On the Need for an AI Public Option

Long piece by Bruce Schneier on this.    Worth reading.    Be cautious he says.  I agree,  but also be cautious about how we stifle our future.   And be very careful about the government doing this for you.

On the Need for an AI Public Option

Artificial intelligence will bring great benefits to all of humanity. But do we really want to entrust this revolutionary technology solely to a small group of US tech companies?

Silicon Valley has produced no small number of moral disappointments. Google retired its “don’t be evil” pledge before firing its star ethicist. Self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” Elon Musk bought Twitter in order to censor political speech, retaliate against journalists, and ease access to the platform for Russian and Chinese propagandists. Facebook lied about how it enabled Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election and paid a public relations firm to blame Google and George Soros instead. ... '

Connecting Computers to the Brain: Update NeuraLink

Had heard of this some time ago.   Apparently this updates.   Still skeptical as to what the word 'connecting' means here.  We can read brain signals readily, but can we control things that way?   Look forward to see more.  No comments from the pigs.  Suggest some caution before you volunteer

Elon Musk is one step closer to connecting a computer to your brain

Neuralink has demonstrated a prototype of its brain-machine interface that currently works in pigs.
By Rebecca Heilweil  in Vox

At a Friday event, Elon Musk revealed more details about his mysterious neuroscience company Neuralink and its plans to connect computers to human brains. While the development of this futuristic-sounding tech is still in its early stages, the presentation was expected to demonstrate the second version of a small, robotic device that inserts tiny electrode threads through the skull and into the brain. Musk said ahead of the event he would “show neurons firing in real-time. The matrix in the matrix.”

And he did just that. At the event, Musk showed off several pigs that had prototypes of the neural links implanted in their head, and machinery that was tracking those pigs’ brain activity in real time. The billionaire also announced that the Food and Drug Administration had awarded the company a breakthrough device authorization, which can help expedite research on a medical device.

Like building underground car tunnels and sending private rockets to Mars, this Musk-backed endeavor is incredibly ambitious, but Neuralink builds on years of research into brain-machine interfaces. A brain-machine interface is technology that allows for a device, like a computer, to interact and communicate with a brain. Neuralink, in particular, aims to build an incredibly powerful brain-machine interface, a device with the power to handle lots of data that can be inserted in a relatively simple surgery. Its short-term goal is to build a device that can help people with specific health conditions.

The actual status of Neuralink’s research has been somewhat murky, and Friday’s big announcement happened as ex-employees complain of internal chaos at the company. Musk has already said the project allowed a monkey to control a computer device with its mind, and as the New York Times reported in 2019, Neuralink had demonstrated a system with 1,500 electrodes connected to a lab rat. Since then, Musk has hinted at the company’s progress (at times on Twitter), though those involved have generally been close-lipped about the status of the research.  .... " 

How AI is Already Changing Business

An HBR Ideacast ...

How AI Is Already Changing Business

Erik Brynjolfsson, MIT Sloan School professor, explains how rapid advances in machine learning are presenting new opportunities for businesses. He breaks down how the technology works and what it can and can’t do (yet). He also discusses the potential impact of AI on the economy, how workforces will interact with it in the future, and suggests managers start experimenting now. Brynjolfsson is the co-author, with Andrew McAfee, of the HBR Big Idea article, “The Business of Artificial Intelligence.” They’re also the co-authors of the new book, Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future.

 Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green Carmichael.
It’s a pretty sad photo when you look at it. A robot, just over a meter tall and shaped kind of like a pudgy rocket ship, laying on its side in a shallow pool in the courtyard of a Washington, D.C. office building. Workers – human ones – stand around, trying to figure out how to rescue it.

The security robot had just been on the job for a few days when the mishap occurred. One entrepreneur who works in the office complex wrote: “We were promised flying cars. Instead we got suicidal robots.”

For many people online, the snapshot symbolized something about the autonomous future that awaits. Robots are coming, and computers can do all kinds of new work for us. Cars can drive themselves. For some people this is exciting, but there is also clearly fear out there about dystopia. Tesla CEO Elon Musk calls artificial intelligence an existential threat.

But our guest on the show today is cautiously optimistic. He’s been watching how businesses are using artificial intelligence and how advances in machine learning will change how we work. Erik Brynjolfsson teaches at MIT Sloan School and runs the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. And he’s the co-author with Andrew McAfee of the new HBR article, “The Business of Artificial Intelligence.”

