This is not really “intelligence”. What has been solved is a computational problem. AI may use techniques not found in more traditional computers but it is not “intelligent” in the human sense. Like any computer an AI can acquire and apply information – we start to call it “intelligent” because it is able to do this adaptively. However, this is with respect to a constrained and well-defined problem. Human intelligence can adapt from one type of problem to another and at present that ability is well beyond the reach of any machine.
I don’t think that the human intelligence you describe is anything more than powerful processing and pattern identification. AI should be able to replicate that.
Self-awareness is the part that raises the bigger question. Is there a magic point of processing power at which a computer will suddenly ‘wake up’ ?
It’s very doubtful that existing computer architecture (Turing Machines, Von Neumann etc) is capable of fully reproducing human thought processes. See Sir Roger Penrose’s books on the subject for a full discussion.
I don’t believe that anything magical is going on in human consciousness – the brain is conscious and it’s a ‘mere’ physical object. But what it does isn’t simple computation as currently understood. Maybe quantum computation is involved.
The basis of what Penrose is saying stems from the formalisation of the concept of Algorithms, which came about from the work of Post, Turing, and others, after attempts by mathematicians and philosophers from the late 19th century onwards to ‘ground’ the basis of maths in solid foundations ““ this is what Russell picked holes in when Frege published a ‘foundation’ framework, and what Gödel eventually proved was never going to be possible. Beyond showing that a formalism cannot be proved as valid from it’s own axioms from within the system, Gödel also showed there are mathematical truths (Gödel sentences) that humans can ‘see’ to be true but cannot be proven algorithmically, and Penrose is using this to disavow the possibility of human understanding being algorithmic.
But Penrose is drawing a distinction between intelligence and sentience. And he’s only claiming human sentience is not replicable algorithmically, not human intelligence. On the contrary, he expects machines to replicate and go past humans in intelligence. Personally I hope to God that bPenrose is right about sentience, but the Penrose stance is a minority view amongst Philosophers, Mathematicians and Computer Scientists.
Over the years I have found it difficult to believe human sentience is the result of algorithmic processes or could be replicated algorithmically. But after a four decade engagement with the human vs machine intelligence/sentience debate, I’m reluctantly coming to the conclusion that human sentience is ultimately algorithmic, although the consequences of this being the case are in fact stark staring bonkers.
I don’t know about “should”. I’d go with “might”. Such generalised problem-adapting AI is decades away at best. The self-awareness thing is more science fiction for the moment – maybe part philosophy. Until we have a clearer idea of what mammalian thought or consciousness actually is, it will be pretty hard to determine how/when it can be replicated.
Exactly right. What’s advertised as AI is really Machine Learning, and the computer doesn’t ‘care’ if the millions of examples fed into the ‘learning’ process are chess positions or protein configurations. It’s very clever, highly impressive and potentially extremely useful technology; but we’re no closer to a mechanical ‘general intelligence’ than we were in the 60s when AI research made its serious start.
A) I think it’s a lot more interesting. Conversations with an AI Vs conversations with a dumb submarine, for example.
B) it’s therefore a lot more dangerous
Basil Chamberlain
3 years ago
“Sure, that could happen. But we’ll make sure it doesn’t. We’ll make general AI, and it will be awesome.” This is the kind of naive optimism that makes me despair of the future of the human race.
The apex of human achievement was the Pax Romana. We will not see its light again.
You are correct to despair of that species of African ape, we reverentially call human beings. The unbelievably idiotic, mawkish, bovine, behaviour in response to the C-19 Scamdemic is not a good omen for the future.
Perhaps AI will accelerate the continued descent into barbarism and hopefully, near extinction.
Hmm, I suppose you also believe the Black Death, Spanish Flu and Ebola were all scams too? Maybe Pax Romana was also a scam? Silly and not very helpful. Yes AI currently may just be the result of zillions of repetitive loops ending up getting lucky but eventually if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck then AI to all intents and purposes could eventually be characterised as thinking.
