
Public Policy Implications of AI - garry
https://medium.com/initialized-capital/the-public-policy-implications-of-artificial-intelligence-1df075c49755#.4y012wthx
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unignorant
"The second is that there needs to be a political or a regulatory response. We
need to have a national and an international conversation about
redistribution, about safety nets, about measuring this technology and
correctly anticipating its arrival. People are aware of this."

With similar motivations, we did some work measuring public perception of AI
(to appear in AAAI 2017). Recently, there's been a clear increase in concern
about AI displacing human jobs (Figure 3F):
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.04904.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.04904.pdf)

~~~
ASpring
I'm hesitant to generalize the NYT corpus to "public perception". I'd be very
curious to see the regional differences within the United States in these
trends.

~~~
unignorant
Would be very cool! Probably not possible to find data extending back 30
years, though.

And NYT findings are of course not entirely representative, though we did run
a small validation on Reddit.

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neom
Big fan of Jack Clark and his work, from what I gather he is really focusing
on trying to help a wide and not particularly technical audience understand
the near term implications of socioeconomic change caused by emerging
technology.

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maxerickson
The article doesn't really address dealing with "the AI said so" as a
justification for action.

Like if we start using AI to do things like populate no fly lists.

~~~
DonaldFisk
One of the advantages of GOFAI, and expert systems in particular, was that
their reasoning process was a lot more transparent, and in many cases you
could ask them to explain it. Much harder if all you have is dozens of arrays
of connexion weights.

~~~
gumernatorial
Perhaps this is more an exposé of human ability to generate rationalizations
for chaotic biological workings of their brains, than it is a failing of
neural nets to make rational decisions.

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mark_l_watson
Great interview. I have been trying to understand how the success of deep
learning will affect my career (I started using neural networks in the 1980s:
DARPA projects, commercial projects, etc., but now less that 1/2 of my
professional time is spent doing deep learning and General machine learning).
I am trying to decide whether to toatally jump back into the field to take
advantage of a lot of practical work experience, or keep doing general
consulting. I am concerned that the field of deep learning is saturated right
now.

One small nit-pick about the comment "a young child can see a chicken once,
and if you then ask them to draw a chicken, they’ll typically be able to. The
child has a representation of a chicken from one sighting, and is able to
abstract that into a drawing." This hypothetical child watches the chicken,
moves his head for a little different view, the chicken is probably moving,
etc. There is a lot of training data collected by the child.

~~~
mappingbabeljc
Hiya, (I'm Jack Clark) - this is a good point. The child probably gets about
50 to several hundred distinct 'frames' of the chicken. Still, a remarkably
small number of examples.

~~~
dTal
It would also be a terrible drawing. An adult who had seen many other types of
birds would be able to do much better, as they would have learned more
abstractions - for example the experience required to condense a complex
visual pattern to, say, "mottled".

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partycoder
AI can engage into financial transactions, especially now with decentralized
currencies. At scale that would be really hard to regulate and can lead to a
taxation crisis.

~~~
jbpetersen
At scale, a taxation crisis would only be the beginning of all the chaos that
would cause.

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eth0up
Hmmm. I thought this was 'censorship week'[1] where everyone was supposed to
throw themselves on the "flag" link the moment anything "political" was
mentioned.[2]

I can't force myself to do this, but there does seem some mention of the
forbidden word here.

\- Ne boltai

1\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404)

2\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13140330](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13140330)

~~~
maxerickson
Ended early:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251)

~~~
eth0up
Odd. I wonder why that el reg article was flagged. Thanks for the link/info.

To all: Please feel free to flag my off-topic comments here - I can't delete
the parent. And it seems there's a flagging frenzy anyway.

