
Barack Obama on A.I., Autonomous Cars, and the Future of Humanity - gflandre
https://www.wired.com/2016/10/president-obama-mit-joi-ito-interview
======
pashariger
I don't know about you, but I'm very thankful that we have a president that
can understand and intelligently talk about these issues (rather than thinking
it's all just black magic).

~~~
downandout
I'm curious...which President are you saying thought it was "all just black
magic"? Let's also remember that Obama is the man that unapologetically
expanded covert/illegal surveillance programs to an unprecedented scale,
directly costing American technology companies billions of dollars in sales.
I'd say his actions reflect neither intelligence nor understanding of the tech
industry.

~~~
lsadam0
One of the two major candidates for president responds to tech focused
questions with some ramblings about 'the cyber part of security' being
impossible and how good his ten year old son is with a computer. That's quite
the contrast against someone like Obama.

~~~
boona
... and the other sets up her own email private server which got hacked by a
[taxi driver]([https://www.rt.com/news/362417-hacker-guccifer-clinton-
roman...](https://www.rt.com/news/362417-hacker-guccifer-clinton-romania/)).
As intelligent as he can be, if he was able to get in, it's easy to imagine
that any world government had access to all information that came her way.

~~~
unprepare
I dont know if Russia Today is a source I would choose, given that the
counterclaim is that it was the russian state behind the hack...

~~~
totalZero
_Argumentum ad hominem._

RT is state-supported, but it is only one of a number of sources that all
reported pretty much the same thing. Guccifer, who was an unemployed taxi
driver when arrested, led to the disclosure of HRC's server, and claims to
have hacked it "like, twice."

[http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/guccifer-hacker-who-
says...](http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/guccifer-hacker-who-says-he-
breached-clinton-server-pleads-guilty-n580186)

[http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/05/04/romanian-
hacker-g...](http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/05/04/romanian-hacker-
guccifer-breached-clinton-server-it-was-easy.html)

[http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/hacker-guccifer-i-got-inside-
hill...](http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/hacker-guccifer-i-got-inside-hillary-
clintons-server)

^^^ There. Mainstream, American-as-apple-pie sources.

------
msvan
What does Hacker News think about AI? Is it real this time, or are we in for
another winter? I'm seeing a lot of grand claims, and it certainly seems like
there are plenty of applications, but I'm still not totally convinced that it
will turn the entire economy upside down.

Given the enormous amount of press, tweets, blog posts, conferences, degree
programs, seminars and interviews popping up it seems like there has to be
something more than just hot air here. Still, the most outrageous predictions
are hinged on breakthroughs in unsupervised learning happening. Taking the
pessimistic view on science, what if we don't get there?

~~~
imh
Like they say in the article, there's general AI (think sci-fi computers with
minds) and specialized AI (think good old fashioned statistical models, but
applied to more things and super effective).

Specialized AI (and I hate calling it AI) is coming along really quickly.
We're getting better at it in existing fields and learning to apply it to new
fields. More than anything, we just have so much data on everything now, and
computers are pretty powerful now, so even old school models are finding tons
of new applications.

Generalized AI is a different story. We are a few really major breakthroughs
away. We aren't even 100% sure if they are possible, much less understanding
how to do them. These aren't the normal slowly-chip-away-at-it breakthroughs,
these are things we have no clue about. With something like that, who can
really say how far we are? It could be 5 years, it could be never.

~~~
darawk
Honest question: Why do you think that generalized and specialized AI are
distinct things? Is it not possible that general AI is a specialized AI
applied over the field of specialized AI generation?

~~~
mlechha
What people mean by generalized and special AI is not consistent in the field,
but everyone agrees that the current brand of AI driven by statistical
learning techniques and large scale neural networks is far from explaining how
even the simplest of nervous systems work. The key obstacle is adaptation.
Several people believe that they've more or less solved the recognition
problem. However, adaptation is a totally different thing. There are no tools
in the current AI toolkit that we can use to make a robot that can go out
unsupervised in the real world, do something useful and come back safely.
Whereas even the Nematode C. elegans with only 302 neurons is remarkably
flexible, it can forage for food, remember cues that prediction food, manage
food resources, get away from danger or noxious stimuli etc. This allows it to
survive quite well in a world that is constantly changing in unpredictable
ways. This is the kind of intelligence that proponents of so called general AI
want, and I agree we have a couple of major breakthroughs away.

~~~
squirreltalk
And we have a complete wiring diagram for C. elegans, and no clue how it does
any of the things you talked about. So, yeah, general AI is really far off.

