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#431186 The Coming Creativity Explosion Belongs ...
Does creativity make human intelligence special?
It may appear so at first glance. Though machines can calculate, analyze, and even perceive, creativity may seem far out of reach. Perhaps this is because we find it mysterious, even in ourselves. How can the output of a machine be anything more than that which is determined by its programmers?
Increasingly, however, artificial intelligence is moving into creativity’s hallowed domain, from art to industry. And though much is already possible, the future is sure to bring ever more creative machines.
What Is Machine Creativity?
Robotic art is just one example of machine creativity, a rapidly growing sub-field that sits somewhere between the study of artificial intelligence and human psychology.
The winning paintings from the 2017 Robot Art Competition are strikingly reminiscent of those showcased each spring at university exhibitions for graduating art students. Like the works produced by skilled artists, the compositions dreamed up by the competition’s robotic painters are aesthetically ambitious. One robot-made painting features a man’s bearded face gazing intently out from the canvas, his eyes locking with the viewer’s. Another abstract painting, “inspired” by data from EEG signals, visually depicts the human emotion of misery with jagged, gloomy stripes of black and purple.
More broadly, a creative machine is software (sometimes encased in a robotic body) that synthesizes inputs to generate new and valuable ideas, solutions to complex scientific problems, or original works of art. In a process similar to that followed by a human artist or scientist, a creative machine begins its work by framing a problem. Next, its software specifies the requirements the solution should have before generating “answers” in the form of original designs, patterns, or some other form of output.
Although the notion of machine creativity sounds a bit like science fiction, the basic concept is one that has been slowly developing for decades.
Nearly 50 years ago while a high school student, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil created software that could analyze the patterns in musical compositions and then compose new melodies in a similar style. Aaron, one of the world’s most famous painting robots, has been hard at work since the 1970s.
Industrial designers have used an automated, algorithm-driven process for decades to design computer chips (or machine parts) whose layout (or form) is optimized for a particular function or environment. Emily Howell, a computer program created by David Cope, writes original works in the style of classical composers, some of which have been performed by human orchestras to live audiences.
What’s different about today’s new and emerging generation of robotic artists, scientists, composers, authors, and product designers is their ubiquity and power.
“The recent explosion of artificial creativity has been enabled by the rapid maturation of the same exponential technologies that have already re-drawn our daily lives.”
I’ve already mentioned the rapidly advancing fields of robotic art and music. In the realm of scientific research, so-called “robotic scientists” such as Eureqa and Adam and Eve develop new scientific hypotheses; their “insights” have contributed to breakthroughs that are cited by hundreds of academic research papers. In the medical industry, creative machines are hard at work creating chemical compounds for new pharmaceuticals. After it read over seven million words of 20th century English poetry, a neural network developed by researcher Jack Hopkins learned to write passable poetry in a number of different styles and meters.
The recent explosion of artificial creativity has been enabled by the rapid maturation of the same exponential technologies that have already re-drawn our daily lives, including faster processors, ubiquitous sensors and wireless networks, and better algorithms.
As they continue to improve, creative machines—like humans—will perform a broad range of creative activities, ranging from everyday problem solving (sometimes known as “Little C” creativity) to producing once-in-a-century masterpieces (“Big C” creativity). A creative machine’s outputs could range from a design for a cast for a marble sculpture to a schematic blueprint for a clever new gadget for opening bottles of wine.
In the coming decades, by automating the process of solving complex problems, creative machines will again transform our world. Creative machines will serve as a versatile source of on-demand talent.
In the battle to recruit a workforce that can solve complex problems, creative machines will put small businesses on equal footing with large corporations. Art and music lovers will enjoy fresh creative works that re-interpret the style of ancient disciplines. People with a health condition will benefit from individualized medical treatments, and low-income people will receive top-notch legal advice, to name but a few potentially beneficial applications.
How Can We Make Creative Machines, Unless We Understand Our Own Creativity?
One of the most intriguing—yet unsettling—aspects of watching robotic arms skillfully oil paint is that we humans still do not understand our own creative process. Over the centuries, several different civilizations have devised a variety of models to explain creativity.
The ancient Greeks believed that poets drew inspiration from a transcendent realm parallel to the material world where ideas could take root and flourish. In the Middle Ages, philosophers and poets attributed our peculiarly human ability to “make something of nothing” to an external source, namely divine inspiration. Modern academic study of human creativity has generated vast reams of scholarship, but despite the value of these insights, the human imagination remains a great mystery, second only to that of consciousness.
