Year: 2018

Reviewing last year’s AI-related forecasts

Reviewing last year’s AI-related forecasts

As usual, I made some forecasts this time last year about how AI would change, and how it would change us. It’s time to look back and see how those forecasts for 2018 panned out. The result: a 50% success rate, by my reckoning. Better than the previous year, but lots of room for improvement. Here are the forecasts, with my verdicts in italics. 1. Non-tech companies will work hard to deploy AI – and to be seen to be doing so. One consequence will be the growth of “insights-as-a-service”, where external consultants are hired to apply machine learning to...
Book review: “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” by Yuval Harari

Book review: “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” by Yuval Harari

The title of Yuval Harari’s latest best-seller is a misnomer: it asks many questions, but offers very few answers, and hardly any lessons. It is the least notable of his three major books, since most of its best ideas were introduced in the other two. But it is still worth reading. Harari delights in grandiloquent sweeping generalisations which irritate academics enormously, and part of the fun is precisely that you can so easily picture his colleagues seething with indignation that he is trampling on their turf. More important, some of his generalisations are acutely insightful. The insight at the heart...
Don’t shoot the Messenger

Don’t shoot the Messenger

"It was Facebook wot dunnit.” Select the unpleasantness of your choice, and Facebook is almost certainly being blamed for it by someone, and probably a lot of someones. Also in the dock are YouTube and Twitter, with Instagram and Snapchat lurking about, keeping their heads down and hoping that nobody notices them. The charge sheet is long. Facebook and the other social media have shortened our attention spans, leaving us easy prey to slick salesmen with plausible one-liners. They have corralled us all into echo chambers, so that we only ever hear voices telling us what we already think. We...
Algocracy

Algocracy

Powerful new technologies can produce great benefits, but they can often produce great harm. Artificial intelligence is no exception. People have numerous concerns about AI, including privacy, transparency, security, bias, inequality, isolation, oligopoly, and killer robots. One which perhaps gets less attention than it deserves is algocracy. Decisions about the allocation of resources are being made all the time in societies, on scales both large and small. Because markets are highly efficient systems for allocating resources in economies characterised by scarcity, capitalism has proved highly effective at raising the living standards of societies which have adopted it. Paraphrasing Churchill, it...

Just Another Day in Utopia

a Guest Post by Stuart Armstrong Stuart is a Fellow in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute. He works on how to map humanity’s partially defined values onto the potential goals of AI. He is probably best known for his collaboration with DeepMind on how to stop a developing AI resisting being switched off after showing signs of going rogue – see herehere. He has also written some excellent short science fiction stories, such as the one this is excerpted from, which seems to me an admirable blend of Iain M. Banks and Roger...
Time for Europe to step up

Time for Europe to step up

It is widely known that investment in artificial intelligence (AI) is concentrated in two Pacific Rim countries, China and the USA. But the strength of this duopoly is not generally appreciated, so here are two recent data points which throw it into sharp relief. First, we have learned that Amazon’s R&D spend has reached 50% of the total spent by the UK on R&D. This means all the spend on any kind of R&D by the UK government and all the UK’s companies and universities. This astonishing fact becomes even more significant when you consider that a great deal of...
Sunny side up

Sunny side up

Satisfying stories feature a hero or heroine facing jeopardy and triumphing over adversity. This explains why most science fiction is dystopian: that’s where the jeopardy is. This gives us a problem. Science fiction provides the metaphors we use to think about and discuss the future, and unfortunately, for every Star Trek there are multiple Star Wars and Terminators. Fear of the future stops many of us from thinking about it seriously. Maybe we should offset the likes of Black Mirror with some White Mirror. So here is a description of the world in which AI has turned everything upside down...

