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#435046 The Challenge of Abundance: Boredom, ...
As technology continues to progress, the possibility of an abundant future seems more likely. Artificial intelligence is expected to drive down the cost of labor, infrastructure, and transport. Alternative energy systems are reducing the cost of a wide variety of goods. Poverty rates are falling around the world as more people are able to make a living, and resources that were once inaccessible to millions are becoming widely available.
But such a life presents fuel for the most common complaint against abundance: if robots take all the jobs, basic income provides us livable welfare for doing nothing, and healthcare is a guarantee free of charge, then what is the point of our lives? What would motivate us to work and excel if there are no real risks or rewards? If everything is simply given to us, how would we feel like we’ve ever earned anything?
Time has proven that humans inherently yearn to overcome challenges—in fact, this very desire likely exists as the root of most technological innovation. And the idea that struggling makes us stronger isn’t just anecdotal, it’s scientifically validated.
For instance, kids who use anti-bacterial soaps and sanitizers too often tend to develop weak immune systems, causing them to get sick more frequently and more severely. People who work out purposely suffer through torn muscles so that after a few days of healing their muscles are stronger. And when patients visit a psychologist to handle a fear that is derailing their lives, one of the most common treatments is exposure therapy: a slow increase of exposure to the suffering so that the patient gets stronger and braver each time, able to take on an incrementally more potent manifestation of their fears.
Different Kinds of Struggle
It’s not hard to understand why people might fear an abundant future as a terribly mundane one. But there is one crucial mistake made in this assumption, and it was well summarized by Indian mystic and author Sadhguru, who said during a recent talk at Google:
Stomach empty, only one problem. Stomach full—one hundred problems; because what we refer to as human really begins only after survival is taken care of.
This idea is backed up by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which was first presented in his 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation.” Maslow shows the steps required to build to higher and higher levels of the human experience. Not surprisingly, the first two levels deal with physiological needs and the need for safety—in other words, with the body. You need to have food, water, and sleep, or you die. After that, you need to be protected from threats, from the elements, from dangerous people, and from disease and pain.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Photo by Wikimedia User:Factoryjoe / CC BY-SA 3.0
The beauty of these first two levels is that they’re clear-cut problems with clear-cut solutions: if you’re hungry, then you eat; if you’re thirsty, then you drink; if you’re tired, then you sleep.
But what about the next tiers of the hierarchy? What of love and belonging, of self-esteem and self-actualization? If we’re lonely, can we just summon up an authentic friend or lover? If we feel neglected by society, can we demand it validate us? If we feel discouraged and disappointed in ourselves, can we simply dial up some confidence and self-esteem?
Of course not, and that’s because these psychological needs are nebulous; they don’t contain clear problems with clear solutions. They involve the external world and other people, and are complicated by the infinite flavors of nuance and compromise that are required to navigate human relationships and personal meaning.
These psychological difficulties are where we grow our personalities, outlooks, and beliefs. The truly defining characteristics of a person are dictated not by the physical situations they were forced into—like birth, socioeconomic class, or physical ailment—but instead by the things they choose. So a future of abundance helps to free us from the physical limitations so that we can truly commit to a life of purpose and meaning, rather than just feel like survival is our purpose.
The Greatest Challenge
And that’s the plot twist. This challenge to come to grips with our own individuality and freedom could actually be the greatest challenge our species has ever faced. Can you imagine waking up every day with infinite possibility? Every choice you make says no to the rest of reality, and so every decision carries with it truly life-defining purpose and meaning. That sounds overwhelming. And that’s probably because in our current socio-economic systems, it is.
Studies have shown that people in wealthier nations tend to experience more anxiety and depression. Ron Kessler, professor of health care policy at Harvard and World Health Organization (WHO) researcher, summarized his findings of global mental health by saying, “When you’re literally trying to survive, who has time for depression? Americans, on the other hand, many of whom lead relatively comfortable lives, blow other nations away in the depression factor, leading some to suggest that depression is a ‘luxury disorder.’”
This might explain why America scores in the top rankings for the most depressed and anxious country on the planet. We surpassed our survival needs, and instead became depressed because our jobs and relationships don’t fulfill our expectations for the next three levels of Maslow’s hierarchy (belonging, esteem, and self-actualization).