Erik, thanks for talking with the HBR IdeaCast.  ....    "

AI is not Smart Enough Yet

Gets back to the definition of AI.  Sets of algorithms,  machine learning,  rules are still not AI (Artificial Intelligence) , they are new kinds of data processing that will augment people, just like all computing does.   It used to be that computing vastly increased speed and data scope of decisions.   Now decisions can have elements of cognition we could not do before, but as the article gives examples of,  they are not fool-proof.   Thus the use by some of the term 'Augmented Intelligence'.   I like this term, but it is seen by many, especially the investors, as a cop out.

Artificial intelligence is not as smart as you (or Elon Musk) think
Posted Jul 25, 2017 by Ron Miller (@ron_miller)   .... " 

Manipulators of the Mind

Was brought up in this same age of of behavioral economics and advertising tricks. But they never came of age until there was technology interactive enough to deliver them.   Good or bad?

In News from the Edge:  https://www.edge.org/    5/1/2017

Invisible Manipulators of Your Mind     By Tamsin Shaw  

In 2007, and again in 2008, Kahneman gave a masterclass in “Thinking About Thinking” to, among others, Jeff Bezos (the founder of Amazon), Larry Page (Google), Sergey Brin (Google), Nathan Myhrvold (Microsoft), Sean Parker (Facebook), Elon Musk (SpaceX, Tesla), Evan Williams (Twitter), and Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia). At the 2008 meeting, Richard Thaler also spoke about nudges, and in the clips we can view online he describes choice architectures that guide people toward specific behaviors but that can be reversed with one click if the subject doesn’t like the outcome. In Kahneman’s talk, however, he tells his assembled audience of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs that “priming”—picking a suitable atmosphere—is one of the most important areas of psychological research, a technique that involves offering people cues unconsciously (for instance flashing smiley faces on a screen at a speed that makes them undetectable) in order to influence their mood and behavior. He insists that there are predictable and coherent associations that can be exploited by this sort of priming. If subjects are unaware of this unconscious influence, the freedom to resist it begins to look more theoretical than real.

The Silicon Valley executives clearly saw the commercial potential in these behavioral techniques, since they have now become integral to that sector.…..

Invisible Manipulators of Your Mind
Tamsin Shaw APRIL 20, 2017 ISSUE
The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
by Michael Lewis .... " 

Competing Neural Nets Getting Smarter

We experimented with a similar ideas, using simulation and evolutionary methods to rate alternate neural network designs.  Considerable improvements since then.  Net architecture still contains much art.  The 'art' we talk about here can be readily rated by performance.  In Wired:

Google’s Dueling Neural Networks Spar to Get Smarter, No Humans Required

THE DAY RICHARD Feynman died, the blackboard in his classroom read: “What I cannot create, I do not understand.”

When Ian Goodfellow explains the research he’s doing at Google Brain, the central artificial intelligence lab at the internet’s most powerful company, he points to this aphorism from the iconic physicist, Caltech professor, and best-selling author. But Goodfellow isn’t referring to himself—or any other human being inside Google. He’s talking about the machines: “What an AI cannot create, it does not understand.”

Goodfellow is among the world’s most important AI researchers, and after a brief stint at OpenAI—the Google Brain competitor bootstrapped by Elon Musk and Sam Altman—he has returned to Google, building a new research group that explores “generative models.” These are systems that create photos, sounds, and other representations of the real world. Nodding to Feynman, Goodfellow describes this effort as an important path to all sorts of artificial intelligence. .... " 

Merging Brains and Machines

An odd debate.  But regardless we will have to collaborate.   We have been doing this for some time, but the the details of how this is done is getting more important. ....

Merging our brains with machines won’t stop the rise of the robots
February 26, 2017

Tesla chief executive and OpenAI founder Elon Musk suggested last week that humanity might stave off irrelevance from the rise of the machines by merging with the machines and becoming cyborgs.

However, current trends in software-only artificial intelligence and deep learning technology raise serious doubts about the plausibility of this claim, especially in the long term. This doubt is not only due to hardware limitations; it is also to do with the role the human brain would play in the match-up.

