SUMMARY: At Facebook, there are two competing goals; keep the platform free and open to a broad spectrum of ideas and opinions, while reducing the spread of misinformation. The company says it's not in the business of making editorial judgments, so they use fact-checkers, artificial intelligence and their users. Can they stop junk news from adapting? Science correspondent Miles O'Brien reports.
SUMMARY: Tech luminaries and scientists have been worried for years about the existential consequences of artificial intelligence for the human race. Philosopher Nick Bostrom of Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute thinks money ought to be invested in how to manage machine superintelligence that could one day surpass us -- or even wipe us out. Economics correspondent Paul Solman reports.
SUMMARY: Artificial intelligence is going to change how we live to such a degree, that when we look back at driving a car, it will seem to us the way the Middle Ages looks from today's perspective. That's according to Sebastian Thrun, who gives his Brief but Spectacular take on imagining the future and the way we'll all be transformed by the coming revolution.
An artificial intelligence program developed by researchers at Google can beat a human at the board game GO, which some consider to be the most complicated board game in existence. And this AI program — dubbed AlphaGo — didn’t defeat any ol’ human, but the European Go champion Fan Hui in a tournament last October by five games to nil. The findings, published today in the journal Nature, represent a major coup for machine learning algorithms.
“In a nutshell, by publishing this work as peer-reviewed research, we at Nature want to stimulate the debate about transparency in artificial intelligence,” senior editor Tanguy Chouard said at a press briefing yesterday. “And this paper seems like the best occasion for this, as it goes- should I say, right at the heart of the mystery of what intelligence is.”
Known as wéiqí in Chinese and baduk in Korean, GO originated in China over 2,500 years ago. The board consist of a 19 by 19 grid of intersecting lines. Two players take turns placing black and white marbles on individual intersection points. Once place, the stones can’t be moved, but they can be captured by completely surrounding an opponent’s marble. The ultimate objective is control more than 50 percent of the board, but since the board is so intricate, there are numerous possibilities for moves.
“So Go is probably the most complex game ever devised by man. It has 10^170 (that's 10 followed by 170 zeros) possible board configurations, which is more than the numbers of atoms in the universe,” said study author and AlphaGo co-developer Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind.
SUMMARY: As we advance toward increasingly sophisticated forms of artificial intelligence, John Markoff, author of “Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots,” joins Jeffrey Brown to discuss our anxiety about autonomous technology and the human ethics that go into that invention.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): Is it man against or with machine? Do machines, robots help us, replace us, hurt us?
Robots are being built and seeping into more and more of our lives, but how much are their value and impact understood and accounted for?
Such questions are part of a new book that looks at the last decades and the advance of artificial intelligence and robotics. It’s titled “Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots.”
Author John Markoff is a longtime science and technology reporter for The New York Times.
And welcome to you.
JOHN MARKOFF, Author, “Machines of Loving Grace “: Thank you.
JEFFREY BROWN: “Machines of Loving Grace,” it sounds great, wonderful, right? A little bit of religion, a little bit of human love, but it’s more complicated.
JOHN MARKOFF: Yes. Well, yes, and I might have put a question mark after it.
JEFFREY BROWN: OK.
JOHN MARKOFF: Because I think we can go down both paths. And we probably will go down both paths.
My point is, it’s a human choice at this point. These machines are not evolving by themselves. There are human designers.
JEFFREY BROWN: You’re making a distinction. You’re coming at this as a reporter and you’re making a distinction between machines that are replacing humans and those that are sort of helping us.
JOHN MARKOFF: Yes.
SUMMARY: It's not just basic tasks anymore: Computers can now do work once deemed possible only by humans. And in some cases, the computers are doing it better. In an economy driven increasingly by intelligent automation, which jobs will survive? Hari Sreenivasan reports.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): Have you ever worried you might lose your job to a robot? I have.
Hari Sreenivasan finds it could well happen with advances in artificial intelligence, or A.I., transforming the work force.
That’s the latest report in our series on invention and innovation, Breakthroughs.
MAN: Oh, all in?
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): In a closely watched brains vs. artificial intelligence poker match held in Pittsburgh earlier this month, humans pulled off a slim win over a computer program called Claudico.
MAN: All right. Good job.
MAN: Good game, guys. Good game.
MAN: Good game.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Tuomas Sandholm, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, created the algorithms that run Claudico’s A.I.