~~~
schrodinger
I have no idea what I'm talking about. But why couldn't we build some sort of
bio-computer hybrid system around a simple form of life, like "C. elegans" but
augmented with traditional CPUs?

~~~
mlechha
That's another option and there are people who do that
[https://blog.inf.ed.ac.uk/insectrobotics/](https://blog.inf.ed.ac.uk/insectrobotics/).

------
gefh
I wish people would stop bringing up the trolley problem as somehow relevant
to self driving cars. In any situation,a car is going to brake as hard as
possible while maintaining control, and only serve if there's no way to stop
and a clear space. Other than that, a good enough interview that I can't see
taking place again next presidential term.

~~~
greeneggs
The trolley problem is just an extreme example, that people can easily
understand and think about. Less extreme versions of it occur all the time.

For example, say you are driving along a road, passing a bicyclist. You'd like
to give the cyclist more room, but there's an oncoming car in the lane next to
you. How much room do you give? At exactly what threshold do you decide to
wait to pass the cyclist? What if the cyclist is a kid?

All the time, the driver has to make decisions that trade off the safety of
multiple parties, from the car's occupants to other drivers, to bicyclists and
pedestrians. In reality, these will almost always be statistical tradeoffs,
and usually comparing very small probabilities of accidents, but they are
still real ethical decisions that have to be made.

~~~
imtringued
If there is an oncoming car you don't overtake.

~~~
Scarblac
If the road is really broad and there is plenty of space for the cyclist and
you without getting close to the lane the oncoming car is in, of course you
overtake.

The interesting case is in between.

------
harry8
I like Barack and this is not a party political statement when I say I am
about as interested in what he thinks about tech as Jim Carter, George Bush
Jnr & Snr or Bill Clinton. Now he's not likely to affect much in the way of
policy there are just more insightful people to read and listen to so what
we're left with is a bit of celebrity worship, which is fine with me as long
as I acknowledge it as such.

What the two possible next presidents think is more interesting simply because
they may affect policy, regardless of their being more or less insightful than
B.O.

------
notliketherest
"But it also has some downsides that we’re gonna have to figure out in terms
of not eliminating jobs. It could increase inequality. It could suppress
wages."

No doubt that advances in technology have always done away with jobs. We're
almost to the point at which the biggest blue collar industry (truck drivers)
is about to be wiped out by self driving trucks. What I'm concerned about is
the government stifling innovation such as driverless trucks to retain those
jobs, or some sort of regulation that stifles the technology's potential. What
is the alternative?

~~~
pmyjavec
Why aren't you "concerned" about people losing their jobs?

The alternatives are tech companies start to pay their taxes and humans start
to use tech to care for one another, genuinely, not just wealthy Silicon
Valley types trying to make buckets because their "entitled" to do so and
pretend it's all in the name of progress.

The idea of the Internet and Automation were exciting to me as it was about
liberation and decentralisation, from where I'm sitting it's turning into a
bit of a joke, it's just empowering those who own the tech and their not
giving a whole lot back right now.

Not attacking you personally, but this, attitude of "don't worry, those people
who will be made redundant will be fine" thing is a myth, they will suffer and
so will their families.

~~~
zaroth
Consider a broader timeline. It used to take humans over 500 hours of labor
spinning, weaving, and sewing to produce a single shirt.

Automating textile production has "put more people out of work" than computers
_ever_ will. Do you think for a second we would ever want to go back to how it
was? Do you ask the inventor of the sewing machine how they will start giving
back?

These inventions free humanity for more worthwhile endeavors. Nobody will look
back after the next great transition and wish we just had more humans driving
trucks around the country. It would be utter lunacy. And the people who
created the self-driving machines will be seen as liberators of human
potential and ushers of a new era of productivity.

So it is, same as it ever was.

~~~
brokenmasonjars
I often feel what will replace jobs is people just going to school and earning
a PhD or two or three. It'll certainly destroy their idle time of unemployment
and make them and everyone else - the collective a whole lot smarter. Perhaps
subspecialties emerge with dual-PhDs.

I often hear that not everyone is capable of getting a PhD, but then again if
we take the same energy and dedication of a career and push it over into
education I think plenty have the capability. I often consider myself exhibit
A so to speak since I got my GED and was working three low end jobs (line
cook, gas station attendant and construction worker) until I bounced out of
the workforce and pursued my PhD in Public Policy. I'm sort of playing around
with undergrad level math now as I prepare for a second PhD. Seriously think
if I could manage at least one PhD anyone else could easily manage 2 or 3.

~~~
jmickey
OK, but is there a demand for so many PhDs? Having a PhD doesn't really
guarantee a good income now. It will be worse once everyone has one.