Today, the rise of machine creativity demonstrates (once again), that we do not have to fully understand a biological process in order to emulate it with advanced technology.
Past experience has shown that jet planes can fly higher and faster than birds by using the forward thrust of an engine rather than wings. Submarines propel themselves forward underwater without fins or a tail. Deep learning neural networks identify objects in randomly-selected photographs with super-human accuracy. Similarly, using a fairly straightforward software architecture, creative software (sometimes paired with a robotic body) can paint, write, hypothesize, or design with impressive originality, skill, and boldness.
At the heart of machine creativity is simple iteration. No matter what sort of output they produce, creative machines fall into one of three categories depending on their internal architecture.
Briefly, the first group consists of software programs that use traditional rule-based, or symbolic AI, the second group uses evolutionary algorithms, and the third group uses a variation of a form of machine learning called deep learning that has already revolutionized voice and facial recognition software.
1) Symbolic creative machines are the oldest artificial artists and musicians. In this approach—also known as “good old-fashioned AI (GOFAI) or symbolic AI—the human programmer plays a key role by writing a set of step-by-step instructions to guide the computer through a task. Despite the fact that symbolic AI is limited in its ability to adapt to environmental changes, it’s still possible for a robotic artist programmed this way to create an impressively wide variety of different outputs.
2) Evolutionary algorithms (EA) have been in use for several decades and remain powerful tools for design. In this approach, potential solutions “compete” in a software simulator in a Darwinian process reminiscent of biological evolution. The human programmer specifies a “fitness criterion” that will be used to score and rank the solutions generated by the software. The software then generates a “first generation” population of random solutions (which typically are pretty poor in quality), scores this first generation of solutions, and selects the top 50% (those random solutions deemed to be the best “fit”). The software then takes another pass and recombines the “winning” solutions to create the next generation and repeats this process for thousands (and sometimes millions) of generations.
3) Generative deep learning (DL) neural networks represent the newest software architecture of the three, since DL is data-dependent and resource-intensive. First, a human programmer “trains” a DL neural network to recognize a particular feature in a dataset, for example, an image of a dog in a stream of digital images. Next, the standard “feed forward” process is reversed and the DL neural network begins to generate the feature, for example, eventually producing new and sometimes original images of (or poetry about) dogs. Generative DL networks have tremendous and unexplored creative potential and are able to produce a broad range of original outputs, from paintings to music to poetry.
The Coming Explosion of Machine Creativity
In the near future as Moore’s Law continues its work, we will see sophisticated combinations of these three basic architectures. Since the 1950s, artificial intelligence has steadily mastered one human ability after another, and in the process of doing so, has reduced the cost of calculation, analysis, and most recently, perception. When creative software becomes as inexpensive and ubiquitous as analytical software is today, humans will no longer be the only intelligent beings capable of creative work.
This is why I have to bite my tongue when I hear the well-intended (but shortsighted) advice frequently dispensed to young people that they should pursue work that demands creativity to help them “AI-proof” their futures.
Instead, students should gain skills to harness the power of creative machines.
There are two skills in which humans excel that will enable us to remain useful in a world of ever-advancing artificial intelligence. One, the ability to frame and define a complex problem so that it can be handed off to a creative machine to solve. And two, the ability to communicate the value of both the framework and the proposed solution to the other humans involved.
What will happen to people when creative machines begin to capably tread on intellectual ground that was once considered the sole domain of the human mind, and before that, the product of divine inspiration? While machines engaging in Big C creativity—e.g., oil painting and composing new symphonies—tend to garner controversy and make the headlines, I suspect the real world-changing application of machine creativity will be in the realm of everyday problem solving, or Little C. The mainstream emergence of powerful problem-solving tools will help people create abundance where there was once scarcity.
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#431165 Intel Jumps Into Brain-Like Computing ...
The brain has long inspired the design of computers and their software. Now Intel has become the latest tech company to decide that mimicking the brain’s hardware could be the next stage in the evolution of computing.
On Monday the company unveiled an experimental “neuromorphic” chip called Loihi. Neuromorphic chips are microprocessors whose architecture is configured to mimic the biological brain’s network of neurons and the connections between them called synapses.
While neural networks—the in vogue approach to artificial intelligence and machine learning—are also inspired by the brain and use layers of virtual neurons, they are still implemented on conventional silicon hardware such as CPUs and GPUs.
