Steve Steinberg, former Legion of Doom member and current Wall Street hacker, posted a rare update to his .CSV blog, and it’s a doozy. He unpacks two big developments in “weak” artificial intelligence that manage to slip under the radar, mostly because they don’t involve emotional robots or bring The Singularity a few days closer. Along the way, he shreds insurance companies that seek to correlate bad credit with bad driving, and pokes at Google’s trust of “man over machine,” a “cultural quirk,” as Steve puts it, that’s overlooked amidst all the talk of algorithms and massive data sets. From .CSV:
While strong AI still lies safely beyond the Maes-Garreau horizon (a vanishing point, perpetually fifty years ahead) a host of important new developments in weak AI are poised to be commercialized in the next few years. But because these developments are a paradoxical mix of intelligence and stupidity, they defy simple forecasts, they resist hype. They are not unambiguously better, cheaper, or faster. They are something new.
What are the implications of a car that adjusts its speed to avoid collisions … but occasionally mistakes the guardrail along a sharp curve as an oncoming obstacle and slams on the brakes? What will it mean when our computers know everything – every single fact, the entirety of human knowledge – but can only reason at the level of a cockroach?I mention these specific examples – smart cars and massive knowledge-bases – because they came up repeatedly in my recent conversations with AI researchers. These experts expressed little doubt that both technologies will reach the market far sooner, and penetrate it more pervasively, than most people realize.
But confidence to the point of arrogance is practically a degree requirement for computer scientists. Which, actually, is another reason why these particular developments caught my interest: for all their confidence about the technologies per se, every researcher I spoke to admitted they had no clue – but were intensely curious – how these developments will affect society.
