Artificial intelligence

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

Also, not to be lost in my chess rambling, is how DeepMind performed in the game Go which has many (exponentially) more possible positions than chess although to Schlich's point it is still well-defined inputs and outputs with simple rules. But, this was a game that many thought computers wouldn't be able to master due to the larger number of possibilities.

After learning to play the game for 30 some odd hours against itself, it beat the top player in the world in I think 5 of 6 games. In the one game it lost, it seemingly got confused and started spitting out random/non-sense moves. Then, in the next game, it was spitting out moves that the developers were very concerned were non-sense, but in the end it won the game by a narrow margin.

So, yeah, it wasn't as dominant at Go as it was at Chess, but Go is a more complex game and DeepMind managed to become better than any human in a relatively minuscule amount of time.

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

Great post AW. It’s why I really think Chess960 may offer a future for human players and removes so much automaton like play.

Again, not that I know much, but I always figured if Chess960 was adopted as the preferred game, after a period of time, it would get to the point that Chess is today where with any given set of pieces, players would be able to memorize openings and go from there. As it is today, there's only one setup but the openings have become standard theory. Given time, maybe a lot of time, standard theory would be obtained for all of the 960 set ups and of those 960, while there would be nuances, a lot of the setups would be similar.

That said, and I don't think I'm alone when I say this, I much prefer watching old games between the likes of Tal, Ivanchuk, Fischer, Nezhmetdinov, Kasparov, Alekhine, etc where they were figuring almost everything out over the board and taking risks that escape the best players today largely because most risks have been assessed and figured out.

[pioneer98]

This whole thing creeps the hell out of me. First off, and probably least important, is that this kind of thing just kind of eliminates any "art" to playing chess, or anything else - baseball too. This research implies that there may be One Best Way to play chess and all others are inferior. This may be correct, but it's boring as hell. It kind of reminds me of this Harper's article I read recently, which argues that the art of writing novels is even being reduced to a "conservatory" art - like orchestra. Meaning all the important stuff has already been done, and the important thing is to just preserve it. The best you can ever hope to accomplish is to mimic one of the old masters (or in the case of chess, mimic the best AI).

To Schlich's point about how this kind of AI really only works for closed systems with well-defined rules....my fear is it will be too tempting to apply this kind of AI on those messier problems, anyway, and there will be all kinds of unintended consequences that we won't understand until it's too late. It's probably already happening, like in the stock market for example. Companies are using algorithms to control their buy/sell decisions and we've already had massive, instantaneous drops in the market. The stock market is complicated, but even it is not as complicated as like, cancer or weather or quantum physics or whatever.

Imagine a world where every product, song, film, sport, ad campaign, news article, etc has been designed to meet some ultimate "Best Way" according to some AI. I think it would be boring as hell and we would only get a glimpse of the "code" every so often when there is some spectacular failure. We are already far down this road. Everything is just a risk to be eliminated. Every movie nowadays is a superhero movie sequel, songs are written by a small group of Scandinavians, and all ballplayers will be Paul DeJong clones except for the most elite. Obviously, I think there would be a backlash against this optimization of everything. But then what if the AI is smart enough to foresee that backlash and account for it? After all, backlash is a big risk that must be eliminated. We're gonna live in The Matrix guys.

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

Kind of following along with the chess thing, because really that's what I understand best, it's not so much that there is a right/wrong way to play. And, no one that I know of is saying that DeepMind is the end all be all master, rather at this point in time it is the best 'player' human or computer in the world. The chess community, I think, has started to take notice that the Stockfish/engine method is being refuted every time DeepMind plays a move that is inconsistent with the materialistic/incremental bludgeoning to death of opponents. Now, will a human ever be able to replicate the computing power that either engines or AI have? Obviously not. They're computing millions of positions in seconds. That's far beyond the capability of the human brain.

What I find alarming is how rapidly AI systems progress. Like I noted in my previous post, human created chess engines have been under development since the 60s or 70s. And, even given superior computing ability to DeepMind, DeepMind is still superior and became superior in 4 hours. Or to put it another way, an AI chess playing program took 4 hours to surpass decades worth of human programming efforts. That's absolutely terrifying.

If an AI program like DeepMind was turned against security for banks, governments, etc, how long would it take a program to hack into any of those systems?

[stlouie_lipp]

I, for one, bow to our new robot overlords.

[mikechamp]

Happy happy, joy joy!

Oh, wait...

‘Godfather of AI’ says Bill Gates and Elon Musk are right about the future of work—but he predicts mass unemployment is on its way

The long-term impact of artificial intelligence is one of the most hotly debated topics in Silicon Valley. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang predicts that every job will be transformed—and likely lead to a 4-day workweek. Other tech titans go even further: Bill Gates says humans may soon not be needed “for most things,” and Elon Musk believes most humans won’t have to work at all in “less than 20 years.”

While those predictions might sound extreme, they’re not just plausible, they’re likely, said Geoffrey Hinton—the British computer scientist widely known as the “Godfather of AI.” The transition, he warned, could trigger a sweeping economic reshuffling that leaves millions of workers behind.

“It seems very likely to a large number of people that we will get massive unemployment caused by AI,” Hinton said in a recent discussion with Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) at Georgetown University. “And if you ask where are these guys going to get the roughly trillion dollars they’re investing in data centers and chips… one of the main sources of money is going to be by selling people AI that will do the work of workers much cheaper. And so these guys are really betting on AI replacing a lot of workers.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/god ... 38384.html

[CardsofSTL]

I went through the Wendy's Drive Thru today (don't judge me [expletive]) and instead of a speaker where you can't hear the person ask for your order there was a robot voice telling me to order when ready. The robot also tried to upsell me on combos and sizes. Damn robot.

I don't do a whole lot of fast food so not sure if this is a very new or somewhat commonplace thing...but it is a thing.

[GeddyWrox]

This was an interesting article. Not surprising, really, to think of how humanity is going to lose at least some of our ability to think and write in complex structures.

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelli ... ommunicate

Research has already shown that AI-generated language relies on shorter-than-average sentences, while using a narrower vocabulary than human speech. It also sacrifices what makes human-written text human, including what Palmer and Schneier term “meanders, interruptions and leaps of logic that communicate emotion.”

Worse yet, AI models developed after the advent of ChatGPT run the risk of being trained on output that was itself generated by an AI, a dangerous feedback loop that could further entrench these machine-inspired patterns.

Beyond linguistic choices, AI models have long been shown to be highly agreeable or “sycophantic” towards the user, often indulging in their potentially flawed or downright dangerous lines of thinking or beliefs. It’s a tendency that can “reinforce bias and even worsen psychosis,” Palmer and Schneier argue.

For impressionable minds, the consequences could be far reaching. Educators are warning that students are losing their ability to think for themselves, instead choosing to consult AI when prompted with a question they can’t answer. University students are worried their peers are starting to all sound the same, relying on the same machine-generated output. Meanwhile, experts are worried the widespread use of AI products in the workplace could be causing users’ cognitive faculties and critical thinking skills to deteriorate.

[mikechamp]

Yeah, it is interesting to think about what this will do to researchers.

We cannot lose critical thinking.

[Joe Shlabotnik]

And to think we fear something that all we have to do is pull the plug...

Related : Maybe its me being an old fart, but I swear, every phone update i accept makes me wonder if I could go back to a land line. I serve my phone, my phone has ceased to serve me.