The Rise of Intelligent Machines

I gave a speech today in my Toastmaster's club, titled "Neural Networks and the Future - A Sensational Speech on Intelligent Machines". I think the slides and speech turned out pretty well. The speech had a number of big topics:

• The new age, comparing the intelligent machines to the advent of the steam engine where all of a sudden we could do more than with our own strength and now we have an age when intelligent machines are doing much of that mental/intelligent work
• How neurons relate to intelligence and addressed the elephant in the room (elephants have 4 times as many neurons as humans)
• How a neuron works
• A highly abbreviated history of artificial neural networks
• Familiar examples of neural networks (tagging on Facebook, aging filters, smart cars, etc).
• Basics of a neural network and how it is trained
• Comparison of Humans and Artificial Neural Networks
• Prediction that humans and intelligent machines would be pushed into distinct areas/capabilities as the technology progresses

A few ideas caught my attention as I was preparing and giving the speech. They are:

1. People, including all their feelings, thoughts, and memories are just the result of a trained complex network.
2. It is really easy to imagine a dark future when discussing intelligent machines 
3. In the near future we may be competing against the intelligent machines for work, hoping for scraps to be tossed down from the ultra-rich. 

I've been reading "The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies" by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, and it foreshadows some of the amazing things to come, but also has ominous undertones for our economic place in this new world order.

Let tackle the three ideas that caught my attention. First - people, including all their feelings, thoughts, and memories are just the result of a trained complex network. I grew up in a very conservative Utah religion. The idea of the immortal soul and being spirit children of deity were woven into the fabric of my life. But...if we are really just complex neural networks, trying to achieve sufficient numbers of biologically rewarded behaviors, that changes things in a big way.

All of a sudden, cruelty to animals becomes much more heinous. Death is much more scary, but the death penalty doesn't seem all that inhumane. The things that are important a
re no longer some set of spiritual codes of conduct - the way we feel and the positive interactions with others become more important than some arcane moral code. Rather than people being "good" or "evil", we see them as trained entities - pursuing the attainable rewards using patterns of behavior that proved successful previously. It's pretty crazy and I'm still trying to come to terms with this idea.

The second idea - that it is really easy to imagine a dark future when discussing intelligent machines. I wonder if this is just based on the number of Dystopian novels I've read or whether this is a real concern. Clearly some people are going to create malicious neural machines. There will also be cases where the reward function and training were not quite right and a program cause unexpected harm. I don't think we will have machine overlords anytime soon. With animals, they're biological programming has occurred of thousands and millions of years, so we can expect many of the critical errors that would jeopardize massive populations to be bred out of the population. With machines - especially in these early phases of the intelligent machine age, we may encounter some bad actors. Maybe something like a self-driving bus that drives the passengers off a bridge or a controller that damages power grid equipment.

The third idea, involving the competition between people and intelligent machines will be interesting. That will probably play out during my career, assuming I have to spend another 30 years catering to corporate overlords. Many jobs are going to going to be lost, probably more than are created. I think there will be enormous gains in efficiency, lower prices, better products... but unless people win the skill lottery or adapt with the wave, there may be many people left behind.

Given the looming uncertainty, I plan to jump into machine learning. The field is fascinating and the progress is phenomenal. The field is on fire, it is exploding as the applications for intelligent machines multiply and are recombined in an ever-growing variety of ways.

About the future, I am cautiously optimistic. I feel certain I can provide for my family. I'm excited to see the wonders and marvels that are coming. I'll be glad to do road trips in self-driving cars and have custom computer-composed songs to listen to. That being said, I can't help but want to say, "O brave new world". 

Beginning the Blog

My life has been pretty epic, but most of the details go relatively unnoticed. So I am going to write about it. First some basics: I am finishing up a degree in mechanical engineering with minors in math and Russian. I am probably one of the busiest people you could ever meet. If it looks like I'm slacking off, it's probably because I'm trying to tackle seven other projects at the same time. I love country music. I'm not sure why, it just sort of happened. I play jazz trombone in the bands up at USU. My favorite sport it Ultimate. I have the coolest family in the world and I've lived in four houses in the same ward in Brigham City.

I just got back from Seattle looking at the University of Washington for a master's program. Other than the fact that it poured rain the entire time I was there, I had a wonderful time. I spent time hanging out with a Peace Corp volunteer named Alaric and learning about issues in tidal energy harvesting. I needed to talk with one of the graduate students whose placed I was supposed to take ... so I actually had to go into a bar to talk with him. That was a different experience. People draining pitchers of beer and little old me nursing a Diet Coke. Either way, I ended up getting the information I needed from him. Then I went to the Friday Night Institute activity. It turns out one of my old Continental buddies, Shawn, is one of the Elder's Quorum presidents there...small world.

I spent most of Saturday walking around various areas of the city. First in a residential area North of the University, and later in the downtown area. Talk about a neat city. I want to go live there sometime, but not for grad school. My favorite thing was a crazy Russian rock-n-roll accordianist going at it down at the Pike Place Market. He looked to be about 18, had a giant goatee, and was yelling at the top of his lungs as he played some of the coolest chords and tunes I've ever heard. Definitely cool. I even walked by a Libya protest. I'll be going back there again as soon as I can.