Obama and Singularity: Why is the United States President Telling About Artificial Intelligence Is Cool

On August 24, 2016, editor-in-chief Scott Dadic, US President Barack Obama and head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, Joey Ito, gathered at the White House to talk about how states should prepare for the singularity for the November issue of Wired magazine. Instead of a farewell interview with the outgoing politician, we had an interesting conversation on important topics, which resulted in the discovery that, in practice, “we are of the same blood as the geek and the president of the USA”.


Full text of the interview and Russian translation

The singularity has long been turned into such an elephant in a room - its inevitability seems to be disputed by no one, but, besides, it is not specifically discussed by anyone, remaining the subject of scientific discussions and sraches in commentation on Giktams.

Understanding why this is happening is not difficult. Take, for example, global warming: in spite of the fact that polar ice continues to melt, the apocalyptic picture of flooding of coastal territories all over the planet is still in the mass consciousness related to science fiction films like “The Day After Tomorrow” rather than to a really possible future perspective. In the same way, the topic of artificial intelligence seems so disconnected from life that in the mass consciousness it is perceived solely as a traditional element of the not very believable plot of the next loud summer blockbuster.
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The reasons for this are well known to all visionaries: Steve Jobs, explaining the futility of focus groups to assess the relevance of new inventions, quoted Henry Ford: "If I asked my clients what they would like, they would answer me:" A faster horse. " In other words, for the most part, people rely on already existing experience - therefore situations that radically change their reality seem completely unreal.

Singularity - i.e. the transition to a reality in which cars start teaching themselves and a person risks losing control and even the idea of ​​what is happening in their electronic brains is so blatantly different from the last thousands of years of human civilization experience that it’s easier not to think about it at all don't hammer the brain. The scientific and geek community is not very helpful in this, without bothering with the release of books, articles and funny videos on YouTube in the format of Singularity for Dummies.

And at this moment, the current American president in an interview for one of the largest geek editions of the world demonstrates his knowledge of the topic at the level of if not MIT professor, then at least qualitatively examined the question and making independent conclusions of the geek. And it is certainly better than the professor who is able to formulate these conclusions - the question of the language in which science communicates with the broad masses of the people: the video clearly shows how difficult it is for Joey Ito to say something intelligible. Whereas Obama speaks, albeit slowly but surely, in the case and completely without water and empty demagogy.

Obama makes the main focus on specialized AI, which, unlike the yet distant perspective of a full-fledged AI, has already become part of everyday life. Suppose, judging by the ongoing presidential campaign in the United States, people are still traditionally more afraid that their jobs will be stolen by foreigners than cars, now it's time to worry about whose workers robots and neural networks will take:

AI will be able to lure not only low-skilled labor - even tasks that require high qualification, which contain significant elements of routine and repeatability, are also likely to be performed by a computer.

Unlike populists and alarmists, Obama in spirit can be attributed to the real geeks, because he shares the techno-optimism inherent in the scientific and IT-community:

history has shown that humanity is always assimilating new technologies, people see that new jobs are created, adapt - and the standard of living eventually grows.

The text version of the conversation with Obama contains more content than the video version of the interview. In particular, in the full version of the conversation, Obama still answers the question of how to prepare for a possible future war with SkyNet - the answer lies somewhere in the fight against pandemics:

We usually think about security and self-defense in terms of weapons and barriers. But more and more often I find myself looking at medicine and thinking about viruses and antibodies. Partly maintaining cybersecurity is also so difficult because it’s not just some tanks attacking you, but a whole bunch of systems that may be vulnerable to getting the worm inside. This means that we should approach security issues differently, invest in it differently - it may not look too cool, but, in practice, it will be very important.

What really bothers me is something like a pandemic. No wall will protect us from getting another airborne virus into our territory. Therefore, we need to help build health systems around the world, set up alert systems and have procedures and systems for more effective vaccines. And I think that the experience of preventing pandemics, and the experience of dealing with cyber threats can be useful in the sense of dealing with the dangers of AI.

