Get Used to It: Robots Are Smarter than Us

Has machine intelligence overtaken human intelligence, or will it do so shortly? Phil and Stephen examine recent news stories that may provide some answers.

Insurance Companies Are Now Offering Discounts if You Let Your Tesla Drive Itself

Britain’s largest automobile insurance company, Direct Line, has announced a 5 percent discount for customers who activate Autopilot functionality in their Tesla. It follows in the footsteps of Root, a startup that offers a similar promotion across nine states in the US.

DeepMind AI needs mere 4 hours of self-training to become a chess overlord

We last heard from DeepMind’s dominant gaming AI in October. As opposed to earlier sessions of AlphaGo besting the world’s best Go players after the DeepMind team trained it on observations of said humans, the company’s Go-playing AI (version AlphaGo Zero) started beating pros after three days of playing against itself with no prior knowledge of the game.

This week, a new paper details how quickly DeepMind’s AI has improved at its self-training in such scenarios. Evolved now to AlphaZero, this latest iteration started from scratch and bested the program that beat the human Go champions after just eight hours of self-training. And when AlphaZero instead decided to teach itself chess, the AI defeated the current world-champion chess program, Stockfish, after a mere four hours of self-training. (For fun, AlphaZero also took two hours to learn shogi—”a Japanese version of chess that’s played on a bigger board,” according to The Verge—and then defeated one of the best bots around.)

Seen on Facebook: “If you can map data about the real world to a game, AlphaZero will beat it.”

AI will obliterate half of all jobs, starting with white collar, says ex-Google China president

Everyone needs to rethink the practical and social impact of fewer jobs in the future, Kai-Fu Lee says.
The chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures believes about half of all jobs will disappear over the next decade.

True Artificial Intelligence will change everything

Juergen Schmidhuber at TEDxLakeComo explains why everything is going to be different in the very near future.

Every 5 years computers become 10 times cheaper.

Soon will have machine that can compute is much is a human brain.

50 years later, one little device will be able to computers much is all 10 billion human brains soon all of medical diagnosis will be superhuman.

It will be mandatory that be done by machine because that will be so much better than human doctors.

Eventually AIs will set their own goals and become much smarter than we are.

WT 381-692

Photo by Dominik Scythe on Unsplash

About Phil 523 Articles
Phil Bowermaster is a nationally recognized author and speaker. He has more than 25 years experience writing about emerging technologies and the future. As co-host of the popular Internet radio series, The World Transformed, Phil has talked with leading scientists and technologists, best-selling authors, philosophers, filmmakers, artists, entrepreneurs and others who are shaping our understanding of the amazing era of transformation in which we live. Phil helps leaders and their organizations develop strategies for managing accelerating change. He shows how imagination, optimism, empathy, and humor can make all the difference in both understanding and making the most of the powerful currents of change we face.

2 Comments

  1. Huh. If A.I. keeps this up, we’ll be solving problems in an hour, then a minute, then a second, then no time at all. Continuing that rate of progress, we’ll be building sustainable batteries in zero minus-one minute, then curing cancer 2 hours ago, then solving aging last year.

    Ultimately, we’ll push the Singularity back to the Big Bang.

    (Until a few days ago, I didn’t realize that there was a comment section for the Speculist, aside from a Facebook interface. I download the podcasts from Blog Talk Radio, which requires you to have a Facebook account.)

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