{"id":1020,"date":"2017-02-21T13:29:16","date_gmt":"2017-02-21T00:29:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/?p=1020"},"modified":"2017-02-21T13:30:03","modified_gmt":"2017-02-21T00:30:03","slug":"nbr-column-the-state-of-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/?p=1020","title":{"rendered":"NBR column – the state of AI"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is my NBR column<\/a> from Feb 2017:<\/strong><\/p>\n

In June last year a fascinating aerial battle took place.\u00a0It didn\u2019t take place in the actual sky\u00a0but rather in the virtual one, which was appropriate considering it was a battle of man against machine.<\/p>\n

The man in question wasn\u2019t an ordinary pilot\u00a0but a retired US Airforce pilot, Gene Lee, with combat experience in Iraq and a graduate of the US Fighter Weapons School.\u00a0The machine he was battling was a simulated aircraft controlled by an artificial intelligence (AI).<\/p>\n

What was surprising about the outcome was that the artifical AI emerged as the victor.\u00a0What was more surprising was that the computer running the software wasn\u2019t a multimillion dollar supercomputer\u00a0but one that used about $35 worth of computing power.<\/p>\n

Welcome to the fast-moving world of AI.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an area that has attracted significant media focus, and justifiably so.\u00a0Experts in the field see the deployment of AI as the dawn of a new age.\u00a0Andrew Ng, chief scientist at Baidu Research, is one of the gurus in the field<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cAI is the new electricity,\u201d he says. \u201cJust as 100 years ago electricity transformed industry after industry, AI will now do the same.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most of the current applications of AI focus on recognising patterns.\u00a0Software is “trained”\u00a0with vast amounts of information, usually with help from people who have manually tagged the data.\u00a0In this way, an AI may start with images that have been labelled as cars, then, through trial and error guided by programmers, eventually recognise images of cars without any intervention.<\/p>\n

Extraordinary breakthroughs<\/strong>
\nThis simple explanation of AI belies the extraordinary breakthroughs achieved with this approach\u00a0and is illustrated by an experiment conducted by an English company called DeepMind.<\/p>\n

In 2015,\u00a0DeepMind revealed<\/a> that its AI had learned how to play 1980s-era computer games without any instruction. Once it had learned the games, it could outperform any human player by astonishing margins.<\/p>\n

This feat is a stark contrast to the battle waged almost two decades ago when an IBM computer beat Russian grandmaster Gary Kasparov at chess in the mid-1990s. To beat him,\u00a0the computer relied on a virtual encyclopaedia of pre-programmed information about known moves. At no point did the machine learn how to play chess.<\/p>\n

Winning simple computer games clearly wasn\u2019t enough to prove the abilities of DeepMind, so a more challenging option was found in the game called Go<\/a>.\u00a0It\u2019s an incredibly complex Asian board game with more possible moves than the total number of atoms in the visible universe.<\/p>\n

To learn Go, the AI played itself more than a million times. To put this in perspective, if a person played 10\u00a0games a day every day for 60\u00a0years, they would only manage to play around 180,000 games.<\/p>\n

Despite the bold predictions of expert Go players, when the tournament ended in 2015, it was the DeepMind AI that had beaten one of the world\u2019s best players.<\/p>\n

The ability to “learn”\u00a0can be easily leveraged into the real world.\u00a0While gaming applications may excite hard-core geeks, DeepMind\u2019s power was unleashed on a more useful challenge last year \u2013 increasing energy efficiency in data centres.<\/p>\n

By looking at the information about power consumption \u2013 such as temperature, server demand and cooling pump speeds \u2013 the AI reduced electricity requirements<\/a> for a Google data centre by an astonishing 40%. This may seem esoteric\u00a0but around the world data centres already use as much electricity as the entire UK<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Potential implications<\/strong>
\nOnce you start to consider the power of AI, the feeling of astonishment evaporates and is replaced with an unsettling feeling about the potential implications.\u00a0For example, at the end of last year a Japanese insurance company laid off a third of one of its departments when it announced plans to replace people with an IBM AI<\/a>.\u00a0 In this example, only 34 people were made redundant\u00a0but this trend is likely to accelerate.<\/p>\n

At this stage, it\u2019s useful to put this development in context\u00a0and consider what jobs might be replaced by AI.\u00a0Andrew Ng has a useful rule of thumb<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 \u201cIf a typical person can do a mental task with less than one second of thought, we can probably automate it using AI either now or in the near future.\u201d<\/p>\n

What\u2019s important about this quote is the term \u201cnear future.\u201d Once you extend the timeline out longer, researchers have theorised that the implications of AI on the workforce are significant.\u00a0 One study published in 2015<\/a> estimated that across the OECD an average of 57% of jobs were at risk from automation.<\/p>\n

This number has been disputed heavily since it was published\u00a0but it doesn\u2019t really matter what the exact percentage will be.\u00a0What is important to keep in mind is that AI will change the nature of jobs forever, and it\u2019s highly likely that work in the future will feature people working alongside machines. This will result in a more efficient workforce, which will in turn likely to lead to job losses.<\/p>\n

However, it\u2019s not just the workforce that could change.\u00a0The potential for this technology dwarfs anything humans have ever invented, and, just like the splitting of the atom, the jury is out on how things will develop.<\/p>\n

One of the world\u2019s experts on existential threats to humanity\u00a0\u2013\u00a0Nick Bostrom at Oxford University<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 surveyed the top 100 AI researchers<\/a>.\u00a0 He asked them about the potential threat that AI poses to humanity, and responses were startling. More than half of them responded that they believed there is a substantial chance that the development of an artificial intelligence that matches the human mind won\u2019t end up well for one of the groups involved.\u00a0 You don\u2019t need to work alongside an AI to figure out which group.<\/p>\n

The thesis is simple \u2013 Darwinian theory applied to the biological world leads to the dominance of one species over another.\u00a0 If humans create a machine intelligence, probably the first thing it would do is re-programme itself become smarter.\u00a0 In the blink of an evolutionary eye, people could become subservient to machines with intelligence levels that were impossible to comprehend.<\/p>\n

The exact timeframe for this scenario is hotly debated, but the same experts polled by Bostrom thought that there was a high chance of machines having human-level intelligence this century \u2013 perhaps as early as 2050.<\/p>\n

To paraphrase a well-worn clich\u00e9, we will live in interesting times.<\/span><\/p>\n

Copyright NBR. Cannot be reproduced without permission.
\nRead more: https:\/\/www.nbr.co.nz\/opinion\/keeping-eye-artificial-intelligence<\/a>
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This is my NBR column from Feb 2017: In June last year a fascinating aerial battle took place.\u00a0It didn\u2019t take place in the actual sky\u00a0but rather in the virtual one, which was appropriate considering it was a battle of man against machine. The man in question wasn\u2019t an ordinary pilot\u00a0but a retired US Airforce pilot, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,7,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-case-studies","category-emerging-technology","category-futures-thinking"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1020"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1020\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1022,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1020\/revisions\/1022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}