
A Roadmap Towards Machine Intelligence - vonnik
http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.08130
======
grondilu
Seems like the authors do not consider how safe such a system would be. Yet it
seems to me that a machine whose main goals would be to learn things about the
world so that it can communicate with humans and answer their questions, is
possibly very dangerous. While reading the first section I kept thinking about
this blog entry from Paul Tyma, "How Artificial Intelligence Will Really Kill
Us All":

[http://paultyma.blogspot.fr/2015/10/how-artificial-
intellige...](http://paultyma.blogspot.fr/2015/10/how-artificial-intelligence-
will-really.html)

~~~
vdaniuk
Mutually assured destruction doctrine is possibly very dangerous, too. Also:
Biological weapons, destruction of rainforest ecosystems, ocean acidification,
etc etc. Why these discussions don't consider opportunity costs of NOT
developing AI as fast as possible?

Most people live in appalling, inhuman conditions:

$100 monthly income puts a person in the top 52.40% earners worldwide. [0]
$300 monthly income puts a person in the top 28.35% earners worldwide. [0]

Human intelligence is obviously suboptimal for solving global problems,
perhaps AI will do better.

[0] [http://www.globalrichlist.com/](http://www.globalrichlist.com/)

~~~
logingone
_$100 monthly income puts a person in the top 52.40% earners worldwide._

That's misleading without considering numerous other variables - cost of
things? It seems to me to be the kind of statement aimed at deceitfully
triggering emotions, by the likes of charities. Charities are like police -
there for good reason, but along with the good intentions they have a slightly
seedy side. Of the countries I've lived in, the one where I was paid least had
the highest standard of living.

~~~
vdaniuk
Actually, it's other way around. Your comment is misleading and your
intentions have not-so-slightly seedy side. Are you really attacking a
_concept_ of charity organization in a capitalistic world?

Calculation methodology is available on the linked page:

"For currency conversion we use Purchasing Power Parity Dollars (PPP$) in
order to take into account the difference in cost of living between countries;
PPP$ are also less susceptible to short term fluctuations."

~~~
logingone
"there for good reason"

------
denniskane
I will do everything in my power to ensure that corporate-backed, ivory-tower,
anti-philosophical, techno-enthusiast academics do not figure out some kind of
formula to dominate the world of human affairs with their so-called "super
intelligent machines". I'm not saying that this specific research group falls
under this umbrella, but they are all credited as being associated with
Facebook AI research, so take it FWIW. I do believe that a certain Elon Musk
would back me up here:

"I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to
guess like what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that. So we
need to be very careful with the artificial intelligence. Increasingly
scientists think there should be some regulatory oversight maybe at the
national and international level, just to make sure that we don't do something
very foolish. With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all
those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water,
it's like yeah he's sure he can control the demon. Didn't work out."

The classes of algorithms that are meant to directly interact with people in a
way that appears authentically human must obviously be highly regulated, and I
certainly agree that these kinds of regulations should be on par with
international nuclear oversight bodies.

It is always important to give end users the option to figure out for
themselves how the algorithms that they interact with actually function. In
order to encourage this kind of thing, I have been working on an online,
distributed operating system concept for the past several years, and one of
the apps is a simple, "Hello World" kind of an AI that goes by the name,
Bertie.

I am working on making the underlying system code (which is mostly JavaScript)
completely editable by end users. They will be able to test out their edits in
an application window inside of the web page, and will be able to share their
changes with each other over the distributed, web-based filesystem that I am
actively developing.

If you are running Chrome, you can try out the OS by going to [https://nacl-
pg.appspot.com/](https://nacl-pg.appspot.com/). To see the AI app, just click
on the Applications folder, and then click on Bertie's face. Alternatively, if
you are feeling lazy, just click on the following link and the Bertie app will
automatically open: [https://nacl-
pg.appspot.com/desk?open=Bertie](https://nacl-
pg.appspot.com/desk?open=Bertie).

------
simonh
I'm not quite sure why this made it to the front page. It's just a wish list
of things they would like an AI to be able to do.

~~~
hiddencost
They're some of the most prominent people in their field, and they are setting
a major direction for Facebook ai research. So this is the Facebook road map.
Also, because everyone is focused on ML, the move bank to people trying to
solve AI is a big deal. Other major researchers are saying similar things

~~~
simonh
Ok, good explanation. Thanks.

------
tajen
Outline:

1\. Introduction

2\. Desiderata for an intelligent machine

2.1 Ability to communicate

2.2 Ability to learn

3\. A simulated ecosystem to educate communication-based intelligent machines

3.1 High-level description of the ecosystem (Agents, Interface channels,
Reward, Incremental structure, Time off for exploration, Evaluation)

3.2 Examples from early stages of the simulation (Preliminaries and notation,
The Learner learns to issue Environment commands, Associating language to
actions, Learning to generalize, Understanding higher-level orders,
Interactive communication, Algorithmic knowledge)

3.3 Interacting with the trained intelligent machine

4\. Towards the development of intelligent machines

4.1 Types of learning

4.2 Long-term memory and compositional learning skills

4.3 Computational properties of intelligent machines

5\. Related ideas

6\. Conclusion

I'm thinking the winner might not be the company who makes huge progress
towards MI, it could be the one who provides the ecosystem. For example, in
the trend of Siri-type chatbots, Slack is very well positioned to reap most of
the benefits even without doing much research in AI, because they could get a
commission on the platform usage.

~~~
JoshTriplett
If we successfully create actual machine intelligence, with the ability to
learn and communicate, then the "winner" hardly matters; it only matters
whether they programmed it correctly or not. Any scenario that has a "winner"
means they didn't.

------
varelse
"And bingo! I get to press the button again, woohoo!"

Wonder what _the other button_ does...

On the bright side, they bucked the trend and cited Terry Winograd's research
from the 1970s instead of pretending they made this idea all up by themselves.

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

------
karmacondon
Lot of interesting ideas and research collected in one place. It looks like
the high concept pitch for this is, "chatbot that can query the internet"

~~~
mziel
So basically Siri?

