AIs won’t really rule us, they will be very interested in us:
Juergen Schmidhuber
Jacob Koshy
DECEMBER 20, 2017 00:15 IST
UPDATED: DECEMBER 19, 2017 22:27 IST
The pioneering computer scientist prophesies that machines smarter than humans
will emerge in the next two decades
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12/20/2017 AIs won’t really rule us, they will be very interested in us: Juergen Schmidhuber - The Hindu
Juergen Schmidhuber, 54, is a computer scientist who works on Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Considered to be one of the pioneers in improving neural networks, his techniques, the best
known being Long Short-Term Memory, have been incorporated in speech translation
software in smartphones. In this interview conducted in Berlin, he speaks of developments in
AI, why the fear of job loss due to AI is unfounded, and his work. Excerpts:
How impressed are you by AlphaGo, a creation of Google DeepMind, that now
beats human Go champions?
DeepMind is a company that was heavily shaped by some of my students. Shane (Legg), one of
the co-founders, was among those who worked in my lab. It’s great that you can play Go better
than any human. On the other hand, the basic techniques (in making AlphaGo) date back to
the previous millennium. In the ’90s, there was a self-teaching neural network by IBM that
learned to play backgammon by playing against itself. So board games are kind of simple in
the sense that they can use a ‘feed-forward’ network. (These are layers of neural networks
arranged to mimic neurons in the brain. The programe makes decisions based on how
information moves up these layers.) There are no feedback layers and they cannot ‘learn’
sequences. These principles were developed when computers were 100,000 times more
expensive than today. It’s great that Go (like chess), which is so popular in Asia, is among those
that machines play better.
finger muscles. Initially all connections are random and the network, perceiving all this,
outputs rubbish. There’s a difference between the rubbish that comes out and the translated
sentence that should have come out. We measure the difference and translate it into a change
of all these connection strengths so that they become ‘better connections’ and learn through
the Long Short-Term Memory algorithm to adjust internal connections to understand the
structure of, say, Polish, and learn to translate between them.
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12/20/2017 AIs won’t really rule us, they will be very interested in us: Juergen Schmidhuber - The Hindu
Interestingly, people have predicted similar things for decades — for example, in industrial
robots. Volkswagen and other companies had hundreds of millions of workers who lost jobs to
robots. But look at countries with a high per capita presence of industrial robots — Japan,
South Korea, Germany. They all have low unemployment rates. This was because lots of new,
unanticipated jobs came up. Who could have thought there’s a job where people make money
being YouTube bloggers? Or selling Apps? Some make a lot of money, some don’t, but it’s still a
lot of new jobs. It’s easy to see what jobs will be lost but harder to predict what new ones will
emerge. Societies must think of alternative ways to adjust to these new realities. There was a
referendum on universal basic income in Switzerland. It failed, but still got 30% of the vote.
You wait another 20 years and it could be 55%.
Do you think it will be possible for AI systems to ‘learn’ ethical and moral
codes?
Anything that can be taught via demonstration can be taught to an AI in principle. How are we
teaching our kids to be valuable members of society? We let them play around, be curious and
explore the world. We punish them, for instance, when they take the lens and burn ants. And
they learn to adopt our ethical and moral values. The more situations they are exposed to, the
closer they come to understanding values. We cannot prove or predict that they are always
going to do the right thing, especially if they are smarter than the parents. Einstein’s parents
couldn’t predict what he would do, and some of the things he discovered can be used for evil
purposes. But this is a known problem. In an artificial neural network, it’s easier to see, in
hindsight, what went wrong. For instance, in a car crash, we can find which neuron influenced
the other. If it’s a huge network, it will take some time, but it’s possible. With humans you
can’t do this. You can only ask them and very often, they will lie. Artificial systems, in that
sense, are under control.
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12/20/2017 AIs won’t really rule us, they will be very interested in us: Juergen Schmidhuber - The Hindu
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