This makes sense, if there is some sort of government sponsorship or grants,
but providing these to all people would mean drastically higher taxes, and
companies are opposed to those.

~~~
brokenmasonjars
It's not about the demand so much in my view. Post graduation, people move
onto research. The site Innocentive comes to mind sort of in regards to
developing a form of compensation. Rewards for discovery. Nature had a
partnership with that company for a bit but I believe they went separate ways.

I think the funding issue can be figured out without higher taxes or at the
very least without absurdly higher taxes. Perhaps one idea would be to train
people to invest through grades 9-12, have some sort of basic minimum income
which isn't rich but isn't below poverty either; encourage people to invest
with those funds and use profits to pay for college etc. I also sort of align
with Jaron Lanier's concept of paying people for their data usage; but built
onto that maybe so that it includes both government and private companies
usage of that data; individuals don't see those funds until 18, from which
they are encourage to go to school. As those funds are held they are invested
like social security maybe? None of these ideas are really all that worked out
just yet, just responding to you is all.

------
zanny
Rawr rah, mandatory link to Humans Need Not Apply:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU)

I wonder if President Obama has seen it yet, because while his wording
obviously has to be steeped in establishment rhetoric, its not a matter of
"if" the automation comes for our jobs, but that we are already dealing, will
continue to deal, and how we will deal in the future with the reality that for
decades now automation of varying degrees has been eroding the market for
human mental labor.

It is exactly like climate change. It is not a future problem. It is a now
problem, but the progress is so slow and the symptoms variable enough you
don't obviously see the underlying trend already taking place, so nobody
regards it with the urgency it deserves. Social stratification, growing wealth
inequality, growing partisanship, growing radicalism, and growing
unemployability is already expanding _globally_ in response to the ongoing
obsolescence of the human mind. The first step is to recognize that it is
happening.

------
haalcion2
> Ito: I generally agree. The only caveat is that there are a few people who
> believe that there is a fairly high-percentage chance that a generalized AI
> will happen in the next 10 years. But the way I look at it is that in order
> for that to happen, we’re going to need a dozen or two different
> breakthroughs. So you can monitor when you think these breakthroughs will
> happen.

> Obama: And you just have to have somebody close to the power cord. [Laughs.]
> Right when you see it about to happen, you gotta yank that electricity out
> of the wall, man.

Do we seriously think that it would be that easy? I think an a "generalized"
AI, if aware of the ability for a human to remove its power and so that as a
bad thing, would not be stopped by unplugging it. By the point you realized
you needed to unplug it, it would have already convinced a human that to help
it spread and it would have found other sources of power.

~~~
GunboatDiplomat
That's kind of handwavy, don't you think? How does an AI, presumably requiring
specialized (and expensive) hardware, simply escape? Further, this requires
humans to be easily hackable by the AI, which is not obviously going to be the
case. Why would human cognition have a built in flaw the AI can exploit to
escape? Imagine a superintelligent person in a cage, a person as smart as an
AI. No matter how clever he is, he's not going to be able to escape that cage
given certain levels of precaution.

If you'd say that the AI will be super-persuasive, persuasive enough to make
humans behave irrationally, I say, maybe, but it's possible to simply use
already irrationally fearful humans as guards to prevent the AI from escaping.

~~~
tdaltonc
I find the scenario in 'Avogadro Corp' pretty reasonable.

------
V-2
> _JOI ITO: This may upset some of my students at MIT, but one of my concerns
> is that it’s been a predominately male gang of kids, mostly white, who are
> building the core computer science around AI, and they’re more comfortable
> talking to computers than to human beings. A lot of them feel that if they
> could just make that science-fiction, generalized AI, we wouldn’t have to
> worry about all the messy stuff like politics and society. They think
> machines will just figure it all out for us._

Why is that a problem that they're mostly white? The interviewer doesn't
bother to elaborate, it's sort of mentioned in passing as if it were something
obvious. To me (a non-American here, mind you) it isn't. Would the
difficulties they mention be alleviated if that wasn't the case? Why? Couldn't
- say - an Asian student fall into a misconception that machines will come up
with answers to all questions? Is it less likely? What substantiates such a
claim?

~~~
Red_Tarsius
I'm trying to stop reading news from US/UK sources. The depth of political
discourse only goes as far as your self-appointed identity. Actions don't
matter anymore.

White people are guilty of colonialism much like Catholic children inherit the
_Original Sin_ , that is, it's a means of control by anti-intellectuals.

I wouldn't support Trump, but the American Left is especially dangerous
because it relies on gender / racial divide to get the most votes. In some
twisted sense, the problem is not supposed to be solved.