Of course, the US president should have commented on the issue of state participation. Again, he began with a soul-warming declaration that he is a supporter of the “blossoming of a thousand flowers”:

State intervention should be limited to relatively light strokes and generous investments in science and to support the links between basic and applied research.

But still believes that the state should invest in the AI ​​more:

An example to which we still address when it comes to the great technological breakthroughs, and now, 50 years later, is landing on the moon. I was reminded here that the space program then ate half a percent of GDP. This does not sound very scary, but today it would mean spending $ 80 billion a year only on AI. In fact, we spend, I think, less than a billion.

And explains why this is important:

if we want the interests of society in all its diversity to be reflected in the new breakthrough technologies, the government should participate financially in them. And if the state avoids this, the social aspects of progress risk being either unnoticed or not well thought out.

However, once again reassuring especially nervous geeks that state participation should ensure common interests, and not the interests of this state itself. The approach is clearly unfamiliar to politicians in modern Russia, by the way:

I want to emphasize that government funding and participation in data collection does not mean that we want to appropriate or militarize these technologies. A simple example: for an exact medicine project, it was necessary to collect a sufficiently large amount of information about the genomes of a large and diverse number of Americans. But instead of giving money to Harvard or Stanford, where they store their samples, we launched a full-fledged genetic database that anyone can access. This is an example of general interest, common architecture, which guarantees transparency of research instead of monetization by someone specific.

Unconditional basic income

Not without mentioning the topic of basic income, which is directly related to the topic of AI and singularity, but it is much easier to explain and understand the average person, therefore, they have captured a much larger number of minds lately. Obama does not give a direct answer to this question, but he says that the modern scale of assessing the usefulness (and, accordingly, payability) of different types of activity in society does not seem fair to him, so that the AI’s penetration into our lives in connection with this change will force we finally come to the new version of the social contract. In which, perhaps, there will be a place for unconditional income - or perhaps other forms and models will be found:

We pay teachers too little, although it is hard work in which a computer is unlikely to be an adequate substitute for a really good teacher. So, a review of the expenses that we are willing to afford for teachers, nurses, caregivers, moms or dads sitting with children, artists and others who are busy with important things for us, but not too valuable things, is a matter to start discussing.

In this, Joey Ito agrees with him, demonstrating the traditional left-wing view in academic circles:

I think a Wall Street spirit is: “if you're so smart, then why are you so poor” - is one of the problems. And now, while working at the academy, I realized that a lot of smart people have no money.

Returning to the topic of global warming, Obama puts priorities in the following way: the main thing is not to drown, and we will deal with the rest:

if we cope with climate change, press the brakes and prevent the sea level from rising 2 meters, the rest of humanity will decide on its own.

And finally, dear geek, Obama also shares your impatience in anticipation of cosmic breakthroughs:

And since these are the problems of the pioneers, I want to mention at last that I remain a big fan of space and think about how to move to a new stage of space wanderings - to which we are obviously not spending enough. The private sector has achieved great success, because it invested in various “Why the heck, why not?” Various risky and insane enterprises, where the state did not set foot. And we are still talking about space travel, reasoning categories of the same chemical reactions that launched the first Apollo. Half a century later, it already seems — I don’t know how things are going on with warp engines — that some breakthroughs should happen.

Of course, a conversation with an audience of a geek's publication is not a breakthrough in the minds of the mass listener, but it’s still warming the heart that not only geeks, science fiction writers, scientists and alarmists, but world politicians are also preparing for the future. But otherwise, even if in the XXI century, people continue to be afraid of vaccinations and GMOs, preferring the good old infant deaths and vegetables poisoned by pesticides. The achievements of science do little - they need to be explained:

Having made the right decisions now, we will prepare for the moment when AI will become a full-fledged part of our economy, so that people welcome it, and not oppose it.

In general, the end of the presidential term is clearly not the end of the world, and after this article it’s really interesting what Obama will do next. Such a strong ally on the side of the forces of progress will certainly not hurt us. And no matter what awaits us in the future, Skynet is now unlikely to sneak up unnoticed.