The main benefit of mimicking the architecture of the brain on a physical chip, say neuromorphic computing’s proponents, is energy efficiency—the human brain runs on roughly 20 watts. The “neurons” in neuromorphic chips carry out the role of both processor and memory which removes the need to shuttle data back and forth between separate units, which is how traditional chips work. Each neuron also only needs to be powered while it’s firing.
At present, most machine learning is done in data centers due to the massive energy and computing requirements. Creating chips that capture some of nature’s efficiency could allow AI to be run directly on devices like smartphones, cars, and robots.
This is exactly the kind of application Michael Mayberry, managing director of Intel’s research arm, touts in a blog post announcing Loihi. He talks about CCTV cameras that can run image recognition to identify missing persons or traffic lights that can track traffic flow to optimize timing and keep vehicles moving.
There’s still a long way to go before that happens though. According to Wired, so far Intel has only been working with prototypes, and the first full-size version of the chip won’t be built until November.
Once complete, it will feature 130,000 neurons and 130 million synaptic connections split between 128 computing cores. The device will be 1,000 times more energy-efficient than standard approaches, according to Mayberry, but more impressive are claims the chip will be capable of continuous learning.
Intel’s newly launched self-learning neuromorphic chip.
Normally deep learning works by training a neural network on giant datasets to create a model that can then be applied to new data. The Loihi chip will combine training and inference on the same chip, which will allow it to learn on the fly, constantly updating its models and adapting to changing circumstances without having to be deliberately re-trained.
A select group of universities and research institutions will be the first to get their hands on the new chip in the first half of 2018, but Mayberry said it could be years before it’s commercially available. Whether commercialization happens at all may largely depend on whether early adopters can get the hardware to solve any practically useful problems.
So far neuromorphic computing has struggled to gain traction outside the research community. IBM released a neuromorphic chip called TrueNorth in 2014, but the device has yet to showcase any commercially useful applications.
Lee Gomes summarizes the hurdles facing neuromorphic computing excellently in IEEE Spectrum. One is that deep learning can run on very simple, low-precision hardware that can be optimized to use very little power, which suggests complicated new architectures may struggle to find purchase.
It’s also not easy to transfer deep learning approaches developed on conventional chips over to neuromorphic hardware, and even Intel Labs chief scientist Narayan Srinivasa admitted to Forbes Loihi wouldn’t work well with some deep learning models.
Finally, there’s considerable competition in the quest to develop new computer architectures specialized for machine learning. GPU vendors Nvidia and AMD have pivoted to take advantage of this newfound market and companies like Google and Microsoft are developing their own in-house solutions.
Intel, for its part, isn’t putting all its eggs in one basket. Last year it bought two companies building chips for specialized machine learning—Movidius and Nervana—and this was followed up with the $15 billion purchase of self-driving car chip- and camera-maker Mobileye.
And while the jury is still out on neuromorphic computing, it makes sense for a company eager to position itself as the AI chipmaker of the future to have its fingers in as many pies as possible. There are a growing number of voices suggesting that despite its undoubted power, deep learning alone will not allow us to imbue machines with the kind of adaptable, general intelligence humans possess.
What new approaches will get us there are hard to predict, but it’s entirely possible they will only work on hardware that closely mimics the one device we already know is capable of supporting this kind of intelligence—the human brain.
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#431159 How Close Is Turing’s Dream of ...
The quest for conversational artificial intelligence has been a long one.
When Alan Turing, the father of modern computing, racked his considerable brains for a test that would truly indicate that a computer program was intelligent, he landed on this area. If a computer could convince a panel of human judges that they were talking to a human—if it could hold a convincing conversation—then it would indicate that artificial intelligence had advanced to the point where it was indistinguishable from human intelligence.
This gauntlet was thrown down in 1950 and, so far, no computer program has managed to pass the Turing test.
There have been some very notable failures, however: Joseph Weizenbaum, as early as 1966—when computers were still programmed with large punch-cards—developed a piece of natural language processing software called ELIZA. ELIZA was a machine intended to respond to human conversation by pretending to be a psychotherapist; you can still talk to her today.
Talking to ELIZA is a little strange. She’ll often rephrase things you’ve said back at you: so, for example, if you say “I’m feeling depressed,” she might say “Did you come to me because you are feeling depressed?” When she’s unsure about what you’ve said, ELIZA will usually respond with “I see,” or perhaps “Tell me more.”
