[FRIAM] AI advance

[Pamela McCorduck]

To consider the issue perhaps more seriously, AI100 was created two years ago at Stanford University, funded by Eric Horowitz and his wife. Eric is an early AI pioneer at Microsoft. It’s a hundred-year, rolling study of the many impacts of AI, and it plans to issue reports every five years based on contributions from leading AI researchers, social scientists, ethicists, and philosophers (among representatives of fields outside AI). 

Its first report was issued late last year, and you can read it on the AI100 website.

You may say that leading AI researchers and their friends have vested interests, but then I point to a number of other organizations who have taken on the topic of AI and its impact: nearly every major university has such a program (Georgia Tech, MIT, UC Berkeley, Michigan, just for instance), and a joint program on the future between Oxford and Cambridge has put a great deal of effort into such studies.

The amateur speculation is fun, but the professionals are paying attention. FWIW, I consider the fictional representations of AI in movies, books, TV, to be valuable scenario builders. It doesn’t matter if they’re farfetched (most of them certainly are) but it does matter that they raise interesting issues for nonspecialists to chew over.

Pamela



> On Jan 31, 2017, at 8:18 AM, Joe Spinden <js at QRi.us> wrote:
> 
> In a book I read several years ago, whose title I cannot recall, the conclusion was: "They may have created us, but they keep gumming things up.  They have outlived their usefulness.  Better to just get rid of them."
> 
> -JS
> 
> 
> On 1/31/17 7:41 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> Steve writes:
>> 
>> "Maybe... but somehow I'm not a lot more confident in the *product* of humans who make bad decisions making *better* decisions?"
>> 
>> Nowadays machine learning is much more unsupervised.    Self-taught, if you will.   Such a consciousness might reasonably decide, "Oh they created us because they needed us -- they just didn't realize how much."
>> 
>> Marcus
>> 
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> -- 
> Joe
> 
> 
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