For a deeper background on this, I recommend "AI superpowers - China, Silicon Valley, and The New World Order" by Kai-Fu Lee.
Xi Jinping urges China to use artificial intelligence in race for tech future
21–30 of 64 posts
Re: Xi Jinping urges China to use artificial intelligence in race for tech future
#22It is already a bubble. The number of no-nonsense applications (classification problems) is actually quite limited and depends on the quality of available datasets. Andrew Ng used to stress this in his courses.
To apply machine learning techniques successfully the phenomena in question should be, ideally, discrete, fully-observable, deterministic (very precise terminology from classic AI). Mere tweaking of parameters on nonsensical or too abstract data will lead nowhere.
Outside of academia ML already is an astrology with numbers instead of planets and stars.
Re: Xi Jinping urges China to use artificial intelligence in race for tech future
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Smart decision from China perspective, they can't be reliant on something potentially so crucial with western technologies. But I can't help but think how it will be used for monitoring of lives of everybody. You do one misstep, government will know about it. Effectively no privacy. Compared to what it may be (and probably will), current state of China is a hippie paradise.
These discussions reminds me how Nazis had their own physics…
Absolutely nothing to do with it...
Re: Xi Jinping urges China to use artificial intelligence in race for tech future
#24I think China will create an AI bubble, currently studying in Beijing and all EE and CS students I know focus all their time at either stats, ML or data mining. While I think China might have a big shot at the AI race, I don't think it's useful to have to only focus on AI because it's hot right now, they may lack progress in other fundamental fields that may lead to more important breakthrough and technological chang…
It's not just China. At my German university all courses related to AI/ML/data mining/stats are oversubscribed by a factor of 2 to 5. One professor went so far as to stress that he didn't have any experience with deep learning and he'd only cover Bayesian statistics in order to discourage students. I don't think it worked. I'm pretty sure that there's a similar surge of interest in all countries.
>>I'm pretty sure that there's a similar surge of interest in all countries.
Yup. Same here in India.
People talk as though singularity is next year or so, and like Y2K jobs they have to do AI programming jobs.
Went to campus hiring like a few weeks back. And everyone had one or two show-and-tell AI/ML projects on their resume. Like every one. Everything from fitness apps to face emotion recognition.
Re: Xi Jinping urges China to use artificial intelligence in race for tech future
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assume that cheap flying drones are the weapons of the future, not just in military but police too. Small drones everywhere of all kinds. The drones would at least be semi-autonomous as having a human behind every single drone sounds expensive at scale.
Luckily drones still have significant limitations on achievable flight time. Some of which are dictated by the laws of physics. So for the foreseeable future there won’t be any bird sized drones chasing you down. Military drones on the other hand are much larger and expensive.
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Re: Xi Jinping urges China to use artificial intelligence in race for tech future
#26Kind of unrelated, but I remember reading this interview with President Obama and being really impressed with how much he seemed to know about AI: https://www.wired.com/2016/10/president-obama-mit-joi-ito-in...
"either they’re drugging us to keep us fat and happy or we’re in the Matrix"
I miss this guy and his connectedness with our culture.
Re: Xi Jinping urges China to use artificial intelligence in race for tech future
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
These discussions reminds me how Nazis had their own physics…
Absolutely nothing to do with it...
Are you sure? We're already getting stories over here in the West where people are struggling with the results AI gives them when applied to people because the results are basically Wrongthink, and are trying to figure out how to get the AIs to conform better to their ideology and preconceived notions of what the AIs should be outputting. It's not a terribly far trip from there to Deutsche Physik or Lysenkoism, except wrapped in a much denser fog of complex math and enough complicated details to construct any narrative you want. Using AI to ideologically crack down on a population will eventually reach even the AI researchers and destroy their ability to maintain and develop the AI.
(I don't think it's an inevitable trip from struggling with AI outputs and preconceived ideological notions to Lysenkoism. But I think it is an extremely tempting path for the society as a whole. There are a lot of forces that push in that direction, as the nature of the AI and what they do and control moves from a scientific and mathematical matter to a political one.)
Re: Xi Jinping urges China to use artificial intelligence in race for tech future
#28Few things in the world scare me more than the idea of Xi Jinping with control over semiautonomous flying robocops. Other people worry about climate change. Some religious nutcases worry about paperclip maximizers and basilisks. I worry about Robocop.
I agree! Civilian-murdering drones should only belong the U.S of A!
America! Fuck yeah! Comin' again to save the motherfuckin' day, yeah!
Re: Xi Jinping urges China to use artificial intelligence in race for tech future
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assume that cheap flying drones are the weapons of the future, not just in military but police too. Small drones everywhere of all kinds. The drones would at least be semi-autonomous as having a human behind every single drone sounds expensive at scale.
Luckily drones still have significant limitations on achievable flight time. Some of which are dictated by the laws of physics. So for the foreseeable future there won’t be any bird sized drones chasing you down. Military drones on the other hand are much larger and expensive.
And one crash will have high repercussion, even in China.
Re: Xi Jinping urges China to use artificial intelligence in race for tech future
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely nothing to do with it...
Are you sure? We're already getting stories over here in the West where people are struggling with the results AI gives them when applied to people because the results are basically Wrongthink, and are trying to figure out how to get the AIs to conform better to their ideology and preconceived notions of what the AIs should be outputting. It's not a terribly far trip from there to Deutsche Physik or Lysenkoism, excep…
This has nothing to do with Deutsche Physik but it fits the narrative of some people to associate China with Nazi Germany or any other dystopian regime.