AI and ML Futures 1: Background

With the purchase of DeepMind by Google for a rumoured 400 million pounds a chain of events was set off that began a debate in the glare of the media: just how far away was superintelligence, the AI singularity? Elon Musk was an investor in DeepMind, and a reader of Nick Boström's book "Superintelligence" and he became convinced that artificial intelligence was a threat to humanity "We are summoning the demon" he said. To the researchers behind the most recent developments in AI, the idea that our faltering steps towards artificial perceptual systems were anywhere close to a demon seemed ridiculous (speech recognition, object recognition). But the public perception remained and yet others with little knowledge of the technologies underpinng the advances added their voices to the fray. At the post conference banquet for NIPS 2014, a few of us were talking about the potential effect of these discussions on our research.