Better than ever: When man and machine work together

Chess grand master Garry Kasparov pioneered the concept of man-plus-machine matches, in which AI augments human chess players rather than competes against them.

In 1997, Watson’s precursor, IBM’s Deep Blue, beat the reigning chess grand master Garry Kasparov in a famous man-versus-machine match. After machines repeated their victories in a few more matches, humans largely lost interest in such contests. You might think that was the end of the story (if not the end of human history), but Kasparov realized that he could have performed better against Deep Blue if he’d had the same instant access to a massive database of all previous chess moves that Deep Blue had. If this database tool was fair for an AI, why not for a human? To pursue this idea, Kasparov pioneered the concept of man-plus-machine matches, in which AI augments human chess players rather than competes against them.

Now called freestyle chess matches, these are like mixed martial arts fights, where players use whatever combat techniques they want. You can play as your unassisted human self, or you can act as the hand for your supersmart chess computer, merely moving its board pieces, or you can play as a “centaur,” which is the human/AI cyborg that Kasparov advocated. A centaur player will listen to the moves whispered by the AI but will occasionally override them—much the way we use GPS navigation in our cars. In the championship Freestyle Battle in 2014, open to all modes of players, pure chess AI engines won 42 games, but centaurs won 53 games. Today the best chess player alive is a centaur: Intagrand, a team of humans and several different chess programs.

But here’s the even more surprising part: The advent of AI didn’t diminish the performance of purely human chess players. Quite the opposite. Cheap, supersmart chess programs inspired more people than ever to play chess, at more tournaments than ever, and the players got better than ever. There are more than twice as many grand masters now as there were when Deep Blue first beat Kasparov. The top-ranked human chess player today, Magnus Carlsen, trained with AIs and has been deemed the most computer-like of all human chess players. He also has the highest human grand master rating of all time.

If AI can help humans become better chess players, it stands to reason that it can help us become better pilots, better doctors, better judges, better teachers. Most of the commercial work completed by AI will be done by special-purpose, narrowly focused software brains that can, for example, translate any language into any other language, but do little else. Drive a car, but not converse. Or recall every pixel of every video on YouTube but not anticipate your work routines. In the next 10 years, 99 percent of the artificial intelligence that you will interact with, directly or indirectly, will be nerdily autistic, supersmart specialists.

Source: Wired

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Kevin Kelly on “AIs will help define humanity”

 

AI Quotes

Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired

We haven’t just been redefining what we mean by AI—we’ve been redefining what it means to be human. Over the past 60 years, as mechanical processes have replicated behaviors and talents we thought were unique7ddac8199e485dc8fe198d34b726f76680e7b86e_2880x1620 kevin kelly for socializing AI blog to humans, we’ve had to change our minds about what sets us apart. As we invent more species of AI, we will be forced to surrender more of what is supposedly unique about humans. We’ll spend the next decade—indeed, perhaps the next century—in a permanent identity crisis, constantly asking ourselves what humans are for. In the grandest irony of all, the greatest benefit of an everyday, utilitarian AI will not be increased productivity or an economics of abundance or a new way of doing science—although all those will happen. The greatest benefit of the arrival of artificial intelligence is that AIs will help define humanity. We need AIs to tell us who we are.

Source: Wired

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Elon Musk on “summoning the demon”

AI Quotes
ELON MUSK, CEO AND CHIEF PRODUCT ARCHITECT OF TESLA MOTORS

I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess like what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that.
So we need to be very careful with the artificial intelligence. Increasingly scientists think there should be some regulatory oversight maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure thelon musk 2at we don’t do something very foolish. With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like yeah he’s sure he can control the demon. Didn’t work out.
 
Source: bigthink.com
Elon Musk: “We should be very careful about artificial intelligence.”
by Robert Montenegro
October 26, 2014
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Mark Zuckerberg on “we want to develop artificial intelligence”

AI Quotes

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook

“Facebook is 10 years old this year. So if I ask 10 years from now, what should we develop? I decided we should develop three things. First, we need to connect the entire world. We need everybody to use the internet. Second, we want to develop (in English) artificial intelligence. I think 10 years from now computers will be better than humans at reading, listening, talking, and other things. So we are developing this. Third, when everyone is using mobile phones, I believe the next platform will be (in English) virtual reality. Oculus is the first product, but we hope there will be many products. Those three things.”mark zuckerberg

Source: Quartz, October 23, 2014
The Most Important Things Marck Zuckerberg just said in broken Chinese
Written by Gwynn Guilford and Nikhil Sonnad

 

 

 

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Vivek Wadhwa on “older entrepreneurs are going to better the world.”