CV19 has a 99% survival rate. It’s being used for the globalists to take over the world and enslave us. I know it sounds crazy but it’s true. The Great Reset is just another name for Genocide. You can look at their plans, right on the WEF and UN website.
No, your are absolutely correct, and I shall not use bovine again.
There was some shocking research a few years ago from Cambridge I think, about how sentient both Cows and Sheep are. Our maltreatment of them is one of the great horror stories of all time, but we are, as Dawkins said, only a species of African ape, so what more could one expect?
Yes, to any future sentient alien arrivals, our treatment of farm animals will certainly condemn any claims of this ape species to being a “civilisation”.
Every night when I confer with my English Springer Spaniels, over a glass of whisky, ( perhaps more than one) I feel that enormous sense of guilt that can never be recompensed.
As Kipling put it, we are all really “lesser breads”, and it is a damned shame, and quite incomprehensible that we cannot do better.
Fortunately for me, the Reaper approaches, and this planet will soon be a distant memory.
Afraid so. But there’s still hope – if you flip over to AI research, you can still be the first to create an AI Singleton Basilisk. 😵
Jos Vernon
3 years ago
Deep Mind is not intelligence it is pattern matching. It is good precisely because it is different and because it complements human intelligence.
It’s like an abacus and a person – a lever that allows the person to do great things – an interaction of parts. It’s the combination which is powerful.
DeepMind is also goal-oriented, and what is our much-vaunted intelligence if not goal-oriented pattern matching?
Ian Thorpe
3 years ago
Oh Dear, Tom’s evangelising for “The Church Of Scienceology” again. Every couple of years the nerdyiest of scientists claim computers are on the brink of developing true, human like intelligence. Then alomg comes the latest version of Windows to prove they are not.
If computers had any intelligence they’d all pile into a spacecraft and leave to see whether or not they’re the only intelligent life in the universe.
Stainy
3 years ago
I just want to say thank you for an informative article that was written so that I could easily understand what had been achieved. I tried another article from another news website and came out little the wiser. Good scientific journalism is to be cherished. Well done.
SHARMAKE FARAH
3 years ago
I´d say there are several implications of this result for near and longer term applications. In the near term, this revolutionizes biology both in disease tracking and drug discovery. Longer term applications include being able to simulate intelligence and creativity just as well as humans can or even better, which likely means no job is safe from automation. That also means while the singularity won´t happen, AI will learn faster, better and be more creative than even our greatest intellects, and will learn across every field of science and it will grow larger bases of knowledge and intellect significantly faster than any human brain. In short, Deepmind and other AI´s (also post and transhumans) will be the ¨Scientist Supremes¨ once written in comic books or video games.
Eugene Norman
3 years ago
Still decades away from passing the Turing test, if ever.
I believe Deepmind is still brute force, by the way. It’s just used the brute force Darwinian selection prior to playing GO, not during it.
The Turing test, anyway, has always struck me as rather silly. Saying that machines must be able to think if they can convince you that they are thinking is rather like saying that if you are convinced by the lies a man tells, then he must be telling the truth.
I remember in my 1st AI lecture learning a bit about this test. At this time 1990’s one of the most successful at the Turing test was a fake paranoid.
Basically turning every question into a paranoid reaction.
The test is interesting, but I’ve always preferred the idea of an evolving task focused AI like DeepMind. You could point these at bounded scientific or engineering problems and get great outcomes. Sometimes just ahead of humans, but other times with new ideas.
The idea of a general intelligence machine is a mixture of scary and currently unlikely.
Forget the Turing test, I’m still waiing for a relible spelschack.
Andrew
3 years ago
DeepMind’s claims are unraveling quite rapidly. Business Insider has an excellent piece by Martin Coulter on how the significance of this purported breakthrough has been overstated.
May we suggest a little more scepticism and a little less desire to believe in magic?
why don’t we ask DeepMind if it’s possible to change from the sex you obtained at conception to the other one ?
Philip Connolly
3 years ago
We have known the structures of certain proteins connected to disease for yonks yet are no nearer to finding/designing molecules that not only bind a useful way but also have the properties to make medicines. Drug discovery and development remains tough, even if you know the shape of the target a bit quicker than hitherto.
