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      "body": "Hi, I'm A.M for now, I'm in my mid-20s and want to share my story with working and facing this thing called life after I watched a lot of YouTubers like Thomas James \"TomSka\" David Brown \u201cboyinaband\u201d and many others who have very openly shared their hardships, they have inspired me to write this\u2026.. Whatever this is.\nI don't consider myself a good writer so bare with me here.\nTo try to keep this post organized and make sense I'll highlight the point I want to talk about and tell the relevant part of my story, you can connect the pieces all together at the end.\n\n**First how am I?** \nI grow up in the countryside I went to normal school when I was yang, because I was the quiet introvert and wasn't from the town I was in I got bullied a lot for most of my time at school, I got through school time knowing just two friends, I was OK with it.\nI genuinely lost interest in school when I was in the ninth grade It seemed more like a memory test than a way of learning so I started looking for ways to make money, \"why waste time learning things irrelevant in real life if I can make money now\" my naive 16 years old self said, don't get me wrong I didn't think I was done with learning I just wanted to learn in my own way, and I didn't stop school, now I'm in part time Business school, so back then I started looking for any way to make money in the last 5 year I tried: working in sales for over 2  years, selling products online, becoming instructor online, worked as SEO & social media consultant, tried starting my own business for 4 times, and for the last year and half I taught myself how to program and how to use Unity game engine and now I'm working on my first game, I can easily and proudly say that I didn't succeed at any of what I did so far, but I've learned a lot every time and I would do it all over again if I had the chance.\nThe process of picking myself up every single freaking time was a living hell and I got desperate many times.\nbecause I saw a lot of people feeling relevant to what David said in his video I want to share how I managed to keep my sanity and my opinion about some point he brought in his video.\n\n\n**Not thinking your work is good enough:**\nIs that really a bad thing? not being satisfied with what you just accomplished is a sign that you always look forward to what you still can do.\nI remember after I published my first course on Udemy I got invited to a hangout and I went for it I thought I'll give myself some slack, while I was there someone shouted out \"this guy here just published his first course let all give him a clap shall we\" for some reason he thought that was a good idea, I don't think I can blame him his intentions were good, I never tried to put a smile as hard as I did that moment I guess I just didn't want to look like a selfish prick, but the truth that I wasn't happy about what I accomplished I was thinking about my bad English poor structure of the course and was I being a sellout for trying to sell my knowledge? halfway of creating the course, I was already thinking about 5 other things I wanted to do next.\nI think there's nothing wrong about not being satisfied with what you finish, I think It's a good sign of an ambitious creator.\nWhen you first make the decision to accomplish something It looks like that godly thing that you think It would feel good to have or do, but when you start turning that big sexy thing to a small to-do list somewhere the appeal you had to that thing will disappear to a certain point, it's not that godly sexy thing you thought about before it's becoming a part of your routine now you know the process of doing that thing It's not a mystery anymore.\nI think that's why they say: \"It's about the journey, not the destination\".\n\n\n**Not taking care of yourself:**\nIt's hard to keep taking care of yourself to others people standards, whether it's about looking ripped putting makeup or buying the latest clothes, instead find your own save point and move forward from there if you feel the need to.\nWhen I was working in seals I had to look my best most of the time's which was exhausting more than the work itself and what made it worst is that some coworkers starting hinting that I need to start working out to look sharper and more confident.\nBecause I was desperate for results from my work I started going to the gym and I got stuck at joining for a month or two then giving up for half a year couple of times, every time I stopped going to the gym I over beat myself saying that I need this for my work, I need more money to do a lot of things, if this work didn't go well what else Am I going to do, eventually I usually took it out on food, I don't even want to start thinking what would have happened to me if my body was able to store fat.\nTrying to take care of yourself to others standards can be very exhausting, I felt down because I was putting so much effort in things I don't really care about to get others approval, I genuinely don't care about having a ripped body, it would look cool sure but I'm not willing to put all that effort into health and looks at least for now, who knows maybe in the future things will be better and I'll be willing  to put the effort necessary to have 6 pack abs (wink wink ladies).