Skin color does not make Obama an expert in race relations. If he had said
"... _but one of my concerns is that it’s been a predominately male gang of
kids, mostly_ black, _who are building the core computer science around
AI_..." there would have been riots in the streets. Tim Hunt's joke was taken
out of context and almost ruined his career.

EDIT: To be clear, his _white_ remark was fully intentional.

~~~
bcook
Can you share a link to the Dawkins' out-of-context joke?

~~~
Red_Tarsius
I wrote the comment in a hurry, I meant _Tim Hunt_. Sorry, I'm going to fix
the original post.

On 8 June 2015, during the 2015 World Conference of Science Journalists in
Seoul, at a lunch for female journalists and scientists, Hunt was asked on
short notice to give a toast
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Hunt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Hunt)).
He made a self-deprecating comment and media vultures run with it. He was
shamed out of the Royal Society and UCL.

------
ensiferum
The future of humanity? The few and select Big Corp will own the
infrastructure and technology and employ and sell it to reduce human labor as
much as possible thereby creating massive value increases for the stock
holders and displacing millions of blue collar workers into poverty. (In later
stages also white collar workers). The execs will all be trillionaires and
live off their own walled societies while the rest of us fight for our lives
for tooth and nail. Eventually we can't even have a revolution since the
goverments are owned by the Big Corp, which has manipulated and coerced the
system into activities such as spying on their own citizens on the pretext of
terrorism etc. Any act of revolution will be quickly and swiftly dealt with
immediate force.

------
macns
I was intrigued by this:

 _Part of what makes us human are the kinks. They’re the mutations, the
outliers, the flaws that create art or the new invention, right? We have to
assume that if a system is perfect, then it’s static. And part of what makes
us who we are, and part of what makes us alive, is that we’re dynamic and
we’re surprised._

And then he goes on: _One of the challenges that we’ll have to think about is,
where and when is it appropriate for us to have things work exactly the way
they’re supposed to, without surprises?_

One might argue that in software development things never work exactly the way
they're supposed to.

------
throw2016
I think their discussion on AI and implications was insightful. Their
perspective is much wider, multifaceted and reflects a deeper and more nuanced
perspective of technological and socio-political issues.

I think HN is best when its money or pure tech and tends to be dismissive or
diminish the other stuff and you are left with a sterile unidimensional
discussion.

Its like the gold rush, they can generate the wealth but the harder questions
around politics, economics, social structures and humanity will have to be
done in more 'distant' surroundings less touched by the frenzy of greed and
profit.

------
nohat
Interesting that Obama is particularly concerned with specialized ai for cyber
security/warfare applications. I thought he had a fairly balanced and
knowledgeable viewpoint on these issues, though I think both he and Ito
underestimate the impact and timeline.

Not much to say on the general AI question, but that's understandable.

------
andirk
What was that about "a friar... who is trying to understand Bitcoin
encryption... from the perspective of the Catholics"?

------
jjtheblunt
Barack Obama couldn't figure out how to take a selfie with Bear Grylls with an
iPhone, but people are going to listen to his prognostications on AI? WTF!

------
helthanatos
"we found that most people liked the idea that the driver and the passengers
could be sacrificed to save many people" Understand morals? Probably not...

~~~
ericlavigne
MIT's "moral machine" site presents a set of ethical dilemmas involving
driving so you can explore your own perspective on morality.

[http://jalopnik.com/this-mit-online-activity-lets-you-
choose...](http://jalopnik.com/this-mit-online-activity-lets-you-choose-who-
gets-kille-1787333738)

[http://moralmachine.mit.edu/](http://moralmachine.mit.edu/)

~~~
helthanatos
Yeah. Anyone doing that should have kept alive whoever was not breaking the
law. I noticed that it said I killed more women, but women broke the law more.

------
rl12345
Every time I listen or read Obama talk, I become a bigger fan of the guy.

------
cjbprime
> OBAMA: The way I’ve been thinking about the regulatory structure as AI
> emerges is that, early in a technology, a thousand flowers should bloom.

I gotta say, I thought he'd be more familiar with that metaphor.

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

~~~
s_q_b
I think he knew the origin, but chose it anyway. It is an elegant phrase.
Communists could be very eloquent.

How else do you think they managed to convince so many people to be
communists?

~~~
proteinbased
I am not a communist, but I must point out, that it works exactly the same way
with capitalism too. If you got some time, there is a great documentation
called 'The Century of the Self', which shows (among other things) how modern
marketing in western countries started and evolved.

~~~
s_q_b
Thank you, I'll have to add it to my list.

------
gxs
Somehow, someway, a discussion about AI has to touch on disadvantaged people
and racism. Sigh. Can't wait for a new president.