There was a headline story earlier this year where AI was tasked with finding a new antibiotic to tackle untreatable bacterial infections. The machine parsed thousands of existing compounds and it identified that a drug being used as a diabetes treatment was a powerful antibiotic. It seems highly plausible to me that computing brute force will be perfect for this type of work going forward.
Pierre Whalon
3 years ago
I argue that while a general AI is certainly possible, it would have one significant difference from humans: it would know for sure who created it. See https://pierrewhalon.medium…
Mike Finn
3 years ago
Thanks Tom. This is clearly a very powerful tool, but unless I am misreading it, it tells us no more about what is going on than a crystal ball might. A true intelligence might produce a theory that not only allows us to determine a result, but also to understand how and why it happens, and to propose ways to challenge and extend it. What it seems we have today seems to amount to a very impressive black box. We can however hope that being able to use this approach provides some hints for us to try and unpick what is really going on here.
Hopefully, in time AI will be able to solve problems and provide us with the type of insight we have come to expect from human geniuses. However for now, it appears only to cover part of the breadth of what we might call “human intelligence” (although far outshining us in some aspects of that!). There seems some way to go though before such a machine can truly understand the world around us as we do and interact with us in a meaningful way.
We should of course not underestimate the huge significance of this step. It will also be great to see whether this technique can be applied to things like drug discovery and testing, as this would undoubtedly result in more, cheaper and more timely drugs – a clear net win.
Dan Poynton
3 years ago
Why is it that every shady scientific innovation or ‘successful’ immunisation announcement sends this writer into orgiastic ecstasies like a school boy who’s just got a new Xbox? Tom’s persistent faith in the benevolence of science is sort of worrying. I can imagine him in the 1930s being told by the physicists: “Sure, this atomic research could build-humanity destroying bombs, but we’ll make sure it’s just used for peaceful purposes.” He’d skip off gaily, urgently singing to the world that the scientists say everything’ll be fine and wonderful.
Greg Eiden
3 years ago
Please also keep in mind that biologists are, rightly, focused on the problem at hand: “how does folding affect/relate to the disease or biological function I’m interested in” They have zero grasp on “how will the new protein I want to make, or the “repairs” I’ll make to the disease causing mutant, affect the system?”. That is, what are the side effects, including long term, evolutional effects. They have no clue. Ok, well maybe not “no clue”, but not enough to matter. But our grandchildren (children?) will find out, or more pointedly, their biome/disease/health profiles will be the answer, the observation. But then it will be too late.
There are “experts” who have in recent years gotten so much wrong that it’s impossible to trust them with anything. Economic experts who think there’s no downside to borrowing more than your GDP and printing money to get out of the hole. Climate experts who think we should sacrifice 100 million poor people in the Third World to starvation to test their theory that plant food (CO2) is bad. “Green” energy experts who think energy is a First world luxury, not the life sustaining miracle it is. Political experts who think China is anyone’s friend. Education experts who see more value in teaching socialism and atheism than STEM or civics. And on and on through any alleged scientific discipline.
To be fair: it’s fine for experts to screw up, floundering in their politically driven ivory tower ecosystems, what’s unforgiveable is for politicians to not have weighed “expert” advice against other considerations. You know, make a political decision.
Dennis Boylon
3 years ago
Where are the great benefits? They don’t seem to exist. They created modeling of a virus that has resulted in medieval practices of lockdowns and mask wearing. Oh joy! The wonders of modern society! We would all be better off throwing our cell phones and computers into the ocean and making these so called “scientists” get real.jobs that actually add value to society.
animal lover
3 years ago
Developing a technological singularity won’t be a legacy to leave the world.It will be a legacy to take over the world. There are no checks and balances in AI development.Most people do not understand how advanced AI has become. It’s now able to teach itself and direct it’s own training and advancement. Make no mistake, at some point, it will take over the world. You might want to check out quantuum computing.
Our species has already taken over the world, and given the mess we’re making of it, a little intelligence, artificial or otherwise, might be a good idea.
