Artificial Intelligence.. Dangerous or useful?

[Hayden]

FS Community-

What are your thoughts on the development and use of AI. What are the implications in regards to the industries you currently work in? I read an interesting article in Business Insider regarding the use of AI in organizations and the dangers that come with it.

"Yet one thing is clear and remains in our power: artificial intelligence, will never substitute for human wisdom or moral responsibility."

What are your thoughts on this quote? Are we getting over our ski's on this one? I would love to here some thoughts.


Here is the article for reference: https://www.businessinsider.com/sap-executive-on-ai-ethics-2018-10

[hyperobjeckt]

Interesting article and definitely important to think about. I am long SAP and work in biotech, have a lot of thoughts on this but a few key points to me are:

• AI is a tool
• like other tools, it perpetuates ethical choices made by its designers
• we rarely consider how our own biases affect the tools we create
• an external ethics advisory panel + internal steering committee is a good idea; sustaining the process and giving it teeth is a tough job that will require constant support from management

The cynic in me thinks that the first time this panel advises delaying a ship date in order to address ethical concerns, they will get ignored, rendering the whole thing pointless.

[supportingmaps]

I'm in school for technology and will be done in March 2021. I had a discussion weeks ago about AI and it's ethical implications. There's warfare, privacy, and employment considerations.

There's reasons to be concerned and I've read a fair amount of information. Bottom line is there are intelligent people like Elon Musk and Bill Gates that think AI can eventually overpower humanity. With that being said there are organizations and individuals that are devoted to incorporating safeguards into AI.

There's also reason to be optimistic. Ray Kurzweil believes in the singularity which is when man converges with machine. I have Peter Diamandis on my reading list as well.

Relevant books:
"Our Final Invention" by James Barrat
"How to Create a Mind" by Ray Kurzweil
"I have no Mouth and I Must Scream" by Harlan Elison
"Big Brain" by Gary Lynch
"Abundance The Future Is Better Than You Think" by Peter Diamandis
"The Future Is Faster Than You Think" by Peter Diamandis
"Out of Control" by Kevin Kelly
"Superintelligence" by Nick Bostrom

[supportingmaps]

By the end of the week, I'll have a book review of Big Brain by Gary Lynch. I have no neuroscience background aside from making a couple neural nets in my coding school. I'll be making associations with other readings and videos I've seen. Stay tuned!

[supportingmaps]

Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence by Gary Lynch Review

As some of you may know I started programming about 12 months ago. Artificial Intelligence is an expanding field and one way to advance the field is to understand how the brain works. I'm in a perfect position to share my thoughts on this book and whether or not you may be interested in reading it as well. I have no background in neuroscience and I would classify this book as a bottom up approach to learning about the brain. I have created a neural network in school and understand how neurons work (top down approach). A way to understand this type of learning is to tell someone to play soccer instead of sit them down and explain the ball's friction to the grass and where the shin guards are made.

Key quote:
“Our job in this book is to use knowledge of skulls, genes, brains, and minds, those of ourselves, those of other extant animals such as chimps, and even those of artificial creations such as robots, to extrapolate the likely contents of the brains of Boskops, and, from their brains, to surmise their mental lives.”

General takeaway I got from this book is the brain has been impacted by evolution. As a student this is similar to the technology sector since technologies are advancing and dying all the time. In chapter 3 the author pointed out programmers writing up AI programs and not succeeding. Since this book was written in 2008 technology has greatly advanced. There's discussions about how the brain works and Boskops, a species that supposedly lived alongside homo sapiens.

Similar reads:
How to Create a Mind by Ray Kurzweil
Impossible to Ignore by Carmen Simon
The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil
Our Final Invention by James Barrat

Similar videos:
Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle | AI Podcast #99 with Lex Fridman
"Uncle" Bob Martin - "The Future of Programming"

[supportingmaps]

I'm currently going through Abundance: The Future is Better than you Think by Peter H. Diamandis. There's some information on AI. I hope to have a book review ready by the end of the week.

[supportingmaps]

I just finished Abundance by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler. Overall, it's an optimistic perspective on the future. A theme that's constantly hammered is in America, even the lower classes have better living standards than the wealthy decades ago. The authors believe technology is improving the living standards of the world and that it will lead to increased happiness. There's a Maslow hierarchy of needs like water, education, energy, and food. There's some potentially controversial topics the authors use to bolster their needs hierarchy like GMOs, criticism of the education system in general, and nuclear energy.

To relate the book to this particular thread, AI is mentioned where it can be used to save lives for drivers and analyze health problems to lower medical costs. Overall, the book was thought provoking and worth the effort reading it.

