
Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence - apsec112
https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2016/05/03/preparing-future-artificial-intelligence
======
paulsutter
This level of hype reminds me of the AI winter. Concerned that public interest
hits a peak and then a few months later disillusion sets in and AI becomes a
discredited failure in the public's eye, since even rapid progress moves
slower than an election or typical news cycle.

~~~
kordless
At this point, I really don't think our government has any idea how to deal
with what is coming.

~~~
Aelinsaar
Our government doesn't know how to deal with what happened a couple of decades
ago, technologically speaking; a couple of decades _at least_.

~~~
themartorana
Well, except for those pesky NSA and DARPA agencies, to name just two of many,
that have access to technology you haven't even dreamed of yet.

Congress might be full of idiots or smart people trying to make you believe
they're idiots, but don't for a moment think the federal government as a whole
is technologically stunted.

~~~
bogomipz
Certainly not but consider the level of dysfunction and complete lack of
interdepartment cooperation. We have the NSA actively hacking other nation-
states and our own private sector and then we have an FBI that resets an
icloud password preventing them from getting a backup of data they desperately
needed.

~~~
mirimir
The NSA hacks anyone who seems interesting. But that, arguably, is their job.
As they see it, anyway. The FBI isn't so high-tech, for sure. But they get
help, eventually.

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Animats
From the press release: _" In education, AI has the potential to help teachers
customize instruction for each student’s needs."_

Does anybody actually do that? Most "online education" still seems to be
canned lectures. There was work on this from the 1960s to the 1990s, but
efforts seem to have stalled.[1] There are drill-and-practice systems, but
they're really just workbooks with automatic scoring.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_tutoring_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_tutoring_system)

~~~
dvanduzer
There's a hip startup downtown working on something just like that.[0]

Will these systems be any better than an automatic scoring system with spaced
repetition? Well. More fundamentally, what are a student's needs? Sesame
Street and other organizations[1] have known for a long time that the most
"engaged" learners also happen to be having fun.

The only particularly controversial thing in that quote is the word
_teachers_. Left relatively unsupervised, the kids today will voraciously seek
youtube videos to teach themselves how to make a Turing machine in Minecraft.
What an intelligent tutor really needs to be able to do, is pay attention to
what a student is _curious_ about. Ubiquitous sensors will probably play into
some of the new efforts. But the biggest leaps will come from systems that
help kids learn from each other, together.

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lG4xBoEgZo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lG4xBoEgZo)

[1] [http://www.instituteofplay.org](http://www.instituteofplay.org)

~~~
alphydan
> Left relatively unsupervised, the kids today will voraciously seek youtube
> videos to teach themselves how to make a Turing machine in Minecraft

I am currently teaching middle school and high school and I think nothing is
further from the truth. A few kids do, maybe most children of HN's parents,
... but most kids don't care at all about programming, science or building
anything.

It's a lot harder to do differentiation than it sounds. After 10 min of hour-
of-code many are bored out of their mind, say they don't like video games and
want to do something else (acting, paint _without code_, do sports, take
selfies, gossip, read a novel, etc ...).

~~~
dvanduzer
I don't mean to say that every child shows a natural interest in programming.
But I didn't have access to YouTube 30 years ago when I was first learning to
program. And even with the resources available, we were the privileged few who
were able to pursue our curiosity.

Teenagers congregated in the same place, away from their parents? That's the
age when humans tend to get much more curious about other humans. You could
have them code on paper, and reason with each other while _looking_ at each
other.

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desireco42
With all the people scared from AI, I can imagine if they would replace
politicians and government officials with AI in just small part of the
country, after the initial surprise, within weeks satisfaction would be
through the roof and we would have AI running the country.

~~~
kordless
For software based AI to be successful at what it does, it must compete. If it
does not compete well, it will suck, and the government will suck just as bad.
Government, at least the way we've been thinking about it thus far, will have
to change for AI to be good at it.

~~~
SapphireSun
For a software based AI to be successful, it must be good at convincing people
to go along with it and balancing sometimes paradoxical concerns from the
public. I think efficiency is the least of its worries.

~~~
taneq
I think that if given a chance, current AI would be terrifyingly effective at
maximizing public support while minimizing accountability. It seems like the
sort of big-data problem that's a perfect fit for modern machine learning
methods.

