From Chatbots to Machine Learning: An AI Reading List
A little something to get you started
Thought I’d share some of the stuff that’s been blowing my tiny mind lately. It’s clearly not a comprehensive list, but should get you nicely on your way down a rabbit hole.
Let’s start with what I think is still the best introduction to the topic out there: Wait But Why’s two-part primer on the AI Revolution.
If our meager brains were able to invent wifi, then something 100 or 1,000 or 1 billion times smarter than we are should have no problem controlling the positioning of each and every atom in the world in any way it likes, at any time — everything we consider magic, every power we imagine a supreme God to have will be as mundane an activity for the ASI as flipping on a light switch is for us. Creating the technology to reverse human aging, curing disease and hunger and even mortality, reprogramming the weather to protect the future of life on Earth — all suddenly possible. Also possible is the immediate end of all life on Earth. As far as we’re concerned, if an ASI comes to being, there is now an omnipotent God on Earth — and the all-important question for us is:
Will it be a nice God?
Next up is this from the MIT Technology Review on the importance of explainability in deep learning— and why it’s so difficult to achieve.
There’s already an argument that being able to interrogate an AI system about how it reached its conclusions is a fundamental legal right. Starting in the summer of 2018, the European Union may require that companies be able to give users an explanation for decisions that automated systems reach. This might be impossible, even for systems that seem relatively simple on the surface, such as the apps and websites that use deep learning to serve ads or recommend songs. The computers that run those services have programmed themselves, and they have done it in ways we cannot understand. Even the engineers who build these apps cannot fully explain their behavior.
KurzweilAINews is generally a great AI resource, especially if you like your news bursting with possibility. Want to start preparing for our posthuman future? Look no further. This is basically a detailed analysis of the current literature along with excerpts and recommendations.
All of them, spanning the current spectrum of discourse from Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis to Leonhard and Havens all the way to Fukayama and religious fundamentalists, seem bent on making grand declarations. Yet, those who would lay down lists of demands and prescriptions make a shared assumption, the same one proclaimed by Plato and so many other dogmatists: that they know the way of things better than our descendants will!
Recall the quotation from George Orwell that opened this article: “Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.” Shall we then demand that our children and grandchildren — perhaps a bit augmented and smarter than us, but certainly vastly more knowledgeable — ought to follow blueprints that we lay down? Like Cro-Magnon hunters telling us never to forget rituals for propitiating the mammoth spirits? Or bronze age herdsmen telling us how to make love?
To get the big names’ take on things, check out The Partnership on AI. With members including Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM and Faceboook (among others), the partnership was:
Established to study and formulate best practices on AI technologies, to advance the public’s understanding of AI, and to serve as an open platform for discussion and engagement about AI and its influences on people and society.
The Future of Life Institute is also a good place to go for ethics questions and debates. Its primary goal is the prioritisation of research into Robust and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence
There is now a broad consensus that AI research is progressing steadily, and that its impact on society is likely to increase. The potential benefits are huge, since everything that civilization has to offer is a product of human intelligence; we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools AI may provide, but the eradication of disease and poverty are not unfathomable. Because of the great potential of AI, it is important to research how to reap its benefits while avoiding potential pitfalls.
Elsewhere, the Scientific American asks: Will Democracy Survive Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, and The Atlantic takes a deep dive into China’s Artificial-Intelligence Boom.
It must be about time for Elon Musk to make an appearance. Here he is in VANITY FAIR on a Billion-Dollar Crusade to Stop the AI Apocalypse.
I’ve been writing a bit about chatbots — how they could help us talk to animals (How We Get To Next) and change our lives in unexpected ways (Dose).
For further exploration, Alex Kistenev has listed the Best AI and Chatbot Conferences of 2017.
