Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Barack Obama on A.I., Autonomous Cars, and the Future of Humanity

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 239 posts

Re: Barack Obama on A.I., Autonomous Cars, and the Future of Humanity

#21

Post by imh »

msvan wrote: post #16

What does Hacker News think about AI? Is it real this time, or are we in for another winter? I'm seeing a lot of grand claims, and it certainly seems like there are plenty of applications, but I'm still not totally convinced that it will turn the entire economy upside down. Given the enormous amount of press, tweets, blog posts, conferences, degree programs, seminars and interviews popping up it seems like there has…

Like they say in the article, there's general AI (think sci-fi computers with minds) and specialized AI (think good old fashioned statistical models, but applied to more things and super effective).

Specialized AI (and I hate calling it AI) is coming along really quickly. We're getting better at it in existing fields and learning to apply it to new fields. More than anything, we just have so much data on everything now, and computers are pretty powerful now, so even old school models are finding tons of new applications.

Generalized AI is a different story. We are a few really major breakthroughs away. We aren't even 100% sure if they are possible, much less understanding how to do them. These aren't the normal slowly-chip-away-at-it breakthroughs, these are things we have no clue about. With something like that, who can really say how far we are? It could be 5 years, it could be never.

Re: Barack Obama on A.I., Autonomous Cars, and the Future of Humanity

#22

Post by mbostleman »

cjbprime wrote: post #5

> OBAMA: The way I’ve been thinking about the regulatory structure as AI emerges is that, early in a technology, a thousand flowers should bloom. I gotta say, I thought he'd be more familiar with that metaphor. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign

Same as FDR's inversion of Sumner's Forgotten Man

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgotten_man

Re: Barack Obama on A.I., Autonomous Cars, and the Future of Humanity

#23

Post by msvan »

jMyles wrote: post #17
msvan wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also thought it was a slightly inappropriate metaphor, but it gets the point across.

By "the point," do you mean that the government intends to initially encourage innovation, only to later stifle, repress, and criminalize the elements it doesn't like? I mean, that's the reasonable application of the metaphor, right?

My point was that, assuming most people are unfamiliar with Chinese history under Mao, the expression will have positive connotations.

Re: Barack Obama on A.I., Autonomous Cars, and the Future of Humanity

#24

Post by forgetsusername »

golergka wrote: post #15
pmyjavec wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why aren't you "concerned" about people losing their jobs? The alternatives are tech companies start to pay their taxes and humans start to use tech to care for one another, genuinely, not just wealthy Silicon Valley types trying to make buckets because their "entitled" to do so and pretend it's all in the name of progress. The idea of the Internet and Automation were exciting to me as it was about liberation and dec…

A lot of comments like yours are based on the assumption of "giving back". I don't quite understand it. Let's suppose I've founded booking.com and put a LOT of travel agents out of business. At what point did I assume the responsibility of giving back to those travel agents? I agree that they are miserable because of my actions. However, in real life, nothing happens because of a single reason. They are also miserabl…

>At what point did I assume the responsibility of giving back to those travel agents?

You won't have to. If it gets bad enough, they'll come take it.

Re: Barack Obama on A.I., Autonomous Cars, and the Future of Humanity

#25

Post by joe_the_user »

msvan wrote: post #16

What does Hacker News think about AI? Is it real this time, or are we in for another winter? I'm seeing a lot of grand claims, and it certainly seems like there are plenty of applications, but I'm still not totally convinced that it will turn the entire economy upside down. Given the enormous amount of press, tweets, blog posts, conferences, degree programs, seminars and interviews popping up it seems like there has…

I think machine learning has a real ability to do certain things (image recognition especially) and do them in a way that isn't hype by itself.

I suspect that you'll encounter limits to the techniques before they do everything a person can do.

If there's a potential problem with machine learning that could sink the enthusiasm over time, I suspect it would come because machine learning applications are these black-boxes system which are the product of training with huge datasets and which use the very tuned-level of expertise of their creators (a common joke is talking of the "graduate school descent" algorithm, getting enough grad students to tune your app till it work). It may be that the deployers of these applications may find that when they have to train them again, in a year's time, that the geniuses have moved on to other things or that the geniuses now charge rates that look excessive for an application that works for just a year.

But that's just spinning possibilities. Currently things seem to be going great.

