by Maxwell Anderson
INTRODUCTION
I’ve written a lot about reasons to be concerned about the development of artificial intelligence. It could lead to widespread job loss, more lethal forms of warfare, and in the scariest of scenarios, some have speculated it could lead to the wholesale extinction of the human race. But let’s talk about the real downsides. Just kidding.
I’m changing course. This edition is about why we ought to be optimistic about a future influenced by artificial intelligence. My favorites here are #4 by Kevin Kelly, #5 by Kissinger and #2 about AI-enabled eye exams.
Read widely. Read wisely.
Max
P.s. This week I participated in an event with the Denver Institute of Faith & Work called “Mind and the Machine: A Christian Perspective on Artificial Intelligence.” Great conversation on a topic off the radar of many people – how will machine learning and computer “intelligence” change our notions of religion, ethics, and what it means to be human. Thanks to Jeff, Joanna and the team there for putting this together! Check their site to see if they put up video.
FIVE RECOMMENDED READINGS
1. AI may not be bad news for workers
by The Economist
I’ve talked in these emails about the potential for automation, robotics and artificial intelligence to displace millions of workers from their jobs. But a recent report detailing the opinions of major corporate executives suggests they believe that jobs will change but won’t be eliminated. “There’s no need to by so gloomy,” say Ken Goldberg of the University of California, Berkeley, and Vinod Kumar, the chief executive of Tata Communications, a unit of India’s biggest business house. They have produced a report that is much more optimistic about the outlook for ordinary employees. In many cases, it says, job satisfaction will be enhanced by the elimination of mundane tasks, giving people time to be more creative.
Their views are backed up by a survey of 120 senior executives, conducted for the report, which found that more of them (77%) thought that AI would create new roles than believed it would replace existing positions (57%; respondents could choose both options). Extra skills may be needed to cope with the new technology and more than half of the bosses are already taking steps to train their workforces.”
2. The first AI approved to diagnose disease is tackling blindness in rural areas
by Emily Mullin in Quartz
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During a recent checkup with his diabetes doctor in Iowa City, Kevin Sales rested his chin onto a machine that snapped some pictures of his eye. Using artificial intelligence, it analyzed his retina and, 20 seconds later, made its diagnosis…
The company behind the tool, IDx, got a green light from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in April to market its AI-powered system to identify diabetic retinopathy. It’s the first FDA-approved autonomous-AI diagnostic system, meaning that it can make an initial diagnosis without the need for an eye specialist to interpret the image or results…
Diabetes is on the rise globally, and with it, diabetic retinopathy, a leading cause of blindness. About one-third of the estimated 285 million people with diabetes worldwide have signs of diabetic retinopathy. If you catch the warning signs of the disease, it’s fairly treatable. But often, the disease goes undetected for years. One reason is those afflicted typically don’t have noticeable symptoms in the early stages. That’s why doctors recommend all diabetics get an annual eye exam. Another issue is that, in many rural areas, eye doctors are scarce.”
3. Famous futurist explains why we shouldn’t fear artificial intelligence
by Dom Galeon in NBC News
Ray Kurzweil is the alpha male of the pack of futurists predicting the Singularity – a belief that in the (not-too-distant) future, the exponential growth of computer power will lead machines to an “intelligence explosion” that makes them vastly more intelligent (and therefore powerful) than humans. But Kurzweil isn’t afraid that this will lead to humans being treated like pets, or worse, like mosquitos to be squashed, by our new robot overlords. Instead, his vision of the future is a melding of marchine and human in a way that make humans more super-human themselves.
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For Kurzweil, the singularity, if it happens, won’t be a machine takeover. Instead, he predicts it to become more like a co-existence, where machines reinforce human abilities. Kurzweil predicts that a hybrid AI would become available by the 2030s. This hybrid AI, he explained, would allow human beings to tap directly into the cloud with just their brains, using what he called a neocortex connection.
In short, according to Kurzweil, there will be a melding of humans and machines as a result of the singularity and the growth of AI. Kurzweil said that we’re already experiencing this with our smartphones, which he referred to as “brain extenders.” He told the audience at CFR, “I mean, who can do their work without these brain extenders we have today? And that’s going to continue to be the case.”
