CHM Revolutionaries:The Challenge & Promise of Artificial Intelligence

[Recorded: November 5, 2011]
Join leading researchers Dr. Eric Horvitz of Microsoft Research and Dr. Peter Norvig of Google for an intriguing discussion about the past, present, and future of artificial intelligence, moderated by KQED's Tim Olson. We are extremely fortunate to have Eric and Peter on our stage -- they've known each other for several years, and can discuss everything from machine learning to data-driven science, the world of perception, speech recognition, robotics, self-driving cars, and even a computer called Watson. A Wonder Dialog indeed!

We are proud to partner with the Bay Area Science Festival on this Wonder Dialog. This event is also part of the Museum's Revolutionaries 2011 lecture series, featuring conversations with some of the most distinguished thinkers in the technology industry.

[KarenHopeSheraton]

Estimates are that the Human brain computes somewhere between 100 Teraflops and 1 Petaflops, (100 trillion to 1 quadrillion operations per second)
IBMs Blue Gene/P operates at 1 Petaflop, and can speed up

P.S. Since doing that bit of research, every time Google checks my spelling and responds with "did you mean..." the hair stands on the back of my neck :)

Meanwhile, the computational power of all connected home desktops in North America is far greater than the most powerful supercomputer.

[KarenHopeSheraton]

THATS WHAT U ALL NEED IS COMMON SENSE KNOWLEDGE.. AY IT AS IT IS THIS IS A WARFARE IN A PRE WAR SITUATION.. im feeling lucky!!!

[KarenHopeSheraton]

Beat the devil out of them lol.. meaning its happening

[KarenHopeSheraton]

IE.. USED IN FORENSIC QUESTIONING UK POLICE

[astroboomboy]

I also speak Chinese relatively fluently, and have followed Chinese politics and media for the last 4 years quite frequently, reading Chinese journals and newspapers in Chinese. I wouldn't think that would make me brainwashed... Anyways, I hope China will continue it's growth, but I doubt it.

[astroboomboy]

China also spends a large amount on military, but I'm talking about embezzlement. Single politicians who steal billions, and who let their family steal as well. Where do you have the statistics of Chinese parents spending more than UK? I would like to see that, sounds interesting, but I don't believe it's true if you take China's whole population, maybe it's true for a city. Btw, I lived in Beijing for a year, so I have at least a sense of the Chinese situation outside of Western media.

[astroboomboy]

Well, I don't think that will happen for two reasons. US, Europe and to some extent Japan, are the innovators. China doesn't seem to be able to create innovative minds simply due to its political system. It is a system where innovative and creative minds are kept at bay, at worst imprisoned. Only free and liberal societies seem to be able to create the conditions for innovation to blossom, Chinese students learn to emulate, not to think for themselves.

[astroboomboy]

Yeah, you'r so right! We're very far away from real intelligence. What we have now is just a set of if-then rules (too overly simplify it). In terms of idea and conception we haven't come any further than the calculator (and I'm talking about old-school calculators from antiquity). It's just so complex that it seems like it's intelligence. There's just too much we don't understand, and the people in AI need to make it sound like we do in order to get funding, you know.

[astroboomboy]

Microsoft has a huge research group devoted to developing AI, it's a huge part of it's R&D, and the technology of Siri is very basic. The complexity of google translate in comparison is huge, so is the search engine of google. But none of these programs are actually doing anything intelligent. They are just a bunch of if-then and probability algorithms.

[astroboomboy]

That's so true, in many ways simple is the hardest because it may be so obvious, so in front of our nose, that we often miss it. Think about Huffman coding. Such a simple algorithm, yet it was one of the biggest problems of computation for decades!

[Thevoiceofoz]

Make A.I robots put them on the moon and mars. Use the robots to make cities on the moon first to support human life. Send them to mars to mine for rare earth elements. Use the moon for storage space. They could mine the moon for metals and gold.

[astroboomboy]

Yeah, the Chinese gov. (I think a few years back) put huge sums into AI research. There are so many in China studying computer science it's just insane. East Asia is where it's at as far as I can see, at least where it will be.

[astroboomboy]

Jeff Hawking is a genius, but I think (I may be wrong) that most of his ideas and the way he programs is based on very complex sets of computation and algorithms. Do you know? He's one of my heroes though!

[astroboomboy]

In the end I think US and Europe will still be the dominant power for decades, maybe even centuries to come. Name on great modern innovation that is Chinese?

[mattway-x]

This talk just sounded like bunch of excuses, and a can't do teach mentality about AI. I just want to clarify for you all, the AI we have around today is NARROW AI. We have no real AI yet.

[EgaoNoGenki]

WOW! This new YT interface remembers WHERE ON THE VIDEO I left off when the tab crashed! When I reloaded said tab, it restarted on 14:17!

How does YT do this now???

[peppeddu]

How come that Microsoft and Google are talking about AI and Apple is putting it into the hands of millions of people without making any panel discussion about it.

[francisshortjr]

We are far away from human eqiv intelligence...how can you consider many trillion x our intelligence

[astroboomboy]

The algorithms used today seem to me to be too complex. They do not result in universal systems. I think the underlying rules of intelligence is quite simple, but those rules result in highly complex behavior.

[mike]

Computers are already smarter than humans. They don't have endless, pointless wars.