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Reviewing last year’s AI-related forecasts

This time last year I made some forecasts about how AI would change, and how it would change us. It’s time to look back and see how those forecasts for 2016 panned out. Not a bad result: seven unambiguous yes, four mixed, and one outright no. Here are the forecasts (and you can see the original article .) AlphaGo is the big one: it caught most people by surprise, and is still seen as one of the major landmarks in AI development, along with Deep Blue beating Kasparov in 1997 and Watson beating Jennings in 2011. Admittedly AlphaGo had already...

Future Bites 1

The first in what may or may not become a series of un-forecasts*, little glimpses of what may lie ahead in the century of two singularities. It’s 2025 and self-driving trucks, buses, taxis and delivery vans are the norm. Almost all of America’s five million professional drivers are out of work. They used to earn white-collar salaries for their blue-collar work, which means it is now virtually impossible for them to earn similar incomes. A small minority have re-trained and become coders, or virtual reality architects or something, but most are on welfare, and / or earning much smaller incomes...

Discussing AI with George Osborne

One of the many worrying aspects of the Brexit referendum in the UK and the Trumpularity in the US is that most politicians are not yet talking about the challenges posed by the coming impact of powerful artificial intelligence.  This needs to change. A conversation I had recently with George Osborne (until recently the UK's Chancellor of the Exchequer) gives grounds for hope. The video below (16 minutes) contains excerpts from a recent panel discussion called "Ask Me Anything About the Future".  Hosted by Bloomberg, it was organised by Force Over Mass, an early-stage investment fund manager.  It was very ably chaired...

It’s not the Fourth Industrial Revolution!

Industrie 4.0 Klaus Schwab is a clever man. After a rapid ascent through the ranks of German commercial life, he founded the World Economic Foundation (WEF) in 1971. The WEF is best known for organising a five-day annual meeting of the global business and political elite at the ski resort of Davos in Switzerland. He has a list of awards and honorary doctorates as long as your arm. Schwab has done much to popularise the notion that we are entering a fourth industrial revolution – not least by writing a book of that name. He didn’t invent the phrase: rather...
The Simulation Hypothesis: an economical twist (part 2 of 2)

The Simulation Hypothesis: an economical twist (part 2 of 2)

Offending Copernicus Of course this is all wild and ultimately pointless speculation, so I won’t be at all upset if you decide it is more worthwhile to go watch a game of baseball or cricket instead of reading the rest of this post. But if you’re still with me, then isn’t it a curious coincidence that you happen to be alive right at the time when humanity is rushing headlong towards the creation of AGI and superintelligence? And that you might very possibly be alive to see it happen? Doesn’t that situation offend against the Copernican principle, also known as...
The Simulation Hypothesis: an economical twist (part 1 of 2)

The Simulation Hypothesis: an economical twist (part 1 of 2)

Are we living in the Matrix? Are we living in the Matrix? This question seems futuristic, a theme from a science fiction movie. (Which of course it is.)  But the best science fiction is philosophy in fancy dress, and philosophers have been asking the question since at least the ancient Greeks. The question generated considerable interest in June this year when Elon Musk said the chance that we live in a “base reality” was “one in billions”. But as long ago as 380 BC, when the Greek philosopher Plato wrote “The Republic”, he included the Allegory of the Cave, which argued...

The Hawking Recursion*

A couple of years ago Stephen Hawking told us that (general) AI is coming, and it will either be the best or the worst thing to happen to humanity.  His comments owed a lot to Nick Bostrom's seminal book "Superintelligence" and also to Professor Stuart Russell.  They kicked off a series of remarks by the Three Wise Men (Hawking, Musk and Gates), which collectively did so much to alert thinking people everywhere to the dramatic progress of AI.  They were important comments, and IMHO they were r Journalists are busy people, good news is no news, and if it bleeds it leads.  For a year...
Book review: “Homo Deus” by Yuval Harari, (part 3 of 3)

Book review: “Homo Deus” by Yuval Harari, (part 3 of 3)

Week Three: Extreme Algocracy In the first third of Homo Deus, Harari claims that humanity has more-or-less conquered its traditional enemies of famine, plague and war, and has moved on to chasing immortality, happiness and divinity. He also urged us all to become vegetarian, if only to make us less contemptible in the eyes of a future superintelligence. In the second third of the book he offers a surprisingly cursory review of the two singularities – the economic and the technological. He seems to assume that most people already know about them, or at least won’t need much persuading to...
Book review: “Homo Deus” by Yuval Harari, (part 2 of 3)

Book review: “Homo Deus” by Yuval Harari, (part 2 of 3)

