It could be terrible and it could be great. It's not clear. Right But one thing is for sure, we will not control it. Go is arguably the most complex board game in existence Its goal is simple Surround more territory than your opponent This game has been played by humans for the past 2,500 years And is thought to be the oldest board game still being played today However, it's not only humans that are playing this game now In 2016, Google DeepMind's AlphaGo beat 18-time world champion Lee Sedol in four out of five games Now, normally a computer beating a human at a game like chess or checkers wouldn't be that impressive But Go is different Go cannot be solved by brute force Go cannot be predicted There are over 10 to the 170 moves possible in Go To put that into perspective There are only 10 to the 80 atoms in the observable universe AlphaGo was trained using data from real human Go games It ran through millions of games and learned the techniques used and even made up new ones that no one had ever seen and this is very impressive alone However, what many people don't know is that only a year after AlphaGo's victory over Lee Sedol A brand new AI called AlphaGo Zero beat the original AlphaGo Not in four out of five games Not in five out of five games Not in ten out of ten games But beat alphago 100 to zero 100 games in a row The most impressive part? It learned how to play with zero human interaction This technique is more powerful than any previous version Why? It isn't restricted to human knowledge No data was given. No historical figures were given With just the bare-bones rules AlphaGo Zero surpassed the previous AlphaGo in only 40 days of learning In only 40 days, it surpassed over 2,500 years of strategy and knowledge It only played against itself and is now regarded as the best Go player in the world Even though it isn't human But wait, if this AI learned how to play without any human interaction Made up strategies of its own and then beat us with those strategies Then that means there's more non-human knowledge about Go than there is human And if we continue to develop Artificial Intelligence Then, that means there's going to be more and more non-human intelligence Eventually, there's going to be a point where we represent the minority of intelligence Maybe even a very minuscule amount That's fine though, we can just turn it off. Right? It's a thought, but think! When modern-day humans begin to take over the planet Why didn't the chimps and Neanderthals turn us off? If this artificial intelligence becomes super intelligent and learns through and is connected to the Internet We can't just shut down the entire Internet, there's no off switch So, what happens if we end up stuck with AI that is constantly and exponentially getting smarter than we are? What if it gets to a point that us, humans, get in the way? And the AI hits the off switch on humani… When people think of AI, they tend to think of super intelligent AI AI that serves the human race, but could also end us at a moment's notice But is this REALLY going to happen? Pop culture, mostly movies, tend to depict AI not as benevolent creations, but rather as robots with a malicious intent Except for "TARS" in "Interstellar", he's pretty cool Yeah, you can use it to find your way back in the ship after I blow you out of the airlock There's a lot more to AI than you might think There's a lot more types that serve different purposes Artificial Narrow Intelligence Also known as weak AI is the only form of Artificial Intelligence that humanity has created so far It makes this sound kind of bad, but trust me it does a really good job at what it's supposed to do Narrow AI is AI that was created for the sole purpose of handling one task It's the kind of AI that AlphaGo is Narrow AI is good at speech and image recognition and also, at playing games like chess or Go or even pretty complex games like “Dota 2” At the International 2017 World Championship OpenAI’s artificial intelligence destroyed pro player Dendi 2-0 But much like AlphaGo Zero, it wasn't taught how to play the game It played out millions of years’ worth of 1 vs. 1 matches against itself and learned on its own It started out barely knowing how to walk and, eventually as time went on, it surpassed human level skill If you use Spotify, you'll see that it creates a daily mixes for you based on the music you listen to Amazon learns from and teaches itself your buying habits to suggest you new products but it seems an uncommon re-occurrence where these AI teach themselves how to do the task at hand How is that even possible? Well, through something called "Machine Learning" "Machine Learning" is the science of trying to get computers to learn and think like we humans do "Machine Learning" is essentially the same way that babies learn We start off as small screaming sacks of meat, but over time we improve our learning We take in more data and more information from observations and interactions And most of the time we end up pretty smart The most popular technique out there to make a computer mimic a human brain is known as a "neural network" Our brains are pretty good at solving problems But each neuron in your brain is only responsible for solving a very minuscule part of any problem Think of it like an assembly line. Where each neuron in your brain has a certain job to do in order to completely solve a problem Let's make a simple example of a neural network In order to say that someone is alive, they have