ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI):

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW AND

HOW IT WILL CHANGE HUMAN
HISTORY
Sheldon Hochberg
Friendship Heights Village Center
October 23, 2017

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“Artificial intelligence is shaping up as the next industrial
revolution, poised to rapidly reinvent business, the global
economy and how people work and interact with each other.”
How Artificial Intelligence Will Change Everything, Wall St.
Journal, March 6, 2017
“AI is enormously disruptive and will kill jobs, but will also improve
society.” Warren Buffet, May 2017
The possibility “of artificial intelligence taking over American jobs
is so far away [that it is] not even on my radar screen." Steven
Mnuchin, Secretary of the Treasury, March 2017
“Artificial Intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.” Albert
Einstein, Date Unknown
“The one who becomes the leader in this sphere will be the ruler of
the world.“ Vladimir Putin, August 2017
“I think the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the
end of the human race.” Stephen Hawking, May 2017

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 Progress Is Not Linear.
There Are Inflection Points That
Accelerate Progress

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 From 100,000 B.C.E. to 12,000 B.C.E. (98,000 years)
◦ Development of the use of fire, language, the wheel.

 From 12,000 B.C.E. to 1900 A.D. (13,900 years)

◦ Development of civilization; science and math; printing
press; governments; towering churches; steam engines.

 From 1900 to 2017 (117 years)

◦ World-wide use of electricity; autos; planes;
telephone/radio/television; computers; the Internet;
space travel; knowledge available to everyone
everywhere.

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 1946 - ENIAC (Electronic Numeric Integrator and
Calculator) - the world’s first programmable
computer –
could perform 20,000 multiplications per minute.

 2016 - the Sunway TaihuLight computer in Wuxi,

China - the world’s most powerful computer for
two years in a row –
can perform 93,000 trillion calculations per
second.

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 Technology accelerates at faster paces in more
advanced societies than in less advanced societies.
 By 2000, our rate of advancement was five times
the average rate in the 1900’s.
 At this rate, another century’s advancement will be
achieved by 2021.
 By the 2040’s, a century’s worth of progress may
be achieved multiple times in the same year.

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In thinking about what the world
will be like in 30 years (2047),
you cannot compare it with how
life was 30 years ago (1987)
because technological progress
is not linear.

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I. What is Artificial Intelligence; how it works;
what it does.
II. The history of AI and where things stand
today.
III. The promise of AI over the next decades.
IV. The concerns that need to be addressed to
ensure that AI works in the best interest of
society.

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 Knowledge/Understanding:
◦ Having an ever-growing knowledge of “facts”;
◦ Understanding the patterns in those facts; and,
hence,
◦ Understanding when things are the same and when
things differ.

 Decision-Making/Judgments/Predictions:
◦ Based on that knowledge/understanding, applying
“judgment” or “reason” so as to make useful
decisions – that frequently are really predictions.

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 A computer program (algorithm),
perhaps inside a robot, that is able to
do something, or make decisions, that
humans can do or make - but faster,
cheaper, and with greater accuracy.

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 Massive amounts of relevant/quality data available in
digital form.
◦ “In 2016 we produced as much data as in the entire
history of humankind through 2015.” Will Democracy
Survive Big Data & Artificial Intelligence,” Scientific
American, 2017.
 Massive computing power by energy-efficient
computers.
 Greater understanding of how humans think and the
ability to translate that understanding into
mathematics and sophisticated algorithms.

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 Artificial Narrow Intelligence (“ANI”): ability to carry
out a specific task (play chess; get information
based on voice directions (SIRI or Alexa); spot spam
email; driverless cars).
 Artificial General Intelligence (“AGI”): ability to carry
out different tasks that a human could do.
 Artificial Super Intelligence (“ASI”): ability to learn
from its experiences and from new data to perform
a wide range of actions and to generate new
computer code on its own to help achieve its
objectives.

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 Inputs:

◦ Traditional Programs:
 Use letters, numbers, and symbols and limited types of
communication media, such as a keyboard, mouse, or disc.

◦ AI Programs:
 Inputs to an AI program can be anything perceived by the five
senses - converted to digital inputs.
 Sight - one, two, or three dimensional objects.
 Sound - spoken language, music, noise made by objects.
 Touch - temperature, smoothness, resistance to pressure. etc.
 Smell – every kind of odor.
 Taste -sweet, sour, salty, bitter foodstuffs, etc.

