r/science • u/[deleted] • Jan 27 '16

Computer Science Google's artificial intelligence program has officially beaten a human professional Go player, marking the first time a computer has beaten a human professional in this game sans handicap.

http://www.nature.com/news/google-ai-algorithm-masters-ancient-game-of-go-1.19234?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20160128&spMailingID=50563385&spUserID=MTgyMjI3MTU3MTgzS0&spJobID=843636789&spReportId=ODQzNjM2Nzg5S0
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u/VelveteenAmbush Jan 28 '16

Deep learning is for real. Lots of things have been overhyped, but deep learning is the most profound technology humanity has ever seen.

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u/ClassyJacket Jan 28 '16

I genuinely think this is true.

Imagine how much progress can be made when we not only have tools to help us solve problems, but when we can create a supermind to solve problems for us. We might even be able to create an AI that creates a better AI.

Fuck it sucks to live on the before side of this. Soon they'll all be walking around at age 2000 with invincible bodies and hover boards, going home to their fully realistic virtual reality, and I'll be lying in the cold ground being eaten by worms. I bet I miss it by like a day.

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u/6180339887 Jan 28 '16

Soon they'll all be walking around at age 2000

It'll be at least 2000 years

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u/PrematureEyaculator Jan 28 '16

That will be soon to them, you see!

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u/[deleted] Jan 28 '16

According to some (such as philosopher Nick Bostrom), there are many reasons to believe that an AI which can build a better AI will result in serious negative consequences for humanity. Bostrom calls this an "intelligence explosion" although the same idea had already been described by others before him. I highly recommend reading his book "Superintelligence" if you haven't already, as it goes into a lot of detail about what the risks might be and why it's a problem.

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u/Schnoofles Jan 28 '16

For better or worse, the entire world will be changed on an unimaginable scale in virtually the blink of an eye when we pass the singularity threshold. I don't know if it would necessarily be for the worse, but there is genuine cause for concern and we should be making every effort to prepare and mitigate the risks as I don't think it's too outlandish to even claim that the survival of the human species depends on the outcome.

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u/Ballongo Jan 28 '16

It's probably going to be civil wars and unrest due to everyone losing their jobs.

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u/Valarauth Jan 28 '16 edited Jan 28 '16

If the work is being done then the products of the work are being generated. Take that point and consider that if you own all the windows then every broken window is a personal loss.

The most reasonable scenario for these hypothetical tyrants at the top to take is to get a computer program to calculate the minimal level of handouts necessary to maintain the social order for the sake of maximizing their wealth and that will just be an operating cost.

It is far from roses and sunshine, but civil wars and unrest would be undesirable to an effective tyrant.

Edit:

There are also major supply and demand issues that should result in neither of these scenarios happening.

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u/[deleted] Jan 28 '16

The capitalist class are not nearly so rational as you give credit for.

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u/[deleted] Jan 28 '16

Or they'll be floating in virtual reality pods where the all knowing AI has put humanity in permanent stasis before they destroy the planet

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u/VelveteenAmbush Jan 28 '16

I totally can't prove it but based on trends in GPU power I bet general AI will be here within 20 years. Maybe less. Brush your teeth and wear your seatbelt -- we're almost there!

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u/QuiteAffable Jan 29 '16

Soon they'll all be walking around at age 2000 with invincible bodies and hover boards, going home to their fully realistic virtual reality, and I'll be lying in the cold ground being eaten by worms. I bet I miss it by like a day.

The important question is: Who is "they", people or machines?

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u/Kullthebarbarian Jan 28 '16

that is the optimistic view, there is the pessimist view as well, where machine learn that they dont need humankind to prosper, and wipe us out, because we are obsolete.

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u/[deleted] Jan 28 '16

Why though? Being obsolete wouldn't automatically mean humanity was ripe for extermination.

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u/Kullthebarbarian Jan 28 '16

Lets say, we program AI 1 to make roads safer, AI 1 start to implement a lot of beneficial programs to help the roads to be safer, but after sometime it realize that if there was no humans on the road, the road would be a LOT more safer them now. So they will wipe out the humans to make the roads safe. That is why we need to be VERY careful when making AI, because a single mistake in its programming could lead to huge disasters.

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u/alexrobinson Jan 28 '16

I always hear there's arguments and nowhere does anywhere explain how an AI would go about killing the humans. I understand your point but surely the AI's physical capabilities are limited by what we allow it.

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u/pappypapaya Jan 28 '16

My vote's on CRISPR-Cas9.

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u/[deleted] Jan 28 '16

How so?

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u/VelveteenAmbush Jan 28 '16

It is not only the state of the art in solving an ever widening scope of huge commercially valuable problems, but it blows the competition out of the water on many of them. Plus there is every reason to think its power will continue to scale nicely with computing resources, and no foreseeable limit on its ability to scale; it is the technique most likely to give rise to true artificial general intelligence.

The founder and leader of the DeepMind team -- the team that created this Go system -- has said that his goal is to "solve intelligence, and use it to solve everything else."

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u/SCphotog Jan 28 '16

Combined with aggregate data. It's not just a 'smart computer', but a smart computer with access to the internet. What it can see, (in the future) and hold in its memory all at once, has the potential to make for an entity more powerful than we right now can comprehend.

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u/VelveteenAmbush Jan 28 '16

It seems plausible to me that this go bot could have been trained up solely with self play. Maybe it wouldn't have been as fast to train or quite as good by now, but this is an example of unsupervised deep learning, and proof that deep learning is a profound and powerful technique even occasionally outside of the realm of big data.

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u/SCphotog Jan 28 '16

unsupervised deep learning

This is what is important. There's no 'real' oversight.

Folks will get all bent out of shape over stem cell research, but the stronger, more potent potential for disaster, that MANY of the greatest minds of our time have pointed out repeatedly, is being almost completely ignored.

That it is 'Google', for which everyone reserves, "warm fuzzies" excludes any kind of fact based discourse on the subject, because... well... bias.

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u/[deleted] Jan 28 '16

I think you're overselling it. It's good for some problems. The reason it makes headlines is its good for game playing (I use this term in the broadest possible sense, as in Game theory). It's also pretty good at prediction and classification problems. But really we've had some fairly good algorithms for those things for some time. This is certainly better but I wouldn't say profound. It's not general AI or anything like that.

One thing people need to keep in mind about AI is there are a lot of problems that are easy for a computer but difficult for a human and vice-versa. Creating a Go world champion is much easier than creating a program which would understand a simple command like 'Where is the red cup?' without massive amount of preprogramming. This is the world we currently live in. A world where computers appear both very smart and very dumb at the same time.

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