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What AlphaGo Zero teaches us about what’s going wrong with innovation

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Re: What AlphaGo Zero teaches us about what’s going wrong with innovation

#91

Post by alephnil »

marcosdumay wrote: post #59
lustig wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically yes, most often it's about stacking more layers in neural networks, making them "deep". However, there is some merit to the new hype since stacking more layers worked way better than anyone previously working with neural networks and ML thought it would. But in theory you could generalize deep learning to other methods than neural networks, it's basically about creating way more complex models than those…

> it's basically about creating way more complex models than those used in previous research and feeding them lots of data Those are instructions for over-fitting. Deep learning neural networks escape from this problem somehow, but it's not a given that other models would escape it too.

They mostly escape from that by using huge amount of data and massive computing resources. Deep learning was became feasible because of the huge amount of data companies like Facebook, Google, Apple and others has collected.

Re: What AlphaGo Zero teaches us about what’s going wrong with innovation

#92

Post by cinquemb »

bluesnowmonkey wrote: post #90
ThomPete wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are looking at this from the wrong perspective. You are assuming there is someone (other humans) who are feeding you. The point of UBI is that it's built on a realization that technology itself is feeding you. In the end, there isn't going to be any single owners because everything is better solved by the technology we are all going to be owning the means of production so to speak. The post-scarcity society is wh…

Why should technology continue to feed you though? Maybe it's more efficient to let you starve. This isn't a theoretical, what-would-a-currently-uninvented-AI-decide-to-do kind of question. Just look at what corporations do now. It's all about dollars and cents. Non-human entities don't care about what's right for humans. Even ones that are mostly composed of humans.

>Why should technology continue to feed you though?

I think this comes from current thinking based on past history where we were more resource constrained, embodied by this:

"In the rest of society, however, we often both try to hire people who seem to show off the highest related abilities, and we let those most prestigious people have a lot of discretion in how the job is structured. For example, we let the most prestigious doctors tell us how medicine should be run, the most prestigious lawyers tells us how law should be run, the most prestigious finance professionals tell us how the financial system should work, and the most prestigious academics tell us how to run schools and research."[0]

Where as a more technological perspective might recognize how thinking purely along the current "dollars and cents" prestige lines, and might come to realize that by seeking to sustain every human to some increasing degree, will then "free" the marginal human to help maximize along some dimension that isn't necessarily the "dollar and cents" direction (think for every high/college/grad school drop out now making ~6 figures writing software, that could be if afforded a similar style of living/degree of autonomy in life as they do today, might choose to pursue something more likely to enhance technological development[well who knows, maybe I am just speaking for myself], or those who were born into a situation where everyday was a arduous to feed themselves who then will be "free" to spend more of this time to anything but relative foraging for sustinence). This can perhaps be embodied as a solution by recognizing this:

"This can go very wrong! Imagine that we wanted research progress, and that we let the most prestigious researchers pick research topics and methods. To show off their abilities, they may pick topics and methods that most reduce the noise in estimating abilities. For example, they may pick mathematical methods, and topics that are well suited to such methods. And many of them may crowd around the same few topics, like runners at a race. These choices would succeed in helping the most able researchers to show that they are in fact the most able. But the actual research that results might not be very useful at producing research progress."[0]

[0] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/06/beware-prestige-based-...

Re: What AlphaGo Zero teaches us about what’s going wrong with innovation

#93

Post by fjsolwmv »

GuB-42 wrote: post #54
mda wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny that up until 2016 go was regarded as one of the most difficult games that computers could master, and now that it is solved it becomes a PR stunt? Would you claim the same in 2015?

It was a hard problem, and that's what makes it an effective PR stunt. Google was working on machine learning for some practical application like image classification, better targeted ads or whatever thing Google does. A bunch of people then came up with the idea: "hey, we have all that AI stuff, we may be able to use it for computer go". And Google replied with "OK, sounds like good publicity, here is a budget, we a…

That's not true though. Google bought a company whose main product was a Go machine, on the idea that potentially those smart people could do useful work also. Or just as PR cover for their unrelated AI work.

Re: What AlphaGo Zero teaches us about what’s going wrong with innovation

#94

Post by ThomPete »

bluesnowmonkey wrote: post #90
ThomPete wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are looking at this from the wrong perspective. You are assuming there is someone (other humans) who are feeding you. The point of UBI is that it's built on a realization that technology itself is feeding you. In the end, there isn't going to be any single owners because everything is better solved by the technology we are all going to be owning the means of production so to speak. The post-scarcity society is wh…

Why should technology continue to feed you though? Maybe it's more efficient to let you starve. This isn't a theoretical, what-would-a-currently-uninvented-AI-decide-to-do kind of question. Just look at what corporations do now. It's all about dollars and cents. Non-human entities don't care about what's right for humans. Even ones that are mostly composed of humans.

Oh you are right this is a potential risk and I don't see it as theoretical.