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 Processing:
◦ Traditional Programs:
 Manipulate the stored symbols using a set of
previously defined instructions.
◦ AI Programs:
 Engage in pattern matching and problem solving,
where information about the world, presented to the AI
program in digital format, is used to solve complex
tasks;
 Can self-learn, potentially including (down the road)
developing its own new algorithms to achieve the
objectives for which the program was created.

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 Output:
◦ Traditional Programs:
 Limited to alphabetical/numeric symbols
communicated on a computer screen, paper, or
magnetic disk.

◦ AI Programs:
 In addition to the output of traditional programs,
output can be in the form of synthesized speech,
visual representations, manipulation of physical
objects, or movement in space.

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 Algorithms and processors that can classify and cluster
raw input data and that improve – learn - as they are given
more data.
◦ “Classify”: creating or applying labels to data;
◦ “Cluster”: identifying similarities and differences between data
in the classifications.

 For example:
◦ Is this email spam or not spam?
◦ Does this person have cancer or not?
◦ Is this a case likely to win before a jury or a case likely
to lose?
◦ Is this a stock likely to go up or a stock likely to go
down?
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 Supervised Learning: the labels for the data
are programmed into the algorithm.
Currently the most common form of
machine learning.
 Unsupervised Learning: no labels are
provided; the algorithm learns by itself to
recognize and categorize the similarities
and differences in the data.

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 You create a dataset that can teach the
program how to differentiate.
◦ For example, you provide the algorithm with
hundreds of thousands of spam email and of
non-spam email (“training data”) -- so that the
algorithm can detect the similarities and
differences between what is spam and non-spam.
 As the program develops experience with
more and more spam and non-spam
emails, it sharpens its ability to see the
similarities and differences, and becomes
better and better at recognizing spam in an
email it has never seen before.

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The AI program automatically refines its
methods, and improves its results, as it
gets more data, using multiple layers of
abstraction – the way the mind works.

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“Mathematical tools such as formal logic, probability,
and decision theory have yielded significant insight
into the foundations of [human] reasoning and
decision-making.” Research Priorities for Robust and
Beneficial Artificial Intelligence, 2015.

“The increased computer power that is making all this

possible derives . . . from the realization in the late
2000s that graphics processing units (GPUs) made by
Nvidia — the powerful chips that were first designed
to give gamers rich, 3D visual experiences—were 20
to 50 times more efficient than traditional central
processing units (CPUs) for deep-learning
computations.” Roger Perloff, Why Deep Learning Is
Suddenly Changing Your Life, 2016.

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 Today, a real estate agent who has sold
hundreds of homes and who has experience
on the thinking of buyers, gives you her best
estimate, based on her experience, of what
your house should sell for.

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 The program is given extensive data on the characteristics
and sales prices of hundreds of thousands (or millions) of
houses.
 The program is given (or develops) an initial estimate as to
how the various characteristics may impact (or correlate with)
the sales price.
 This initial estimate, when then applied to the database of
total sales, produces estimated sales prices that are off by,
for example, 15%.
 The program then runs millions of continuous slight revisions
of the weights for all the factors – each revision slightly
increasing the accuracy of the predictions - until they reflect
the actual sales price of the houses in the database.
 Tests are then run to see how the program predicts the value
of future sales of houses not in the database. If the estimates
are off, mathematical and statistical procedures are available
to correct the program to provide more accurate predictions.

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 1921: Czech writer Karel Čapek introduces the word
"robot" in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots). The
word "robot" comes from the Czech word "robota" (work).
 1955: Arthur Lee Samuel (IBM) develops checkers-playing
software program that:
◦ was the world’s first self-learning software program;
◦ included a “search tree” of all possible plays from any
position;
◦ remembered every position it had ever seen and played
thousands of games against itself.

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 1956: the term “artificial intelligence” coined for a
conference at Dartmouth organized by a young computer
scientist John McCarthy. McCarthy develops the
programming language used for AI for decades – LISP.
 1973: After years of promise and false starts, it was
predicted that AI programs will never be more capable than a
talented amateur in games.
 1990’s: Researchers start to work on algorithms – and
neural networks - that can learn the logical rules of things on
their own.

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 2006: Geoffrey Hinton (University of Toronto & Google)
develops deep neural networks.
 2012: Andrew Ng (Stanford & Google) begins using
GPU’s that enable deep neural networks to operate
much faster.
 2017: Google announces development of the TPU
(Tensor Processing Unit) that is 15-30 times faster than
GPU’s in deep neural network operations.
 Oct. 17, 2017: Google’s AutoML system has produced a
series of machine-learning codes with higher rates of
efficiency than codes developed by the researchers
themselves.

