tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21077063.post6411443174266958643..comments2024-02-16T08:32:46.618+00:00Comments on Donald Clark Plan B: Remember this date – 12 02 2012 - the day our species lost to AI - but wonDonald Clarkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00796341486328270474noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21077063.post-32987907839084538092016-03-13T14:17:04.384+00:002016-03-13T14:17:04.384+00:00Hi Nick
1. Fully understand this and using several...Hi Nick<br />1. Fully understand this and using several different types of AI myself in projects. There's dozens of different approaches and I've never argued that what AI does is to even mimic the brain. Most of it focuses on solving problems. Incidentally, some aspects of AI really do attempt to do what brains do, but that's a long scientific and philosophical debate. Sure there's crowdsourcing but even underlying that approach is some very smart search, sort and now semantic algorithms at work. On pattern recognition - facial recognition is getting good, fast and other stuff will follow.<br />2. There is a point here about what we as humans do when most of the mundane tasks are done by machines, and by mundane I mean most professional management jobs. Although, having been involved with AI driven adaptive learning for several years, I've seen it paly the role of teacher across a range of subjects.Far from seeing AI helping us do the things we do today, it certainly will eliminate many of those things - driving and so on. Learning has already shifted, as you say, from us to them, but it's a los more complex than this. The work we've been doing in the US shows that optimum teaching with a good 'teacher and AI gives optimum results.<br />3. I am not assuming the 'transfer' model.Indeed, I gave a talk on Thursday on your very point - Little Ice has already done HER in rela life - a massive Turning test (affectively).the VR component introduces the emotional aspect - see Henry & Oculus. You have a good point about not replacing humanoid 'teachers' and I agree. We didn;t go faster by copying the bones structure of a cheetah but invented the wheel. This is not about being human, it is about 'learning more effectively. Software already does this and will do it better and better. The difference is that the performance of that software also 'learns' and gets better and better, whereas we remain in the slow lane.<br />Donald Clarkhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00796341486328270474noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21077063.post-66460566340735190262016-03-13T10:54:31.724+00:002016-03-13T10:54:31.724+00:00Hi Donald. It's a fun thing to worry about, I ...Hi Donald. It's a fun thing to worry about, I agree. Three areas where I would take issue with your post:<br />1) AI is learning to do some of the things people do - but it is doing them in a fundamentally different way. AI computation is completely unlike human computation. That means that sometimes it really is better than people (like in the chess/GO) examples, but other times it is effectively crowdsourcing the problem back to people because it can't do it (e.g. language translation). Things in the middle (pattern recognition) AI struggles with. I've written more about that here: http://www.aconventional.com/2016/01/the-trouble-with-ai.html<br /><br />2) A world without teachers - surely that's a typo. You mean 'a world without learning'. The whole point of AI is that it mitigates our need to learn (in the sense of education as opposed to play). The idea of AI super-teachers is bizarre - like the notion of someone trying to memorise everything on the internet. It's there so you don't have to learn it - you just use it. There is a world without learning; it is called 'play'. The things we learn through play (running, jumping, chatting with friends, shaping clay) we do not experience as 'learning'. Like many people I think you assume that AI is somehow here to help us continue doing what we do today. Really it would be better to think of learning as an autonomous agent, shifting from poor hosts (us) to better ones (AI). I have written more about this here: http://www.aconventional.com/2014/09/the-learning-machine-pecking-pigeons.html<br /><br />3) The idea that teaching could be automated exposes a misunderstanding of learning: i.e. a model of learning as knowledge-transfer. The teachers we remember are the ones who care (not going to go over the Affective Context Model again here) and it is unclear exactly how AI might express care (though movies like 'Her' and 'Ex Machina' hint at this). Probably AI can do this - but only by crowdsourcing actual human care, so it's not really being solved by AI. Probably AI, coupled with VR, could provide a optimum level of experience design - but again based on crowd-sourcing.<br /><br />P.S. in order to post this comment i had to 'select the images with pickup trucks' to prove I am not a robot ;o)shackletonjoneshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03742707556911164797noreply@blogger.com