CapitalistImperialistPig

The toughest game, the one that emphasized human intuition, seems to be gone. Google's AI machine, AlphaGo crushed the best human again today, and it wasn't even close. Lee Se-dol, the best human player in the world, and plausibly the best human player ever, went down again and this time nobody could find significant mistakes in his play. From the New Scientist: In the minutes after today’s match ended, Jackson said AlphaGo’s flawless play left him in shock. “Things that looked questionable in hindsight turned out to be correct. That’s its hallmark.” At yesterday’s post-game press conference, Lee looked shell-shocked. Today he seemed resigned. One reporter asked what AlphaGo’s weaknesses are? Lee laughed: “Well, I guess I lost the game because I wasn’t able to find out.” This is a huge milestone for artificial intelligence. The methods and techniques which conquered the best humans in chess had proven hopelessly impotent against go. One of the most shocking things is ...

I was doing some laundry this morning, when my Roomba awoke to begin her daily chore. She started buzzing around, trying to vacuum up my feet and nearly tripping me, so I addressed her with a mild imprecation and a shove with my foot. Afterwards, I thought about comparing myself to the guy in Ex Machina who routinely abuses his robot servant/mistress. First they get inside our heads.

Via Brad DeLong , Zynep Tufekci in the NYT Sunday Review: CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — THE machine hums along, quietly scanning the slides, generating Pap smear diagnostics, just the way a college-educated, well-compensated lab technician might. A robot with emotion-detection software interviews visitors to the United States at the border. In field tests, this eerily named “embodied avatar kiosk” does much better than humans in catching those with invalid documentation. Emotional-processing software has gotten so good that ad companies are looking into “mood-targeted” advertising, and the government of Dubai wants to use it to scan all its closed-circuit TV feeds. Yes, the machines are getting smarter, and they’re coming for more and more jobs. Not just low-wage jobs, either. Today, machines can process regular spoken language and not only recognize human faces, but also read their expressions. They can classify personality types, and have started being able to carry out conversations wi...