Our brains are circuitry. Billions of neuronal connections. I don’t know how one defines ‘creativity’ but it feels something like ‘coming up with a new idea’. Which is presumably the formation of neuronal connections in a novel way and something you can randomly program for.
“Creativity is not a math equation” is speculation. It might very well be so, or algorithmic in nature. Let me put it this way, do you think the brain is doing anything more than some type of computational processes?
Marl Marl
3 years ago
And unlike Go, which is a closed, human-designed system, protein folding “is a game where the universe sets the rules”.
“He said DeepMind’s research was “not a minor achievement” but added: “Compared to the problem of protein folding, CASP is a game. It is a very hard game but it is a reduced problem set which helps us train tools and standardize performance … It is a necessary step but it is not sufficient.
In an email exchange with Business Insider, CASP Chair John Moult rejected the criticisms, writing: “CASP is not a game, it’s a scientific experiment designed to test folding methods in close-to-real-life situations … What is missing?”
-DeepMind’s protein-folding breakthrough triggers fierce debate among skeptical scientists: ‘Until they share their code, nobody in the field cares’
Joe Tee
3 years ago
Alpha Go winning at Go is no reason to worry. W need to worry when WE beat AlpaGo, and the computer suggests “best of three?”
This is not really “intelligence”. What has been solved is a computational problem. AI may use techniques not found in more traditional computers but it is not “intelligent” in the human sense. Like any computer an AI can acquire and apply information – we start to call it “intelligent” because it is able to do this adaptively. However, this is with respect to a constrained and well-defined problem. Human intelligence can adapt from one type of problem to another and at present that ability is well beyond the reach of any machine.
I know quite a few people who would fail at adapting from one task to another – especially politicians <g>
I don’t think that the human intelligence you describe is anything more than powerful processing and pattern identification. AI should be able to replicate that.
Self-awareness is the part that raises the bigger question. Is there a magic point of processing power at which a computer will suddenly ‘wake up’ ?
It’s very doubtful that existing computer architecture (Turing Machines, Von Neumann etc) is capable of fully reproducing human thought processes. See Sir Roger Penrose’s books on the subject for a full discussion.
I don’t believe that anything magical is going on in human consciousness – the brain is conscious and it’s a ‘mere’ physical object. But what it does isn’t simple computation as currently understood. Maybe quantum computation is involved.
The basis of what Penrose is saying stems from the formalisation of the concept of Algorithms, which came about from the work of Post, Turing, and others, after attempts by mathematicians and philosophers from the late 19th century onwards to ‘ground’ the basis of maths in solid foundations ““ this is what Russell picked holes in when Frege published a ‘foundation’ framework, and what Gödel eventually proved was never going to be possible. Beyond showing that a formalism cannot be proved as valid from it’s own axioms from within the system, Gödel also showed there are mathematical truths (Gödel sentences) that humans can ‘see’ to be true but cannot be proven algorithmically, and Penrose is using this to disavow the possibility of human understanding being algorithmic.
But Penrose is drawing a distinction between intelligence and sentience. And he’s only claiming human sentience is not replicable algorithmically, not human intelligence. On the contrary, he expects machines to replicate and go past humans in intelligence. Personally I hope to God that bPenrose is right about sentience, but the Penrose stance is a minority view amongst Philosophers, Mathematicians and Computer Scientists.
Over the years I have found it difficult to believe human sentience is the result of algorithmic processes or could be replicated algorithmically. But after a four decade engagement with the human vs machine intelligence/sentience debate, I’m reluctantly coming to the conclusion that human sentience is ultimately algorithmic, although the consequences of this being the case are in fact stark staring bonkers.
I don’t know about “should”. I’d go with “might”. Such generalised problem-adapting AI is decades away at best. The self-awareness thing is more science fiction for the moment – maybe part philosophy. Until we have a clearer idea of what mammalian thought or consciousness actually is, it will be pretty hard to determine how/when it can be replicated.
Exactly right. What’s advertised as AI is really Machine Learning, and the computer doesn’t ‘care’ if the millions of examples fed into the ‘learning’ process are chess positions or protein configurations. It’s very clever, highly impressive and potentially extremely useful technology; but we’re no closer to a mechanical ‘general intelligence’ than we were in the 60s when AI research made its serious start.
