Learn About Artificial Intelligence Before Artificial Intelligence Learns About You
Hahaha, just kidding, it’s too late for you now.
To understand why scale is so important, however, you have to start to understand some of the more technical details of what, exactly, machine intelligences are doing with the data they consume. A lot of our ambient fears about A.I. rest on the idea that they’re just vacuuming up knowledge like a sociopathic prodigy in a library, and that an artificial intelligence constructed to make paper clips might someday decide to treat humans like ants or lettuce. This just isn’t how they work. All they’re doing is shuffling information around in search of commonalities — basic patterns, at first, and then more complex ones — and for the moment, at least, the greatest danger is that the information we’re feeding them is biased in the first place.
One day there will be something that can read this whole story for you and give you a simple explanation but until then you need to do it yourself, which is better because you will actually learn stuff. Maybe email yourself the link and save it for tonight or the weekend, because oh my God there is so much of it. “How machine learning is poised to reinvent computing” is just one thing you’ll learn. There’s a whole lot going on here.