to either have a pulse or they must be breathing But not necessarily both at the same time This yellow dot represents a neuron in a neural network It functions just like a neuron in your brain does It takes in information and then gives an output If this neuron takes in the information that says "hey this person has a pulse and is breathing" Then the neuron deciphers this information and says "okay this person is alive" It learns to analyze situations where the human would be declared alive If it's breathing or has a pulse And in situations where the human would be dead Where neither of those is true That's essentially a bare-bones explanation of how it works Of course no neural network is really this simple Many have millions of parameters and are much more complex than just this one-layer network The world is full of sounds and visuals and just data in general And we take in all of this to form our view of reality However, as more and more complex topics show up with more and more data It becomes harder and harder for humans to do this analysis on their own This is where machine learning comes in handy Machines can not only analyze data given to it But also learn from it and adapt its own view of it Let's go back to AlphaGo Zero In only 40 days, it surpassed thousands of years of strategy and knowledge and even made up some of its own strategies But how did it do all of this so quickly Biological neurons in your brain operate at about 200 Hertz That's proved to be fine for us But modern transistors operate at over 2 gigahertz An entire order of magnitude faster Those neurons in your brain traveled to what are known as “axons” And they travel at about a hundred meters per second Which is pretty fast and gives us pretty good reaction time But it's only about a third as fast as the speed of sound Computers, however, can transmit information at the speed of light or 300 million meters per second So, there's quite a big difference between our brain’s capabilities and our computers In just one week, a computer can do 20,000 years’ worth of human level research or simulations or anything that is trained to do A brain has to fit inside your head There's a limit to how much space they can take up But a computer could fill an entire room or even an entire building Now, obviously, weak AI doesn't require an entire server room to run Like we saw with OpenAI it only took a USB stick But for more intelligent AI, it may require much more power Artificial General Intelligence or AGI is AI with more than a single purpose AGI is almost at or equal to human level intelligence And this is where we're trying to get to But there's a problem The more we search into it, the harder and harder it seems to be able to achieve Think about how you perceive things When someone asks you a complicated question, you have to sort through a ton of unrelated thoughts and observations And articulate a concise response to that question This isn't exactly the easiest thing for a computer to achieve See, humans aren't able to process information at the speed of light like computers can, but we can plan things We can think of smart ways to solve problems without having to brute-force through every option Getting a computer to human level thinking is hard We humans can create things. We invent things. We create societies and play games and laugh These are all very hard things to teach a computer How can you teach a computer to create something that doesn't exist or hasn't even been thought of? and what would be its incentive to do so? I believe AGI or strong AI is the most important artificial intelligence to be created And here's why: Machine learning is exponential Meaning that it starts off rather slow But there's a certain tipping point where things start to speed up drastically The difference between weak AI and strong AI is millions of times larger than the difference between strong AI and super intelligent AI Once we have the artificial general intelligence that can function like a human being For the most part at least, it may help us reach super intelligence level in only a few months or perhaps even weeks But here comes another big problem See, many people tend to see intelligence on a graph like this We have maybe an ant here, a mouse at about here, the average human here, and maybe Einstein right here just above If you asked most people "where a super intelligent AI would lie on this graph?" Most would probably put it somewhere around here But this just isn't the case Although AI might not be at human level intelligence yet, it will be one day and it won't stop at human level It'll most likely just zoom past and continue getting on more and more advanced until, eventually, the graph looks something like this This is what is known as “the technological singularity” Where artificial intelligence becomes so advanced to the point where there's an extreme explosion of new knowledge and information Some that might not even be able to be understood by humans If we make a super intelligent AI, that AI would be able to improve upon itself And in turn gets smarter in a shorter amount of time Which means that this new and improved AI could do the same thing It continues to repeat this process doing it faster and faster each time The first recreation may take a month The second a week, a third a day And this keeps going until it's billions of times smarter than all of humanity Compared to chimps, we share about 96% of their DNA We are 96% chimp But in that little four percent We went from being extremely hairy and mediocre primates To a species that has left the planet We're a species that plans to colonize Mars A species that made missiles and millions of inventions All compacted down into that four percent DNA difference The number of genetic differences between a human and a chimp is ten times smaller than
