The future with smart machines and artificial intelligence (But human traits are beyond the pale of smart machines) ALTES Facts & Quotes Billboard New York City, Nov. 1, 2014 Excerpts from “Our Machine Masters” by David Brooks, columnist, The New York Times Op-Ed, Oct. 31, 2014 ● Smart machines - “He (writer Kevin Kelly) writes that the smart machines of the future won’t be humanlike geniuses … They will be more modest machines that will drive your car, translate foreign languages, organize your photos, recommend entertainment options and maybe diagnose your illnesses … Even more than today, we’ll lead our lives enmeshed with machines that do some of our thinking tasks for us.” ● Artificial intelligence - “This artificial intelligence breakthough, he argues, is being driven by cheap parallel computation technologies, big data collection and better algorithms.” ● Vast-though-hidden power - “To put it more menacingly, engineers at a few gigantic companies will have vast-though-hidden power to shape how data are collected and framed, to harvest huge amounts of information, to build the frameworks though which the rest of us make decisions and to steer our choices. If you think this power will be used for entirely benign ends, then you have not read enough history.” ● Machines are getting better - “A.I. (artificial intelligence) will redefine what it means to be human. Our identity as humans is shaped by what machines and other animals can’t do. For the last three centuries, reason was seen as the ultimate human faculty. But now machines are better at many of the tasks we associate with thinking – like playing chess, winning at Jeopardy, and doing math.” ● What machines can’t do - “On the other hand, machines cannot beat us at the things we do without conscious thinking: developing tastes and affections, mimicking each other and building emotional attachments, experiencing imaginative breakthroughs, forming moral sentiments.” ● What make humans human - “In the age of smart machines, we’re not human because we have big brains. We’re human because we have social skills, emotional capacities and moral intuitiveness. I could paint two divergent A.I. futures, one deeply humanistic, and one soullessly utilitarian. ● I.Q. less important - “In the humanistic one, machines liberate us from mental drudgery so we can focus on higher and happier things. In this future, differences in innate I.Q. are less important. Everybody has Google on their phones so having a great memory or the ability to calculate with big numbers doesn’t help as much.” ● Emphasis on personal and moral faculties - “In this future, there is increasing emphasis on personal and moral faculties: being likable, industrious, trustworthy and affectionate. People are evaluated more on these traits, which supplement machine thinking, and not the rote ones that duplicate it.” ● Less idiosyncratic - “In the cold utilitarian future, on the other hand, people become less idiosyncratic. If the choice architecture behind many decisions is based on big data from vast crowds, everybody follows the prompts and chooses to be like each other. The machine prompts us to consume what is popular, the things that are easy and mentally undemanding.”
Posted on: Sat, 01 Nov 2014 10:36:20 +0000
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