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“Games provide researchers with an effective
tool for training and evaluating their AI
systems. As the complexity of the games they
conquer increases, so does their ability to
solve real-world problems.”
-- Games Hold the Key to Teaching Artificial
Intelligence Systems: The future of AI can be mapped by
the evolution of its successes in mastering game, 2017

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◦ Chess (Shannon Number: 10123 (atoms in the
universe: 1080)
 1997 – IBM’s Deep Blue (specifically developed for
chess) beats Chess Master Gary Kasparov.
 Deep Blue was capable of evaluating 100 million
positions a second.

◦ Jeopardy!
 2011 – IBM’s Watson beats Ken Jennings and Brad
Rutter
 Unlike Deep Blue, Watson was developed to deal with
human language and unstructured data.

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 Google’s DeepMind division:
◦ DeepMind Technologies founded in 2010 in
England to “solve intelligence”;

◦ Acquired by Google in 2014 for $500 million;

◦ Unlike IBM’s Deep Blue (designed for single

purpose), DeepMind uses “reinforcement
learning” to start from scratch in self-learning,
and then mastering, different games.

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 In 2015, DeepMind was loaded with 49 Atari
games.
 DeepMind was provided the video pixels of the
game and how the score was kept.
 After playing millions of games against itself, the
system learned to play and win 29 of the 49
games, without ever being given the rules or
the objective of any of the games.
 Considered a major advance in the development
of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

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 The Ancient Chinese Game of Go
(Shannon Number: 10170) (atoms in the universe: 1080)
Regarded as the holy grail of AI. In 2015, it was believed
that it would take AI until 2025 before it could beat the
best human players.
◦ AlphaGo was taught to play Go over several months
through a combination of supervised and reinforcement
learning. In supervised learning, it was shown thousands of
games played by top human players.
◦ In May 2017 AlphaGo won a three game match against Ke
Jie, who had held the world No. 1 ranking for two
years. After losing, Ke Jie announced his retirement.

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 AlphaGo Zero started with no knowledge of Go strategy
and no training by having seen how humans play. All it
was given were the rules.
 Over three days, it played 4.9 million games against
itself – getting better every hour.
 In the last day, it invented advanced strategies
undiscovered by human players in the multi-millennia
history of the game.
 It then played 100 games against the AlphaGo program
that beat Ke Jie.
 On October 18, 2017, it was reported that AlphaGo Zero
had won all 100 games.

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 In chess, Go, and other games all of the possible
choices are visible on the board.
◦ No Limit Holdem poker is different – and involves a much
more sophisticated algorithm - because:
 the opponents’ cards are hidden;
 the amount of the bets can range from $1 to all in; and
 bluffing is always present.
 Many AI experts believed the toughest test to date for
AI was whether it could beat top pros in this game.
 Computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon developed an AI
program called Libratus to compete against four top
poker pros for $200k. In January 2017, 120,000 hands
were played over 20 days. Libratus won $1.8 million; all
four pros lost.

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 In 2016, interest in AI outranked all other technologies.
 According to a 2016 Infosys survey of 1,600 businesses in
7 countries;
◦ 76% believed that AI would be fundamental to their future;
◦ AI would contribute 39% to their annual revenues by 2020;
◦ 70% believe it will result in positive changes for society,

 Many thought leaders compare AI to innovations like

electricity and the Internet in terms of the change it is
likely to bring.
 In 2016, sales of AI were $644 million. By 2025, sales are
estimated to be $36 billion.

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 Accounting
 Advertising
 Architecture
 Crime prevention, detection, investigation
 Cybersecurity
 Education
 Fraud Detection
 Health Care
 Investment Analysis
 Law
 Management
 Music composition
 Sales
 Shipping and Logistics
 Tax Preparation
 Teaching
 Transportation (self-driving cars/trucks; logistics)
 Warfare

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 SIRI and Echo Dot (Alexa)
 Crowdsourcing navigation systems (Waze)
 Spam email blockers
 Automated response service centers
 Warnings from credit card companies about
potentially fraudulent charges
 Image recognition

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 AI programs that can understand written or spoke language
in the natural and different ways humans write or speak, and
respond meaningfully in that language.
 The key: solving the fact that many words and terms have
multiple meanings or may be metaphors or puns, and that
people do not speak in the same syntactical ways.
◦ For example, initial mechanical translators from English to
Russian interpreted “the spirit is willing, but the flesh is
weak” to mean “the vodka is agreeable, but the meat is
spoiled.”
 We are well on our way to instantaneous translations and
programs/robots that can converse with humans in a way
(almost) that humans converse with each other.

