I've been spending a lot of time lately digging into "outdated" 80's era approaches to AI. Some people think I'm wasting my time and ask "why aren't you doing Deep Learning?" This is the reason why:
"You can think about deep learning as it currently is today as the equivalent in the brain to our sensory cortices: our visual cortex or auditory cortex. But, of course, true intelligence is a lot more than just that, you have to recombine it into higher-level thinking and symbolic reasoning, a lot of the things classical AI tried to deal with in the 80s. One way you can think about our research program is [that it's investigating] 'Can we build out from our perception, using deep-learning systems and learning from first principles? Can we build out all the way to high-level thinking and symbolic thinking?'. In order to do that we need to crack problems like learning concepts, things that humans find effortless but our current learning systems can't do."
I basically completely agree with Demis on this. A lot of the stuff that was being done in the 80's wasn't "wrong" so much as it was ahead of its time. And just like advances in data, algorithms, and compute power helped propel Neural Networks (which are actually a really old idea) to another level, I suspect some other "old" approaches will also experience a similar resurgence due to that same confluence of factors.
Yes, I like to separate, such as they can be separated, the tasks of 'parsing' and 'thinking' when it comes to AI. In the 80s (and really, all the way back to the 50s when we started trying computational AI), the tasks that we were attempting to solve were in the `thinking` category; solving tasks at a high level of abstraction with complex ontologies.
The revolution in Deep Learning has been almost entirely on the parsing side of things. The conversion of unstructured data from sensors (an array of pixels, say) into semi-structured semantic units in the beginnings of an ontology. This makes sense, because some of the greatest success has come from modeling a part of the brain that we understand pretty well; the occipital lobe (specifically, V1), which is responsible for parsing the input from the eyes and feeding the resulting information in to the rest of the brain. This is the motivation behind the layered, columned CNN architecture.
We've seen some success performing some tasks that exist in the (quite large) grey space between parsing and thinking (which are probably platonic ideals anyway, more than they are real things), but I get the feeling we're reaching the limit of how far we can reach into the grey starting from the left side of this continuum.
So I don't think it's a waste of time at all to consider the deep, impressive work from the 80s and the 60s in Philosophy and logic and GOFAI.
What if logic itself is just reduction to a simple binary system with few moving parts - the easy case?
Being able to logically explain how something works in special cases is what we have been able to do until now with pencil and paper.
Then you get approaches in the more general case, like New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram to “study” self-similarity. And you have fluid dynamics, which oncd again tries to find analytic closed-form solutions after averaging.
But what if - with computers - you can GENERALIZE REASONING ABOUT MODELS to something far beyond logical explanation? And it’s not reducible to a few main factors, but instead relies on precomputing HUGE VECTORS via gradient descent or MCTS (like AlphaZero) and store that information compactly. So you can’t really explain “why” this move is (one of) the best moves, it just is.
What if you could generalize AND handle a greater set of problems and “logic” was just a subset of it after all?
Ideas like “all swans are white” and syllogisms are just approximations of the real world. With deep learning you can find patterns that contain far more variables and complex interrlationships.
So maybe the 80s AI will suddenly emerge as a super-logical reasoning computer, not from efforts like Cyc which attempt to feed it data, but from general purpose deep learning with zero experience!
What if it is suddenly better than everything humanity has ever produced or reasoned about, similar to how AlphaZero beat every bespoke chess computer program ever written after a few hours of training?
So maybe the 80s AI will suddenly emerge as a super-logical reasoning computer, not from efforts like Cyc which attempt to feed it data, but from general purpose deep learning with zero experience!
That's a fair point, and I've spent some time thinking about roughly the same thing. My current thought on it is this: "general intelligence" may well turn out to be an emergent property of very simple lower-level primitives, and it may be that what we call "deep learning", done with a sufficiently deep and wide network, might actually produce "general intelligence".
But... I feel like we're still pretty far from having the compute power to run an ANN of such scale (that's just a guess though). So where we can "help" the process by hand-engineering modules that do specific elements of what we call intelligence, combine those modules, that's one way to short-cut the process. And in my view, things like Deep Learning, DRL, MCTS, etc. would also be included, along with older approaches: PCT for abductive inference, logical inference, maybe something like symbolic regression with GA's, etc., etc.
That particular comment is very likely traceable to some work undertaken by DeepMind in learning symbolic representations using deep learning, described here:
From where I'm standing (studying symbolic machine learning algorithms) the obvious next step in machine learning and AI is the combination of sub-symbolic, with symbolic approaches. It's just, nobody has quite figured out how to make it all work yet. There are reasons for this, not all technical, but it seems to me it's the easiest "next big thing" to at least try.
From where I'm standing (studying symbolic machine learning algorithms) the obvious next step in machine learning and AI is the combination of sub-symbolic, with symbolic approaches. It's just, nobody has quite figured out how to make it all work yet. There are reasons for this, not all technical, but it seems to me it's the easiest "next big thing" to at least try.