Week two: the two Singularities In the first third of his new book, Yuval Harari described how humanity escaped its perennial evils of famine, plague and war, and he claimed that we are now striving for immortality, happiness and divinity.  Now he enters the territory of the economic and the technological singularities.  Read on... Free will is an illusion Harari begins this section by attacking our strong intuitive belief that we are all unitary, self-directing persons, possessing free will. “To the best of our scientific understanding, determinism and randomness have divided the entire cake between them, leaving not even a crumb for ‘freedom’. … The...
Book review: "Homo Deus" by Yuval Harari

Book review: "Homo Deus" by Yuval Harari

Week One: ending famine, plague and war… Clear and direct Yuval Harari’s book “Sapiens” was a richly deserved success. Full of intriguing ideas which were often both original and convincing, its prose style is clear and direct – a pleasure to read.* His latest book, “Homo Deus” shares these characteristics, but personally, I found the first half dragged a little, and some of the arguments and assumptions left me unconvinced. I’m glad that I persevered, however: towards the end he produces a fascinating and important suggestion about the impact of AI on future humans. Because Harari’s writing is so crisp,...

The Reverse Luddite Fallacy

Economists can be surprisingly dangerous Most economists are convinced that automation will not lead to lasting unemployment. They point out – rightly – that it has not happened in the past. Instead, it has made products and services cheaper, which raises demand and creates new jobs. They say that the Luddites, who went round smashing weaving machines in the early nineteenth century, simply mis-understood what was happening, and this mis-understanding has become known as the Luddite Fallacy. But in the coming decades, automation may have a very different effect. Past rounds of automation replaced human and animal muscle power. That was...

Bumps on the road to the Economic Singularity (Part 3 of 3)

Peviously on this blogpost… In Part 1 we reviewed the concept of the Economic Singularity, and asked whether automation by machine intelligence will be different from previous rounds of automation.  We identified three potential dangers – one for each of the coming three decades.   In Part 2 we looked at the dangers in the 2020s and the 2030s.  For this rousing finale we look at something that could go wrong in the 2040s.  Read on... 3. The 2040s The danger: the scenario of the Gods and the Useless It is the early 2040s. For some years, most people have been unemployed,...
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Bumps on the road to the Economic Singularity (Part 2 of 3)

Peviously on this blogpost... We reviewed the concept of the Economic Singularity, and asked whether automation by machine intelligence will be different from previous rounds of automation.  We identified three potential dangers - one for each of the coming three decades.   Read on... 1. The 2020s The danger: Panic It is the mid-2020s, and self-driving vehicles (now called “autos”) are widespread. They are well on the way to being universal in commercial vehicles, including trucks, delivery vans, taxis, buses and coaches. As a result most of the five million Americans who used to drive for a living (and the three-plus million whose...

Bumps on the road to the Economic Singularity

A THREE-PART BLOGPOST PART ONE of THREE Two Singularities The term “singularity” was first applied to the impact of technology on human affairs back in the 1950s by John von Neuman, one of the founding fathers of computing. He took it from maths and physics, where it means a point at which a variable becomes infinite. The centre of a black hole is a singularity because matter becomes infinitely dense. When you reach a singularity, the normal rules break down, and the future becomes even harder to predict than usual. Since you are reading this blog, you are probably familiar...

Auto-cars Assemble!

Journalists covering the birth of the self-driving car industry are being kept very busy, and sometimes they must worry if they can keep up with all the new announcements. They haven’t even had time to pause for long enough to give the industry a proper name: “self-driving cars” is too long and too ugly. By way of giving them a helping hand, I’d like to suggest “auto-cars”. That was the name for the horseless carriage adopted by The Times of London newspaper in the late 19th century. Linguistic purists objected that it mixed Greek (auto) with Latin (car), so if...
A bet about conscious machines

A bet about conscious machines

The estimable Robin Hanson and I are reviewing each other’s books. We disagree with each other about almost everything, which is great. I admire Robin’s ability to disagree strongly without a trace of animosity. The bet arose because of the following passage in my new book, The Economic Singularity: Geoff Hinton – the man whose team won the landmark 2012 ImageNet competition – went further. In May 2015 he said that he expects machines to demonstrate common sense within a decade. (Here is a report of Hinton saying that.) Robin is famously sceptical about the rapid progress of AI, thinking...

The Economic Singularity – out now!

Artificial intelligence (AI) is overtaking our human ability to absorb and process information. Robots are becoming increasingly dextrous, flexible, and safe to be around (except the military ones).  It is our most powerful technology, and we all need to understand it. In this new book I argue that within a few decades, most humans will not be able to work for money.  Self-driving cars will probably be the canary in the coal mine, providing a wake-up call for everyone who isn’t yet paying attention. All jobs will be affected, from fast food McJobs to lawyers and journalists. This is the single most important...