AI Quotes

VIVEK WADHAWA, distinguished scholar at Singularity and Emory universities

Vivek-Wadhwa-1A technology shift is happening that will dramatically alter the entrepreneurial landscape in the next few years. Several technologies — involving medicine, robotics, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, 3D printing, and nanomaterials — are advancing at exponential rates and are converging.

These technologies will make it possible to create the next trillion-dollar industries and to better our lives. But they require knowledge of fields such as medicine, biotechnology, engineering, and nanotechnology. They require experience, an understanding of the problems people face, and cross-disciplinary skills. All of these come with age and experience, which middle-aged entrepreneurs have in abundance. That is why we need to get beyond the stereotypes and realize that older entrepreneurs are going to better the world.

Vivek Wadhwa is a fellow at the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University, director of research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke’s engineering school and distinguished scholar at Singularity and Emory universities. His past appointments include Harvard Law School and University of California Berkeley.

Source: VentureBeat
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The brainchild of Google: Knowledge graph on steroids

The Knowledge Graph is well known throughout the SEO community as a knowledge base that collects data from a variety of sources across the Web to enhance its search results. But will its technology be “old news” soon? Enter the Knowledge Vault, the brainchild of Google and a sort-of “Knowledge Graph on steroids” that could soon be a reality for search.

knowledge-vault 2

This paper published by Google goes into more detail about the concepts behind the Knowledge Vault, citing three major components:

  • Extractors: These systems extract triples from a huge number of Web sources. Each extractor assigns a confidence score to an extracted triple, representing uncertainty about the identity of the relation and its corresponding arguments.
  • Graph-based priors: These systems learn the probability of each possible triple, based on triples scored in an existing KB (knowledge base).
  • Knowledge fusion: This system computes the probability of a triple being true, based on agreement between different extractors and priors.

The potential of a machine system that has the whole of human knowledge at its fingertips is huge. One of the first applications will be virtual personal assistants that go way beyond what Siri and Google Now are capable of, says Austin.

Source: Search Engine Watch

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Introducing Watson’s Discovery Advisor

Watch how IBM Watson is making connections for humans in healthcare,  law enforcement, finance, retail, government, manufacturing, energy and education. They are forging new partnerships between humans and computers to enhance, scale and accelerate human expertise.

Quote from the video: “The next great innovations will come from people who are able to make the connections that others cannot put together.”

PL – These advances are great! But we are particularly interested in ways that Watson can help humans with tough human issues: The inter and intra – personal space, as we the bloggers of this site, like to call it.  

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Elon Musk
“potentially dangerous”

AI Quotes

Elon Musk,CEO and Chief Product Architect of Tesla Motors

elon musk“I like to just keep an eye on what’s going on with artificial intelligence. I think there is potentially a dangerous outcome … we should try to make sure the outcomes are good, not bad.”

Source: CNBC Interview June 17, 2014

 

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Will we survive it? The developing culture in AI is our blueprint

Phil Lawson: If I may, for a sec, compare the culture being developed right now in AI to the culture of a nation. Note what this means to a nation via the following excerpts from the book, Cultural Imperative: Global Trends in the 21st Century, by Richard D. Lewis:

It [a nation’s culture] is an all-embracing pattern of a group’s entire way of life, including a shared system of values, social meanings, and agendas … Some of these attributes are subject to change, but the cultural framework generally endures … “

google diversitySo far, 29-year-old white males (@ Google) represent the “majority” defining the culture in search and AI. It is from this perspective that search criterion and ranking is being established — that the cultural framework for AI is taking shape, that the patterns and ‘systems of value, the social meanings and agendas’ are forming. Therefore, we’d like to suggest (insist, really) that:

  1. Those designing (and socializing) AI must have a broad understanding of humanity (not just code / algorithms)
  2. And they must rethink omniscient programming approaches for search and AI / personal assistants 
average age in tech

March 2014 Bloomberg report on the Average Age of Tech Employees

We know this: There is no magic algorithm that produces perfect search returns to a user. Human coders working for corporations are using editorial judgements to offer this service. Note the following:

“Humans are the ones who decide,” says a white paper commissioned by Google in August of 2012, page 11, “how the algorithm should predict the likely usefulness of a Web page to the user. These human editorial judgments are responsible for producing the speech displayed by a search engine … criterion for ranking search results … and … measure of a site’s value. Search engine results are thus the speech of the corporation.”

