Artificial Intelligence

[waltky]

Granny wants one o' dem robots so she don't have to cut the grass...

Does AI Pose A Dire Threat To Mankind?
Saturday, May 3, 2014 ~ Stephen Hawking warns of possible dire threat to mankind from artificial intelligence

Author, physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking co-wrote a dire warning to the human race about the danger of unintended consequences from our current fascination with artificial intelligence (AI). In an open letter with three other scientists published in The Independent, Hawking contended that dismissing “the notion of highly intelligent machines as science fiction” could be “our worst mistake in history.”

Consumers use AI each day in the form of the iPhone’s personal assistant Siri, Google Now and other programs. Breakthroughs like newly developed self-driving cars herald a generation of products and services to come as computers become more and more adept at solving problems quickly. “The potential benefits are huge,” wrote Hawking. “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 that AI may provide, but the eradication of war, disease, and poverty would be high on anyone’s list. Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history.”

However, the letter warned, these developments do not come without risks and dangers. Already, defense firms are exploring the use of fully autonomous weapons that are sent into the field to track and kill specific targets. “Looking further ahead, there are no fundamental limits to what can be achieved: there is no physical law precluding particles from being organized in ways that perform even more advanced computations than the arrangements of particles in human brains,” said Hawking, meaning that our creations could learn to think, program and modify themselves faster and faster, making possible an “explosive transition” in which “machines with superhuman intelligence could repeatedly improve their design even further, triggering what Vernor Vinge called a ‘singularity’ and Johnny Depp’s movie character calls ‘transcendence.’”

Whoever owns such machines would have the potential for “outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand.” “Although we are facing potentially the best or worst thing to happen to humanity in history, little serious research is devoted to these issues,” warned Hawking. “All of us should ask ourselves what we can do now to improve the chances of reaping the benefits and avoiding the risks.”

Stephen Hawking warns of possible dire threat to mankind from artificial intelligence

 

[waltky]

Teaching a computer to think like humans...

Scientists Coax Computers to Think Like People
December 11, 2015 | WASHINGTON — For artificial intelligence and smart machines to really take off, computers are going to have to be able to think more like people, according to experts in the field. Researchers are now making important progress toward that goal.

Scientists said on Thursday they had created a computer model, or algorithm, that captures the unique human ability to grasp new concepts from a single example in a study involving learning unfamiliar handwritten alphabet characters. This work as well as research like it has the twin goals of better understanding human learning and developing new, more human-like learning algorithms, New York University cognitive and data scientist Brenden Lake said. "We aimed to reverse-engineer how people learn about these simple visual concepts, in terms of identifying the types of computations that the mind may be performing, and testing these assumptions by trying to recreate the behavior," Lake said.

An illustration picture shows a projection of binary code on a man holding a laptop computer.​

The algorithm was designed to make a computer able to learn quickly from a single example in the way people do. "You show even a young child a horse or a school bus or a skateboard and they get it from just one or a few examples," Massachusetts Institute of Technology computational cognitive science professor Joshua Tenenbaum said. Standard algorithms in machine-learning require tens, hundreds or even thousands of training examples to yield similar results, Tenenbaum said. In the study, computers boasting the new algorithm and human subjects were presented with selected characters among a data set of about 1,600 handwritten characters from 50 alphabets from around the world. They even included a fictional alien alphabet from the animated TV show "Futurama."

Among other tasks, the human subjects and computers were directed to reproduce various characters after being given a lone example. Human judges were then asked to identify which characters were reproduced by a computer. The judges found the work produced by the computers to be virtually indistinguishable from that of human subjects. University of Toronto computer science and statistics professor Ruslan Salakhutdinov said he hoped this new work would help guide progress in artificial intelligence by leading to next-generation intelligent machines "that hopefully will come close to displaying human-like intelligence." The same approach used in the study might be applicable to machine learning for many other tasks like speech recognition and object recognition, Lake said. The research was published in the journal Science.

Scientists Coax Computers to Think Like People

 

[Delta4Embassy]

I think it does pose a threat since anything created by Man will be flawed just as Man is flawed. Also, any AI looking at Man's flaws may well come to the same conclusion Man itself does and reason the world's better off without Man and its flaws.

 

[ScienceRocks]

There's two things that I'd like to see come out of AI.
1. Robots that can do most of our farming and food production. This would be a great thing as this is hard work and would leave more time for better things.
2. Robots that can do advance science. Huge data bases allowing for science to advance much faster.

 

[ScienceRocks]

I see great things coming from AI!

 

[miketx]

I think it does pose a threat since anything created by Man will be flawed just as Man is flawed. Also, any AI looking at Man's flaws may well come to the same conclusion Man itself does and reason the world's better off without Man and its flaws.

I have always said that the world would be a great place if it were not for the people.

 

[ScienceRocks]

I think it does pose a threat since anything created by Man will be flawed just as Man is flawed. Also, any AI looking at Man's flaws may well come to the same conclusion Man itself does and reason the world's better off without Man and its flaws.

I have always said that the world would be a great place if it were not for the people.

Humanity has always used machines and devices to make our lives easier. What's the point if there's no humans to enjoy the easier life that machines grant us?

 

[miketx]

Well, if they do come up with computers that think like humans, they'll be killing each other real quick.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Well, if they do come up with computers that think like humans, they'll be killing each other real quick.

Well, we just have to make sure that violence and violent reactions isn't art of their program. Only a idiot would program a farm or science robot with such.

 

[miketx]

Well, if they do come up with computers that think like humans, they'll be killing each other real quick.

Well, we just have to make sure that violence and violent reactions isn't art of their program. Only a idiot would program a farm or science robot with such.

What part of "they're going to program them to think like humans", didn't you comprehend?