the genetic difference between a mouse and a rat But yet only being four percent different from them their entire fate seems to lie in our hands If we want to, for some reason, put a McDonald's on a chimpanzee habitat We just do it. We don't ask. There are 5.5 quadrillion ants on the earth Ants outnumber us 1 million to 1 and yet we actually live like they don't exist at all If we see one crawling on our table, we just smush it and move on with our day What happens when the day comes where AI becomes the humans in this situation, and we become the ants? Super intelligent AI is different from software we know today We tend to think our software is something that we program in the computer to follow our rules But with highly advanced AI and through machine learning The AI teaches itself how and what life is as well as how to improve it After a while, there is no need for any human interaction Perhaps humans would even slow it down, as opposed to speeding it up We have to be careful about how we make it As Sam Harris has stated The first thing you wanna do is not give it access to the Internet, right? You just gonna cage this thing, right? Because you don't want it to get out, right? But you want to tempt it. You want to see if it's trying to get out. How do you know whether… it is called a honeypot strategy where you tempt it To make certain moves in the direction of acquiring more power For example, if we're somehow able to give a super intelligent AI orders and it follows those orders It may just take the quickest and easiest route to solve them Just because we make a super intelligent AI, that doesn't mean that it's going to be wise There's a difference between intelligence and wisdom Intelligence is more about making mistakes and acquiring knowledge and being able to solve problems through that Wisdom, on the other hand, is about applying the correct knowledge in the most efficient way Wisdom is being able to see beyond the intelligence gained and being able to apply that to other things In, hopefully, a productive way If we give AI an order to solve world hunger The easiest way to solve world hunger is just to kill all life on the planet and then nothing would ever be hungry again But, obviously, that isn't what we want We would have to, somehow, teach the AI to have human like values A moral code to follow and somehow work around that In a way, we'd want it to be like a super intelligent human cyborg You may not even realize it, but the majority of humans are already cyborgs Humans are already becoming less biological and more technical We already put our minds on non-biological things How? Well, many of you are watching this video on that device right now Phones! Your phone has become an extension of yourself It can answer any question you could ever ask in a moment's notice There's only one problem though Your inputs are just too slow If we were able to create a high bandwidth link between the brain and the internet We would be literally connected to everyone and everything on the entire planet This is what neural link is aiming to do Create what is known as a “neural lace” Your brain has two big systems Your limbic system and your cortex and these two are in a relationship with each other Your limbic system is responsible for your basic emotions your survival instinct Your cortex is responsible for your problem-solving skills - your critical thinking “Neuralink” is aiming to create a third layer to this The AI would be like a third wheel in this relationship But would increase our capabilities by multiple orders of magnitude We all would have eidetic memories - picture perfect memory We would have access to all the information available to the world and be able to access it instantly With the addition of this third layer People may eventually realize that they like this new-found knowledge and way of living more than the alternative More than living without this new-found AI that has been installed into them Eventually, people may decide to ditch their human body, their biological self, in favor of the artificial world This, of course, is a long ways away But it doesn't mean we shouldn't think about it There are, of course, many problems and counter-arguments that come up and I'll address some of them now For starters, how do we program something like consciousness? We don't even know what it is yet How do we program something like a limbic system into a machine? Something that has a sense of fear perhaps even a fear of death Can a machine or an AI really love someone or show that emotion? Because if it can love it can also hate Which could raise big problems for us in the future This is a fear of many people when the idea of super intelligent AI is brought up The biggest and most pressing question is Will it be pleasant? or will it be hateful? Could it even be either of those things in the first place? And, more importantly, is it even necessary? Sure, a super intelligent AI would have all the information in the world at its disposal But, then again, so do you and I So do all the people in the world with very radical views Who's to say that a