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The AI winter is very much over, and we're back to the good old days of selling the future. I bet this team is very sharp, but there's still merit to "over-prom
by mattj 13y ago
The AI winter is very much over, and we're back to the good old days of selling the future. I bet this team is very sharp, but there's still merit to "over-promise, under-deliver."
"Phoenix, the co-founder, says Vicarious aims beyond image recognition. He said the next milestone will be creating a computer that can understand not just shapes and objects, but the textures associated with them. For example, a computer might understand “chair.” It might also comprehend “ice.” Vicarious wants to create a computer that will understand a request like “show me a chair made of ice.”
Phoenix hopes that, eventually, Vicarious’s computers will learn to how to cure diseases, create cheap, renewable energy, and perform the jobs that employ most human beings. “We tell investors that right now, human beings are doing a lot of things that computers should be able to do,” he says."
- samstave 13y agoFunny to think that instead of curing diseases or making cheap renewable energy, we'd instead try to spend resources to invent a computer to do that for us...
- danso 13y agoSo the question you should be asking is...if everyone agrees that cheap renewable energy and curing diseases is a good thing, why haven't we done it yet? I guess if you're cynical, you'd argue, because no one can make a profit from it (uh...right). However, if you see it as a pragmatic problem, then maybe the answer to why not? is because we need better ways to process information -- and this kind of unsupervised machine learning is critical to doing that.
- samstave 13y agoYes, know, i just found the phrase funny.
- icefox 13y agoWhy is curing all diseases a good thing?
- MacsHeadroom 13y agoIs being unhealthy good? Do you enjoy being ill?
- aviraldg 13y agoI've given some thought to this, and the answer is it might be. Consider a future where we've managed to eliminate all diseases. By then our natural resistance to disease might have atrophied to a point where we will absolutely be unprepared to deal with new diseases (biologically), before we've managed to develop a cure for them.
- baddox 13y agoBecause, unless you're using a specially crafted definition of the term, diseases are all bad.
- loup-vaillant 13y agoHigher order strategy. We do that for ourselves when we learn first about something, plan ahead, and then do it. Thing is, we don't know how to cure diseases, we don't know how to make cheap renewable energy, and we certainly don't know how to turn Earth into Heaven. The direct approach might very well be harder than the AI one.
- carlmcqueen 13y agoNASAs goal to go to the moon brought a lot of the innovations we enjoy in our day to day lives.
- johnrob 13y agoWhy do you think our creators made the simulated universe we live in? There's an infinite-loop bug, however: each simulation tries to solve the real problem by creating a sub-simulation.
- 0003 13y agoNow you have infinite problems.
- bitcuration 13y agoThat's not infinite loop bug, that's recursion. Usually an exit condition will get out of the loop. In this case, sounds like once found solution to cure disease and new energy, the condition is met. Yes?
- otikik 13y agoIt makes sense to invest on a plow instead of keeping hunting and gathering.
- Houshalter 13y agoWell it is incredibly dangerous, but if we did make safe, super intelligent AI, it would definitely be a much greater investment than directly working on those problems. To put it lightly, it would automate and massively bring down the cost/increase the speed of research and engineering. Sure enough money, spent on enough humans, given enough time, could eventually find a cure for any disease. But why do that when you can just ask the AI and have a cure overnight? Of course it's not clear how safe such an AI would be (such a being could easily outsmart us and get what it wants, whatever that even is), nor how difficult it will be to create one.
- throwaway7808 13y agoWell, let's hope they will go broke wasting money into the AI research black hole before being able to actually build one :) Otherwise, you are correct. A successful built of super intelligent AI is probably an extinction event for the humans.
- ra88it 13y agoAfter super intelligent AI, what's special about humans?
- Houshalter 13y agoDefine "special". I don't want to be killed to make way for more paperclips.
- JabavuAdams 13y agoWe still have pets, and they're rather well taken care of.
- Houshalter 13y agoThat's just another human weakness - we anthropomorphize lesser creatures. And even with that, we still don't look before stepping on ants.
- 13y ago
- zxcvvcxz 13y agoNot to be cynical, but isn't this whole thing a glorified research project with founders that can sound visionary? Maybe that's a good formula.
- neutronicus 13y agoI assume you meant "under-promise, over-deliver".
- cpeterso 13y agoProbably, but it's easier to get funding or acquired if you over-promise (and inevitably under-deliver).
- enupten 13y agoI wish instead of making computers do things that Humans are doing, people put more effort into making the Humans' job, instructing these stupid beasts (I mean the computers), easier.
- gambogi 13y agomutually exclusive endeavors etc etc