New book: Artificial Intelligence and the Two Singularities

My latest book has just been published by CRC Press, an imprint of the academic publishing house Taylor and Francis.  It updates and expands on my previous non-fiction AI books, especially the sections on the economic singularity. Having been published in the past by Random House, and having also self-published, it is exciting to complete the trio of publishing options with an academic publisher, and it is an honour to be picked up by CRC.  (This does have an impact on pricing beyond my control.) The book has attracted some gratifying reviews, including these: "The arrival of super-intelligent AI and the...

AI: it's not a race

Giant cogs are starting to turn Western governments are finally waking up to the significance of artificial intelligence. It’s a slow process, with much further to go, and most politicians have yet to grasp the significance of AI, but the gradual setting into motion of giant cogs is to be welcomed. In the November 2017 budget the UK’s Chancellor excitedly announced expenditure of £75m on AI. In March 2018, France’s President Macron put that to shame by announcing a spend of €1.5bn by 2020, primarily to halt the brain drain of French computer scientists. The following month Germany’s Chancellor Merkel...

Aggravating algorithms

You’ll have noticed there is something of a backlash against the tech giants these days. In the wake of the scandal over Cambridge Analytica’s alleged unauthorised use of personal data about millions of Facebook users, Mark Zuckerberg was subjected to an intensive grilling by the US Senate. (In the event, the questions were about as lacerating as candy floss because it turns out that most Senators have a pretty modest level of understanding about how social media works.) More seriously, perhaps, the share prices of the tech giants have tumbled in recent weeks, although Mr Zuckerberg’s day in Congress raised...
Superintelligence: a balanced approach

Superintelligence: a balanced approach

A couple of recent events made me think it would be good to post a brief but (hopefully) balanced summary of the discussion about superintelligence. Can we create superintelligence, and if so, when? Our brains are existence proof that ordinary matter organised the right way can generate general intelligence – an intelligence which can apply itself to any domain. They were created by evolution, which is slow, messy and inefficient. It is also un-directed, although non-random. We are now employing the powerful, fast and purposeful method of science to organise different types of ordinary matter to achieve the same result....
Book review: “Enlightenment Now” by Stephen Pinker

Book review: “Enlightenment Now” by Stephen Pinker

“Enlightenment Now” is the latest blockbuster from Stephen Pinker, the author of “The Blank Slate” and “The Better Angels of Our Nature”. It has a surprising and disappointing blind spot in its treatment of AI risk, which is why it is reviewed here, but overall, it is a valuable and important book: it launches a highly effective attack on populism, which is possibly the most important and certainly the most dangerous political movement today. The resistance to populism needs bolstering, and Pinker is here to help. Populism Populists claim to defend the common man against an elite – usually a...

The productivity paradox

In a July 2015 interview with Edge, an online magazine, Pulitzer Prize-winning veteran New York Times journalist John Markoff articulated a widespread idea when he lamented the deceleration of technological progress. In fact he claimed that it has come to a halt.i He reported that Moore’s Law stopped reducing the price of computer components in 2013, and pointed to the disappointing performance of the robots entered into the DARPA Robotics Challenge in June 2015 (which we reviewed in chapter 2.3). He claimed that there has been no profound technological innovation since the invention of the smartphone in 2007, and complained...

Reflections on Dubai’s World Government Summit

I lived in Dubai for three years in the early 1980s. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) was a very young country then, but its ambition was clear. The tallest building was the Dubai Trade Centre, at 30 stories. In fact, it was the tallest building in the whole of the Middle East at the time, and many people thought it was a folly: why build a skyscraper in the desert? It was a fair question: the road leading south from the Trade Centre towards Abu Dhabi was flanked on both sides by desert. Now the Trade Centre is a smallish...
Don’t panic!

Don’t panic!

Franklin D Roosevelt was inaugurated as US President in March 1933, in the depth of the Great Depression. His famous comment that “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” was reassuring to his troubled countrymen, and has resonated down the years. If and when it turns out that machines will make it impossible for many people to earn a living, fear will not be our only problem. But it may well turn out to be our first very serious problem. Fully autonomous, self-driving vehicles will start to be sold during the coming decade – perhaps within five...