In my mind evolution favors the best information carriers and technology seems to be a better information carrier than humans. Also when it comes to going into space.

One argument for why technology would feed us is that until it's self-aware it needs us to be aware for it.

But I am fully with you on the non-certainty here. The premise is that humans are still around and thus needs UBI.

Re: What AlphaGo Zero teaches us about what’s going wrong with innovation

#95

Post by [deleted] »

GuB-42 wrote: post #54
mda wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny that up until 2016 go was regarded as one of the most difficult games that computers could master, and now that it is solved it becomes a PR stunt? Would you claim the same in 2015?

It was a hard problem, and that's what makes it an effective PR stunt. Google was working on machine learning for some practical application like image classification, better targeted ads or whatever thing Google does. A bunch of people then came up with the idea: "hey, we have all that AI stuff, we may be able to use it for computer go". And Google replied with "OK, sounds like good publicity, here is a budget, we a…

[deleted]

Re: What AlphaGo Zero teaches us about what’s going wrong with innovation

#96

Post by namlem »

cdancette wrote: post #2

A simple solution would be for the government to fund more fundamental research. Research results should be public goods. It seems hard to encourage companies to do public research, as they have no short / middle term interest to do so

Government should fund more research, but that on its own is not a solution. The entire system of academic research is fundamentally broken and laden with perverse incentive structures.

Re: What AlphaGo Zero teaches us about what’s going wrong with innovation

#97

Post by patall »

klmr wrote: post #53
d--b wrote: post #5

Mmmh, I am not a specialist and I don't know the numbers, but it seems to me that fundamental research is not less active than it used to be. Physics made a lot of progress in materials (nano tech, weird polymers, and so on), in building batteries, in finding the higgs boson and gravitational waves, and I'm sure plenty of other fields. Medical research has advanced a lot with the invention of CRISPR. CS has grown a l…

> Medical research has advanced a lot with the invention of CRISPR. You are overestimating the importance of CRISPR. Don’t get me wrong — it is hugely important and innovative. But it’s not even the most important biomedical research innovation of recent years (I’d give that title to RNA-seq or more generally next-gen sequencing technology; but there are several contenders). But at any rate all the innovations you li…

I beg to differ, it is hard to overestimate the importance of CRISPR. There have been gene editors like zink-fingers or TALENs before but CRISPR is in its total capability is a true breakthrough.

NGS on the other side is more or less a gradual development. While the exact technology may be novel or unique the whole process is not as can be seen by the various competing technologies that existed and still do exist within about 1 or 2 orders of magnitude in pricing over time. And gene expression read-out especially is not that novel at all given arrays existed for some time. Sure, the single applications are cool but quite a few could be done with related technologies.

But sure, in the end its not whether one thing matters more than the another as all together make a great progress.

Re: What AlphaGo Zero teaches us about what’s going wrong with innovation

#98

Post by fjsolwmv »

choonway wrote: post #43
l3robot wrote: post #40

"It was a time when companies weren’t afraid to invest in basic science." No they were probably afraid, but they were forced to invest in science by states. AT&T did not decide to invest massively in science and risky projects like Unix, they were forced to. Please stop thinking companies are behind innovation. A great piece of article that demestify this myth: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/11/tech-…

The push came most likely from the pressures of the cold war. Now that it is long over, threats like Russia/Syria/ISIS/North Korea/China don't provide the same level of urgency to compete as before.

We are also past the era where someone like Shannon or Turing noodling on a sheet of paper could invent a war-changing idea.

Re: What AlphaGo Zero teaches us about what’s going wrong with innovation

#99

Post by fjsolwmv »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #76
eru wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies have at least as much interest to do research as they have to do any other charitable activity. The private sector does plenty of charity. Not sure the government should be involved. Not because basic research ain't great---in an ideal world we'd all get ponies from the government---but because budgets are finite and there are other opportunities some of them with more definite benefits. (Like eg funding ed…

>Not sure the government should be involved. Not because basic research ain't great---in an ideal world we'd all get ponies from the government---but because budgets are finite and there are other opportunities some of them with more definite benefits. Budgets are finite, but currently, the state leaves both money and economic legibility on the table. The simple system should be: if you build and commercialize techno…

How about the government just taxes all income at some appropriate rate?

Re: What AlphaGo Zero teaches us about what’s going wrong with innovation

#100

Post by fjsolwmv »

watwut wrote: post #19
eru wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's relatively easy to set up a charity to do your basic research for you, and reap the tax benefits? (I'm not an American, and I assume you are talking about American tax system? Other countries are different.) Universities are notorious for spinning their basic research into good PR (and often overblown press releases), even if it would only be interesting to specialists normally. I think companies like Go…

"I think it's relatively easy to set up a charity to do your basic research for you, and reap the tax benefits?" That would likely qualify as tax fraud.

IKEA does this. Their product design is done by a "charitable foundation"
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