If you believe everything you read, you are probably quite worried about the prospect of a superintelligent, killer AI.
— Oren Etzioni
One of my favorite sayings is, 'Much have I learned from my teachers, but even more from my friends and even more from my students.'
Cloud computing, smartphones, social media platforms, and Internet of Things devices have already transformed how we communicate, work, shop, and socialize. These technologies gather unprecedented data streams leading to formidable challenges around privacy, profiling, manipulation, and personal safety.
Because of their exceptional ability to automatically elicit, record, and analyze information, A.I. systems are in a prime position to acquire confidential information.
People thrive on genuine connections - not with machines, but with each other. You don't want a robot taking care of your baby; an ailing elder needs to be loved, to be listened to, fed, and sung to. This is one job category that people are - and will continue to be - best at.
Sooner or later, the U.S. will face mounting job losses due to advances in automation, artificial intelligence, and robotics.
A calculator is a tool for humans to do math more quickly and accurately than they could ever do by hand; similarly, AI computers are tools for us to perform tasks too difficult or expensive for us to do on our own, such as analyzing large data sets or keeping up to date on medical research.
There are many valid concerns about AI, from its impact on jobs to its uses in autonomous weapons systems and even to the potential risk of superintelligence.
Our highways and our roads are underutilized because of the allowances we have to make for human drivers.
In the past, much power and responsibility over life and death was concentrated in the hands of doctors. Now, this ethical burden is increasingly shared by the builders of AI software.
We don't want A.I. to engage in cyberbullying, stock manipulation, or terrorist threats; we don't want the F.B.I. to release A.I. systems that entrap people into committing crimes. We don't want autonomous vehicles that drive through red lights, or worse, A.I. weapons that violate international treaties.
Instead of expecting truck drivers and warehouse workers to rapidly retrain so they can compete with tireless, increasingly capable machines, let's play to their human strengths and create opportunities for workers as companions and caregivers for our elders, our children, and our special-needs population.
Deep learning is a subfield of machine learning, which is a vibrant research area in artificial intelligence, or AI.
To say that AI will start doing what it wants for its own purposes is like saying a calculator will start making its own calculations.
Netbot was the first comparison shopping company. We realized comparison shopping can be quite tedious if you are driving from one furniture store to another. On the Internet, you can automatically look at a bunch of different stores and see where can you get the best price on a computer or some such thing, so that was the motivation.
Ultimately, to me, the computer is just a big pencil. What can we sketch using this pencil that makes a positive difference to society and advances the state of the art, hopefully in an outsized way?
Even seemingly innocuous housecleaning robots create maps of your home. That is information you want to make sure you control.
A.I. should not be weaponized, and any A.I. must have an impregnable 'off switch.'
Automation has emerged as a bigger threat to American jobs than globalization or immigration combined.
The mechanical loom and the calculator have shown us that technology is both disruptive and filled with opportunities. But it would be hard to find a decent argument that we would have been better off without these inventions.
The popular dystopian vision of AI is wrong for one simple reason: it equates intelligence with autonomy. That is, it assumes a smart computer will create its own goals and have its own will and will use its faster processing abilities and deep databases to beat humans at their own game.
