François Chollet

Fringe conspiracy videos and weird kids cartoon mashups aren't the problem. The problem is this:

https://medium.com/@francois.chollet/what-worries-me-about-ai-ed9df072b704

Everyone carries a set of basic assumptions about how the human system works, like what's acceptable public behavior, how the government should be run (which affects who you vote for), expectations about how certain people will act, etc.

These assumptions are based on the information we take in each day, like articles read, images viewed/scrolled past, and so on. We ARE our media diets, whether we want to admit it or not.

Our opinions are formed slowly, they change slowly, and there are several well known "bugs" in human thought patterns that make us tend to prefer an echo chamber and reject information that doesn't line up with held beliefs.

AI enables fine-tuned control of exactly what assumptions people gain and maintain. What happens if YouTube silently starts recommending PragerU videos to all the millions of high schoolers that match the "impressionable" profile? What would that do to the basic expectations of the citizenry about what the "right" kind of government and tax system is?

What if the platform was used to convince everyone that annual slavery reparations must be made in perpetuity?

No one wants to admit that ads work on them, but we all know they work in general. So how much of what you know is true, was fed to you? In a world where everything we consume runs through relatively…

“Intelligence is situational — there is no such thing as general intelligence. Your brain is one piece in a broader system which includes your body, your environment, other humans, and culture as a whole. […] Currently, our environment, not our brain, is acting as the bottleneck to our intelligence.”

“Human intelligence is largely externalized, contained not in our brain but in our civilization. We are our tools — our brains are modules in a cognitive system much larger than ourselves. A system that is already self-improving, and has been for a long time.”

“Recursively self-improving systems, because of contingent bottlenecks, diminishing returns, and counter-reactions […], cannot achieve exponential progress in practice. Empirically, they tend to display linear or sigmoidal improvement.”

“Recursive intelligence expansion is already happening — at the level of our civilization. It will keep happening in the age of AI, and it progresses at a roughly linear pace.“

François Chollet

https://medium.com/@francois.chollet/the-impossibility-of-intelligence-explosion-5be4a9eda6ec

Interesting to learn about Dreyfus, I was aware of this line of thought from Francois Chollet's article. He is the creator of Keras and some pretty advanced research papers in the nature of intelligence.

He states that the environment and embodiment are crucial for the development of intelligence. Even for humans, 'our environment puts a hard limit on our individual intelligence'.

https://medium.com/@francois.chollet/the-impossibility-of-intelligence-explosion-5be4a9eda6ec

The implausibility of intelligence explosion (2017)

..

In essence we need simulators on par with reality to train human-like intelligence. BTW, take a look at ThreeDWorld, just came out: 'A High-Fidelity, Multi-Modal Platform for Interactive Physical Simulation'. We're getting closer, and AI scientists are aware of the environment problem.

http://www.threedworld.org/