic impact we'll need to deal with in the near future. That's not mutually exclusive with beginning to research ways to ensure that, as we start building more and more advanced systems, they are provably controllable and aligned with human values. These are two different problems to solve, on different timescales, both important and well worth the time and energy of smart people.

Computers have always been very good at performing very specific tasks in highly proscribed circumstances. What were learning to do is expand the circumstances within which the computer can operate, but as you say the tasks are still very highly specific.

We could probably have programmed a computer to drive a car back in the 70s, within an extremely specific configuration of roads and with no traffic or pedestrians. Now self driving cars have very advanced sensors, can cope with other traffic, pedestrians and a much wider range of road geometries. But it's still only useful for driving a car, you couldn't take the same program and teach it to even controll a boat or a plane let alone play Jeopardy, predict the weather or trade on the stock market. Systems like this are going to be very useful, but they are not taking us on a path to develop strong general AI.