Pedro Domingos on the Arms Race in Artificial Intelligence

I found some of his comments insightful: If you think about it, democracy is still in the 19th century. Your communication with your representatives and ministers amounts to a few bits per year. It's ridiculous. and Just like Americans believe in lawyers, the Chinese believe in engineers. However, I resent the needlessly antagonistic us-and-them closing paragraph, which is not constructive. In Buddhism it is said that "right speech" unites people instead of dividing them, and the conclusion to the "scary technology" article transfers the scary to China and is fundamentally divisive.

Back in the real world, as a nominal German starting an AI-backed startup in China, I also found it refreshing and healthy that he can directly criticize Germany for its cultural conservatism in a widely read German publication. We don't see much of that in Australia, New Zealand or China, all of whom, I would argue, consider themselves as a culture significantly less homogenous and conservative than they really are.

Perhaps the world is a far more nuanced place than any of its commentators can fathom, or to quote another German - Einstein (speaking perhaps prophetically for 20th century humanity on the cusp of the self-styled information era): The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.

Come to think of it, 90% is pretty low for a course of totally unnecessary chemotherapy that cold've been avoided by a human doctor noticing, as humans often do, how dumb the provided explanation was. So maybe even as a patient this isn't an obvious choice.

More generally, I'm super amused by the idea that the Master Algorithm will fall out of the brilliance at few big tech companies, but only if they could have access to my purchase history or porn viewing habits from the past decade.

We are allowing a very powerful system called capitalism to drive large multinational corporations that increasingly use simplistic objective functions to satisfy greed and often just greed alone. (Greed has its place, no doubt, but it should not be the overpowering force driving the world.) Capitalism and many corporations have often been major forces for progress for a great many people but as they grow so powerful as to overwhelm other counterbalancing institutions--governments (often through means behind the scene), nonprofits, civic organizations--more should be asked of them than mostly profit maximization. (We may not want these corporations to determine the veracity of information; those implementation issues need to be figured out. The larger point is that the corporations and the algorithms should take into account more than economic objectives.)

"There is no law detailed enough to compete with the complexity of things that algorithms can do. What can be regulated, though, are the dangers that come from overly crude objective functions such as Facebook's algorithms maximizing the time you spend on their site. These can be regulated by saying: OK, you have these business elements in your objective function because you need to make money. But you should also have these societal goals like, for example, the truth value of the things that are being said."

That being said, at some point in the future, when these types of problems with NN can all be ironed out, I think going with the NN will be the obvious choice. The massive numerical complexity of cancer and the human body is too large for any human to understand and treat optimally.

NN + doctor for now; just NN in the (relatively near) future.

I hope people also get to hear from researchers on the other side of the argument (like Michael Jordan): the real risk is not super-intelligent AI destroying human race, but stupid AI being handed over control of critical aspects of our daily lives.