Musk’s thesis is straightforward: that sufficiently advanced interfaces between brain and computer will enable humans to massively augment their capabilities by being better able to leverage technologies such as machine learning and deep learning.

But the exchange goes both ways. Brain-machine interfaces may help the performance of machine learning algorithms by having humans “fill in the gaps” for tasks that the algorithms are currently bad at, like making nuanced contextual decisions. ...   " 

What AI Needs is a Dose of Realism

Good thoughts, though I am a strong proponent of AI, there is still much to do.

What AI needs is a dose of realism
Oren Etzioni talks about the current AI landscape, projects at the Allen Institute, and why we need AI to make sense of AI.

Video by Jenn Webb January 5, 2017  ,,, 

"I think what's missing in the AI conversation is a dose of realism. We have on the one extreme people like Kurzweil, who are fantastically optimistic but don't really have data to back up their wildly optimistic predictions. On the other hand, we have people who are very afraid, like Nick Bostrom, who's a philosopher from Oxford, or Elon Musk, who needs no introduction, and say AI is like summoning the demon, which is really religious imagery. But again, neither party has the data to base their conclusions on; it's wild extrapolations, it's metaphor (like AI is a demon), it's philosophical argumentation.

"I think we need to have a more measured approach, where we measure AI's performance, where we understand that superhuman success on a narrow task like Go doesn't translate to even human performance level on a broad range of tasks, the kind that people do. I like saying my six-year-old is a lot smarter than AlphaGo—he can cross the street, more or less."

—Oren Etzioni

When Computers Become Smarter than Humans

Knowledge@Wharton looks at the often posed question.  The answer is, they already are.  First they did math better, then searched better, connected to people better, played chess better, stored data better  ...     But these are all relatively narrow areas. Becoming less narrow every day.  At what time do all of these areas combine into everything we do?    Even in these still relatively narrow areas. And is that then assumed to be 'smart'?  Smart,  even for humans,  is always in some context.

What if Computers Become Smarter Than Humans?  Nov 22, 2016

You’re ordering tickets to a play or a big sports event online. You’re almost done when that annoying Captcha screen comes up and makes you type some blurry letters and numbers into a box. This step, as most people know, is to ensure that you’re just a person buying tickets and not a computer program deployed to illicitly to grab up a bunch of seats.

But why can’t a computer that can perform calculations astronomically faster than humans identify the letter B just because it’s in a fancy font with a strikethrough, or the number 5 in a fuzzy photo of a front door? Why is it so easily baffled by something the average second-grader can handle?

The answer lies in understanding the current state of artificial intelligence (AI) — what it’s capable of, what is still beyond its grasp, and how we may be rocketing toward an increasingly intelligent technology without enough thought about the implications for ourselves and our planet. This is according to Tim Urban, author of the quirky, stick-figure-illustrated, popular blog Wait But Why, which counts Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg among its fans. He spoke recently at the McNulty Leadership Program’s Authors@Wharton speaker series.  .... "

Myths About an AI Future

Brought to my attention.

“It’s Going to Kill Us!” and Other Myths About the Future
of Artificial Intelligence by Robert D Atkinson.  

Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, June 2016

The past decade has seen many important advancements in computer
science that enable software systems to compile and process new
information to continually improve the way they function. Indeed, with
artificial intelligence (AI), computing is moving from something that
“computes” to something that effectively reasons, thinks, and learns. In so
doing, it is becoming an ever more powerful and valuable complement to
human capabilities: improving medical diagnoses, weather prediction,
supply-chain management, transportation, and even personal choices
about where to go on vacation or what to buy.

Although artificial intelligence has become commonplace—most smartphones contain some version of AI, such as speech recognition—the public still has a poor understanding of the technology. As a result, a diverse cast of critics, driven by fear of technology, opportunism, or ignorance, has jumped into the intellectual vacuum to warn policymakers that, sooner than we think, AI will produce a parade of horribles: mass unemployment, abuse from “algorithmic bias,” the end of privacy, an atrophying of human agency, and even the destruction of humanity, as “Skynet”-like machines decide the world is better off without us.

