An example of chatbots exchanges
Humans as Aliens in a Connected AI World
June 24, 2017. Editorial.
To the world we spend billions if not trillions to build, with AI, robots and connected objects, we humans are more and more outsiders, with:
- 1. algorithms taking autonomous and unexpected decisions
- 2. according to processes they cannot explain to us
- 3. speaking languages suited to their agendas but no to our understanding
- 4. in charge of more and more powerful if not regalian processes, including
life and death power over us.
Then no need of metaphysics, sci-fi speculations of transhmanist discourse to see that we are "at exponential speed" excluding ourselves from the world we spend billions if not trillios to build.
Pierre Berger
Examples.
1. Autonomous and unexpected. It's the case with all the winning machines at
games (Deep Blue for chess, Watson for Jeopardy, Alpha for Go). And even more
for the consequences (FTS, Fast Transaction Systems in Finance).
2. Not explicable to us. It's the case with neural networks. They learn, but store the knowledge and know-how as connection weighing not related to rational thinking. With algorithmic programming and the (Gofai) symbolic AI, an expert system could retrace the logic of its choices, but yet this logic was not within the reach of everybody. And Asimov's I Robot has shown for long (1950) that algoritmic laws could lead to unexpected results. Neural networks push a step farther.
3. Non-human languages. We have known for long that machine-to-machine communication can be much simpler and faster than human-to-human (and even from the foot to the brain). Sismondi saw that as far as 1819. But they can also elaborate their own languages. Frédéric Kaplan has led experiments at Sony CSL labs (La naissance d’une langue chez les robots, 2001). And we read in The Atlantic (article linked on by ACM Technews) : "Something unexpected happened recently at the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research lab. Researchers who had been training bots to negotiate with one another realized that the bots, left to their own devices, started communicating in a non-human language" ( Read the full paper).
4. In charge of major and life or death processes. No need to comment.