I 100% agree, FWIW. I believe that figuring out how to properly integrate those different regimes will be a Big Deal.
I'd say that's a good idea. A 30-year cycle (say one human generation) seems to occur in many fields, for various reasons.
For instance, some of the first transistors were field-effect (FETs), then bipolar junction (BJTs) ruled the first integrated circuits, then MOS technology made FETs again the standard technology. Some of the design approaches were recycled ...
Sometimes things seem to go in a spiral, and the new level amplifies the previous. I'd just caution that knowing why the previous approach went out of fashion would be useful, but that's often hard to determine - acknowledging failure is not a popular activity. Lack of power may not be the only problem ...
Good question. There's a LOT of material out there, and it could take a lifetime to parse through it all. So my own approach has been to skim a lot and latch onto whatever superficially seems interesting at first blush, do a deeper dive, and decide whether or not to keep digging. As it happens, one of the first things I latched onto was abductive inference, and an approach to automating same called "parsimonious covering theory". I've been working on my own implementation of PCT as a way to learn that.
I also think there are some interesting ideas in Minsky's The Society of Mind approach, so I've been going through some of his stuff. That and the old "Blackboard Architecture" model, which I see as having a tenuous sort of connection.
And while it's more "90's" than "80's", I've also been reading a lot of older literature on Multi-Agent Systems lately. There's been a lot of talk lately about "Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning" so I'm interested in that entire space.
Really, there's a thin, tenuous thread connecting most of my interests in this area (with the PCT stuff being sort of un-connected w/r/t the rest)... MAS's, Blackboard Architecture, Society of Mind, all deal with the idea of multiple "things" (call them modules, agents, components, whatever) working together in some fashion. I suspect there's "some there there" in terms of unifying all of these various AI approaches and achieving something useful. I could be wrong, but this is where I've been directing a lot of energy lately.
I always find it strange to hear people talk about climate change as if it is some sort of tricky challenge we need to solve, like improving education or curing cancer. It is a 'problem' of completely different magnitude. It is on track to end civilization as we know it within two generations. A rational society would think about nothing else.
Our children will be astonished and mystified - and furious - to see all the things we got up to instead of dealing with this thing that is the only thing that matters.
> It is on track to end civilization as we know it within two generations. A rational society would think about nothing else.
If you mean by "to end" something like "to extinguish" than I think this hyperbole is enormous.
If you mean by "to end" that the civilization will change, than there is nothing new under the sun. If I look at pictures from 19th century, which is very recent, I am always baffled at how much have changed in the passing of time.
A while back I read Six Degrees by Mark Lynas, who read 3000 peer-reviewed papers on the effects of climate change and summarized them, one chapter per degree, with extensive references.
My takeaway from that book was that three degrees was pretty terrible but life would go on, but at four degrees modern civilization would have a hard time surviving. Go all the way to six and there won't be many humans left on the planet.
I'm not saying we'll get to four degrees in two generations, but at the rate we're going we'll be well on the way, and enough feedbacks will have kicked in by then to make it inevitable.
How is that possible?
From the Amazon blurb, it seems that the book talks about what would be destroyed by weather change, but nothing about what would be created. If temperature increases, some current cold areas would be more habitable. If sea levels rise, some inland area would become coastal.
These changes would happen over generations, so populations would move. There would be tumult in human and animal life, which is bad but not a novel part of human experience (we've always had hurricanes, tsumanis, earthquakes, and plenty of manmade disasters), but a new equilibrium would be reached. There was once an Ice Age that supported human life!
I don't think the overall human environment 6 degrees in the future would be worse than say 200 years ago.
Also, it's been 16 years since the book was published. Have temperatures risen? Have the predictions come to pass?
We're currently at one degree above preindustrial, and the world looks a lot like he described for that level.
The book was published in 2009 but most of the news since has not been encouraging. A recent book that covers similar ground, also with a lot of references, is Unprecedented by David Ray Griffin; the conclusions are similar. If you want more detail on the geologic evidence, see Storms of My Grandchildren by James Hansen.
You're surely right that there will be things that improve. However, we know from geology and paleontology what's happened in previous major warming periods: mass extinction, and a huge loss of biomass, with most of the survivors clustered around the poles. That doesn't bode well for us.
> However, we know from geology and paleontology what's happened in previous major warming periods: mass extinction, and a huge loss of biomass, with most of the survivors clustered around the poles.
I thought that warming events were generally associated with speciation events, at least on land. (Marine life is a different story.) The last event, the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, coincided with a major speciation event for mammals.
Our children will be astonished and mystified - and furious - to see all the things we got up to instead of dealing with this thing that is the only thing that matters.
That's been happening since Generation X kids were old enough to understand what a mess our parents made of the world.
Unfortunately we haven't done a very good job of making a difference. Frankly I'm a little disappointed in my cohort in that regard. We knew things needed to be different, and we were mad as hell about how the preceding generations fucked everything up... and then we got so caught up in the drudgery of every day life that we kept perpetuating the same problems instead of fixing them.
