Game ON: the end of the old economic system is in sightGoogle is a pioneer in limited artificial general intelligence (aka computers that can learn w/o preprogramming them). One successful example is AlphaGo. It just beat this Go Grandmaster three times in a row.
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What makes this win interesting is that AlphaGo didn't win through brute force. Go is too complicated for that:
...the average 150-move game contains more possible board configurations — 10^170 — than there are atoms in the Universe, so it can’t be solved by algorithms that search exhaustively for the best move.
It also didn't win by extensive preprogramming by talented engineers, like IBM's Deep Blue did to win at Chess.
Instead, AlphaGo won this victory by learning how to play the game from scratch using this process:
No assumptions. AlphaGo approached the game without any assumptions. This is called a model-free approach. This allows it to program itself from scratch, by building complex models human programmers can't understand/match.
Big Data. It then learned the game by interacting with a database filled with 30 million games previously played by human beings. The ability to bootstrap a model from data removes almost all of the need for engineering and programming talent currently needed for big systems. That's huge.
Big Sim (by the way, Big Sim will be as well known as Big Data in five years <-- heard it here first). Finally, it applied and honed that learning by playing itself on 50 computers night and day until it became good enough to play a human grandmaster.
The surprise of this victory isn't that it occurred. Most expected it would, eventually...
Instead, the surprise is how fast it happened. How fast AlphaGo was able to bootstrap itself to a mastery of the game. It was fast. Unreasonably fast.
However, this victory goes way beyond the game of Go. It is important because AlphaGo uses a generic technique for learning. A technique that can be used to master a HUGE range of activities, quickly. Activities that people get paid for today.
This implies the following:
This technology is going to cut through the global economy like a hot knife through butter. It learns fast and largely on its own. It's widely applicable. It doesn't only master what it has seen, it can innovate. For example: some of the unheard of moves made by AlphaGo were considered "beautiful" by the Grandmaster it beat.
Limited AGI (deep learning in particular) will have the ability to do nearly any job currently being done by human beings -- from lawyers to judges, nurses to doctors, driving to construction -- potentially at a grandmaster's level of capability. This makes it a buzzsaw.
Very few people (and I mean very few) will be able to stay ahead of the limited AGI buzzsaw. It learns so quickly, the fate of people stranded in former factory towns gutted by "free trade" is likely to be the fate of the highest paid technorati. They simply don't have the capacity to learn fast enough or be creative enough to stay ahead of it.
Have fun,
John Robb
PS: Isn't it ironic (or not) that at the very moment in history when we demonstrate a limited AGI (potentially, a tsunami of technological change) the western industrial bureaucratic political system starts to implode due to an inability to deal with the globalization (economic, finance and communications) enabled by the last wave of technological change?
PPS: This has huge implications for warfare. I'll write more about those soon. Laying a foundation for understanding this change first.
source:
http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/
Topic: Game ON: the end of the old economic system is in sight (Read 1899 times)
