4 Talks to Win Over the Artificial Intelligence Skeptic

By monitoring and analyzing data streams from more than 200,000 news and social media sites, Healthmap.org predicted the 2014 Ebola outbreak 9 days before the World Health Organization announced it.

Healthmap worked with computers trained to react to more than 19 million relevant phrases. The advanced warning—made possible by machine intelligence (MI)—may have saved lives. 

Stories like this make it hard to deny MI’s potential to improve the world, but there are still those that do. Naysayers often fall into two camps. One says MI is an empty, overhyped promise. The other believes when we eventually succeed at inventing autonomous, super-intelligent machines, they’ll overthrow us, zeroing in on human will as a source of inefficiency.

Those in the first camp may not be paying attention. There are plenty examples of how MI already enables us to know and act on the previously unknowable—to conceive of and achieve the previously impossible.

The TED Talks below highlight some examples. Booz Allen MI experts Josh Sullivan and Angela Zutavern expand on more in The Mathematical Corporation, their new book on the incredible possibilities born by fruitful collaborations between imaginative human leaders and mathematically-mighty machines. Consider the oceanographer using machine learning to identify plankton in more than 60 million high definition underwater photographs, or the major airline that used computer-powered predictive modeling to uncover the precise chain of circumstances causing a mysteriously recurring flight delay.

The second camp’s doomsayers express valid concerns. As advancement in machine intelligence rapidly accelerates, we need them to a be a constructive part of the conversation. They’ll make sure we proceed with appropriate caution.

And proceed we will. We’ve compiled the following TED Talks for enthusiasts and skeptics alike. They offer ample evidence that MI will soon revolutionize work, business, government, science, education, and more. These talks also expose the difficult questions we still need to answer about how technology can be ethically, safely, and creatively employed.  

TED Talk 1: How Computers Are Learning to Be Creative

What happens when you take a computer that’s learned to recognize faces and ask it to draw what it sees in a photograph of fluffy, white clouds? Watch and learn from Blaise Aguera y Arcas, a principle scientist at Google, and a leading authority on machine perception.

TED Talk 2: What Happens When Our Computers Get Smarter Than We Are?

Machines that function like hyper-intelligent human minds are as much a physical possibility as splitting the atom was 80 years ago. It’s only a matter of time.

But what if, when we set them to work solving the world’s toughest problems, they behave like evil genies, granting wishes with brutal literalism? Watch as philosopher Nick Bostrom argues for the critical importance of making sure smart machines share the values of their creators.

TED Talk 3: How AI Can Bring on a Second Industrial Revolution

Machines that surpassed and amplified the physical strength of humans and work animals made the first Industrial Revolution possible.

Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired, makes the case that super-smart machines will fuel a second Industrial Revolution by similarly amplifying our intelligence. Like the first, this one will eliminate some professions while creating many more.

TED Talk 4: Machine Intelligence Makes Human Morals More Important

We already use MI to inform decisions that have a profound impact on people’s lives. Wisconsin’s justice system, for instance, uses it to help determine which inmates should be granted parole.

Citing that and other examples, techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci argues that we need to do more to ensure the computers that advise us don’t reflect—or even amplify—the biases of their creators.

For a more complete exploration of the MI concepts touched upon in these TED Talks, pick up a copy of The Mathematical Corporation.