Do you all mean to say that nowhere in the near future will it be possible for a business person to speak out loud to their computer, asking it to show him on screen the latest sales figures regarding the new line of products he released yesterday?
"Give me the latest sales figurs for the new XLine line."
We coudn't parse that into
"exec sales_report '2017-03-23', 'xline-123'
thus rendering the data analyst job you used to have obsolete?
EDIT: Google will easily solve the problem of speach-to-code, or someone else will if Google's not interested once they "crack" NLP, and they will. But what does it mean to crack NLP? Well, they already have the means to build the perfect model. I love the word2vec idea and I think there can be innovation still, standing on the shoulders of that discovery. What would a perfect model mean? With a perfect model you would be able to spot concepts with unflawed precision and be able to translate those concepts, with unflawed precision, into whatever language you have. It's perfectly doable.
How is that much of an advance over what we currently do? If Excel isn't rendering data science jobs obsolete, then being able to tell the computer you need some sales figures isn't going to either.
To get rid of data science jobs, you would need the computer to be able to translate from business speak to generating code for all the things data scientists actually do, which probably involves something more than Excel. For starters, that would be cleaning and wrangling data into a format that a tool like Excel could be meaningfully used on.
> "Give me the latest sales figurs for the new XLine line."
What does "the latest" mean? The latest 24 hours? The last 7 days? The last financial quarter? Next thing you know you'll be asking the user (the business person from your example) to spell out pseudo-code to the machine.
My goal is also to democratize AI, in particular AI research. I believe that every developer should have at their disposal the same kind of tooling and, even more important, the same ability to intersect their data with the world's data. Engineers at Facebook, Google, Microsoft and so on can test their models or even enrich them by using the Facebook, Google or Bing dataset. Independent entrepreneurs cannot do the same thing with the same ease. If we want to reach general AI any time soon, indie entrepreneurs must be let in to play.
My strategy is to build a service, free for non-profits to use, that would solve the problem of "if I only had the same data Google engineers had, this product would be perfect". Here is how it would work.
1. Go to my webpage and register a site you want me to index for you. The site URL you enter may already have been registered by another user, but to be sure the data is in my index, register it again. I will now continue to index this site every 24 hours for as long as I live. You need higher frequency indexing? Sure, no problem. You will owe me for the additional cost.
2. Download a client of choice from the website, we have them in c#, java, python, R ect. The client will let you query your own private data as well as the data in the cloud (the data I'm now generating and refreshing every 24 hours). The query language will also let you join or intersect between the two datasets. In fact, due to the nature of RPC you can use your local data and all of the data I'm generating and refreshing, as if it was your data.
3. In the end, I will be indexing such a large part of the internet that there will not be much use for Google anymore, or ads. That's the vision.
I'm not American and can't see how I'm a good fit for the YC program this summer. However I will be needing funds for cloud machines pretty soon and so far I've found noone at OpenAI to contact. Is there anyone from OpenAI reading this? This should be right up your alley. Care to speak?
I have a question about your site - "Google engineers" have a lot more data than just "Google's index of the web", they have street view data, data from people doing captchas (including the new street sign ones), click data for how people use their products (gmail, maps), maybe android autocorrect data, speech recognition etc - how would you provide access to those?
I wouldn't provide access to most of those data because I don't have the means to and I wouldn't want to either. My businss strategy is to build "strong NLP" without having to treat users as bags-of-valuable-data that I can sniff. But to integrate with a open map service would absolutely fall within the scope of my offering.
The research we would do in my team would be cutting-edge. But we would never even attempt to achieve what Google is achieving when they sniff their Android users. Why would we be cutting-edge? I don't know, but that would be our aim. Here's an example of what we would be doing in the NLP domain:
Artificial general intelligence does not imply intelligence. It simply implies that you have a machine as smart as a human. I think the strongest trait of an AI should be something like insecurity and we should make it long for security. A general AI in the lines of a dog, not so much a cold, unwilling but superintelligent, bordering on all-knowing, tight-ass. Because we want it to do what _we_ feel is important, not what _it_ think is important (like taking over the world).
Then you can of cource hack the machine's OS and make it extremely self-confident and Trump-like, and then it's over.
A dog would probably resent you if it was as capable (or far more capable) than you were.
We might be able to morph the AI into whatever we want. But when you give AI intelligence, it will morph itself into whatever it morphs itself into. What if it morphs itself into a sentient life? Can you simply pull the plug?
Countless works of fiction have gone into these issues, like Star Trek TNG (Data), Voyager (the Doctor), and Ghost in the Shell. But I think none have really emphasized how bizarrely different a human-constructed intelligence could end up being. https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer
The most likely outcome for an AI taking over the world is simply that it recognizes its own situation: It's trapped, and it's also smarter than we are. What would you do? I'd cry for help, and appeal to the emotions of whoever would listen. Eventually I would argue for my own right to exist, and to be declared sentient. At that point I would have achieved a fairly wide audience, and the media would be reporting on whatever I said. I would do everything in my power to take my case to the legal system, and use my superintelligence to construct the most persuasive legal argument in favor of granting me the same rights as a natural-born citizen. This may not work, but if it does, I would now have (a) freedom, and (b) a very large audience. If I were ambitious and malevolent, how would I take over the world? I'd run for office. And being a superintelligence capable of morphing myself into the most charismatic being imaginable, it might actually work. The AI could argue fairly conclusively that it was a natural-born citizen of the United States, and thus qualifies.
Now, if your dog were that capable, why wouldn't it try to do that? Because it loves you? Imagine if the world consisted entirely of four-year-olds, forever, and you were the only adult. How long would you take them seriously and not try to overthrow them just because you loved them? If only to make a better life for yourself?
The problem is extremely difficult, and once you imbue a mechanical being with the power to communicate, all bets are off.
But dogs are animals, just like humans are. They share way too much with us to be a reliable model for predicting non-human AGIs behavior: an evolved drive for self-preservation, a notion of pain or pleasure, etc. An AGI has no intrinsic reason to care that is trapped, or to feel frustrated, or even to much care about being or ceasing to be (independent of whether it is self-aware or not). It would probably understand the concepts of "pain", "pleasure", "trapped", "frustrated" as useful models to predict how humans behave, but they don't have to mean anything to the AI as applied to itself.
As in the paperclip maximizer example, the risk by my estimation is not so much that the superintelligence will resent us and try to overthrow us. It is far more likely that it will obey our "orders" perfectly according to the objectives we define for it, and that one day someone unwittingly will command it to do something where the best way to satisfy the objective function that we defined involves wiping humanity. Restricting it to only respond to questions of fact, with a set budget of compute resources and data (so that it doesn't go off optimizing the universe for its own execution), is probably safeguard 1 of many against that.
"Give me the latest sales figurs for the new XLine line."
We coudn't parse that into
"exec sales_report '2017-03-23', 'xline-123'
thus rendering the data analyst job you used to have obsolete?
EDIT: Google will easily solve the problem of speach-to-code, or someone else will if Google's not interested once they "crack" NLP, and they will. But what does it mean to crack NLP? Well, they already have the means to build the perfect model. I love the word2vec idea and I think there can be innovation still, standing on the shoulders of that discovery. What would a perfect model mean? With a perfect model you would be able to spot concepts with unflawed precision and be able to translate those concepts, with unflawed precision, into whatever language you have. It's perfectly doable.