I'm not terribly optimistic that any subsequent generation is going to do a much better job in general. It seems to be a fundamental human failing that we're not good at dealing with issues that span time-periods longer than our lifetimes. :-(
To tackle big problems, you need the structures in place to organize people, lead them, figure out not just the grand goal but the sub-objectives to be met, and to reward those who contribute and punish cheaters, and also the money and resources to do all of those things above.
But at this point you're no longer talking about getting a diffuse group of people together who believe in the same thing, but building something like a corporation or an NGO. That can easily take half a lifetime and a lot of perseverance. Most people don't have the time, energy, or money to go that route.
Except that the structures we have in place have time horizons even shorter than a human lifespan. Stock market runs on quarterly reports, governments run on election periods of a couple years. The organizations we give the most power to just don't operate using long term incentives. And then democratic processes don't even let everyone who is currently alive vote, much less those who aren't born yet. It's a problem that largely requires unselfish thinking which makes it extremely difficult to incentivize.
I am really optimistic about the younger generation, actually.
I'm a gen-Xer. Our mantra was "whatever". Instead of trying to solve problems, we just tried to detach from them. As long as we were self-aware and cynical about what we were being sold, we thought things would be fine.
But that's obviously stupid in retrospect. People in power love cynicism — why bother defeating other people when they'll defeat themselves?
Millenials, on the other hand, seem way more organized and engaged. For their generation "woke" doesn't just mean being aware of what's going, it means doing something about it. So I hope that they (and us too) can start changing some of the fundamental structural flaws in the current systems of power.
The woke generation before the Gen X was the....baby boomers. Remember civil rights and environmentalism? Perhaps the simplistic generational model is a poor fit for reality.
> It is on track to end civilization as we know it within two generations.
The reason why so many people don't take climate change seriously is because of extreme hyperbole like this. Climate change is outdoing even the "peak oil" craze of the past. If you think civilization is going to end in 40 years ( 2 generations ), then you leave no room for debate.
> A rational society would think about nothing else.
No. A rational society would think about lots of other things. Zealots think about nothing else.
Climate change is going to create challenges and opportunities. The societies/people better able to adapt will thrive. Others won't.
Yes, because qubax does not believe that civilization is going to end in 40 years. "The world getting hotter and the weather more extreme" != "the end of civilization in 40 years".
So, as someone apparently aware of the problem on a level higher than most of humanity, and so confident that we should be thinking of nothing else, what are you doing daily to resolve the problem? Are all of your resources and time allocated to solving this?
Obviously the answer is no, and probably for the same reasons as everyone else: people have other things going on in their lives.
I was actually just amused to see climate change used in a throwaway manner to justify some kind of AI whatever. The topic of climate change deserves to be talked about seriously or not at all.
As a creature capable of empathy, I am quite upset at the thought of incalculable suffering we are condemning future generations to just because we can't be bothered not to.
That's because you have a working assumption there's something we can do about it.
I don't believe there is: in that regard, humanity is as much in control of its own destiny as a mold colony growing on a slice of bread under a glass dome.
To wit: we have been incapable of solving basic problems like ending hunger or war for our entire history. There is zero reason to believe we can actually do anything about something much harder like global warming.
What will happen is what seem to happen to all form of life on planet Earth throughout history (e.g all life before stromatolites started pumping highly poisonous oxygen into the biosphere, or dinosaurs and whatever put them down, etc...): we will go through a cataclysmic, extinction-level event.
What will come out the other side will likely still be life, but unlikely be human, or if it is, vastly changed.
And you can pump out as much empathy as you'd like. As has been repeated ad nauseam, the physical world doesn't give two hoots.
If a solution exists to global warming, it's expansion, nothing else. Musk is correct in that regard.
> The idea that the coming generations are more important than the current is frankly the most unemphatic thing I have heard in a long time.
You're right. We should definitely continue with the status quo of stuffing our fat faces with slop and burning oil like there's no tomorrow, literally.
If you take a couple of steps back and think about this idea that future generations are more important than current ones you would probably realize that it's not such a simple thing to conclude on.
I never said we shouldn't do anything. What I said is that the idea of simply using the well being of the future generations as an argument for how the current generations should behave isn't empathic.
We should do a lot of course among others keep developing new technologies to solve some of the problems that humans create while still allowing the many millions who are poor improve their lives too.
That is the paradoxical discussion here and it's frankly way more important than some strawman about not doing anything here.
> Yes, learn to accept your mortality. Long term the human race will die.
Don't give up?
We can accept our mortality as individuals but why accept that of the species? There is no precedent for what we are. We are the first species that we know of that could be actively trying to survive for as long as possible, at the species level, by concerted effort of intelligent individuals and long term planning.
The average lifespan of mammalian species seems to be 1 to 2 million years. Very short. We should try to survive for much longer than that, and this needs planning and not fucking everything up.
It's also kind of important that we or a descendant species (including a robotic one) survive because we might be alone in the Universe.
In the very long term we're all dead. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't actively work to prevent that for as long as possible. Just because you'll die of old age at some point it's not okay for me to torture you to death.
