Google Deep Mind & AIs - Part II

Hello everyone, in this article I'll quickly explain what Google Deep Mind AI capable of doing? How they use their reinforcement technology, what are uses for us from AIs, and our future with AIs. if you haven't read my previous article here is the link. Enjoy !

In the previous article  I have talked about the origin of the Deep Mind Technologies, its' goals & how does a Deep Mind AI works. I have said that they are trying to build powerful general-purpose algorithms. Let's talk about this general-purpose term.

General-purpose Algorithms

What about this general-purpose term? What is that actually mean? Well because of the machine learns from its’ own experience and data it can perform well across a wide variety of tasks straight out of the box.

Let me show you this video. Watch the videos and then continue reading.

🔺Let’s watch the system in action learning how to play breakout and space invaders. And remember machine didn’t have any foreknowledge as to what task it was going to complete. It had to figure out how to do everything only from its’ own experience.

Deep Mind AI was losing at its first time in playing space invaders. AI was controlling the green rocket in the game to shoot space invaders. The researchers let AI to play the game overnight (8 Hours) on a normal computer and when they come back in the morning, it’s in superhuman level as you can see on the video. So now the machine can play space invaders better than any human can. As you can see on the video the final shot is kind of predictive shot of where the final space invader will be in few seconds.🔻

But the cool thing is after understating how to play a few games it will be able to transfer this knowledge and understanding across more games. At the moment, Deep Mind is currently playing games from 1970s & 80s but work is currently being on more complex 3D games such as Doom which appeared in early ‘90s. So, what could general-purpose Al be useful?

We’d love to use these types of algorithms for things like health care & science to improve the speed of breakthroughs in those areas by helping human experts archive more 

                                                                                                       -by Demis Hassabisin

General-purpose AI actually could be huge. It can be thought of as another emerging science much like Newtonian physics laid the groundwork for technologies such as rockets. A science found in general-purpose digital neural networks that use reinforcement learning could lay the groundwork for unimaginable things in the near future.

So I'm almost at the end of the post but there is one pressing question.

Should We Be Worried?

In the thousands of years of meaningful civilisation, our modern existence right now is an anomaly. We’ve overcome the limits of the nature with technology that helps us facilitate such a life style but artificial intelligence is different. The reason being AI is the first thing human have created that tends to function in a way that we can’t predict. So, should we worry.? My belief is fear of the unknown is mostly what drives the hysteria that arises form AI anxiety. 

The website ‘Wait but Why’ has fairly interesting & comprehensive look at AI. We don’t have time to explore it all but the article does raise an interesting point. Though it’s about how human have an inability to perceive exponential change. For long time people aren’t going to take AI seriously & it would seems like progress is very slow but then suddenly it could overtake our wildest expectation. One of the method that AI could use to achieve this outcome is by giving itself an ability for self-improvement thus following the law of accelerating returns. Stephen Hawking & Elon Musk have both shown their reservations towards AI but others like Paul Allen ( Co-Founder of Microsoft) have different views.

If you can forget about the movie Terminator for second, there is a possibility that AI could be man’s greatest aid fixing fundamental problems on our planet & allowing us to have technology or infrastructure that could have otherwise taken a century, if we try to figure it out ourselves. On the other hand there is a possibility that AI could be malicious and would outwit us but at this stage we really just don’t know. This is a story for another day. So at the moment I’m not worried but cautiously optimistic.

As for Deep Mind one of their conditions after Google’s acquisitions was that they establish an AI ethic board. I think most of us would agree that’s a prudent decision.

Conclusion 

All in all, we may be at a historic point, a critical point in artificial intelligence. The could see deep neural learning & general-purpose AI in out smartphones & computers. Some say that we might even have to start thinking of a whole new economy. After decades of trying to build smarter computers & algorithms it turns out that the best blueprint was in our heads the whole time - the Human Brain. So naturally our minds are capable of so much, it just depends on how we use it.