This is probably a good idea. My take is that most of resistance I'm culturally aware of would come from people concerned about an irreversible change to the ecosystem, whether or not this concern is warranted. Potentially worth investigating/getting some experts on your side/proposing a contained preservation of a mosquito population (the way we preserve rare diseases)
Assuming you have some exposure to linear algebra, calculus, and a little programming, I recommend Andrew Ng's machine learning course on youtube. AI: A Modern Approach is still a good textbook, but I think machine learning specifically is where interesting stuff is happening right now.
There is also an argument for doing stuff that's less in vogue right now.
I recommend against starting with deep learning.
reason? (I intuitively agree with you, just curious)
We're in the process of getting it onto Audible and plan to get it onto iTunes as well to get it in front of the widest audience as possible.
Hey Rick - any update on Audible? I'm deciding whether to get the podcast or wait for (the much more usable IMO) Audible format
$250 plus a vote to have winter fundraiser right after the bonus season :)
I left this comment on Hacker News exploring whether "AI for everyone" will be a good thing or not. Interested to hear everyone's thoughts.
My concern is similar to your last sentence. I think a lot of choices are being made up front without "thinking them through" as you put it; I wish the resources were spent more evenly to enable answering those questions better, and also allocating some to MIRI which is ironically running a fundraiser right now and getting some 10s and 20s while a quite a pile of resources has been allocated to something I don't (yet) have confidence in under the safety umbrella.
Good thing I hear MIRI is actively in touch with those guys, so I hope the end will be better than the beginning.
Janos and I are at NIPS!
Any chance you'll eventually get this up on Audible? I suspect that in the long run, it can find a wider audience there.
Two thumps up! Audible has a much better interface/DRM management than podcast readers. Many LW readers already use Audible. Plus you can get a lot of traffic via the recommender system
Thanks for writing this; a couple quick thoughts:
For example, it turns out that a learning algorithm tasked with some relatively simple tasks, such as determining whether or not English sentences are valid, will automatically build up an internal representation of the world which captures many of the regularities of the world – as a pure side effect of carrying out its task.
I think I've yet to see a paper that convincingly supports the claim that neural nets are learning natural representations of the world. For some papers that refute this claim, see e.g.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.6199 http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6572
I think the Degrees of Freedom thesis is a good statement of one of the potential problems. Since it's essentially making a claim about whether a certain very complex statistical problem is identifiable, I think it's very hard to know whether it's true or not without either some serious technical analysis or some serious empirical research --- which is a reason to do that research, because if the thesis is true then that has some worrisome implications about AI safety.
I think I've yet to see a paper that convincingly supports the claim that neural nets are learning natural representations of the world. For some papers that refute this claim, see e.g.
My impression that they can in fact learn "natural" representations of the world, a good example here http://arxiv.org/abs/1311.2901
On the other hand since they tend to be task-specific learners they might take shortcuts that we wouldn't perceive as "natural"; our "natural object" ontology is optimized for much more general task than most NNets.
If I'm correct about this I would expect NNets to become more "natural" as the tasks get closer to being "AI-complete", such as question-answering systems and scene description networks.
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Well yes, I am very concerned, because you're talking about convincing people that it won't collapse ecosystems, and not about figuring out whether it'll actually collapse ecosystems in the real world that doesn't care how persuasive you sound.
I agree figuring out whether this might collapse ecosystems is important, (and what this collapse would entail, it would probably go beyond mosquitos and lead to some species rebalancing, but pretty darn sure not "destroy everything" either)