But a future of abundance would mean we’d have to deal with these levels. This is the challenge for the future; this is what keeps things from being mundane.
As a society, we would be forced to come to grips with our emotional intelligence, to reckon with philosophy rather than simply contemplate it. Nearly every person you meet will be passionately on their own customized life journey, not following a routine simply because of financial limitations. Such a world seems far more vibrant and interesting than one where most wander sleep-deprived and numb while attempting to survive the rat race.
We can already see the forceful hand of this paradigm shift as self-driving cars become ubiquitous. For example, consider the famous psychological and philosophical “trolley problem.” In this thought experiment, a person sees a trolley car heading towards five people on the train tracks; they see a lever that will allow them to switch the trolley car to a track that instead only has one person on it. Do you switch the lever and have a hand in killing one person, or do you let fate continue and kill five people instead?
For the longest time, this was just an interesting quandary to consider. But now, massive corporations have to have an answer, so they can program their self-driving cars with the ability to choose between hitting a kid who runs into the road or swerving into an oncoming car carrying a family of five. When companies need philosophers to make business decisions, it’s a good sign of what’s to come.
Luckily, it’s possible this forceful reckoning with philosophy and our own consciousness may be exactly what humanity needs. Perhaps our great failure as a species has been a result of advanced cognition still trapped in the first two levels of Maslow’s hierarchy due to a long history of scarcity.
As suggested in the opening scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey, our ape-like proclivity for violence has long stayed the same while the technology we fight with and live amongst has progressed. So while well-off Americans may have comfortable lives, they still know they live in a system where there is no safety net, where a single tragic failure could still mean hunger and homelessness. And because of this, that evolutionarily hard-wired neurotic part of our brain that fears for our survival has never been able to fully relax, and so that anxiety and depression that come with too much freedom but not enough security stays ever present.
Not only might this shift in consciousness help liberate humanity, but it may be vital if we’re to survive our future creations as well. Whatever values we hold dear as a species are the ones we will imbue into the sentient robots we create. If machine learning is going to take its guidance from humanity, we need to level up humanity’s emotional maturity.
While the physical struggles of the future may indeed fall to the wayside amongst abundance, it’s unlikely to become a mundane world; instead, it will become a vibrant culture where each individual is striving against the most important struggle that affects all of us: the challenge to find inner peace, to find fulfillment, to build meaningful relationships, and ultimately, the challenge to find ourselves.
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Posted in Human Robots
#434865 5 AI Breakthroughs We’ll Likely See in ...
Convergence is accelerating disruption… everywhere! Exponential technologies are colliding into each other, reinventing products, services, and industries.
As AI algorithms such as Siri and Alexa can process your voice and output helpful responses, other AIs like Face++ can recognize faces. And yet others create art from scribbles, or even diagnose medical conditions.
Let’s dive into AI and convergence.
Top 5 Predictions for AI Breakthroughs (2019-2024)
My friend Neil Jacobstein is my ‘go-to expert’ in AI, with over 25 years of technical consulting experience in the field. Currently the AI and Robotics chair at Singularity University, Jacobstein is also a Distinguished Visiting Scholar in Stanford’s MediaX Program, a Henry Crown Fellow, an Aspen Institute moderator, and serves on the National Academy of Sciences Earth and Life Studies Committee. Neil predicted five trends he expects to emerge over the next five years, by 2024.
AI gives rise to new non-human pattern recognition and intelligence results
AlphaGo Zero, a machine learning computer program trained to play the complex game of Go, defeated the Go world champion in 2016 by 100 games to zero. But instead of learning from human play, AlphaGo Zero trained by playing against itself—a method known as reinforcement learning.
Building its own knowledge from scratch, AlphaGo Zero demonstrates a novel form of creativity, free of human bias. Even more groundbreaking, this type of AI pattern recognition allows machines to accumulate thousands of years of knowledge in a matter of hours.