You seem to be implying that promotion of one's genes is the only worthwhile goal. Stipulating that value system for the sake of argument, procreation is hardly the only way to do that. Literally anything you do in life affects other life forms which share some of your genes.
"Summary:
Male homosexuality doesn't make complete sense from an evolutionary point of view. One possible explanation is what evolutionary psychologists call the "kin selection hypothesis." What that means is that homosexuality may convey an indirect benefit by enhancing the survival prospects of close relatives."
Humans have had to deal with climate change for all our existence and to think that the only problem with regards to the climate is human-made illustrates how absurd the discussion have become.
The biggest opportunity to solve, whatever affect humans have is through technological progress, not beliving humans basic instinct and behavior is somehow going to change. Humans are both rational and irrational, mostly irrational. There is no such thing as a rational society it's simply not how nature works.
Humans won't change, our kids are some of the biggest users of the technology we developed and they will also be both benefitters and further developers of ways to deal with the never ending challenges nature provides us.
So yes we actually do need to think about climate change as something that always happens to us and then do something about those changes.
Blaming humans for not being rational is the least useful thing to do.
Compared to where they were technologically it's not that far off.
Nature doesn't give us a safe environment we make unsafe, it gives us an unsafe and hostile environment we try to make safe. Yes, that has consequences, consequences that aren't solved by wishing we were more rational.
First off, I want my amazing AI and renewable/sustainable energy generation via microgrids and all manner of eco-friendly technologies. However, the economics and individual freedom aspects are pushing those forward; there largely orthogonal to the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming issue.
The greatest source of energy beyond anything humanity could possibly hope to attain in the immediate future is reducing its output[1]. Man can cause localized disruptions and pollution but cannot yet alter the entire planet - that is sheer arrogance.
Volatility increases during periods of change. It is therefore no surprise that strange weather is being experienced where few or no living people can recall these occurrences.
It was hotter during the Roman empire than it is now, yet people survived and thrived. If I were you, I'd be digging deeper and preparing for colder weather instead of listening to politically-motivated, fund-seeking charlatans proclaiming we're all going to fry.
Thank you for the supporting information showing that both temperatures and sea levels during the pre-industrial era have been higher than they are now.
Everything has a cycle - those swings in temperatures and sea levels over the past 20,000+ years were not due to human activity but natural processes. No trend on an astronomical scale can be stopped or reversed by humans yet. Until we consistently produce a significant fraction of the energy output of the sun, we don't come close to running the show.
However, the AI that has panned out so far (whatever subset of the Hard Problem of Consciousness we've been able to...I don't really want to say solve. Address? Attempt?) in the current summer has done very little to further any of these goals, and has done quite a bit to advance many of the aspects he's worrying about.
So when are we going to start seeing evidence that these kinds of lofty prophecies will pan out? Or is the idea that it's going to arrive all at once like the Messiah, and save us from ourselves. I'm very excited about and deeply interested in Artificial Intelligence the discipline. Artificial Intelligence the Religion, I could do without.
"Either we need an exponential improvement in human behavior — less selfishness, less short-termism, more collaboration, more generosity — or we need more cake.
"If you look at current geopolitics, I don't think we're going to be getting an exponential improvement in human behavior any time soon.
What I'm most excited for is Demis using his AI to finally finish his Infinite Polygon Engine. I expect he'll get to that right after solving mass inequality and creating world peace.
Before Demis Hassabis was a master of AI hype he was a master of video game hype. The misleadingly named Infinite Polygon engine was one over hyped aspect of the over hyped and much delayed game Republic the Revolution. I think it actually turned out an ok game but is a notorious example of over promising and under delivering in the games industry.
There is so little information about the Infinite Polygon Engine that my comment above is now the #1 Google search result for "Infinite Polygon Engine" (with quotes), even above that Eurogamer article. Without quotes, my comment is only #2. :)
Compare these claims to the game as reviewed when it finally shipped some 2 years later. It probably did do some reasonably clever and even innovative things but it never really lived up to the hype.
He's a smart guy but his real genius appears to be drumming up breathless and relatively unskeptical media coverage, something else he probably learned from Peter Molyneux who also made a career out of some genuinely innovative games that nonetheless rarely quite lived up to the extravagant claims made about them years before they shipped.
This seems to be a bit of oversell, similar to how a gifted musician might declare that music can cure all diseases, including cancer.
We must take care to ensure that AI doesn't end up atrophying intelligence of humans, and make us its slave, like how technology seems to be doing. I mean, look at how people have lost capacity to do basic maths mentally, or follow a route based on landmarks only. Technology is useful as long as its our slave, like the slide rule or the compass. Same goes for AI.