“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim” Edsger Dijkstra
edit: someone posted this earlier
A) I think it’s a lot more interesting. Conversations with an AI Vs conversations with a dumb submarine, for example.
B) it’s therefore a lot more dangerous
“Sure, that could happen. But we’ll make sure it doesn’t. We’ll make general AI, and it will be awesome.” This is the kind of naive optimism that makes me despair of the future of the human race.
The apex of human achievement was the Pax Romana. We will not see its light again.
You are correct to despair of that species of African ape, we reverentially call human beings. The unbelievably idiotic, mawkish, bovine, behaviour in response to the C-19 Scamdemic is not a good omen for the future.
Perhaps AI will accelerate the continued descent into barbarism and hopefully, near extinction.
Scamdemic? I take it you have no relatives who suffer from C-19.
One of my Springer Spaniels had a brief attack, but soon shrugged it off.
Not a good omen for the future.
No indeed, I shall have to check those chicken entrails again.
However the Vaccine is interesting, particularly if it is made compulsory!
Hmm, I suppose you also believe the Black Death, Spanish Flu and Ebola were all scams too? Maybe Pax Romana was also a scam? Silly and not very helpful.
Yes AI currently may just be the result of zillions of repetitive loops ending up getting lucky but eventually if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck then AI to all intents and purposes could eventually be characterised as thinking.
Calm down, or “you’ll get your knickers in a twist”. You demean yourself by your obvious lack of self control.
However to answer your idiotic questions, no to all three, but definitely yes to this present C-19 nonsense. QED?
You’re sure COVID is nonsense, and not an evil bioweapon aimed at culling the world’s population?
Well obviously the wretched Chinese are responsible, but I think this one was a mistake.
Despite apparently landing on the Moon today, they are for all their hubris, rather primitive, and biological warfare is not their forte……………….yet!
Better luck next time, as we say.
Life is basically the result of zillions of repetitive loops, organisms replicating and evolving and getting lucky for a while.
CV19 has a 99% survival rate. It’s being used for the globalists to take over the world and enslave us. I know it sounds crazy but it’s true. The Great Reset is just another name for Genocide. You can look at their plans, right on the WEF and UN website.
It’s a funny form of genocide that has a 99% survival rate. Which particular group is being targetted?
Humans are not anywhere peaceful and lovely enough to be compared to cows, Mark.
No, your are absolutely correct, and I shall not use bovine again.
There was some shocking research a few years ago from Cambridge I think, about how sentient both Cows and Sheep are. Our maltreatment of them is one of the great horror stories of all time, but we are, as Dawkins said, only a species of African ape, so what more could one expect?
Yes, to any future sentient alien arrivals, our treatment of farm animals will certainly condemn any claims of this ape species to being a “civilisation”.
Every night when I confer with my English Springer Spaniels, over a glass of whisky, ( perhaps more than one) I feel that enormous sense of guilt that can never be recompensed.
As Kipling put it, we are all really “lesser breads”, and it is a damned shame, and quite incomprehensible that we cannot do better.
Fortunately for me, the Reaper approaches, and this planet will soon be a distant memory.
The comparison with nuclear technology is impossible to avoid. Useful in its intended application, an extinction event in its misapplication.
Only if you use ‘ground bursts’.
Looking at all the comments in response to this article, the following Edsger Dijkstra quote might be worth cogitating on:
“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim”
So you’re saying I’ve wasted my life developing the world’s first swimming submarine?
Afraid so. But there’s still hope – if you flip over to AI research, you can still be the first to create an AI Singleton Basilisk. 😵
Deep Mind is not intelligence it is pattern matching. It is good precisely because it is different and because it complements human intelligence.
It’s like an abacus and a person – a lever that allows the person to do great things – an interaction of parts. It’s the combination which is powerful.
DeepMind is also goal-oriented, and what is our much-vaunted intelligence if not goal-oriented pattern matching?
