Saturday, March 5, 2016

Wisdom Of The Week

One of the things that I'm interested in is how we communicate goals to AIs. How do we talk to the AIs? My basic conclusion is that it's a mixture. Human natural language is good up to a point, and has evolved to describe what we typically encounter in the world. Things that exist from nature, things that we've chosen to build in the world—these are things which human natural language has evolved to describe. But there's a lot that exists out there in the world for which human natural language doesn't have descriptions yet. Even though our AI systems might effectively find those descriptions, we don't have ways to say those ourselves.

When it comes to describing more sophisticated things, the kinds of things that people build big programs to do, we don't have a good way to describe those things with human natural language. But we can build languages that do describe that.

One question I've been interested in is, what does the world look like when most people can write code? We had a transition, maybe 500 years ago or something, from a time when only scribes and a small set of the population were literate and could write natural language. Today, a small fraction of the population can write code. Most of the code they can write is for computers only. You don't understand things by reading code.

But there will come a time when, as a result of things I've tried to do, where the code is at a high enough level that it is a minimal description of what you're trying to do. For example, contracts are written in English and you try to make the English as precise as possible. There will be a time when most contracts are written in code, where there's a precise representation. It might be for cases where it's a computer that says, "Can I use this API to do this?" Well, there's some service level agreement that's going on there that isn't a human contract; it's something that's written in a piece of code that is understandable to humans, but also executable by the machines. This question of, can I do this according to this contract? is an automatic question. That's one tiny example of how the world starts to change when most people can write and read code.

- Steven Wolfram, AI & The Future Of Civilization

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