4. The Myth of a Superhuman AI
by Kevin Kelly in Wired
When people ask me what to read on what makes AI scary, I almost always point them to Tim Urban’s feature-length double blog post on Wait, But Why. Although this piece is much shorter, going forward I’m going to include it with those recommendations, as a thoughtful counterpoint to the thought experiment Urban describes.
Kevin Kelly is the founding editor of Wired magazine. He is also a best-selling author and one of the most respected thinkers in Silicon Valley. In this article, he attacks what he thinks are the unproven assumptions behind the nightmare scenarios some describe about the potential development of Artificial General Intelligence and he lays out a framework for thinking about intelligence and machine intelligence in a manner more consistent with the actual science.
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I’ve heard that in the future computerized AIs will become so much smarter than us that they will take all our jobs and resources, and humans will go extinct. Is this true? That’s the most common question I get whenever I give a talk about AI. The questioners are earnest; their worry stems in part from some experts who are asking themselves the same thing. These folks are some of the smartest people alive today, such as Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Max Tegmark, Sam Harris, and Bill Gates, and they believe this scenario very likely could be true. Recently at a conference convened to discuss these AI issues, a panel of nine of the most informed gurus on AI all agreed this superhuman intelligence was inevitable and not far away. “Yet buried in this scenario of a takeover of superhuman artificial intelligence are five assumptions which, when examined closely, are not based on any evidence. These claims might be true in the future, but there is no evidence to date to support them. “
5. How the Enlightenment Ends
by Henry Kissinger
Henry Kissinger, at age 95, is still exploring and writing about the issues of our time, including AI. In this terrific piece, Kissinger presents a helpful framework for thinking about what artificial intelligence is and is not. He then talks about what the implications are for us not understanding these definitions, including the risk of devaluing the human intellect.
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Ultimately, the term artificial intelligence may be a misnomer. To be sure, these machines can solve complex, seemingly abstract problems that had previously yielded only to human cognition. But what they do uniquely is not thinking as heretofore conceived and experienced. Rather, it is unprecedented memorization and computation. Because of its inherent superiority in these fields, AI is likely to win any game assigned to it. But for our purposes as humans, the games are not only about winning; they are about thinking. By treating a mathematical process as if it were a thought process, and either trying to mimic that process ourselves or merely accepting the results, we are in danger of losing the capacity that has been the essence of human cognition.
The implications of this evolution are shown by a recently designed program, AlphaZero, which plays chess at a level superior to chess masters and in a style not previously seen in chess history. On its own, in just a few hours of self-play, it achieved a level of skill that took human beings 1,500 years to attain. Only the basic rules of the game were provided to AlphaZero. Neither human beings nor human-generated data were part of its process of self-learning. If AlphaZero was able to achieve this mastery so rapidly, where will AI be in five years? What will be the impact on human cognition generally? What is the role of ethics in this process, which consists in essence of the acceleration of choices?
Typically, these questions are left to technologists and to the intelligentsia of related scientific fields. Philosophers and others in the field of the humanities who helped shape previous concepts of world order tend to be disadvantaged, lacking knowledge of AI’s mechanisms or being overawed by its capacities. In contrast, the scientific world is impelled to explore the technical possibilities of its achievements, and the technological world is preoccupied with commercial vistas of fabulous scale. The incentive of both these worlds is to push the limits of discoveries rather than to comprehend them. And governance, insofar as it deals with the subject, is more likely to investigate AI’s applications for security and intelligence than to explore the transformation of the human condition that it has begun to produce.”
Well worth your time to read the whole piece.
Postscript
My friend Jeff Huber is a technologist, entrepreneurand very thoughtful guy. He co-founded a company called Standard Cyborg that uses technology as simple as your iPhone to create sophisticated 3D models of the world, with 3D printing applications ranging from custom orthotics to perfectly shaped running shoes.
