Frank's Blog

People often liken the effort to develop (strong) artificial intelligence to the effort to develop artificial flight. I think the effort to develop the nuclear bomb might be more close, because - It needs a huge effort to develop AI, something like the Manhattan project, whereas artificial flight was done by a couple of guys from a bike shop. - AI will have a more profound effect on the world than flight. - it feels like a creation of something, playing god. Nuclear: humans create a mini-star on earth, like humans creating/controlling fire. AI: humans create something alive. - AI/nuclear have more of a dangerous/dark/scary side than flight. - Because of fears, with nuclear energy there's a choice to use it or not use it. Strong AI might be like that. For flight there is not much reason not to use it. - Nuclear energy is the fundamental energy source in the non-living universe, the ultimate energy. Intelligence is the ultimate product of the living universe. - The nuclear bomb devel...

Start of AI: Dartmouth Conf. 1956 “We are at the beginning of the end of the beginning in A.I.” Faustino Gomez, NY Times, 2016 I like that quote. We are coming to the end of Phase 1, the beginning phase of A.I., after 60 years. Beating Go is part of this. Also IBM Watson Jeopardy. AI is beating humans on obscure or fringe activities; things that humans are not really that good at. Phase 2, the middle phase, will be about everyday activities. Driving, stacking shelves in supermarkets, picking products (these tasks are at the easiest end). End to end order to delivery of goods without a human. Telephone services, dialogue systems. Pretty much all services. Mass unemployment. Eventually reaching human level in vision and language tasks. Robots able to do >95% of current human jobs; that will mark the end of phase 2.  Phase 3, the final phase, will be about superhuman intelligence. People might say everyday tasks were already researched in the last 60 years(e.g. driving), but I see ...