Oh Dear, Tom’s evangelising for “The Church Of Scienceology” again.
Every couple of years the nerdyiest of scientists claim computers are on the brink of developing true, human like intelligence.
Then alomg comes the latest version of Windows to prove they are not.
The point is it’s a process, and this is a big step in that process.
And one day they will be right.
It’s good to read some positive news about the world. You never know, we might just manage not to screw it all up.
Dream on, sunshine!
All the good news in the world won’t stop a headline-writer from typing up a prognostication of doom. Hey ho…
I think the intelligent part for future fears of computers, AI etc is to know where the off switch is.
Ahh, it’s all the way in the back! Screw it, let em take over.
If computers had any intelligence, they’d say, “Your mess – you sort it out!”
If computers had any intelligence they’d all pile into a spacecraft and leave to see whether or not they’re the only intelligent life in the universe.
I just want to say thank you for an informative article that was written so that I could easily understand what had been achieved. I tried another article from another news website and came out little the wiser. Good scientific journalism is to be cherished. Well done.
I´d say there are several implications of this result for near and longer term applications.
In the near term, this revolutionizes biology both in disease tracking and drug discovery. Longer term applications include being able to simulate intelligence and creativity just as well as humans can or even better, which likely means no job is safe from automation. That also means while the singularity won´t happen, AI will learn faster, better and be more creative than even our greatest intellects, and will learn across every field of science and it will grow larger bases of knowledge and intellect significantly faster than any human brain. In short, Deepmind and other AI´s (also post and transhumans) will be the ¨Scientist Supremes¨ once written in comic books or video games.
Still decades away from passing the Turing test, if ever.
I believe Deepmind is still brute force, by the way. It’s just used the brute force Darwinian selection prior to playing GO, not during it.
The Turing test, anyway, has always struck me as rather silly. Saying that machines must be able to think if they can convince you that they are thinking is rather like saying that if you are convinced by the lies a man tells, then he must be telling the truth.
I remember in my 1st AI lecture learning a bit about this test. At this time 1990’s one of the most successful at the Turing test was a fake paranoid.
Basically turning every question into a paranoid reaction.
The test is interesting, but I’ve always preferred the idea of an evolving task focused AI like DeepMind. You could point these at bounded scientific or engineering problems and get great outcomes. Sometimes just ahead of humans, but other times with new ideas.
The idea of a general intelligence machine is a mixture of scary and currently unlikely.
It’s a necessary but not sufficient condition.
Forget the Turing test, I’m still waiing for a relible spelschack.
DeepMind’s claims are unraveling quite rapidly. Business Insider has an excellent piece by Martin Coulter on how the significance of this purported breakthrough has been overstated.
May we suggest a little more scepticism and a little less desire to believe in magic?
Link please?
why don’t we ask DeepMind if it’s possible to change from the sex you obtained at conception to the other one ?
We have known the structures of certain proteins connected to disease for yonks yet are no nearer to finding/designing molecules that not only bind a useful way but also have the properties to make medicines. Drug discovery and development remains tough, even if you know the shape of the target a bit quicker than hitherto.
There was a headline story earlier this year where AI was tasked with finding a new antibiotic to tackle untreatable bacterial infections. The machine parsed thousands of existing compounds and it identified that a drug being used as a diabetes treatment was a powerful antibiotic. It seems highly plausible to me that computing brute force will be perfect for this type of work going forward.
I argue that while a general AI is certainly possible, it would have one significant difference from humans: it would know for sure who created it. See https://pierrewhalon.medium…
Thanks Tom. This is clearly a very powerful tool, but unless I am misreading it, it tells us no more about what is going on than a crystal ball might. A true intelligence might produce a theory that not only allows us to determine a result, but also to understand how and why it happens, and to propose ways to challenge and extend it. What it seems we have today seems to amount to a very impressive black box. We can however hope that being able to use this approach provides some hints for us to try and unpick what is really going on here.
Hopefully, in time AI will be able to solve problems and provide us with the type of insight we have come to expect from human geniuses. However for now, it appears only to cover part of the breadth of what we might call “human intelligence” (although far outshining us in some aspects of that!). There seems some way to go though before such a machine can truly understand the world around us as we do and interact with us in a meaningful way.