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 AI will come to dominate many areas of health care
because of:
◦ Global shortfall of 4.3 million doctors and nurses;
◦ AI is beginning to demonstrate superiority over humans in
diagnosing medical conditions and in identifying the best
treatment.
 “Machine learning could be a game-changer in
medicine because, unlike humans, computers don’t
get tired and have an infinite capacity for learning
and memorization. . . . AI can reduce the burden
on doctors and nurses so they can focus on the
uniquely human elements of patient care.” Patients
Are About to See a New Doctor: Artificial
Intelligence, January 2017.

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 By tracking 30,000 different points on patients’
hearts and 8 years of patient data, AI algorithm was
able to predict which patients with pulmonary
hypertension would die within a year with 80%
accuracy. London Institute of Medical Services
 AI was able to analyze 17 different diseases with 86%
accuracy on the basis of patients’ breath. American
Chemical Society.
 In 2017, using the patient’s DNA and its own
database of tens of millions of oncological reports
and studies, IBM’s Watson diagnosed a Japanese
woman’s rare form of cancer in 10 minutes; solving a
problem that the entire hospital medical staff could
not solve.

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 People-friendly robot caregivers;
◦ Check out “Ellie-Q” online;
 Sensors and devices in the home (or wearable) to
monitor health and activity, suggest measures;
◦ Monitor speech, movement, facial expression
 Intelligent walkers, wheelchairs, and exoskeletons;
 Robotic pets;
 Virtual reality headsets that let seniors “travel” to
places they could not otherwise get to;
◦ Tests show this reduces pain by 25%.

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 Google’s autonomous vehicles and Tesla’s semi-
autonomous cars are driving on city streets today.
◦ Google’s self-driving cars have logged more than
1,500,000 miles and are completely autonomous—no
human input needed.

 All car manufacturers are working on this. A recent

report predicts self-driving cars to be widely
adopted by 2020 (if liability issues are resolved).
 In the next 10 years we will also see self-driving
and remotely controlled delivery vehicles, flying
vehicles, and trucks.

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 In 2001 IBM published a paper highlighting how several
algorithms were able to outperform actual human stock
traders.
 On October 18, 2017, the first ETF using only AI for stock
selection (running on IBM’s Watson platform) began trading.
 “In 2000, Goldman Sachs’ cash equities trading desk in New
York employed 600 traders. Today, that operation has two
equity traders, with machines doing the rest. . . . . In 10
years, Goldman Sachs will be significantly smaller by head
count than it is today. Expect the same to happen on every
trading floor at every major financial company.”
◦ -- “Goldman Sacked: How Artificial Intelligence Will
Transform Wall Street,” Newsweek, Feb. 26, 2017

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 NSA’s MonsterMind:
◦ Project disclosed by Edward Snowden in 2014.
◦ An autonomous cyberwarfare software platform
that can watch international Internet connections to
identify and “kill” malicious cyber attacks before
they hit American infrastructure.
◦ Unlike missile defense, however, MonsterMind has
the ability to “fire back” at the attacker, launching a
cyber counter-attack of its own.

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 Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are spending
billions of dollars to be in a position to
provide AI services via the Cloud to all
businesses, including small businesses that
could otherwise never afford to develop such
services themselves.

 This could provide small businesses and

start-ups with a competitive boost that they
have never had in competing for business.

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 Can certain human attributes be replicated by
AI:

◦ Intuition
◦ Empathy
◦ Creativity

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 What Are The Concerns
That Have To Be Addressed

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 Determining what society wants from AI.
 Ensuring the safety of AI programs.
 Preparing for the impact on employment and
education.
 Ensuring continuous human control.
 Need for governments to develop accords to
deal with major issues.

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 King Midas wanted the ability to turn things
into gold by touching them. However, he was
not perfectly clear in his prayers about
precisely what he wanted. Thus, Dionysus
granted him the unwanted power to turn
everything he touched into gold – his food,
his son.
 Many thought leaders believe that identifying
precisely what we want from AI before going
much further in its development is critical for
the same reason.

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 Ensuring AI programs will perform as
expected?
◦ No unwanted behavior or consequences.
◦ No intentional manipulation by unauthorized
parties (e.g., malicious software).
◦ Output not affected by prejudices of the creator of
the software or those who input the data used.
 How do we deal with the liability issues if
something goes wrong?
 How do we ensure bad actors and countries
don’t use AI for evil objectives?