Certainly, there’s benefit in general universal search returns on our smartphones. But, when it comes to our own individual needs, our unique and evolving circumstances, when it comes to what makes us human in human situations, the information we require must reflect — it must speak to who we are, in each of our moments, all of which is subject to ongoing change as we shift and grow.

To meet this challenge, AI coders must transform omniscient-style programming approaches to include AI to human collaborations
that learn the human, interact with the human, and directly respond to his/her individual needs in real-time.

SOCIALIZING AI FOR HUMANS ABOUT HUMAN ISSUES
TO BOOST HUMAN POTENTIAL
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AI to the rescue? Following doctors orders is exhausting, time-consuming

Did you know that patients with type 2 diabetes should spend 143 minutes per day taking care of themselves if they are to follow every doctors’ orders?

It’s called burden of treatment. It’s a tough reality in healthcare today. It involves illnesses of all kinds. It’s the burden of treatment on the patient, on his or her family and friends, and the doctors who care for them. It involves increased pressures and anxiety, financial strains, and additional demands on time for doctor visits, tests and trips to the pharmacy.  And many patients fail to handle this.

The current method of discovery is “conversation.” But, says Dr. Victor Montori, of the Mayo Clinic, “We need a different way of practicing medicine for patients.”

“I do not think that change will come quietly,” Dr. Montori says, “I am focused on a patient revolution led by patients, in partnership with health professionals, to make healthcare primarily about the welfare of patients.

Phil Lawson: The current method of discovery is “conversation?” Who has the time to do that well, these days? When tweets and “likes” are common forms of communication.

We’ve created planes, trains and automobiles to transport our bodies farther, faster. We’ve created tech to connect us faster to the “things” we want to buy. But we have yet to create faster, better ways for our brains to process complex human scenarios — to help us overcome the 7 things barrier of working memory; to help us connect the dots in life, work, the world.

It’s time for tech to go where no tech has gone before.

Currently, IBM’s Watson is making great strides in diagnosis and treatment for patients, but AI must go deeper. It must get personal. This requires a different kind of approach to coding. A moving beyond omniscient programming. It must involve AI to human collaboration.

Below is an example of a well-being application of our behavior growth tech that could be customized to meet the burden of treatment challenge and how AI can add value.

For more info on this approach see Spherit.com


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Masayoshi Son
on “joy of the robot”

AI Quotes

Masayoshi Son, CEO SoftBank
Masayoshi Son“We want to have a robot that will maximize people’s joy and minimize their sadness … Pepper is a baby step in making robots with emotion. Our vision is to create affectionate robots that understand people’s feelings and then autonomously take action. So the joy of a family will become the joy of the robot.”

Source: Computer World, June 5, 2014

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Stephen Hawking
on success, risks of AI

AI Quotes

Stephen Hawking, theoretical physicist, cosmologist

Stephen Hawking 2“Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks,” says Stephen Hawking, and a group of leading scientists.

Source: The Independent, May, 1, 2014
Stephen Hawking: ‘Transcendence looks at the implications of artificial intelligence – but are we taking AI seriously enough?’  
Stephen Hawking, Stuart Russell, Max Tegmark, Frank Wilczek

 

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Colin Angle
on “What is human?”

AI Quotes

Colin Angle, CEO iRobot

Colin Angle“Long before we have a robot uprising, we’re going to deal with much more interesting problems. This idea that we’re going to build a robot that has human cognition and appreciation for morals and values, that’s super-hard stuff

“The more important question is “What is human?” ” 

Source: Business Insider, Dylan Love, June 1, 2014
A Q&A With iRobot’s Colin Angle, The CEO Of The Only Consumer Robotics Company That Matters

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Kids on Red Bull to create AI?

“It’s almost a no-brainer that a group of smart kids will come together after taking an intensive course on AI and decide that they can use that knowledge to build something of value for humanity. Maybe they will have even more of an inspiration now that there’s a TED XPrize competition for AI. In the process, AI will move from something that took tens of millions of dollars and thousands of people to create, to something that takes tens of thousands of dollars and can be created by a group of kids after an all-night Red Bull session.” 

