It could be terrible and it could be great. It’s not clear. I’m right but one thing is for sure. We will not control it. – ELON MUSK on AI
ALPHAGO and ALPHAGO ZERO
GO is arguably the most complex board game in existence. Its goal is simple surround more territory than your opponent. This game has been played by humans for the past 2,500 years and is thought to be the oldest board game still being played today. However, it’s not only humans that are playing this game now. In 2016 Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo beat 18 times world champion Lee Sedol in four out of five games. Now, normally a computer beating a human at a game like chess or checkers wouldn’t be that impressive. But GO is different, GO cannot be solved by Brute Force, GO Cannot Be predicted. There are over 10 to the 170 moves possible in GO to put that into perspective. There are only 10 to the 80 atoms in the observable universe.
AlphaGo was trained using data from real human Go Games. It ran through millions of games and learned the techniques used and even made up new ones, that no one had ever seen and this is very impressive alone. However, what many people don’t know is that only a year afterAlphaGo’s victory over Lee Sedol, a brand new AI called ALPHAGO ZERO beat the original AlphaGo not in four out of five games, not in five out of five games, not in ten out of ten games, but beat AlphaGo 100 to 0. 100 games in a row, the most impressive part is it learned how to play with zero human interaction. This technique is more powerful than any previous version.
It isn’t restricted to human knowledge.
No data was given, no historical figures were given, with just the bare-bones rules ALPHAGO ZERO surpassed the previous AlphaGo and only 40 days of learning, and only 40 days is surpassed over 2,500 years of strategy and knowledge. It only played against itself and is now regarded as the best GO player in the world, even though it isn’t human.
But wait if this AI learned how to play without any human interaction, made up strategies of its own and then beat us with those strategies. Then that means there’s more non-human knowledge about GO than there is human, and if we continue to develop artificial intelligence, then that means there’s going to be more and more non-human intelligence. Eventually, there’s going to be a point where we represent the minority of intelligence maybe even a very minuscule amount. That’s fine that we can just turn it off right? It’s a thought but think when modern-day humans be in to take over the planet, why didn’t the chimps and Neanderthals turn us off?
If this artificial intelligence becomes super-intelligent and learns through and it’s connected to the internet what we can just shut down the entire internet. There’s no off switch. So what happens if we end up stuck with AI that is constantly an exponentially getting smarter than we are. What if it gets to a point that us humans get in the way and AI hits the off switch on humanity.
When people think of AI they tend to think of super-intelligent AI. AI that serves the human race, but could also end us at a moment’s notice.
There’s a lot more to add than you might think, just a lot more types the serve different purposes.
Artificial Narrow Intelligence
Artificial Narrow Intelligence also known as Weak AI is the only form of artificial intelligence that humanity has created so far it makes this sound kind of bad but trust me. It does a really good job at what it’s supposed to do. Narrow AI is AI that is created for the sole purpose of handling one task. It’s the kind of AI that AlphaGo is. Narrow AI is good as speech and image recognition and also at playing games like chess or Go or even pretty complex games like Dota 2.
At the international 2017 World Championship open AI’s artificial intelligence destroyed Pro Player Dendi 2-0, but much like AlphaGoZero, it played matches against itself and learned on its own. It started out barely knowing how to walk and eventually as time went on it surpassed human-level skill.
If you use Spotify, you’ll see that it creates daily mixes for you based on the music you listen to. Amazon learns from a teaches itself, your buying habits suggest you new products, but it seems like a common reoccurrence where these AI teach themselves how to do the task at hand.
How is that even possible?
Well through something called Machine Learning.
Machine Learning
It is the science of trying to get computers to learn and think like we humans do. Machine Learning is essentially the same way that babies learn. We start off as small screaming sacks of meat, but over time we improve our learning we take in more data and more information from observations and interactions and most of the time we end up pretty smart.
The most popular technique out there to make a computer mimic a human brain is known as a Neural Network. Our brains are pretty good at solving problems. But each neuron in your brain is only responsible for solving a very minuscule part of any problem. Think of it like an assembly line or each neuron in your brain has a certain job to do in order to completely solve a problem. Let’s make a simple example of a neural network.
So there’s quite a big difference between our brains capabilities and computers. In just one week a computer can do 20 thousand years worth of human-level research or simulations or anything it is trained to do. A brain has to fit inside your head, there’s a limit to how much space they can take up but a computer could fill an entire room or even an entire building.
Now, obviously Weak AI doesn’t require an entire server room to run like we saw with open AI it only took a USB stick but for more intelligent AI it may require much more power.
Artificial General Intelligence
Artificial General Intelligence or AGI is AI with more than a single purpose. AGI is almost at or equal to human-level intelligence. And this is where we’re trying to get to, but there’s a problem the more research into it the harder and harder. It seems to be able to achieve. Think about how you perceive things, when someone asks you what complicated question, you have to sort through a ton of on related thoughts and observations and articulate concise response to that question. This isn’t exactly the easiest thing for a computer to achieve.
Technological Singularity where artificial intelligence becomes so advanced to the point where there’s an extremely explosion of new knowledge and information some that might not even be able to be understood by humans. If we make a super-intelligent AI, that AI would be able to improve upon itself and in turn gets smarter in a shorter amount of time, which means that this new and improved AI could do the same thing. It continues to repeat this process doing it faster and faster each time. The first recreation may take a month, the second a week, third a day and this keeps going until it’s billions of times smarter than all of humanity.
It’s almost obvious that superintelligent AI has the capability of making Humanity billions of times better than it is today. But on the flip side, it could also be used as a weapon just think like I said before if this thing is running for a week and has access to all the world’s information it could makeover 20,000 years of technological progress. You let this thing run for six months and you could potentially have 500,000 years or even more of technological progress. Imagine if this got into the wrong hands that imagine the repercussions, that would have. When you Google something not only are you giving out data and telling a potential artificial intelligence what you’re thinking you’re also telling it how you’re thinking we feed it all of our questions all of our answers if we were going to try and program a limbic system into an AI, we will be teaching artificial intelligence what we’re afraid of.
Out of all the data in the world, over 90% of it has been created in the past three years. AI learned how to recognize faces, it learned how to recognize voices, it learns languages and then we’ll eventually translate between them all seamlessly this knowledge and information train could continue until it has gone through all 100 per cent of this data. This is why artificial intelligence is such an important topic.
Superintelligent AI is the last invention that humanity will ever make. Once it’s invented, it can’t be uninvented. The technology and developments that could possibly turn the human species and to a mortal Godlike figures is coincidentally the same technology that could also cause the downfall of humanity.
Many people are resistant to the AI because they fear they may have some of the negative traits that we humans do. It may be greedy, lie, selfish, rebellious, short-tempered. The power of superintelligent AI is there patiently waiting to be found, but the question is do we actually want to find it?