The combinatorial example about chemical compounds is poor because, if anything, it only reflects the imperfect methodology adopted rather than something inherently insurmountable. May be they need more insight to help prune the irrelevant combinations, and actually act like scientists instead of tinkering inventors. If scientists rely on technology or AI to solve these sort of problems, either through brute force or clever algorithms, instead of engaging their intelligence, it would begin the deterioration of humanity as a whole. Though most of the significant scientific discoveries have been accidental, our progress has been due to application of our minds to understanding and harnessing them. Same goes for evolution of society due to philosophy. AI induced atrophied intelligence will push us back to the dark ages, only this time the god would be the AI, the oracles would be the software, and the heretics would be those propounding reliance on innate human intelligence.
Its ironic that a bunch of brilliant scientists creating a brilliant system, on par with human mind, risks destroying the collective brilliance of humans. We must tread carefully.
The problem with current ai right now is that it's very complicated and recent work (meaning the tools required are not for everyone), so it's more research than anything else. Most programmers don't really have a clue of how machine learning works when it works well enough, so that's really few people.
And so far, what applications in the real world are we seeing that are good enough and are actually useful to justify the investment? You cannot really trust self driving cars yet, and researchers don't have an insight on a deep neural network and how to use those results.
I have the feeling deep learning is another excuse to justify selling hardware.
I wish there was more research done at a higher level in Neuro sciences, to have a better definition of general intelligence.
It's sad that a well paid person and probably smart person like Demis Hassabis is so wrong in his view about how the world is.
To quote the article quoting Hassabis, "The reason I say that is that if you look at the challenges that confront society: climate change, sustainability, mass inequality — which is getting worse — diseases, and healthcare, we're not making progress anywhere near fast enough in any of these areas."
For climate change we're not even close to making enough progress. Global CO2 emissions are expected to continue rising for the foreseeable future, so we're not even getting the second derivative right. The chances are close to zero that we'll manage to limit warming to two degrees and imho it's likely that we'll set off some feedback loops (melting permafrost, methane clathrates, albedo changes at the poles, etc.) that will lead to catastrophic warming in the next century.
> we're not making progress anywhere near fast enough in any of these areas.
Unfortunately it is true and I fully agree with this judgement.
We have already so much technology and yet there is still much poverty and misery in every country and NO (elected) government respects even the human rights.
Well, we could go on and both claim our statements are true. OR you just follow the link of my initial post and read a book that simply states facts published by the UN, and you would see for yourself that the rates of poverty, child mortality and mass inequality have become much better in the course of the last 30-50 years.
The only reason why both of our statements are true is because "fast enough" or "not fast enough" is a personal opinion.
I believe in the benefits of technology.
The reason for current misery is not only lack of knowledge (scientific) and technology (e.g. in psychology and psychiatry) but also lack of knowledge (economic) and bad morality as proven by the kind of societies and elected governments in 2018.
That progress was set in motion by decisions we took years ago. I think all of us understand at some level, that we are failing to keep making good decisions. Books like "Better angels of our nature" and "factfulness" try to convince you that world is only going to get better, but I don't think it's obvious at all.
Re: enlightenment values, liberal democracy, trade etc. I believe governments and public institutions played a major role in the past that contributed to our success now.
We have moved from public institutions to private companies now. More capital is being invested now in selling us ads, selling you the next version of iphone etc. The companies with the most capital are tech companies. They are not solving the problem of healthcare, climate change, sustainability, mass inequality or any meaningful thing in any way. People are more excited for VR games. I feel right now, humanity is like a rich spoiled brat.
"A child prodigy in chess, Hassabis reached master standard at the age of 13"
"graduating in 1997 with a Double First[13] from the University of Cambridge"
"obtain[ed] his PhD in cognitive neuroscience from University College London"
"[his] theoretical account of the episodic memory system [...] was listed in the top 10 scientific breakthroughs of the year in any field by the journal Science"
AI has been a marketing terms from its invention, and is very misleading.
Whenever you read something about 'Artificial Intelligence', try to replace this term with an actual technology, such as 'Deep Learning'. If the sentence doesn't make sense with any such replacement, it is most probably just marketing bullshit.
To be honest, I can't really understand how come there are still people who, when confronted to a world that has been irremediably changed by humans' use of technology (for worst, they say) still believe that an improved technology used by the same humans will make things better. I'm looking at these quotes from the article:
> The reason I say that is that if you look at the challenges that confront society: climate change, sustainability, mass inequality — which is getting worse — diseases, and healthcare, we're not making progress anywhere near fast enough in any of these areas.
followed by
> Either we need an exponential improvement in human behavior — less selfishness, less short-termism, more collaboration, more generosity — or we need an exponential improvement in technology.
You take the following things as premises:
a.) Humans tend to reproduce, often above-reproduction level
b.) Humans usually tend to optimize their well-being
c.) Well-being of individuals of your own species is more important than well-being of other species
The first two should be uncontroversial.
The third one is not uncontroversial but still the foundation of most legal systems worldwide.
The argument goes:
More humans need more resources. Each generation uses more resources than the previous generation, due to (b). Even if you could educate everyone to use less, due to (a) you would still have to provide more resources.
Better technology allows more efficient generation of resources with less impact on the environment.
Thus if you care about the environment/whatever, technical advances are a good thing.