Source: The Washington Post blog
DOMINIC BASULTO March 25 at 8:27 am

PL: REALLY? Let’s grow up this view. Our excessive veneration for smart “kids” may do us in. Artificial intelligence is SERIOUS business. We need all hands on deck for this one — young geniuses AND old masters. Let’s start talking, thinking and working with this realization. Let’s co-exist, collaborate and invite diversity to the table. There’s no way that 29-year-old white males have a handle on the human experience. They better not be the primary ones writing the cultural blueprint for artificial intelligence that will permanently alter human existence.

FYI: Here’s a reality check for AI coders who think its possible to map complex human situations by attempting to extrapolate incomplete data about humans online: The human brain has trillions of synapses. The average synapse has 300,000 proteins. Synapses are critical to communication inside the brain and scientists don’t yet know their role in human intelligence. [Click on the video below to learn more about this topic.]

Meanwhile, since this blog is all about ‘connecting dots’ you might also find my blog post about the Human Brain Project of interest. It reveals some of the costs and complexities involved with understanding the human brain, the research of which is now underway.


(No wonder generalized AI (i.e. the movie “Her”) has been daunting to develop.)

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Games? Cats? Google’s “state-of-the-art” AI demonstration

G ai video gamesOn March 19, 2014, at a TED conference, Google CEO Larry Page demonstrated what Google’s state-of-the-art AI can do:

Apparently, it has learned how to play video games without training and it can identify a cat face. One thousand computers watching 10 million YouTube stills for three days “learned the concept of cat faces,” as Mr. Page described it. Mr. Page then said: “Imagine if this kind of intelligence were thrown at your SCHEDULE or your INFORMATION NEEDS …” [capitalization added by blogger]

G ai cats

Phil Lawson: Mr. Page, what if ‘this kind of intelligence were thrown at’ the tough human stuff?

What if AI could help a father and son identify the shape of their relationship? What if it could help patients and their doctors identify burden of treatment issues? What if it could help the staff and management of a company in crisis, identify ways to address their concerns in real-time? 

Video games? Cats? It’s time to go deeper. It’s time for AI to help humans help themselves.

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Jeff Siskind on “It took evolution a billion years”

Quotes
Jeff Siskind, professor at Purdue University

jeffrey siskindThe field of AI is trying to understand human-level intelligence, something that took evolution a billion years and more to develop, and it’s unreasonable to expect humans to recapitulate that process even in a few decades. That said, I think we’re making a huge amount of progress.

Jeff Siskind, professor at Purdue University

Source: ComputerWorld

 

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Are we taking AI seriously enough?

Stephen Hawking 2Artificial-intelligence (AI) research is now progressing rapidly. Recent landmarks such as self-driving cars, a computer winning at Jeopardy! and the digital personal assistants Siri, Google Now and Cortana are merely symptoms of an IT arms race fuelled [sic] by unprecedented investments and building on an increasingly mature theoretical foundation … So, facing possible futures of incalculable benefits and risks, the experts are surely doing everything possible to ensure the best outcome, right? Wrong.  … Although we are facing potentially the best or worst thing to happen to humanity in history, little serious research is devoted to these issues

Stephen Hawking: ‘Transcendence looks at the implications of artificial intelligence – but are we taking AI seriously enough?’ Stephen Hawking, Stuart Russell, Max Tegmark, Frank Wilczek, May, 1, 2014
 
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Excuse me but … physicists are not all-knowing

“The overwhelming success of modern physics does not give physicists the ability to pronounce judgment on other sciences … ” — Physicist, Mathew R. Francis

Source: slate.com
Quantum and Consciousness Often Mean Nonsense
Matthew R. Francis, May 29, 2014

Phil Lawson: Ultimate success in AI will not alone rest on the shoulders of physicists, mathematicians and coders who write deep learning algorithms. It will require interdisciplinary collaborations with neuroscientists, biologists, psychologists, therapists, culturalists and more. It may even require “Spherists” to inspire these interactions 🙂 

[Spherist, as defined on this blog: A person who has experienced the limits of compartmentalized thinking; who values connecting the dots and seeing a bigger picture. Who is also informed in the sciences of systems: chaos, turbulence, self-organization, wholeness, etc.]

