I wrote this for my FB friends for the 2017 election
Just FYI, there is an election coming up and I think it important that everyone wakes up to some new technology which is going to be rather jolting for some tired policies/politicians.
Machine learning is pretty much what you would think, machines that can learn. This is a subset of artificial intelligence, and is what powers many applications we interact with day to day (facebook newsfeed, google search, google translate, instagram filters, netflix recommendations, amazons fast delivery times, …).
Much like people learn from experience, computers can learn from data. In many ways, the two are equivalent. I think machines can do anything people can, and I hope to put everyone out of a job, including myself. This is yet another step forward for automation. For example, self-driving cars (driven by machine learning) are set to take hundreds of thousands of jobs in the few next years. While there have been a couple of revolutions of automation, I think this one is fundamentally different. I think learning is the key to our intelligence and we already know that computers can reason. Given learning and reasoning, what else is there that makes up intelligence?
A common argument that I hear against this optimism is that computers cannot be creative, I disagree. As an example, AlphaGoZero (a learned program – via self-play) recently and convincingly beat the world champion (Lee Sedol) at Go. It played a notably beautiful / ‘creative’ move, move 37 in game 2.
In Go, it is impossible to search all the possible moves. AlphaGo needed to learn a kind of intuition so it could make guesses about which moves would be a good/bad. Machine learning has also been used to produce art, albums, stories, …
Computers will be better at our jobs, and they will do it for less. But, if we can’t get jobs. How do we earn money to feed ourselves, to pay for shelter, to pay the power bill, … etc? That is why I am voting for a UBI.
In my mind the only course of action is to embrace this new technology, let it make our economies efficient and productive. While we share the rewards.