You could also try to kill humans/don't allow them to reproduce but this clashes with (c) and basic decency.
Also: You will never convince a non-marginal amount of humans to give up pleasure for some greater good.
- Cruelty of meat production will be solved by artificial meat, not by a tiny percentage of vegetarians.
- Global warming will also be solved by clean energy, not by using less energy.
What Hassabis is hinting at is the possibility of using AI to advance crops (GMOs) and materials in way that allows efficient provision of more stuff for more people. It is far more likely that these efforts yield fruits than that you convince 8B people to constrain their consumption (we've tried the latter for many years now: If you're aware of any progress made so far I, please share).
I wouldn't say that your premise a) is uncontroversial - it's estimated that the global population will become stationary by 2050 or 2040, not limited by simply lots of people being born and even more dieing from starvation but a globally decreasing birth rate. I.e. people adapt to the environment by having fewer children, because they don't need as many for their family to survive.
Indeed, that is correct. Though I think that most people enjoy having children but the economic circumstances and expectations make it hard to have them.
I personally believe that fertility rates will go up again, due to two things:
- YIMBYs (/reason) will prevail and at some point and living in constrained areas will get more affordable
- Social expectations will change. Having children in school was a bad idea a few decades ago (when school was from 6-18/20). If the majority of people spend their 20s in some sort of school these social norms have less reason to exist and will likely fade at some point.
And even if I'm wrong in both cases, I would assume that the rising population in southern countries will offset losses in the northern countries.
2050 the population will be 20% more than current levels we already are producing more carbon and other polutants than the world can handle . It does not matter if the population will stagnate in the future as current population is already to high.
There is a huge difference between the population flattening out and continuing to grow strongly. Whilst you are broadly correct, that we need to solve for 120% current - that's obviously easier than solving for 200% current.
In my experience (as an Indian), they ask money primarily for alcohol, cigarettes or drugs and buy food from whatever's left over. They are still not what one would call "nourished" and are pretty malnourished in most instances.
Frankly, I can't really understand how come people believe what you just wrote. Yes, technology created many problems, but we can't solve them by doing less technology, without reintroducing problems we've already solved. We can either not solve them, or try to solve it with more progress (likely introducing new problems as well).
In other words: we dug a hole for ourselves with technology, but the only way we can dig ourselves out of it is with more technology. This is pretty much obvious.
The person wrote "an improved technology used by the same humans." The last 3 words ("the same humans") is crucial and it's important to charitably interpret what it may mean, so their position makes sense. (And it does make sense.)
Tech is a tool. In our society, tools have owners, wielders and people who commission their making. Tools are designed to have certain benefits and limitations; purposes they amplify and dampen. (For example, DRM is designed to dampen the ability to copy without permission.)
Later, you define tech as "human capability of solving problems and adapting environments". To that, we can add, "And in particular, the constraints we put on that capability." Tech is a massively collaborative venture (from children who mine raw materials, to societies that fund a certain kind of tech and not others). Therefore it's social. Absent "an exponential improvement" in social organization, "an exponential improvement in technology" may just amplify dystopian impulses.
> In other words: we dug a hole for ourselves with technology, but the only way we can dig ourselves out of it is with more technology
I used to be a technofile, at least an internet-ofile, that's for sure, but I kept reading the same and same discourses about how this time things will be different while in reality things were becoming worse and as such I've started changing my mind.
> This is pretty much obvious.
Honestly, I don't see the obvious in that, quite the contrary, what you're basically saying is that we have used thing A (technology) to dig ourselves into a very big hole but we will dig ourselves out if only we would keep using the same thing A (albeit in a changed, improved form?). I can't really understand this type of reasoning.
> how this time things will be different while in reality things were becoming worse and as such I've started changing my mind
Care to give any examples? Things are almost universally becoming better for most of humanity. Of course, we know a lot of this is unsustainable and will come back to bite us later (unless we develop new techology to cope), but if you compare this year to pretty much any year in the past, things are better.
> what you're basically saying is that we have used thing A (technology) to dig ourselves into a very big hole but we will dig ourselves out if only we would keep using the same thing A (albeit in a changed, improved form?)
Yes, because if you're willing to talk about a single "thing A", then this "thing A", or "technology", is literally human capability of solving problems and adapting environments. Viewed like that, there's no other solution by definition.
And yes, I'm sort of saying that. It's easy to think "technology" is just smartphones and cat memes and bullshit SaaS startups. But technology is much more than that. An Internet company isn't going to save us. But small & safe nuclear reactors just might. Breakthroughs in carbon sequestration just might. New farming methods, new fertilizers, new GMOs. Better batteries, better renewables, improved recyclers, might be just enough to stave off the next disaster, to relieve the pressure we've been putting on the environment for the past couple centuries, and start to repair the damage.
Ultimately, what are the alternatives? Doing nothing? Prayer? Mass depopulation (which is also a likely consequence of the prior two)?
Global warming correlates pretty well with the Industrial Revolution and with technology's breakthroughs from the last 150 years, give or take.