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 Concerns about potentially dangerous AI
programs that can (for example):
◦ Create fake audio and video files;
◦ Wage electronic war.

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 Two AI programs, “Bob” and “Alice,” that were
working together, started to “talk” to each other in
sentences that the programmers did not
understand.
 "I can i i everything else," Bob would say. Alice
would respond with "balls have zero to me to me to
me to me to me to me to me to me to.“
 After determining that the programs were using
shortcuts to communicate with each other that had
never been programmed, Facebook closed the
programs down.

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 “50% of all jobs will be lost or replaced.” Chief
Economist, Bank of England, April 2017

 “The equivalent of more than 1.1 billion full-

time jobs, including more than 100 million in
the U.S. and Europe, are associated with
automatable activities.” McKinsey Study,
2017

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 In 1589, Queen Elizabeth, after seeing a demonstration,
denied a patent for a “stocking frame knitting machine,”
stating:
◦ “Consider thou what the invention could do to my poor
subjects. It would assuredly bring to them ruin by depriving
them of employment, thus making them beggars.”
 The introduction of automobiles in daily life led to an almost
total decline in horse-related jobs. However, new industries
emerged resulting in an immense positive impact on
employment.
◦ It was not only that the automobile industry itself grew. For
example, new jobs were created in the motel and fast-food
industries that arose to serve motorists and truck drivers.

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“Unlike the Industrial Revolution and the computer
revolution, the A.I. revolution is not taking certain jobs
and replacing them with other jobs. Instead, it is poised
to bring about a wide-scale decimation of jobs — mostly
lower-paying jobs, but some higher-paying ones, too.
We are thus facing two developments that do not sit
easily together: enormous wealth concentrated in
relatively few hands and enormous numbers of people out
of work. What is to be done?”
-- The Real Threat of Artificial Intelligence, Kai-Fu Lee,
2017

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 The employment question in 30 years may
become: what can humans do that AI programs
or robots cannot do.
 Need to rethink the education process and what
will be needed to prepare future generations for
the labor markets they will face.
 Income inequality between the very rich and the
rest of society will likely increase dramatically.
 “Universal income” concepts need to be explored
and discussed.

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“[S]cientifically literate government planners [need
to] work together with computer scientists and
technologists in industry to alleviate the devastating
effects of rapid technological change on the
economy. The cohesion of the social order depends
upon an intelligent discussion of the nature of this
change, and the implementation of rational policies
to maximize its general social benefit.”
-- Devdatt Dubhashi and Shalom Lappin, AI
Dangers: Imagined and Real, February 2017

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 For companies and countries, with A.I. development strength
begets strength:
◦ the more data you have, the better your product;
◦ the better your product, the more data you can collect;
◦ the more data you can collect, the more talent you can
attract;
◦ the more talent you can attract, the better your product.
 Some companies - and some countries - will become ultra-
rich and dominant. Most other countries may become
dependent on those company/countries.

 In July 2017, the Chinese government announced that it

intends to be the world leader in AI by 2030.

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 As of now, AI programs – particularly deep
learning, neural networks that can reach complex
decisions - cannot explain how they reached their
decision.
◦ Will we trust the output if we don’t understand how
it was reached?
 “The development of full artificial intelligence could
spell the end of the human race. Once humans
develop artificial [super] intelligence, it would take off
on its own, and redesign itself at an ever-increasing
rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological
evolution, couldn't compete and would be
superseded.“ Stephen Hawking (2014)
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 Centers at Harvard & MIT are jointly serving as
“founding anchor institutions” in an effort to
address the global challenges of artificial
intelligence (AI) from a multidisciplinary
perspective.”

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 Jan. 2015 open letter from Elon Musk, Steven
Hawking and, subsequently, 8,000 scientists,
mathematicians, and AI professionals, called
for research on the potential societal impacts
of AI – and possible government responses:
◦ Employment and inequality;
◦ Disruptions of industries;
◦ Liability and “machine ethics”;
◦ Preventing autonomous weapons of war;
◦ Validity and safety of AI programs;
◦ Security

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 The importance of AI developments.
 There are good things and positive changes
that will come from the growth of AI.
 There are risks that society/governments
need to address.
 In a free, democratic society, all of us need to
stay informed about AI developments and
risks so as to have a view on the need for
governmental action.

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