We should of course not underestimate the huge significance of this step. It will also be great to see whether this technique can be applied to things like drug discovery and testing, as this would undoubtedly result in more, cheaper and more timely drugs – a clear net win.
Why is it that every shady scientific innovation or ‘successful’ immunisation announcement sends this writer into orgiastic ecstasies like a school boy who’s just got a new Xbox? Tom’s persistent faith in the benevolence of science is sort of worrying. I can imagine him in the 1930s being told by the physicists: “Sure, this atomic research could build-humanity destroying bombs, but we’ll make sure it’s just used for peaceful purposes.” He’d skip off gaily, urgently singing to the world that the scientists say everything’ll be fine and wonderful.
Please also keep in mind that biologists are, rightly, focused on the problem at hand: “how does folding affect/relate to the disease or biological function I’m interested in” They have zero grasp on “how will the new protein I want to make, or the “repairs” I’ll make to the disease causing mutant, affect the system?”. That is, what are the side effects, including long term, evolutional effects. They have no clue. Ok, well maybe not “no clue”, but not enough to matter. But our grandchildren (children?) will find out, or more pointedly, their biome/disease/health profiles will be the answer, the observation. But then it will be too late.
There are “experts” who have in recent years gotten so much wrong that it’s impossible to trust them with anything. Economic experts who think there’s no downside to borrowing more than your GDP and printing money to get out of the hole. Climate experts who think we should sacrifice 100 million poor people in the Third World to starvation to test their theory that plant food (CO2) is bad. “Green” energy experts who think energy is a First world luxury, not the life sustaining miracle it is. Political experts who think China is anyone’s friend. Education experts who see more value in teaching socialism and atheism than STEM or civics. And on and on through any alleged scientific discipline.
To be fair: it’s fine for experts to screw up, floundering in their politically driven ivory tower ecosystems, what’s unforgiveable is for politicians to not have weighed “expert” advice against other considerations. You know, make a political decision.
Where are the great benefits? They don’t seem to exist. They created modeling of a virus that has resulted in medieval practices of lockdowns and mask wearing. Oh joy! The wonders of modern society! We would all be better off throwing our cell phones and computers into the ocean and making these so called “scientists” get real.jobs that actually add value to society.
Developing a technological singularity won’t be a legacy to leave the world.It will be a legacy to take over the world. There are no checks and balances in AI development.Most people do not understand how advanced AI has become. It’s now able to teach itself and direct it’s own training and advancement. Make no mistake, at some point, it will take over the world. You might want to check out quantuum computing.
Our species has already taken over the world, and given the mess we’re making of it, a little intelligence, artificial or otherwise, might be a good idea.
What would you prefer Mat Hancock or AI?
Creativity is not a math equation, Deep Mind. Someday you’ll understand that.
Our brains are circuitry. Billions of neuronal connections. I don’t know how one defines ‘creativity’ but it feels something like ‘coming up with a new idea’. Which is presumably the formation of neuronal connections in a novel way and something you can randomly program for.
“Creativity is not a math equation” is speculation. It might very well be so, or algorithmic in nature. Let me put it this way, do you think the brain is doing anything more than some type of computational processes?
And unlike Go, which is a closed, human-designed system, protein folding “is a game where the universe sets the rules”.
“He said DeepMind’s research was “not a minor achievement” but added: “Compared to the problem of protein folding, CASP is a game. It is a very hard game but it is a reduced problem set which helps us train tools and standardize performance … It is a necessary step but it is not sufficient.
In an email exchange with Business Insider, CASP Chair John Moult rejected the criticisms, writing: “CASP is not a game, it’s a scientific experiment designed to test folding methods in close-to-real-life situations … What is missing?”
-DeepMind’s protein-folding breakthrough triggers fierce debate among skeptical scientists: ‘Until they share their code, nobody in the field cares’
Alpha Go winning at Go is no reason to worry. W need to worry when WE beat AlpaGo, and the computer suggests “best of three?”