~~~
themartorana
I was just talking to a friend about this. RNNs are rather brilliant in their
infancy. Imagine when they grow up.

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w_t_payne
AI is, at the end of the day, just software. We have the intellectual tools to
enable us to make high quality software and systems, stemming from industrial
experience stretching back three quarters of a century. We need to free that
knowledge; ossified in dozens of mil-std and similar institutional documents:
re-institutionalising it in the public domain, making free tools and systems
available to support the (public) quality processes that a distributed,
heterogeneous, partially open-source future AI requires.

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erubin
The folks here commenting about entrenched power structures should remember
that Ed Felten (who put his name on the release) is not a career bureaucrat at
all.

~~~
randcraw
True. As FTC CTO, his able past work in privacy and data security was
certainly relevant to traditional FTC interests. As Deputy US CTO, I think his
agenda has broadened.

There's already a ton of gov't interest/activity on surveillance and security
issues, mostly via the military services and adjuncts. I assume this
initiative ain't more of that.

This announcement seems to presage greater federal gov't interest and
involvement in how computing might be used toward _less_ defensive/clandestine
ends, especially in governance (social good), control, and safety, as well as
legal implications -- adding AI as the means to serving gov't ends, so to
speak.

If so, great. I'd love to see greater OPEN use of computing in government,
especially in gathering unbiased metrics and making better use of them to
evaluate the outcome of changes in policy.

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clarkmoody
How wonderful would it be to replace many government jobs with AI ;-)

~~~
chubot
I suspect we've already replaced 100,000+ jobs in call centers with AI -- you
know the menu system that you get before you talk to somebody. (You might not
think of that as AI now, but that's "success" \-- 20 years ago it undoubtedly
was AI.)

I'm not all that excited about interacting with more AI.

~~~
varjag
We had phone menu systems 20 years ago and they most certainly weren't "AI".
I'm actually not sure they were considered as such at any point since DTMF was
devised.

~~~
chubot
I'm not talking about just a menu system; I'm talking about the system that
asks you what you're calling about, does voice recognition, NLP, and then
directs you do a part of the menu.

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bogomipz
I really hate politico speak. What does this really mean?

"to spur public dialogue on artificial intelligence and machine learning and
identify challenges and opportunities related to this emerging technology."

~~~
PeterisP
It's a quite clear statement (though in a niche jargon) - such language means
that they intend to dedicate resources to organize some events/discussion
panels about the topic, and possibly even to some research grants.

The only unclear thing about politico speak generally is that is not clear if
they will do X or if they just wanted to publicly claim that they'll do X for
some PR or voter support, with no intention to actually do it.

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bsbechtel
The idea of a computer deciding whether someone is guilty or not is a scary
prospect. This is a bandwagon I'm not so sure the government should be so
eager to jump on.

~~~
comboy
Computer program makes a decision based on the set of rules it was programmed
with.

We have a law to make humans work exactly the same way. Law is a set of rules
that say who is guilty and who's not. Only that humans are bad at being
objective:
[http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/04/1...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/04/11/justice-
is-served-but-more-so-after-lunch-how-food-breaks-sway-the-decisions-of-
judges/)

~~~
ajnin
Laws are rules but they are not enough on their own to make decisions. They
are written with the implicit cultural background and the intent of the humans
who wrote them. Plenty of case law is around determining what the authors
actually meant when they made a law.

As long as humans write the law, and that there is the notion of a sovereign
people, human judges should decide how to interpret and apply the law.

~~~
zardo
Justice tends to be harsher on a hungry stomach.

I think we should strive for well written laws that don't require so much
interpretation.

[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lunchtime-
leniency...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lunchtime-leniency/)

------
exit
they should discuss a universal basic income to counter the pervasive
unemployment which ai will bring with it.

~~~
qaq
Given election cycles and how expansive it will be to deal with this problem,
none will address this until the effects are strongly felt by avg. voter.

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stephenhess
Love this but they're really not holding one of these in the Bay Area? -_-