Re: Barack Obama on A.I., Autonomous Cars, and the Future of Humanity

#26

Post by tnecniv »

nickff wrote: post #10
notliketherest wrote: post #2

"But it also has some downsides that we’re gonna have to figure out in terms of not eliminating jobs. It could increase inequality. It could suppress wages." No doubt that advances in technology have always done away with jobs. We're almost to the point at which the biggest blue collar industry (truck drivers) is about to be wiped out by self driving trucks. What I'm concerned about is the government stifling innovat…

The alternatives are mostly the pointless gestures we see when the government tries to protect jobs from progress, such as the regions where self-serve gas is illegal. I don't see any viable regulation of AI, other than some attempt to tax it.

I don't even see a practical scheme to tax AI. What counts as AI? Are A* and Sudoku solvers AI, or are we just talking about machine learning? If the latter, am I taxed for doing a linear regression, or only for the "cool" stuff like deep networks? If so, how deep? Am I charged per computation? How are you going to keep me honest?

Re: Barack Obama on A.I., Autonomous Cars, and the Future of Humanity

#27

Post by marcosdumay »

golergka wrote: post #15
pmyjavec wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why aren't you "concerned" about people losing their jobs? The alternatives are tech companies start to pay their taxes and humans start to use tech to care for one another, genuinely, not just wealthy Silicon Valley types trying to make buckets because their "entitled" to do so and pretend it's all in the name of progress. The idea of the Internet and Automation were exciting to me as it was about liberation and dec…

A lot of comments like yours are based on the assumption of "giving back". I don't quite understand it. Let's suppose I've founded booking.com and put a LOT of travel agents out of business. At what point did I assume the responsibility of giving back to those travel agents? I agree that they are miserable because of my actions. However, in real life, nothing happens because of a single reason. They are also miserabl…

> At what point did I assume the responsibility of giving back to those travel agents?

At the point when you started living in a peaceful and organized society, that depends on not many people having a disastrous future to keep being peaceful and organized.

Re: Barack Obama on A.I., Autonomous Cars, and the Future of Humanity

#28

Post by toomanybeersies »

will_brown wrote: post #18
notliketherest wrote: post #2

"But it also has some downsides that we’re gonna have to figure out in terms of not eliminating jobs. It could increase inequality. It could suppress wages." No doubt that advances in technology have always done away with jobs. We're almost to the point at which the biggest blue collar industry (truck drivers) is about to be wiped out by self driving trucks. What I'm concerned about is the government stifling innovat…

>What I'm concerned about is the government stifling innovation such as driverless trucks to retain those jobs...What is the alternative? More likely the Government comes up with "innovative" ways to hide these people from the official unemployment numbers. Somehow unemployment is calculated at only 4.9% today...add 3.5 million newly unemployed commercial drivers tomorrow (>10% of US total population) and the new une…

Unemployment is a very difficult number to define and calculate.

Do you count those that are not actively looking for work, and don't want to look for work? e.g. House(wife|husband)s, semi-retired people.

Do you count those that have given up looking for work?

Do you count those that are working part time, but looking for full time work (i.e. the underemployed)?

Do you count those that aren't really looking for work (for whatever reason), but occasionally look online at job listings (since it's a very low effort thing to do)? This is an interesting one, because Statistics New Zealand just recently decided that this doesn't count as actively seeking work, which seems right to me. I look at online job listings all the time, but am happily employed and not seeking other employment.

Do you count the self employed? Contractors? Are Uber drivers considered employed? What about Airbnb hosts?

Re: Barack Obama on A.I., Autonomous Cars, and the Future of Humanity

#29

Post by darawk »

imh wrote: post #21
msvan wrote: post #16

What does Hacker News think about AI? Is it real this time, or are we in for another winter? I'm seeing a lot of grand claims, and it certainly seems like there are plenty of applications, but I'm still not totally convinced that it will turn the entire economy upside down. Given the enormous amount of press, tweets, blog posts, conferences, degree programs, seminars and interviews popping up it seems like there has…

Like they say in the article, there's general AI (think sci-fi computers with minds) and specialized AI (think good old fashioned statistical models, but applied to more things and super effective). Specialized AI (and I hate calling it AI) is coming along really quickly. We're getting better at it in existing fields and learning to apply it to new fields. More than anything, we just have so much data on everything n…

Honest question: Why do you think that generalized and specialized AI are distinct things? Is it not possible that general AI is a specialized AI applied over the field of specialized AI generation?
Post reply on HN