[supportingmaps]

I'm a member of this AI meetup group. There's usually about 40-50 people that attend virtually. I understand it's based in LA and I'm in Chicago but for the time being you can attend virtually and learn more about how the future is shaping.

https://www.meetup.com/AI-LA-Meetup/

The format is:
* Listen to keynote speaker.
* Breakout rooms for small group discussion.
* Discuss in larger group what we talked about.

This was yesterday's event:
https://www.meetup.com/AI-LA-Meetup/events/271820579/

I learned some new concepts like how AI can be used to train athletes as well as help people emotionally.

[supportingmaps]

I'm currently reading Peter Diamandis' The Future is Faster than you Think.

There's some information about AI and the thesis of the book seems to be technology will converge and advance humanity beyond its limits. In the same vein as his Abundance book it's positive. I want to finish the book up by Tuesday.

I have other books in my reading queue like The Rational Optimist and Democratic Capitalism at the Crossroads.

[supportingmaps]

New LA AI virtual event tomorrow, you don't have to be in LA to attend this.

Are Machines Conscious? Debating AI's Final Frontier

https://www.meetup.com/AI-LA-Meetup/events/271634036/

[supportingmaps]

I finished up "Algorithms to live by" by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. It's a Malcolm Gladwell style book that discusses computer science topics that can be applied in real life. Topics include the explore/exploit tradeoff, sorting, caching, overfitting, networking, and game theory.

Anybody that wants to understand how computer science can be used in real life can read this book but I think it's best suited for those with a computer science background. For example, I already understand how overfitting works by running data through Python's program. Reading that particular section in the book added another layer of understanding to the topic.

[SteveGood]

It depends on user chategory and characters. If you use for good things it's useful or if you use this for bad things it's dangerours.

[supportingmaps]

The Future is Faster than you Think by Peter Diamandis Review

In the same vein as Mr. Diamandis' book Abundance, this is a positive outlook into the future. There's multiple technologies like VR, AR, life extension, 3D printing, and nanorobotics that will make the future exciting to look forward to. This is a good book for high school students, college students, career transitioners, and C-suite executives. Technology is going to change the playing field and you don't want to be left behind.

The one section that was especially relevant to me was The Future of Insurance, Finance, and Real estate. My background is a bachelors of science in accounting with current studies of data science and machine learning. I want to skate to where the puck is going so I was extremely diligent in taking notes with this section.

[supportingmaps]

I was in this live talk and left at the midway point. I did drop my LinkedIn information and hopefully I will meet some interesting people that can assist me in my mission.

AI Talks in Healthcare
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ry4LyHhnpdc

[supportingmaps]

I'm currently reading The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley and I'll have a review with AI as an afterthought in a couple days.

[supportingmaps]

This is my review of Achieving Real Business Outcomes from Artificial Intelligence by Atif Kureishy, Chad Meley, Ben Mackenzie
Released November 2018

This is a fairly quick read and as a reminder, I am a technology student. I understand basic premises the book makes.

The book serves as a primer for digital transformation leaders to outpace their competitors. It covers why AI is going to be game changing as well as the many problems it will take an organization to implement. Differentiates technologies like deep learning and AI. Not too much of a how but a step in the right direction of where to go.

[supportingmaps]

Kind of AI related but a little more geared to understanding that technology doesn't just have implications on career. It will affect politics as well.

Democratic Capitalism at the Crossroads by Carlos Boix is an amazing book. The author did a great job building up his case that technology is changing the landscape of our political and capitalistic society. Professor Boix mentioned Kurzweil's Singularity theory as well as Thomas Picketty's work (Capital in the 21st Century is an excellent read as well). Picketty and Professor Boix both are in agreement that education is a way to move up in the socioeconomic ladder.

Professor Boix briefly covers why populist candidates, like Donald Trump, resonated with a certain segment of the American population. Universal basic income (UBI) is briefly discussed as well since workers will be displaced as automation ramps up. This review unfortunately doesn't do the book justice, which is why I suggest picking it up and reading it.

[supportingmaps]

This is AI/Machine learning related:

Just finished listening to this:
https://twimlai.com/twiml-talk-349-turning-ideas-into-ml-powered-products-with-emmanuel-ameisen/

Bottom line for the non tech people is that AI/ML is difficult to implement.

For the tech people Emmanuel Ameisen is promoting his book and gives plenty of teaser material such as how to debug a ML model and the importance of researching the dataset before going forward with a project.

As a side note, I might want to pursue ML/AI solutions years from now. I ideally would like to work for small businesses instead of working in a corporation.