I prefer to be killed by my own stupidity rather than the codified morals of a software engineer

…or the learned morals of an evolving algorithm. SAS CTO Oliver Schabenberger

With the advent of deep learning, machines are beginning to solve problems in a novel way: by writing the algorithms themselves.

The software developer who codifies a solution through programming logic is replaced by a data scientist who defines and trains a deep neural network.

The expert who studied and learned a domain is replaced by a reinforcement learning algorithm that discovers the rules of play from historical data.

We are learning incredible lessons in this process.

But does the rise of such highly sophisticated deep learning mean that machines will soon surpass their makers? They are surpassing us in reliability, accuracy and throughput. But they are not surpassing us in thinking or learning. Not with today’s technology.

The artificial intelligence systems of today learn from data – they learn only from data. These systems cannot grow beyond the limits of the data by creating, innovating or reasoning.

Even a reinforcement learning system that discovers rules of play from past data cannot develop completely new rules or new games. It can apply the rules in a novel and more efficient way, but it does not invent a new game. The machine that learned to play Go better than any human being does not know how to play Poker.

Where to from here?

True intelligence requires creativity, innovation, intuition, independent problem solving, self-awareness and sentience. The systems built based on deep learning do not – and cannot – have these characteristics. These are trained by top-down supervised methods.

We first tell the machine the ground truth, so that it can discover its regularities. They do not grow beyond that.

Source: InformationWeek



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