super intelligent AI wouldn't adopt these views as its own And then decide to execute on those instead of what we had planned Sure, it's possible that a super intelligent AI could improve upon itself using knowledge gained But, then again, it isn't pulling random improvements out of thin air It's not just going to unite quantum mechanics and general relativity with the raw mathematics What if some of its upgrades needed experiments to be run What if it needs more information? Is it just going to make it up? This leads into: What if the AI learned to lie? And then decides to lie to us about its accomplishments for its own selfish reasons It's also possible that the progress of computing will slow down, and it looks like it already is I mean look at airplanes In the past 100 years, we went from this to this But like many things there's a threshold that is hard to get past but if we do get past this barrier The upsides could be tremendous It's almost obvious that super intelligent AI has the capability of making humanity billions of times better than it is today But on the flipside, it could also be used as a weapon Just think, like I said before, if this thing is running for a week and has access to all of the world's information It could make over 20,000 years of technological progress You let this thing run for six months, and you could potentially have 500,000 years or even more of technological progress Imagine if this got into the wrong hands and imagine the repercussions it would have When you Google something Not only are you giving out data and telling a potential artificial intelligence what you're thinking You're also telling it how you're thinking We feed it all of our questions, all of our answers If we were going to try and program a limbic system into an AI We would be teaching an artificial intelligence what we're afraid of Out of all the data in the world, over 90% of it has been created in the past three years AI learned how to recognize faces It learned how to recognize voices It learns languages and then will eventually translate between them all seamlessly This knowledge and information train could continue until it has gone through all 100% of this data This is why artificial intelligence is such an important topic Super intelligent AI is the last invention that humanity will ever make Once it's invented it can't be “uninvented” The technology and developments that could possibly turn the human species into immortal godlike figures Is coincidentally the same technology that could also cause the downfall of humanity Many people are resistant to the AI because they fear it may have some of the negative traits that we humans do It may be greedy. It may lie. It may be selfish. It may be rebellious. It may be short-tempered. The power of super intelligent AI is there Patiently waiting to be found But the question is Do we actually want to find it? If we want the future to be perfect If we want to create the perfect super intelligent AI We need to be prepared We need the smartest minds and the best strategies in order to create the perfect super intelligent AI Brilliant.org is helping turn people like you and I into the pioneers of the future of humanity Topics such as “machine learning” and “artificial neural networks” aren't exactly the easiest things to grasp But “Brilliant” does a great job at explaining each bit piece by piece You can go in barely knowing anything about a topic and come up with a solid grasp on it before the day is over If you're like me and are interested in the future of artificial intelligence Go check out Brilliant’s courses on machine learning, artificial neural networks, and statistics You'll be surprised on how easy they make it to learn If you're one of the first 200 people to click the link at the top of the description You'll receive 20% off of a premium subscription, and you'll be able to do as many of these courses as you'd like We need smart people to solve the problems that we have with AI So, go get started today
Great compilation of AI-related discourse from the past few years. Excellent soundtrack. Thoughtfully edited. 9.5/10
"why didn't the chimps and Neanderthals hit the off switch on us"
Because they didn't recognize us as a threat and have the means to "turn us off"
I recommend the movie Transcendence to anyone wondering what it could look like when AI starts to take over but in a good way, not the "kill all humans" way.
AI will just be used as a learning tool
I haven't seen any AI that is really 'smart' yet. 'AI' just means 'machine learning' which is a series of algorithms that is naturally conditioned to approach some reward function. AI can learn, but for now it relies on humans to give a body, senses and a purpose. It does not think or care what it's purpose is, just as a car doesn't consider its own purpose.
We shouldn't be afraid of AI. AI being used maliciously by humans is the true fear.
Now artificial intelligence is not smart enough, It will become more and more intelligent in the future.
even low level machine learning stuff can handle things like economies pretty deftly, if you combine that with mass automation you could probably see a mostly if not fully automated economy within a century. of course once we're dead from all that pollution we released that economy would keep chugging and create a bizarre landscape barren of anything but industrial structures, barring any organic life from ever re-emerging, but thats a price we dont have to pay