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 Satya Nadella
on “software-powered world”

AI Quotes

Satya Nadella, CEO Microsoft

LE WEB PARIS 2013 - CONFERENCES - PLENARY 1 - SATYA NADELLA

“I believe over the next decade computing will become even more ubiquitous and intelligence will become ambient …

“This is a software-powered world. 

“It will better connect us to our friends and families and help us see, express, and share our world in ways never before possible. It will enable businesses to engage customers in more meaningful ways.”

Source: Excerpt from email to employees on first day as CEO, Feb. 4, 2014

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Peter Lee
on cost of (AI) talent

AI Quotes

Peter Lee, Head of Microsoft Research

Peter Lee 2010

We would have more if the talent was there to be had. Last year, the cost of a top, world-class deep learning expert was about the same as a top NFL quarterback prospect. The cost of that talent is pretty remarkable.”

Business Week, January 27, 2014

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David Galenson
on inconspicuous “late bloomers”

AI Quotes

David Galenson, author; professor of economics, University of Chicago

David_Galenson“In today’s hyperkinetic world of instant internet links and television sound bites we’ve become conditioned — I would say brainwashed — into believing that the innovative people who make important contributions to our culture and our economy are all whiz kids — prodigies — fresh from the most prestigious art schools and institutes of technology who leap to sudden dramatic discoveries and quickly become rich and famous.

“A really wonderful book.” — Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink

“In fact, however, these young geniuses may be matched in both number and importance by much less conspicuous late bloomers who spend much of their lives working patiently and tirelessly in obscurity only gradually arriving at the achievements that ultimately gain them recognition.”

Source: Old Masters and Young Geniuses

 

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Time to change “whole system” of search

Kai Yu Baidu

(Photo Wired)

Excerpt from Wired from interview with Kai Yu, CEO of Bidhu, China’s largest search engine:

Today, web searches for products or services give you little more than long list of links, and “then it’s your job to read through all of those webpages to figure out what’s the meaning,” Yu says. But he wants something that works very differently.

We need to fundamentally change the architecture of the whole system,”
– Yu explains.

That means building algorithms that can identify images and understand natural language and then parse the relationships between all the stuff on the web and find exactly what you’re looking for. It other words, it wants algorithms that work like people. Only faster.

Source: Wired, ‘Chinese Google’ opens artificial intelligence lab in Silicon Valley

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But Watson, is it a good time FOR ME to buy a house?

AI developers at IBM Watson hope some day soon to answer a simple human question, like, ‘Is this a good time to buy a house?’ by having Watson quickly analyze news articles, forum posts, call logs, policy documents and web pages to report ‘window of opportunity’ data.

Phil Lawson: Frankly, Watson, this will be cool when you can do this! But even more important to a human is this question: “Is this a good time FOR ME to buy a house?” When Watson can return this kind of information, based on individual circumstances, this will be awesome. 

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Aside

Point of this blog on Socializing AI

Artificial Intelligence must be about more than our things. It must be about more than our machines. It must be a way to advance human behavior in complex human situations. But this will require wisdom-powered code. It will require imprinting AI’s genome with social intelligence for human interaction. It must begin right now.”
— Phil Lawson
(read more)

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This virtual assistant ‘does it all’?

“From tracking packages to picking the best route for a commute, the virtual assistant does it all. It can even alert a user to local events that might be of interest.”

Source: Entrepreneur.com
Smart Apps Are Great, But Do They Know Too Much?
By Cadie Thompson, May 26, 2014
.

Phil Lawson:  ‘does it all’? This is how we perceive virtual assistants right now. For our external needs. What about using virtual assistants for our internal dilemmas — for navigating complex human situations or crises … that’s what we’re talking about.

(Re: ‘But do they know too much’? We’ll venture into that discussion soon enough on this blog as it relates to our inter-personal space.)

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Herbert Simon
on psychology computerized

AI Quotes

Herbert Simon, political scientist, economist, sociologist, psychologist
HERBERT_SIMON_TAN_FIRST_PORTRAIT_TITLED40

Portrait by Richard Rappaport

In 1957, computer scientist and future Nobel-winner Herbert Simon predicted that, by 1967, psychology would be a largely computerized field.

Source: Popular ScienceThe End is A.I.: The Singularity is Sci-Fi’s Faith-Based Initiative, Erik Sofge, May 28, 2014

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