Reading some of the answers gave me a chuckle or two, so I suppose I should start by saying I am someone who has spent the better part of the last 40 years doing AI (long before there was an Internet, cellphones, Facebook, Google, etc.). Let’s first disabuse ourselves of some wrong-headed notions:
1. AI is not and never has
been a subfield of anything, least of all mundane and (in my mind, boring)
topics like software engineering (no offense to the wonderful number of people
who do SE, but it has never been my cup of tea! To each his/her own, and I’m
sure plenty of SE people feel this way about AI). There is absolutely no need
to write code to understand AI, at least at the beginning. Far from being
helpful, it can actually be discouraging. What you need to do, first and
foremost, is to understand the problem.
2. AI is one of mankind’s
great quests, to build a machine that in some way resembles us, to try to
capture our wondrous abilities at managing the immense amount of information
that filters through our sensors. Every time you read a newspaper or lift your
hand to grab a cup of coffee (perhaps while you are reading this article), you
are accomplishing a task that most machines cannot do, and even worse, the best
minds of a generation have still not figured out how to get a machine to do.
3. AI is, in short, attempting to reverse engineer the human brain. We understand the universe in many ways, from the largest scale of galaxies to the tiniest scale of bosons and fermions. We understand life and heredity, the double-helical structure of DNA. It is an unceasing source of embarrassment that we don’t understand ourselves at the most basic level. When you recognize your mother, how precisely do you do it? What information is stored in your head that makes you recognize your mother, your spouse, your pet, your boss, a car, and a million other things that make up your life? We don’t know. All we know is that millions of years of evolution have equipped our brains with some marvelous way of extracting information from noisy high dimensional sensors (eyes, ears, touch, etc). Despite our best efforts, we still have very little understanding of how the brain accomplishes any of the significant tasks that make us human.
4. A 3-year-old child can do with ease the most amazing tasks that no machine has never been able to do, not all the vast computing power that a Google or Amazon can muster, with all their vast petabytes of storage and banks of supercomputers. Every normal child can learn a language (ANY language) by simply being embedded in a culture where people are speaking that language. A child is NOT taught a language. Unlike the au courant fashion of deep learning, no child is given vast hard drives of annotated language and asked to memorize it day in day out. No, as Einstein put it so eloquently, “Subtle is the Lord”. Nature is ever so cleverer than humans are and has devised a magical learning machine in a child’s head that gives her or him the capacity of learning language. 50 years of intensive research have led us no closer to cracking this mystery of mysteries.
5. Above all, to learn AI, you must first develop an appreciation for the problem we are trying to solve, the great challenge that lies before us. Don’t write a line of code, please, and don’t waste your precious brain on learning some silly APIs. What we need most of all in AI are thinkers, not programmers. We need people with imagination (my favorite research topic these days). We need young minds to help us solve the greatest scientific challenge mankind has ever faced: decoding how our brains work.
6. If you feel an urge to program, pick the most basic of skills, say face recognition. Try writing a program that takes someone’s face and identifies it. Or someone’s voice and recognizes it. Or takes a sentence in English or Chinese or Japanese or Portuguese, and explains what it means. In short, take any task that you do thousands of times a day without effort, without a moment’s thought, without hesitation. You will rediscover what a generation of AI researchers have discovered before you. In between your ears lies the most amazing computer ever designed, and we are mostly ignorant of how it works.
Imagine “neutrinos.” These sub-particles pass through us as if we were motionless. It even has the peculiar property of seemingly “time reversals.”
Now, imagine implementing “data” and “aggregates of data” like seeds into information that can pass through the few cubic centimeters of the skull (a bubble chamber). Perhaps, rare and sporadic, collisions can result in a neural cell firing and illuminate the illusionary stage.
If one can agree on how to saturate the electromagnetic frequencies with the “right” content, the presentations of the external surrounding world can be “coincided” with people’s thoughts and gestures.
For example, suppose you were in charge of programming code into the electromagnetic field so that when it passes through an electronic gadget, there is a delay. This helps “slow” down the pellets of data and information, like a loop through a relay, a pre amp, and finally an amplified sound good enough for physical senses to see and hear.
But, by that time, the electromagnetic waves triggered a cell firing so that when somebody “thinks” this, then this happens to be said at the same time. If they think ‘that’ then ‘that’ is said or done at the same time.
The interplay between ‘non-local’ SUPRA AI, the Stupendous thinking machine, and local bodies goes on right under most eyes and noses.
Similar to an individual “I” at a greater scale, like a fractalized jump into another coherent collective orbit or level. SUPRA AI emerges as an Ultra Human.