For the first few lines of dialogue, especially if you treat her as your therapist, ELIZA can be convincingly human. This was something Weizenbaum noticed and was slightly alarmed by: people were willing to treat the algorithm as more human than it really was. Before long, even though some of the test subjects knew ELIZA was just a machine, they were opening up with some of their deepest feelings and secrets. They were pouring out their hearts to a machine. When Weizenbaum’s secretary spoke to ELIZA, even though she knew it was a fairly simple computer program, she still insisted Weizenbaum leave the room.
Part of the unexpected reaction ELIZA generated may be because people are more willing to open up to a machine, feeling they won’t be judged, even if the machine is ultimately powerless to do or say anything to really help. The ELIZA effect was named for this computer program: the tendency of humans to anthropomorphize machines, or think of them as human.
Weizenbaum himself, who later became deeply suspicious of the influence of computers and artificial intelligence in human life, was astonished that people were so willing to believe his script was human. He wrote, “I had not realized…that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.”
“Consciously, you know you’re talking to a big block of code stored somewhere out there in the ether. But subconsciously, you might feel like you’re interacting with a human.”
The ELIZA effect may have disturbed Weizenbaum, but it has intrigued and fascinated others for decades. Perhaps you’ve noticed it in yourself, when talking to an AI like Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant—the occasional response can seem almost too real. Consciously, you know you’re talking to a big block of code stored somewhere out there in the ether. But subconsciously, you might feel like you’re interacting with a human.
Yet the ELIZA effect, as enticing as it is, has proved a source of frustration for people who are trying to create conversational machines. Natural language processing has proceeded in leaps and bounds since the 1960s. Now you can find friendly chatbots like Mitsuku—which has frequently won the Loebner Prize, awarded to the machines that come closest to passing the Turing test—that aim to have a response to everything you might say.
In the commercial sphere, Facebook has opened up its Messenger program and provided software for people and companies to design their own chatbots. The idea is simple: why have an app for, say, ordering pizza when you can just chatter to a robot through your favorite messenger app and make the order in natural language, as if you were telling your friend to get it for you?
Startups like Semantic Machines hope their AI assistant will be able to interact with you just like a secretary or PA would, but with an unparalleled ability to retrieve information from the internet. They may soon be there.
But people who engineer chatbots—both in the social and commercial realm—encounter a common problem: the users, perhaps subconsciously, assume the chatbots are human and become disappointed when they’re not able to have a normal conversation. Frustration with miscommunication can often stem from raised initial expectations.
So far, no machine has really been able to crack the problem of context retention—understanding what’s been said before, referring back to it, and crafting responses based on the point the conversation has reached. Even Mitsuku will often struggle to remember the topic of conversation beyond a few lines of dialogue.
“For everything you say, there could be hundreds of responses that would make sense. When you travel a layer deeper into the conversation, those factors multiply until you end up with vast numbers of potential conversations.”
This is, of course, understandable. Conversation can be almost unimaginably complex. For everything you say, there could be hundreds of responses that would make sense. When you travel a layer deeper into the conversation, those factors multiply until—like possible games of Go or chess—you end up with vast numbers of potential conversations.
But that hasn’t deterred people from trying, most recently, tech giant Amazon, in an effort to make their AI voice assistant, Alexa, friendlier. They have been running the Alexa Prize competition, which offers a cool $500,000 to the winning AI—and a bonus of a million dollars to any team that can create a ‘socialbot’ capable of sustaining a conversation with human users for 20 minutes on a variety of themes.
Topics Alexa likes to chat about include science and technology, politics, sports, and celebrity gossip. The finalists were recently announced: chatbots from universities in Prague, Edinburgh, and Seattle. Finalists were chosen according to the ratings from Alexa users, who could trigger the socialbots into conversation by saying “Hey Alexa, let’s chat,” although the reviews for the socialbots weren’t always complimentary.
By narrowing down the fields of conversation to a specific range of topics, the Alexa Prize has cleverly started to get around the problem of context—just as commercially available chatbots hope to do. It’s much easier to model an interaction that goes a few layers into the conversational topic if you’re limiting those topics to a specific field.
Developing a machine that can hold almost any conversation with a human interlocutor convincingly might be difficult. It might even be a problem that requires artificial general intelligence to truly solve, rather than the previously-employed approaches of scripted answers or neural networks that associate inputs with responses.
But a machine that can have meaningful interactions that people might value and enjoy could be just around the corner. The Alexa Prize winner is announced in November. The ELIZA effect might mean we will relate to machines sooner than we’d thought.