While these systems can’t answer the question “What is orange juice?” or compete with the intelligence of a fifth grader, they are growing more and more strategically complex, merging with other forms of narrow artificial intelligence. Within the next five years, who knows what successors of AlphaGo Zero will emerge, augmenting both your business functions and day-to-day life.
Doctors risk malpractice when not using machine learning for diagnosis and treatment planning
A group of Chinese and American researchers recently created an AI system that diagnoses common childhood illnesses, ranging from the flu to meningitis. Trained on electronic health records compiled from 1.3 million outpatient visits of almost 600,000 patients, the AI program produced diagnosis outcomes with unprecedented accuracy.
While the US health system does not tout the same level of accessible universal health data as some Chinese systems, we’ve made progress in implementing AI in medical diagnosis. Dr. Kang Zhang, chief of ophthalmic genetics at the University of California, San Diego, created his own system that detects signs of diabetic blindness, relying on both text and medical images.
With an eye to the future, Jacobstein has predicted that “we will soon see an inflection point where doctors will feel it’s a risk to not use machine learning and AI in their everyday practices because they don’t want to be called out for missing an important diagnostic signal.”
Quantum advantage will massively accelerate drug design and testing
Researchers estimate that there are 1060 possible drug-like molecules—more than the number of atoms in our solar system. But today, chemists must make drug predictions based on properties influenced by molecular structure, then synthesize numerous variants to test their hypotheses.
Quantum computing could transform this time-consuming, highly costly process into an efficient, not to mention life-changing, drug discovery protocol.
“Quantum computing is going to have a major industrial impact… not by breaking encryption,” said Jacobstein, “but by making inroads into design through massive parallel processing that can exploit superposition and quantum interference and entanglement, and that can wildly outperform classical computing.”
AI accelerates security systems’ vulnerability and defense
With the incorporation of AI into almost every aspect of our lives, cyberattacks have grown increasingly threatening. “Deep attacks” can use AI-generated content to avoid both human and AI controls.
Previous examples include fake videos of former President Obama speaking fabricated sentences, and an adversarial AI fooling another algorithm into categorizing a stop sign as a 45 mph speed limit sign. Without the appropriate protections, AI systems can be manipulated to conduct any number of destructive objectives, whether ruining reputations or diverting autonomous vehicles.
Jacobstein’s take: “We all have security systems on our buildings, in our homes, around the healthcare system, and in air traffic control, financial organizations, the military, and intelligence communities. But we all know that these systems have been hacked periodically and we’re going to see that accelerate. So, there are major business opportunities there and there are major opportunities for you to get ahead of that curve before it bites you.”
AI design systems drive breakthroughs in atomically precise manufacturing
Just as the modern computer transformed our relationship with bits and information, AI will redefine and revolutionize our relationship with molecules and materials. AI is currently being used to discover new materials for clean-tech innovations, such as solar panels, batteries, and devices that can now conduct artificial photosynthesis.
Today, it takes about 15 to 20 years to create a single new material, according to industry experts. But as AI design systems skyrocket in capacity, these will vastly accelerate the materials discovery process, allowing us to address pressing issues like climate change at record rates. Companies like Kebotix are already on their way to streamlining the creation of chemistries and materials at the click of a button.
Atomically precise manufacturing will enable us to produce the previously unimaginable.
Final Thoughts
Within just the past three years, countries across the globe have signed into existence national AI strategies and plans for ramping up innovation. Businesses and think tanks have leaped onto the scene, hiring AI engineers and tech consultants to leverage what computer scientist Andrew Ng has even called the new ‘electricity’ of the 21st century.
As AI plays an exceedingly vital role in everyday life, how will your business leverage it to keep up and build forward?
In the wake of burgeoning markets, new ventures will quickly arise, each taking advantage of untapped data sources or unmet security needs.
And as your company aims to ride the wave of AI’s exponential growth, consider the following pointers to leverage AI and disrupt yourself before it reaches you first:
Determine where and how you can begin collecting critical data to inform your AI algorithms
Identify time-intensive processes that can be automated and accelerated within your company
Discern which global challenges can be expedited by hyper-fast, all-knowing minds
Remember: good data is vital fuel. Well-defined problems are the best compass. And the time to start implementing AI is now.