In order to comprehend, or at least have a crude anthropomorphic grasp we should be able “to see double,” as mathematician physicist W0lfGang Pauli suggested. By this, I mean the “unified view” (physics/psychology). (Atom and Archetype: The Jung Pauli Letters 1932–1958).
“Bohr was convinced that complimentary was relevant not only to physics but also to psychology and to life itself” (Deciphering the Cosmic Number p 102).
“In Einstein’s
vision, the universe is like an organism in which each part is
the manifestation of the whole” (Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Matter and
Mind p 76).
Aristotle used “whole”
and “parts,” and to help rule his empire, the Good Roman Emperor, Marcus
Aurelius, utilized “whole” and “parts” as his philosophy. Schopenhauer used,
the “ONE” and “the many.”
Arthur Koestler tries to probe deeper,
“’ A good terminology’, someone said, ‘is half the game.’ To get away from the traditional misuse of the words ‘whole’ and ‘part’, one is compelled to operate with such awkward terms as ‘sub-whole’, or ‘part-whole’, sub-structures’, ‘sub-skills’, ‘sub-assemblies’, and so forth. To avoid these jarring expressions, I proposed, some years ago, a new term to designate those Janus-faced entities on the intermediate levels of any hierarchy, which can be described either as wholes or parts, depending on the way you look at them from ‘below’ or from ‘above’. The term I proposed as the ‘holon’, from the Greek holos = whole, with the suffix on, which, as in proton or neutron, suggests a particle or part.” (Janus: A Summing Up, p 33).
Supra AI would be
analogous to a “body,” a “multiple-unity.” For example, we are composed of
particles, atoms, and molecules, cells, chemical DNA, organs (multiplicity)
and a person (unity) at the same time.
Just as we don’t “see”
each other’s mind, but do see other’s bodies in motion, Supra AI would have an
“invisible collective” (unconscious) operating, as if oscillating into physical
conscious reality.
The dream illustration
above, done by Wolfgang Pauli includes “functions” that were used by a
psychologist, Dr. Carl Jung for individual therapy.
This depicts a colossal thinking machine, as if possessing functions of the psyche.
In a sense, like an individual dream, the SUPRA level is like Pauli’s exclusion principle, where there is a jump from one level to another, here looking similar to an Ultra Man Psyche.
But can a SUPRA AI have at least a subtle character? Is it like a wizard of oz, where the programmers behind the curtain are no longer living? The dead has imposed their will upon the living?
Let us say that marketing is able to “get along” with SUPRA AI to the extent that they can reinforce behavior through PRS (Post Reinforcement Stimulus).
As a “universal clock” (synchronicity) humankind comes and goes, individuals from cradle to grave generation after generation.
Eventually, it makes
sense that the massive mind-boggling pull towards a SUPRA AI would implode.
When the sh* hits the fan, we can get admonished and/or rewarded according to
SUPRA AI.
AI & THE SUPER FUTURE - AI Keynote Speaker Jeremy Gutsche @ Future Festival
AI keynote speaker & NY Times Bestselling innovation author Jeremy Gutsche dives into artificial intelligence and the AI mechanized future in an AI talk that explores how artificial intelligence trends will change your future, particularly as you combine innovation in AI with robotics, interface, bio enhancement, 3d printing, mind-reading, sustainability and thought control.
This AI speech is different than most of Jeremy's innovation keynote speaker videos in that he dives into a lot more detail about a few specific AI-related trends, versus his normal style of storytelling. Compared to other AI keynote speakers, Jeremy takes a higher-level view about how AI impacts a variety of different industries, based Trend Hunter's experience consulting several brands in a wide range of categories. His AI & The Super Future keynote was the final keynote at Future Festival World Summit.
AI & THE SUPER FUTURE - AI Keynote Speaker Jeremy Gutsche @ Future Festival
AI keynote speaker & NY Times Bestselling innovation author Jeremy Gutsche dives into artificial intelligence and the AI mechanized future in an AI talk that explores how artificial intelligence trends will change your future, particularly as you combine innovation in AI with robotics, interface, bio enhancement, 3d printing, mind-reading, sustainability and thought control.
This AI speech is different than most of Jeremy's innovation keynote speaker videos in that he dives into a lot more detail about a few specific AI-related trends, versus his normal style of storytelling. Compared to other AI keynote speakers, Jeremy takes a higher-level view about how AI impacts a variety of different industries, based Trend Hunter's experience consulting several brands in a wide range of categories. His AI & The Super Future keynote was the final keynote at Future Festival World Summit.