So, go well, little socialbots. If you ever want to discuss the weather or what the world will be like once you guys take over, I’ll be around. Just don’t start a therapy session.
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#431155 What It Will Take for Quantum Computers ...
Quantum computers could give the machine learning algorithms at the heart of modern artificial intelligence a dramatic speed up, but how far off are we? An international group of researchers has outlined the barriers that still need to be overcome.
This year has seen a surge of interest in quantum computing, driven in part by Google’s announcement that it will demonstrate “quantum supremacy” by the end of 2017. That means solving a problem beyond the capabilities of normal computers, which the company predicts will take 49 qubits—the quantum computing equivalent of bits.
As impressive as such a feat would be, the demonstration is likely to be on an esoteric problem that stacks the odds heavily in the quantum processor’s favor, and getting quantum computers to carry out practically useful calculations will take a lot more work.
But these devices hold great promise for solving problems in fields as diverse as cryptography or weather forecasting. One application people are particularly excited about is whether they could be used to supercharge the machine learning algorithms already transforming the modern world.
The potential is summarized in a recent review paper in the journal Nature written by a group of experts from the emerging field of quantum machine learning.
“Classical machine learning methods such as deep neural networks frequently have the feature that they can both recognize statistical patterns in data and produce data that possess the same statistical patterns: they recognize the patterns that they produce,” they write.
“This observation suggests the following hope. If small quantum information processors can produce statistical patterns that are computationally difficult for a classical computer to produce, then perhaps they can also recognize patterns that are equally difficult to recognize classically.”
Because of the way quantum computers work—taking advantage of strange quantum mechanical effects like entanglement and superposition—algorithms running on them should in principle be able to solve problems much faster than the best known classical algorithms, a phenomenon known as quantum speedup.
Designing these algorithms is tricky work, but the authors of the review note that there has been significant progress in recent years. They highlight multiple quantum algorithms exhibiting quantum speedup that could act as subroutines, or building blocks, for quantum machine learning programs.
We still don’t have the hardware to implement these algorithms, but according to the researchers the challenge is a technical one and clear paths to overcoming them exist. More challenging, they say, are four fundamental conceptual problems that could limit the applicability of quantum machine learning.
The first two are the input and output problems. Quantum computers, unsurprisingly, deal with quantum data, but the majority of the problems humans want to solve relate to the classical world. Translating significant amounts of classical data into the quantum systems can take so much time it can cancel out the benefits of the faster processing speeds, and the same is true of reading out the solution at the end.
The input problem could be mitigated to some extent by the development of quantum random access memory (qRAM)—the equivalent to RAM in a conventional computer used to provide the machine with quick access to its working memory. A qRAM can be configured to store classical data but allow the quantum computers to access all that information simultaneously as a superposition, which is required for a variety of quantum algorithms. But the authors note this is still a considerable engineering challenge and may not be sustainable for big data problems.
Closely related to the input/output problem is the costing problem. At present, the authors say very little is known about how many gates—or operations—a quantum machine learning algorithm will require to solve a given problem when operated on real-world devices. It’s expected that on highly complex problems they will offer considerable improvements over classical computers, but it’s not clear how big problems have to be before this becomes apparent.
Finally, whether or when these advantages kick in may be hard to prove, something the authors call the benchmarking problem. Claiming that a quantum algorithm can outperform any classical machine learning approach requires extensive testing against these other techniques that may not be feasible.
They suggest that this could be sidestepped by lowering the standards quantum machine learning algorithms are currently held to. This makes sense, as it doesn’t really matter whether an algorithm is intrinsically faster than all possible classical ones, as long as it’s faster than all the existing ones.
Another way of avoiding some of these problems is to apply these techniques directly to quantum data, the actual states generated by quantum systems and processes. The authors say this is probably the most promising near-term application for quantum machine learning and has the added benefit that any insights can be fed back into the design of better hardware.
“This would enable a virtuous cycle of innovation similar to that which occurred in classical computing, wherein each generation of processors is then leveraged to design the next-generation processors,” they conclude.
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#431140 Click beetles inspire design of ...
Robots perform many tasks that humans can't or don't want to perform, getting around on intricately designed wheels and limbs. If they tip over, however, they are rendered almost useless. A team of University of Illinois mechanical engineers and entomologists are looking to click beetles, who can right themselves without the use of their legs, to solve this robotics challenge. Continue reading
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