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Posted in Human Robots
#434786 AI Performed Like a Human on a Gestalt ...
Dr. Been Kim wants to rip open the black box of deep learning.
A senior researcher at Google Brain, Kim specializes in a sort of AI psychology. Like cognitive psychologists before her, she develops various ways to probe the alien minds of artificial neural networks (ANNs), digging into their gory details to better understand the models and their responses to inputs.
The more interpretable ANNs are, the reasoning goes, the easier it is to reveal potential flaws in their reasoning. And if we understand when or why our systems choke, we’ll know when not to use them—a foundation for building responsible AI.
There are already several ways to tap into ANN reasoning, but Kim’s inspiration for unraveling the AI black box came from an entirely different field: cognitive psychology. The field aims to discover fundamental rules of how the human mind—essentially also a tantalizing black box—operates, Kim wrote with her colleagues.
In a new paper uploaded to the pre-publication server arXiv, the team described a way to essentially perform a human cognitive test on ANNs. The test probes how we automatically complete gaps in what we see, so that they form entire objects—for example, perceiving a circle from a bunch of loose dots arranged along a clock face. Psychologist dub this the “law of completion,” a highly influential idea that led to explanations of how our minds generalize data into concepts.
Because deep neural networks in machine vision loosely mimic the structure and connections of the visual cortex, the authors naturally asked: do ANNs also exhibit the law of completion? And what does that tell us about how an AI thinks?
Enter the Germans
The law of completion is part of a series of ideas from Gestalt psychology. Back in the 1920s, long before the advent of modern neuroscience, a group of German experimental psychologists asked: in this chaotic, flashy, unpredictable world, how do we piece together input in a way that leads to meaningful perceptions?
The result is a group of principles known together as the Gestalt effect: that the mind self-organizes to form a global whole. In the more famous words of Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka, our perception forms a whole that’s “something else than the sum of its parts.” Not greater than; just different.
Although the theory has its critics, subsequent studies in humans and animals suggest that the law of completion happens on both the cognitive and neuroanatomical level.
Take a look at the drawing below. You immediately “see” a shape that’s actually the negative: a triangle or a square (A and B). Or you further perceive a 3D ball (C), or a snake-like squiggle (D). Your mind fills in blank spots, so that the final perception is more than just the black shapes you’re explicitly given.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons contributors, the free media repository.
Neuroscientists now think that the effect comes from how our visual system processes information. Arranged in multiple layers and columns, lower-level neurons—those first to wrangle the data—tend to extract simpler features such as lines or angles. In Gestalt speak, they “see” the parts.
Then, layer by layer, perception becomes more abstract, until higher levels of the visual system directly interpret faces or objects—or things that don’t really exist. That is, the “whole” emerges.
The Experiment Setup
Inspired by these classical experiments, Kim and team developed a protocol to test the Gestalt effect on feed-forward ANNs: one simple, the other, dubbed the “Inception V3,” far more complex and widely used in the machine vision community.
The main idea is similar to the triangle drawings above. First, the team generated three datasets: one set shows complete, ordinary triangles. The second—the “Illusory” set, shows triangles with the edges removed but the corners intact. Thanks to the Gestalt effect, to us humans these generally still look like triangles. The third set also only shows incomplete triangle corners. But here, the corners are randomly rotated so that we can no longer imagine a line connecting them—hence, no more triangle.
To generate a dataset large enough to tease out small effects, the authors changed the background color, image rotation, and other aspects of the dataset. In all, they produced nearly 1,000 images to test their ANNs on.
“At a high level, we compare an ANN’s activation similarities between the three sets of stimuli,” the authors explained. The process is two steps: first, train the AI on complete triangles. Second, test them on the datasets. If the response is more similar between the illusory set and the complete triangle—rather than the randomly rotated set—it should suggest a sort of Gestalt closure effect in the network.
Machine Gestalt
Right off the bat, the team got their answer: yes, ANNs do seem to exhibit the law of closure.
When trained on natural images, the networks better classified the illusory set as triangles than those with randomized connection weights or networks trained on white noise.
When the team dug into the “why,” things got more interesting. The ability to complete an image correlated with the network’s ability to generalize.
