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Amara’s law, “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”
with every future we wish to create, we must first learn to imagine it.
IT IS BETTER TO LIVE YOUR OWN DESTINY IMPERFECTLY THAN TO IMITATE SOMEBODY ELSE’S PERFECTLY. —BHAGAVAD GITA
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
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.
The whole process was like making coffee. If you had quality coffee beans (data) and appropriate grinding and stamping tools (models), you could brew a great cup of coffee (perspective) with rich flavor and fine layers. By repeating the process many times, accumulating experience and ability, you could move all the way up the ladder from junior researcher to senior partner.
The crux of the problem is that Facebook and Google’s AI objective functions are necessarily business optimizing because they are publicly traded companies, which causes them to optimize goals that we as users have no interest in optimizing. And it is a nonstarter to ask Google and Facebook to use our objective function, for the simple reason that their profits will plummet. In order to find an AI owner we can trust, we need to find an entity not pressured to optimize commercial interests—one that will naturally embrace our interests without reservations.
