More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
AI is an omni-use technology that will penetrate virtually all industries. Its effects are being felt in four waves, beginning with Internet applications, followed by applications in business (e.g. financial services), perception (think smart cities), and autonomous applications, like vehicles.
people often rely on three sources to learn about it: science fiction, news, and influential people.
Relying on “thought leaders” ought to be the best option, but unfortunately most who claim the title are experts in business, physics, or politics, not AI technology. Their predictions often lack scientific rigor.
According to Amara’s law, “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”
While deep learning was inspired by the human brain, the two work very differently. Deep learning requires much more data than humans, but once trained on big data, it will outperform humans by far for a given task, especially in dealing with quantitative optimization (like picking an ad to maximize likelihood of purchase, or recognizing a face out of a million possible faces). While humans are limited in the number of things they can pay attention to at once, a deep-learning algorithm trained on an ocean of information will discover correlations between obscure features of the data that are
...more
people have a unique ability to draw on experience, abstract concepts, and common sense to make decisions. By contrast, in order for deep learning to function well, the following are required: massive amounts of relevant data, a narrow domain, and a concrete objective function to optimize.
Berkeley professor Stuart Russell says: “The capabilities of autonomous weapons will be limited more by the laws of physics—for example, by constraints on range, speed, and payload—than by any deficiencies in the AI systems that control them…One can expect platforms…the agility and lethality of which will leave humans utterly defenseless.” This multilateral arms race, if allowed to run its course, will eventually become a race toward oblivion.
Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom all oppose banning autonomous weapons, stating that it is too early.
The deployment of autonomous weapons will be accelerated by an inevitable arms race that will lack the natural deterrence of nuclear weapons.