Humans subconsciously do this constantly: anything with a handle made out of ceramic, regardless of shape, could easily be a mug. ANNs still struggle to grasp common features—clues that immediately tells us “hey, that’s a mug!” But when they do, it sometimes allows the networks to better generalize.
“What we observe here is that a network that is able to generalize exhibits…more of the closure effect [emphasis theirs], hinting that the closure effect reflects something beyond simply learning features,” the team wrote.
What’s more, remarkably similar to the visual cortex, “higher” levels of the ANNs showed more of the closure effect than lower layers, and—perhaps unsurprisingly—the more layers a network had, the more it exhibited the closure effect.
As the networks learned, their ability to map out objects from fragments also improved. When the team messed around with the brightness and contrast of the images, the AI still learned to see the forest from the trees.
“Our findings suggest that neural networks trained with natural images do exhibit closure,” the team concluded.
AI Psychology
That’s not to say that ANNs recapitulate the human brain. As Google’s Deep Dream, an effort to coax AIs into spilling what they’re perceiving, clearly demonstrates, machine vision sees some truly weird stuff.
In contrast, because they’re modeled after the human visual cortex, perhaps it’s not all that surprising that these networks also exhibit higher-level properties inherent to how we process information.
But to Kim and her colleagues, that’s exactly the point.
“The field of psychology has developed useful tools and insights to study human brains– tools that we may be able to borrow to analyze artificial neural networks,” they wrote.
By tweaking these tools to better analyze machine minds, the authors were able to gain insight on how similarly or differently they see the world from us. And that’s the crux: the point isn’t to say that ANNs perceive the world sort of, kind of, maybe similar to humans. It’s to tap into a wealth of cognitive psychology tools, established over decades using human minds, to probe that of ANNs.
“The work here is just one step along a much longer path,” the authors conclude.
“Understanding where humans and neural networks differ will be helpful for research on interpretability by enlightening the fundamental differences between the two interesting species.”
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Posted in Human Robots
#434759 To Be Ethical, AI Must Become ...
As over-hyped as artificial intelligence is—everyone’s talking about it, few fully understand it, it might leave us all unemployed but also solve all the world’s problems—its list of accomplishments is growing. AI can now write realistic-sounding text, give a debating champ a run for his money, diagnose illnesses, and generate fake human faces—among much more.
After training these systems on massive datasets, their creators essentially just let them do their thing to arrive at certain conclusions or outcomes. The problem is that more often than not, even the creators don’t know exactly why they’ve arrived at those conclusions or outcomes. There’s no easy way to trace a machine learning system’s rationale, so to speak. The further we let AI go down this opaque path, the more likely we are to end up somewhere we don’t want to be—and may not be able to come back from.
In a panel at the South by Southwest interactive festival last week titled “Ethics and AI: How to plan for the unpredictable,” experts in the field shared their thoughts on building more transparent, explainable, and accountable AI systems.
Not New, but Different
Ryan Welsh, founder and director of explainable AI startup Kyndi, pointed out that having knowledge-based systems perform advanced tasks isn’t new; he cited logistical, scheduling, and tax software as examples. What’s new is the learning component, our inability to trace how that learning occurs, and the ethical implications that could result.
“Now we have these systems that are learning from data, and we’re trying to understand why they’re arriving at certain outcomes,” Welsh said. “We’ve never actually had this broad society discussion about ethics in those scenarios.”
Rather than continuing to build AIs with opaque inner workings, engineers must start focusing on explainability, which Welsh broke down into three subcategories. Transparency and interpretability come first, and refer to being able to find the units of high influence in a machine learning network, as well as the weights of those units and how they map to specific data and outputs.
Then there’s provenance: knowing where something comes from. In an ideal scenario, for example, Open AI’s new text generator would be able to generate citations in its text that reference academic (and human-created) papers or studies.
Explainability itself is the highest and final bar and refers to a system’s ability to explain itself in natural language to the average user by being able to say, “I generated this output because x, y, z.”
“Humans are unique in our ability and our desire to ask why,” said Josh Marcuse, executive director of the Defense Innovation Board, which advises Department of Defense senior leaders on innovation. “The reason we want explanations from people is so we can understand their belief system and see if we agree with it and want to continue to work with them.”