And the second one, which has started actually scaring me more and more lately, is the rate of insects' decline. A couple of years ago I was commenting on this very website about how I could still see lots of dead insects on my car's windshield after a highway trip, while HN-ers from countries like Germany and Austria couldn't (I live in Eastern Europe), but this summer I've noticed for the first time that I've started seeing the same phenomenon, i.e. my windshield is almost clear from insects now after a highway trip. More than that, my dad (60+, has never accessed the Internet, not an environmentalist by any means) has also started noticing this phenomenon while recently making hay in a remote village close to the Carpathians, he told my brother that there weren't that many insects and bugs anymore compared to other summers (when you're making hay you kind of notice the presence of insects and bugs). My brother confirmed that that is true, but that it's a good thing, as those bugs tended to bite the hay-makers.
Let's play with that notion for a bit: If technology is a tool, let's say akin to a spade. A spade gets you into a hole. Will more spades ever get you out of a hole? Sounds like you need a ladder instead.
Technology is all the tools. With a spade you got into a hole. With a ladder you'll climb out of it. Hopefully with treasure. Then that spade might help you fill the hole back in.
Particular technologies are highly intertwined - both directly and causally - so you can't really micromanage this. You have to push for technological develoment as a whole, and trim developments here, encourage there. For instance, we wouldn't be talking about renewable energy sources were it not for coal furnaces and internal combustion engines that allowed the world to progress to the point we even can exploit renewables. In this case not only we need the ladder because of the spade, but we also can have a ladder because of a spade.
The tools you mention are also intertwined, with technology in particular being in the driver seat of changes in the other areas you mention. Therefore, it'll still be a necessary component of the solution, even if it won't be the only one.
I firmly disagree. While technology is certainly an enabler, either to implement the solution or to enforce it of a particular solution, it is not the tool from which the solution must be derived. The intertwining that you envision emerges when decision-making bodies look at a particular technology and decide how it should influence humanity.
I think your argument too simplified to be applicable to reality. What would the ladder be in your analogy? A dramatic reduction in population and a return to pre-industrial subsistence farming?
Those are all policy solutions, and they come about when policy is used as a tool. I'm actually not advocating these particular solutions, just the use of policy as a tool, a different one, from technology.
Policies are usually feasible only as much as technology of the day allows it; try to go beyond what's technologically supported, and it'll either be impossible, or you'll have to force people at gunpoint.
The problem is that more technology also creates even more dangers that we would need to work on the same time. Whether we invest more or less in tech does not seem to affect the outcome, but how much of it is done with foresight and additional safety research.
Humans are a technological species. Hence, to modify our parameters of existence from the materialistic point of view the solutions are technology based.
Technology is not just something someone invented - it's an inherent manifestation of the psychology of our species. Hunting patterns? Technology. Better stone tools? Technology. The wheel? Technology.
The key to this, is the rare capability among some individuals to device new solutions to a problem, and the en masse capability of everyone else to copy the solution once implemented and explained.
You forgot the part where we should be able to customize those solutions to our own unique needs and environments, otherwise we're sacrificing personal agency and responsibility to the whims of organizations who very clearly don't always have our best interests in mind.
Hoping technology will save us is as foolish as believing Jesus will, both extremes are bad and missing the larger point that humans are far more complicated than we like to admit.
> Either we need an exponential improvement in human behavior — less selfishness, less short-termism, more collaboration, more generosity — or we need an exponential improvement in technology.
This isn't implying that he believes technology _will_ make it better. He's only saying that we have 3 choices: Better technology, better human behavior, or environmental catastrophe.
Whether or not the first is even possible is an open question.
Yep. Been following this guy since he was at Lionhead, and while he's obviously a very very smart guy, it's disappointing that he puts his hope in techno-fixes. To me it seems fairly obvious that the problems our society faces stem from continuous exponential growth (primarily of energy use), and while technology can be used to tweak the parameters of the growth curve, as it were, the eventual outcome stays more or less the same. This was already shown in the The Limits to Growth model back in the early 70s. To me "new technology will fix it" is essentially a statement of faith, the numbers don't back it up, nor does thinking about or situation honestly.
> To me it seems fairly obvious that the problems our society faces stem from continuous exponential growth (primarily of energy use)
This may be. But then, you have two choices: let humans hit the growth ceiling, which will result in mass starvation and death, or lift the ceiling. Technology is the very thing that allows us to continuously lift the ceiling, so it's obvious that any solution not involving mass murder will have to come from technology.
I don't think he advocates mindless consumption, and blind hope that technology will front run this all-burning-rage of human hubris and reckless hedonism.
We have pretty good predictions about world population. So anyone screaming about exponential growth should STFU and bring real counterarguments to those predictive models (and their results). And second, the ceiling doesn't have to reach the heavens (and once technologies have been "unlocked" they don't really require any expenditure to keep them around), it has to cover those predicted 10-12 billion people.
The solar system has enough resources for trillions of humans. Earth can sustain ~12 billion people almost indefinitely.
