[ExI] stealth singularity

[John Clark]

On Thu, May 16, 2019 at 3:12 PM Dave Sill <sparge at gmail.com> wrote:

* > I can write a perfect tic-tac-toe playing AI, for example,*
>

But you can't write a program that can learn to play chess at a superhuman
level starting from zero and without being taught. Nobody can do that. But
humans can build neural nets, and although a human can explain how it works
in very broad detail nobody can say specifically why the machine decided
this move was better than that move, however it soon becomes crystal clear
it was the better move and its playing Chess at a superhuman level.

Incidentally this sort of thing could cause social problems in the very
near future. Imagine being denied a loan because a AI, which has proven
itself over and over again to be superhumanly good at this, has decided  not
to give you a loan because you are a bad credit risk. You look at your
credit history and it looks pretty good to you and in fact it looks good to
most people, so you ask the AI exactly what is it that you don't like, but
just as it can't explain why it made a particular Chess move it can't
explain why your loan was denied except to say "it just didn't look right
to me". You would probably be frustrated by that response, and what would
make it even worse is the knowledge that it's hunch is probably right, you
probably wouldn't be able to repay it.

*> Chess is vastly harder to play, but chess playing programs still only
> play chess.*
>

 AlphaZero can start with knowing nothing but if you just tell it what the
basic rules of the game are it can teach itself in 24 hours without any
human help to play 3 very different board games at a superhuman level, GO,
Shogi, and Chess (Chess is the easiest of the 3). And if you want to change
the rules of the games, by making the board larger for example then just
give it another 24 hours so it can practice with itself and it will be
superhuman at that too.

And all that was last year, this year a improved version called AlphaStar
played Dario Wunsch, the world's best human player of the video game
Starcraft 2; AlphaStar beat the human in the competition 5 games to zero.

John K Clark
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