Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.

One of the early stage AI companies Google purchased is DeepMind, based in London. In 2015 researchers at DeepMind published a paper in Nature describing how they taught an AI to learn to play 1980s-era arcade video games, like Video Pinball. They did not teach it how to play the games, but how to learn to play the games — a profound difference. They simply turned their cloud-based AI loose on an Atari game such as Breakout, a variant of Pong, and it learned on its own how to keep increasing its score. A video of the AI’s progress is stunning. At first, the AI plays nearly randomly, but it gradually improves. After a half hour it misses only once every four times. By its 300th game, an hour into it, it never misses. It keeps learning so fast that in the second hour it figures out a loophole in the Breakout game that none of the millions of previous human players had discovered. This hack allowed it to win by tunneling around a wall in a way that even the game’s creators had never imagined. At the end of several hours of first playing a game, with no coaching from the DeepMind creators, the algorithms, called deep reinforcement machine learning, could beat humans in half of the 49 Atari video games they mastered.

The ultimate success of AI is not due to journal papers, blogs, press releases, forecasts, corporate acquisitions, speculation, or promises. Success is measured by reduction to practice.

The machine learned the game from scratch, with no coach. The AI followed the fixed rules, not the millennia of accepted cultural norms.

It didn’t take into account the 3000 year old traditions and conventions of the game.

It didn’t accept the narrative of how to properly play.

It wasn’t held back my limiting beliefs.

Part of why predicting the ending to our AI [artificial intelligence] story is so difficult is because this isn’t just a story about machines. It’s also a story about human beings, people with free wills that allows them to make their own choices and to shape their own destinies. Our AI future will be created by us, and it will reflect the choices we make and the actions we take.

For AI.
Against AI slop.

Within a period of 20 years, AI has gone from “it’s an extremely human move” described by world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1996 to “it’s not a human move” opined by Go grandmaster Fan Hui in 2016. There will come a time when humans can no longer explain the decision-making process of a superintelligent computer.

In an age where all skills will be done by AI, what’s left will be the ability to handle uncertainty and rejection.

You’ll still be rewarded for courage to take risk and the ability able to handle criticism.

Cowards will still lose no matter what they have at their fingertips.

One of the most interesting (and also frightening) things about AI is how difficult it is to predict what will happen. My kids ask me what's going to happen, and all I can say is that there will be huge changes, and I can't predict what they'll be.

This is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines. You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots.

Can you imagine the elation that comes from beating a world champion at the game you’ve devoted your whole life to mastering? AlphaGo did just that, but it took no pleasure in its success, felt no happiness from winning, and had no desire to hug a loved one after its victory.

The number one way to protect your career from AI is to be the most aggressive user of AI in your field.

RUN AT IT.

Humans evolve with their tools. Keep evolving.

Aim to be effective, but unpredictable. That is, you want to act in a way that AIs have trouble modeling or imitating. Being unpredictable makes you irreplaceable.

[Berkeley, Professor Hubert Dreyfus] always contended … for very philosophical and biological reasons … [AI was] never going to be able to do what a human being could do, but they could achieve mediocrity as a simulation.