AI Developments... and Predictions

 I've been watching the AI developments... and the bloggers writing about the AI "foom".

• Scott Alexander on the feeling of being on the verge of AI Apocalypse.
• Scott Alexander on the new Janus-faced AI simulators, a weird new breed of alien intelligence we didn't expect.
• Erik Hoel on why we shouldn't be cavalier about the potential impact of super-intelligent AI.  (Item 4 of 9 on the page).

But in my opinion, the new AI chatbots may replace Google's current search, but they will stop far short of replacing anything but the most mundane human jobs. 

Its so hilarious that people are worried about artificial intelligence when we haven't even made a robot that can flip hamburgers yet!  Wake up and smell the grease:  the real world is complicated and messy.  We can't even replace the jobs that everyone, even the people currently working them, want replaced.  I don't think we're going to be replacing professionals anytime soon.

Just look at driverless cars.  Driving is a great example of something you'd think computers would be good at.... if you'd never driven a car in the real world!  Computers are great at driving cars in video games, but the real world is messy.  That's the Real World problem.

The second problem is even bigger: the messiness of the human social world!   Even if driverless cars were better than human drivers, that's not good enough.  We expect computers to be perfect.  If a company sells me a car and I wreck it, I'm responsible.  But if the company sells me a driverless car that crashes, the company is responsible.    

For every task that matters we want a human to be responsible.  Even if they solve the Real World problem with bigger and better AIs, the Responsibility problem will always prevent human replacement.  Imagine if my boss could replace me with a computer: he would then be 100% liable for any mistakes the computer made!  Is that the kind of liability any Pointy Haired Boss wants??  As long as he has real humans working for him, there's always someone to share the responsibility.  

Example: imagine something that's even simpler than driving a car: flying a passenger airplane!  I'm sure autopilot could fly an airplane as well as a human.  But would anyone want to fly on an airplane with no human pilot?  We'll always have the human pilots, even if the autopilot does more and more of the routine work.

Humans are social creatures.  The humans who think AI will rule the world must be living inside a computer world.  Its interesting that, as more and more of our world is computerized, we hear more and more from the people living inside the computer world.  But its not the real world!

Moore's Law Redux: Connectivity is More Important that Processing Power

While Moore's law continues to slow, traffic on international internet links continues to grow faster than capacity. 

Moore's law, which predicted a doubling of the number of transistors per chip every 18 months, lasted from the 1960's through the early 2000s.  Over the last 10 years, newer chips have cost less and use less energy, but they have not been noticeably faster. Yet, even as Moore's law has slowed, the rise of the internet has made individual computer chips less important.

Chip density is still increasing, but progress has slowed as chip designers bump up against fundamental physical constraints, like the size of silicon atoms.  Also, as chips get smaller and denser the problem of dark silicon has increased.  To combat these limitations, manufacturers have added multiple cores and specialized architecture for graphics processing and other specialized operations. But multicore processors are hard for software to use efficiently. (Ars Technica article.)

So the current state-of-the-art 14nm Broadwell chips will remain best for the next 18+ months.  Intel promises to go to 10nm and then 7nm with new non-silicon technology.  Non-silicon technology may also finally allow faster chip speeds.  3D chip architecture is the next big advance that will improve power efficiency.  

In the meantime, manufacturers have focused on building specialized chips for mobile applications and the internet of things.  It seems the brave new frontiers are really in new mobile and cloud-based applications where energy efficiency matters more than processing power.  Every person in the world will have, on average, three internet-connected devices by 2019.

Global peak Internet traffic volumes rose 37 percent overall in 2015.  In years past, peak  internet traffic increased in excess of 41 percent each year, a rate which implies that traffic is more than doubling every two years. Over the next three years, overall growth is projected to slow to 23% a year (Telegeography 2015 Annual Report, Executive Summary.)

Even with the relative slowing of internet growth, global internet traffic in 2019 will be equivalent to 64 times the volume of the entire global internet in 2005. Globally, Internet traffic will reach 18 gigabytes (GB) per capita by 2019, up from 6 GB per capita in 2014.

IP traffic is growing fastest in the Middle East and Africa, followed by Asia Pacific. Traffic in the Middle East and Africa will grow at 44 percent annually between 2014 and 2019. By 2019, there will be more internet traffic in east Asia than in North America.
(Cisco 2015 analysis.) (Ars Technica has an older analysis)