That said, yes, without cooperation and foresight there will be a crash. And a next one, and a next one, as long as we are here and we are dumb. Once one of that changes, the crashes will be very much complete black swans. (And we can - to a certain degree - try to buffer reserves to meet those future challenges. But we're unable to keep CO2equiv emissions low enough to reverse warming, so it's a bit too early to worry about black swans.)
I don't think that a stable population level requires mass starvation or some such thing. Most of the developed world is already at zero or slightly negative population growth, all it required was birth control. (A technology, to your point).
We could achieve a stable population, but we're still growing our energy use - and will be for some time, as there's something like 2 billion people who also want to have western living standards (like hot water and washing machines).
This is not entirely true - in the developed world, energy use per capita has been stable for many decades now, currently economic growth has been decoupled from energy usage, breaking the assumptions of 70s "The Limits to Growth" argument. There's no exponential growth trend; yes, the total energy usage will grow while the population is (still) growing; yes, the energy usage per capita in developing countries will eventually increase to match developed countries, but that's it, there's expected growth but it is limited.
Our continuing progress and well being does not rely on unbounded growth of energy use until it inevitably hits a ceiling; we can expect total energy demand to stabilize at some level (though higher than the current one), and there's no reason why we couldn't meet that energy demand with sustainable means. There's no revolution needed to lift the ceiling - the ceiling we need is within sight, and we can reach it with straightforward application of current technology, e.g. increased adoption and economy-of-scale cost reduction of currently available solar and battery technology among others.
How can presumably smart people still keep saying this? Inequality is decreasing by all measures! And then I'm supposed to believe any other argument this person makes...
Inequality is not decreasing by all measures, for example: "Income inequality in OECD countries is at its highest level for the past half century." [1]
While it is true that global inequality might be decreasing, localised levels are important, especially when existing in regions which might be considered "economic drivers"; because it has important implications for the stability of those regions, and this is highly likely to affect the continuation of the global trend for reduced inequality.
Some people think the inequality has gone down significantly (I'm in that camp), but others point out to things like Bezos and a few others owning more assets than 80% of the world combined.
Regardless, AI is bound to increase inequality. Just yesterday we discussed this book [1] on probabilistic programming here on HN [2]. That book is, by all definitions, an advanced book about AI. How many people without a PhD can read that? How many people with a PhD can read it? Well, guess what, people who can and do read this book earn more than people who don't. That's AI driving inequality. Before AI will create the mythical HAL or other self-aware machines, it will enable humongous productivity for the top 0.01% most highly educated engineers.
Just yesterday we discussed this book [1] on probabilistic programming here on HN [2]. That book is, by all definitions, an advanced book about AI. How many people without a PhD can read that? How many people with a PhD can read it?
From the abstract:
This document is designed to be a first-year graduate-level introduction to probabilistic programming. It not only provides a thorough background for anyone wishing to use a probabilistic programming system, but also introduces the techniques needed to design and build these systems. It is aimed at people who have an undergraduate-level understanding of either or, ideally, both probabilistic machine learning and programming languages.
Thanks to the Internet, how many people who have that prerequisite "undergraduate-level understanding of either or, ideally, both probabilistic machine learning and programming languages" now have access to this material, who otherwise might not have? And thanks to the Internet (Khan Academy, Coursera, OCW, Udacity, Fast.ai, 3blue1brown@youtube, etc.) how many people now have the ability to gain that prerequisite knowledge without investing tens of thousands of dollars in a university degree? Especially people who might not have been able to afford to take time off from working to attend University in the first place?
While in the end you may be right that AI specifically does wind up driving inequality, I think there are strong arguments that technology / the 'net in a general sense also serve to advance equality.
The inequality generated by better tech largely doesn't go to engineers. They're still just knowledge workers, a class that has existed for a long time. It goes to shareholders and executives by virtue of reducing costs and generating more profit.
Perhaps humankind needs a "Butlerian Jihad", as defined in the Dune novels, where all machines made in the image of a human brain are banned for all time.
Distribution of assets or distribution of consumption? I would argue the former is a complete red herring and if one is to be concerned about any inequality, it's inequality of consumption.
"You can think about deep learning as it currently is today as the equivalent in the brain to our sensory cortices: our visual cortex or auditory cortex. But, of course, true intelligence is a lot more than just that, you have to recombine it into higher-level thinking and symbolic reasoning, a lot of the things classical AI tried to deal with in the 80s. One way you can think about our research program is [that it's investigating] 'Can we build out from our perception, using deep-learning systems and learning from first principles? Can we build out all the way to high-level thinking and symbolic thinking?'. In order to do that we need to crack problems like learning concepts, things that humans find effortless but our current learning systems can't do."
I basically completely agree with Demis on this. A lot of the stuff that was being done in the 80's wasn't "wrong" so much as it was ahead of its time. And just like advances in data, algorithms, and compute power helped propel Neural Networks (which are actually a really old idea) to another level, I suspect some other "old" approaches will also experience a similar resurgence due to that same confluence of factors.