He has been a good thought partner for me on imagining the wild possible futures that will be enabled by technology. Jeff tends to err on the optimistic side, while my mind keeps wandering to focus on the risks that each new leap forward brings. My guess is that his neo-utopian ideas about the future are heavily influenced by his surroundings in sunny Silicon Valley, where technologists are building the future and dreaming of conquering sickness and poverty and death. My own skepticism, meanwhile, likely stems from my Swedish roots, where you learn that while you may have a summer when the sun never goes down, winter is always just around the corner and it gets cold and dark for a long, long time.
Jeff has encouraged me to more thoroughly imagine all the good things that AI will bring to the world. This edition is a first, halting step towards accepting that challenge. Even in it I had to include the Kissinger piece, which itself is pretty anxious. And Kevin Kelly’s piece is more about how AI may not be all bad, rather than an argument for why it is good.
In reality though, it is pretty easy to argue for AI making the world better. I use Google Maps every single day and it is as good as it is because Google’s computers are constantly teaching themselves better ways to navigate me home. The eye care article above is just one of dozens of ways that AI is improving the practice of healthcare around the world. Then just think about entertainment. We’re in an era of “Peak TV” partly because Netflix’s algorithms are so good at understanding what we like and delivering it to us.
Technology enables higher standards of living, and recursive self-teaching AI may be the most powerful technology we’ve ever invented. Therefore we might expect our standards of living will continue to increase, at an ever increasing speed. This is a good thing.
People even in the poorest two quintiles in the U.S. generally have a higher quality of life than a monarch would have had three-hundred years ago (think indoor plumbing, electricity, cell phones, life expectancy, the existence of Doritos, etc). This remarkable fact is made possible by technological growth.
I’ve long said that the biggest risks of AI are 1) Existential risk: maybe someday humanity will be wiped out by our creation 2) Identity risk: the existence of seemingly “intelligent” non-organic life could cause us to doubt our own uniqueness as a species and 3) Social unrest risk: the gap between haves and have-nots will increase and possibly millions are thrown out of work – with enormous macroeconomic and individual psychological implications.
But it could be that none of these risks materialize. Perhaps the risk of social unrest will be completely mitigated by the increased convenience and comfort that AI-enabled businesses can provide to consumers at all levels. As for the risk to our identity, perhaps AI will enable us, through brain-computer interfaces, to accelerate and enhance our own cognitive functions such that we will be able to conceive new and healthier self-perceptions than we have today. And, as I heard Brian Gray suggest, AI may begin to resemble human thinking, but it is hard to imagine it can ever have true human-like desire. We will always be unique. And if we can build an AI strong enough to destroy the world, that might make for a great sci-fi movie, but who is to say that we can’t also build an AI strong enough to save the world?
The truth is we don’t know what the future holds. My general thesis is that technology whether it be a hammer or a piece of software, is a tool. Tools enable people to extend their power. The same tool can be used to create or to destroy. A hammer can pound a nail into a piece of wood, securing the frame of a house. It can also be swung against a window to shatter the glass.
Whether the hammer creates more good or more evil depends on the design of the tool and the intent of the user. The disconcerting aspect of machine learning is that, for the first time, humans aren’t the ones making the tools. The computers are making tools for their own purposes. Google Translate’s machine learning algorithm actually invented it’s own “middle language” for the purpose of making translations between two human languages more accurate. That is amazing. It’s also a little bit weird.
My other current thesis on technology is that it enables millions of little good things and risks an occasional really bad thing. Airplanes make millions of people happy, taking them safely from one city to another. And very rarely they crash. Credit cards enable billions of positive human interactions every day, but ocassionally they lead to your identity being stolen. And so on. We welcome AI in the forms it is presented to us because they are so useful on a daily basis: Waze, Siri, Alexa, Google search, Facebook newsfeed. It is when we step back and consider the risks in the big picture that we get nervous. 99% percent of the time, technology is great, and 1% of the time it leads to something really bad. Seems like an ideal situation for someone to write an insurance contract.
So, I don’t know that these reflections actually qualify as a positive case for AI. They probably don’t. Jeff, I tried! I’ll keep trying. Maybe you write something and I’ll share it.
Thanks everyone, for reading along with me. I’d be curious to hear your thoughts. Are we just at the beginning of a magical new era? Or we at the beginning of the end of the last era that was good?