Similarly, we need to have the ability to interrogate AIs.
Two Types of Thinking
Welsh explained that one big barrier standing in the way of explainability is the tension between the deep learning community and the symbolic AI community, which see themselves as two different paradigms and historically haven’t collaborated much.
Symbolic or classical AI focuses on concepts and rules, while deep learning is centered around perceptions. In human thought this is the difference between, for example, deciding to pass a soccer ball to a teammate who is open (you make the decision because conceptually you know that only open players can receive passes), and registering that the ball is at your feet when someone else passes it to you (you’re taking in information without making a decision about it).
“Symbolic AI has abstractions and representation based on logic that’s more humanly comprehensible,” Welsh said. To truly mimic human thinking, AI needs to be able to both perceive information and conceptualize it. An example of perception (deep learning) in an AI is recognizing numbers within an image, while conceptualization (symbolic learning) would give those numbers a hierarchical order and extract rules from the hierachy (4 is greater than 3, and 5 is greater than 4, therefore 5 is also greater than 3).
Explainability comes in when the system can say, “I saw a, b, and c, and based on that decided x, y, or z.” DeepMind and others have recently published papers emphasizing the need to fuse the two paradigms together.
Implications Across Industries
One of the most prominent fields where AI ethics will come into play, and where the transparency and accountability of AI systems will be crucial, is defense. Marcuse said, “We’re accountable beings, and we’re responsible for the choices we make. Bringing in tech or AI to a battlefield doesn’t strip away that meaning and accountability.”
In fact, he added, rather than worrying about how AI might degrade human values, people should be asking how the tech could be used to help us make better moral choices.
It’s also important not to conflate AI with autonomy—a worst-case scenario that springs to mind is an intelligent destructive machine on a rampage. But in fact, Marcuse said, in the defense space, “We have autonomous systems today that don’t rely on AI, and most of the AI systems we’re contemplating won’t be autonomous.”
The US Department of Defense released its 2018 artificial intelligence strategy last month. It includes developing a robust and transparent set of principles for defense AI, investing in research and development for AI that’s reliable and secure, continuing to fund research in explainability, advocating for a global set of military AI guidelines, and finding ways to use AI to reduce the risk of civilian casualties and other collateral damage.
Though these were designed with defense-specific aims in mind, Marcuse said, their implications extend across industries. “The defense community thinks of their problems as being unique, that no one deals with the stakes and complexity we deal with. That’s just wrong,” he said. Making high-stakes decisions with technology is widespread; safety-critical systems are key to aviation, medicine, and self-driving cars, to name a few.
Marcuse believes the Department of Defense can invest in AI safety in a way that has far-reaching benefits. “We all depend on technology to keep us alive and safe, and no one wants machines to harm us,” he said.
A Creation Superior to Its Creator
That said, we’ve come to expect technology to meet our needs in just the way we want, all the time—servers must never be down, GPS had better not take us on a longer route, Google must always produce the answer we’re looking for.
With AI, though, our expectations of perfection may be less reasonable.
“Right now we’re holding machines to superhuman standards,” Marcuse said. “We expect them to be perfect and infallible.” Take self-driving cars. They’re conceived of, built by, and programmed by people, and people as a whole generally aren’t great drivers—just look at traffic accident death rates to confirm that. But the few times self-driving cars have had fatal accidents, there’s been an ensuing uproar and backlash against the industry, as well as talk of implementing more restrictive regulations.
This can be extrapolated to ethics more generally. We as humans have the ability to explain our decisions, but many of us aren’t very good at doing so. As Marcuse put it, “People are emotional, they confabulate, they lie, they’re full of unconscious motivations. They don’t pass the explainability test.”
Why, then, should explainability be the standard for AI?
Even if humans aren’t good at explaining our choices, at least we can try, and we can answer questions that probe at our decision-making process. A deep learning system can’t do this yet, so working towards being able to identify which input data the systems are triggering on to make decisions—even if the decisions and the process aren’t perfect—is the direction we need to head.
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Posted in Human Robots