 Indeed, these voices have grown so loud, espousing a message that a click hungry media eagerly amplifies, that we are very near the point where these narratives may be accepted as truth. Needless to say, when AI is so vociferously demonized (indeed, the engineering magnate Elon Musk has explicitly warned that AI could be “the demon” that threatens our existence, especially if actions are not taken to design systems that can remain under human control), there is a real risk that policymakers will seek to retard its progress.  .... " 

Robotic Housekeeping

Elon Musk looks at a yet harder problem, the robotic housekeeper.  A problem of complex environments.

Open AI Emergent

Why not?  Anything to get the ideas closer to many specific business purposes.   Following.   How can companies ally themselves for this kind of open innovation?   Their OpenAI introductory blog post.   See OpenAI.  Will be approaching.

Elon Musk + Sam Altman launch OpenAI Nonprofit that will use AI to 'benefit Humanity'.
Let by all-star team of Silicon Valley's best and Brightest, OpenAI already has $1 Billion in funding.   By Daniel Terdiman

Silicon Valley is in the midst of an artificial intelligence war, as giants like Facebook and Google attempt to outdo each other by deploying machine learning and AI to automate services. But a brand-new organization called OpenAI—helmed by Elon Musk and a posse of prominent techies—aims to use AI to "benefit humanity," without worrying about profit.  Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, took to Twitter to announce OpenAI on Friday afternoon. ... " 

Future of AI and Work

Future of AI and Work - Millennium Report
"Future Work/Technology 2050 

The future of work and increasing income gaps are among the most discussed topics of long-term prospects at the moment. However, systemic perspectives and global as well as local strategies to improve the long-term outlook are often lacking. 

Stephen Hawkins, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates are warning the world about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence (AI) growing beyond human control. “Whether AI does or does not become the nightmare of some science fiction, we are certain it will have fundamental impacts on the nature of work, worldwide. And the world needs to think seriously about this now, because it may take a generation or more to make serious changes necessary to improve our work-technology future prospects,” says Jerome Glenn, CEO of The Millennium Project. “A growing body of AI experts believes that if socio-political-economic systems stay the same, and technological acceleration, integration, and globalization continue, then half the world could be unemployed by 2050.”"  ....."

(Discussion and link to report at link above)

Concerns about AI

As an early practitioner in AI,  I continue to watch the progress of the technology.  Recall reading some of Stuart Russell's work in the 80s, we used his textbook.  Notable for Inductive reasoning.:  Now in Wired: 

This Artificial Intelligence Pioneer Has a Few Concerns ...  In January, THE British-American computer scientist Stuart Russell drafted and became the first signatory of an open letter calling for researchers to look beyond the goal of merely making artificial intelligence more powerful. “We recommend expanded research aimed at ensuring that increasingly capable AI systems are robust and beneficial,” the letter states. “Our AI systems must do what we want them to do.” Thousands of people have since signed the letter, including leading artificial intelligence researchers at Google, Facebook, Microsoft and other industry hubs along with top computer scientists, physicists and philosophers around the world. By the end of March, about 300 research groups had applied to pursue new research into “keeping artificial intelligence beneficial” with funds contributed by the letter’s 37th signatory, the inventor-entrepreneur Elon Musk.   ... "    

More on Russell in the WP.

AI Arrives, Worries People

In Wired, discussing an arrival of AI and how it worries people.  I remember that this was warned of  in the late 80s as well.   Now we have marched down the road some distance, but we are still not at the general intelligence place yet.  Yes, we will soon have to make adjustments about jobs are done, we did this quickly after the rise of the personal computer.  If you push on the large companies that are doing AI, you still get the answer that the jobs it will do now are focused sub-tasks.  Yes, add these up and jobs will be re-engineered, then lost.   Expect that in the near future.

And in Kurzweil, Elon Musk donates to a fund to keep AI beneficial.

Road to Xavier Gamification for Student Engagement

Gamifying student experience.  Local Xavier University is using gaming dynamics to engage both Candidate students and Freshmen to the experience of the University.  Nice example of dynamic gamification using badges.

In Cinci.com: " ... Last year, it added a game, spiking interest in the site by allowing future Musketeers to earn points for creating a profile, checking out their classmates’ profiles or reviewing their financial aid package.  The game is an example of how colleges are looking for any way possible to engage students so they will stay on campus.

For this year’s freshman class of more than 1,200 members, activity on the website more than doubled compared with last year, with March and April the busiest months as students neared their final college decisions. ... "