TUOMAS SANDHOLM, Carnegie Mellon University: Those algorithms figure out how you should act strategically, how do you avoid or deal with humans trying to deceive you, and how do you deceive humans?
SUMMARY: Every day, we depend on artificial intelligence to help us make sense of a steady deluge of information. AI helps the post office to sort its mail, Wall Street to make financial decisions and physicians to diagnose patients. Hari Sreenivasan reports on how tech firms are investing in the next generation of intelligent computer programs and in what ways the technology still lags behind humans.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): Now we continue our series about artificial intelligence, A.I., where computers are able to make intelligent decisions without human input.
As computing power gets stronger and people continue to generate massive amounts of data, A.I. is making its way into the marketplace and into your doctor’s examination room.
Hari Sreenivasan has the latest in series on breakthroughs in invention and innovation.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): Advances in artificial intelligence continue to push the boundaries between science fiction and reality, like this brain-controlled device at the University of Minnesota. It enables users to fly a model helicopter with only their thoughts. The hope is it will soon help disabled people to operate robotic arms.
But you don’t need to be in a university lab to find A.I. It’s all around us.
MAN (voice on iPhone): What’s the fifth planet from the sun?
HARI SREENIVASAN: Helping us search for information.
WOMAN (voice on iPhone): Jupiter is the fifth planet orbiting the sun.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Our smartphones use A.I. to navigate us, choosing the least congested traffic routes. Even the U.S. Postal Service uses it to sort mail. And on Wall Street, autonomous machines help make major financial decisions.
RAY KURZWEIL, Inventor/Futurist: At least 90 percent of the financial transactions are guided in one way or another by artificial intelligence.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Ray Kurzweil directs Google’s engineering lab, but spoke to us in his capacity as an independent inventor. He’s convinced that A.I. programs are already on track to solve many of the problems vexing mankind today.
RAY KURZWEIL: They’re helping us find a cure for disease, helping us diagnose disease, analyzing environmental data to help us clean up the environment. Virtually every industrial process is a combination already of human and machine intelligence.
SUMMARY: Artificial intelligence is creeping into our everyday lives through technology like check-scanning machines and GPS navigation. How far away are we from making intelligent machines that actually have minds of their own? Hari Sreenivasan reports on the ethical considerations of artificial intelligence as part of our Breakthroughs series.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): You may not realize it, but artificial intelligence is all around us. We rely on smart machines to scan our checks at ATMs, to navigate us on road trips and much more.
Still, humans have quite an edge. Just today, four of the world’s best Texas Hold ‘Em poker players won an epic two-week tournament against, yes, an advanced computer program. The field of artificial intelligence is pushing new boundaries.
Hari Sreenivasan has the first in a series of stories about it and the concerns over where it may lead. It’s the latest report in our ongoing Breakthroughs series on invention and innovation.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): Artificial intelligence has long captured our imaginations.
ACTOR: Open the pod bay doors, Hal. (2001: A Space Odyssey)
ACTOR: I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I cannot do that.
HARI SREENIVASAN: With robots like Hal in “2001: A Space Odyssey” and now Ava from the recently released “Ex Machina.”
ACTRESS: Hello. I have never met anyone new before.
HARI SREENIVASAN: And “Chappie.”
ACTRESS: A thinking robot could be the end of mankind.
HARI SREENIVASAN: The plots thicken when the intelligent machines question the authority of their makers, and begin acting on their own accord.
SUMMARY: Tom Clarke of Independent Television News reports on how an artificial intelligence business owned by Google has created software that can teaching itself to play classic Atari games better than a human.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): Next, Playing video games might seem like child’s play.
But, as Tom Clarke of Independent Television News reports, it’s also at the frontier of artificial intelligence.
TOM CLARKE, Independent Television News: It was the late 1970s, and for the first generation of video gamers, Atari was king. By the standards of the day, the graphics were mind-blowing, the sound out of this world.
And the selection of games just went on and on and on.
Ah.
Compared to the video games of today, Atari looks pretty clunky, but the games are still quite difficult to play, especially if you haven’t picked one up for 30 years, like me. But it’s that exact combination of simple graphics, but quite challenging game play, that has attracted the cutting edge of artificial intelligence researchers back to the 1970s.
This version of “Space Invaders” isn’t being played by a person, but a system of computer algorithms that is learning how to play it just by looking at the pixels on the screen. It may not sound like it, but it’s something of a breakthrough, the work of one of the finest young minds in A.I. research, North Londoner Demis Hassabis.