\nNowadays I eat better than I used to, I still eat some junk food but things are much much better than they were 2 years ago, when I fell down I still go buy and drink a liter of Pepsi but at some point that was my morning coffee, as for my looks I cut my hair very short so I would have one less thing to worry about in the morning, I shave my beard once every couple of weeks I change my cloth every two or three days even if I didn't go out.\nThe point is I take care of myself for my own sack, It was much worse before and I'll always keep working to improve pit by pit.\nIt's about building habits not getting motivated for a couple of weeks then beating yourself for not being able to keep up.\n\n\n**Not mastering one skill:**\nI worked in sales, instructed online, worked as SEO and social media consultant, self taught myself how to program and make games but I don\u2019t think I\u2019m the right person to talk about this, all I\u2019m saying that if you didn\u2019t find that one true call that is right for you, you might be a \u201cmultipotentialite\u201d if you want to know what exactly does this mean I urge you to watch Emilie talk at TedX\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJORi5VO1F8\nAnd check the blog too if you want to know more \nhttp://puttylike.com/\n\n**Everything happens for a reason........ or does it?**\nWhen I was young I was fortunate to know a good old religious man, I don\u2019t know about your perspective about religions but hear me out this isn\u2019t a sermon, I still remember when he tried to teach me that everything happens for a reason I was like \u201cWHAT\u2026\u2026. Oh really, then what is the reason for this and this and that\u201d my question didn\u2019t stop and I wasn\u2019t asking nicely either yet, somehow he was calm about it like some kind of monk, I don\u2019t know if I ruined his day or not but I feel bad for taking the world misery out on him that day, he was just a simple man who was doing what he think is good for others, his intentions were good but unfortunately for him I wasn\u2019t a simple person, I overthink everything and everyone, it\u2019s my blessing and my curse,  later I told my family about him and I was surprised that they knew him, apparently everyone knows each other in the countryside, they told me about what he was facing lately personally, financially, and emotionally, I didn\u2019t believe that someone who is facing all that isn\u2019t depressed or angry and even trying to do good for others at least by his believes, I wanted to know more about him he got my interest, I wanted to know if he\u2019s an imposter who is just putting a good face or not because a part of me didn\u2019t believe how can he be that good, I kept asking about him from time to time and sometimes I even went to his \u201clessons\u201d, eventually I went to face him with what I know about him like a detective facing a criminal, the crime of being that simple yet trying to be better than me, It\u2019s pathetic I know It\u2019s just how my brain works sometimes, because I used to take pride of being logical about everything and not believing in anything without questioning it, it bothered me how can he be at peace with his life and I\u2019m not even that he\u2019s facing a lot more than I\u2019m, I faced him and told him everything then asked how can you be this calm about everything that is happening in your life, he had a faint smile and said \u201cI don\u2019t know the reason for everything that is happening right now but everything happens for a reason\u201d I remember holding my fist hard and walking away, maybe I was holding my fist trying not to hit him for not being realistic like me or probably not to beat myself for not being half the man that he was.\nI don\u2019t know about your perspective about religions and I\u2019m not here to tell you about mine but I respect that some religions teach that everything happens for a reason, is it the truth? Does everything happens for a reason? I don\u2019t know, I don\u2019t think that is even the point, It\u2019s silly to even get in an argument about this because no one can be sure about it, it\u2019s simply just a belief, it\u2019s simply teach you to not overthink about the reasons for everything around you, just learn from it if you can and focus on what you can do, it\u2019s kind of funny for me to tell you not to overthink about somethings because I\u2019m sure my 19 year old me would punch me right in the face, but it\u2019s just too draining and exhausting to try to find a reason for every bad thing that have happened to me or to others.\nIn the last three years two of my best friends died, the first one I knew for about nine years and the other one for around five, both killed, both in a way they didn\u2019t deserve to, each time I had to force myself to focus on the 0.0000001% full part of the cup or else I would have lose my sanity.\nI would hate to think what would be my thought process if someone tried to sell me religion like a product, some of them would be like \u201cHi son, you should follow my beliefs because I\u2019m 100% sure that I\u2019m right and everybody else is wrong and if you don\u2019t, well you\u2019re FU**ED\u201d that would have disfigured some of the beliefs that helped me get better.\nControlling your stream of thoughts will be the hardest thing you\u2019ll ever have to do in your life, but if mastered it you\u2019ll become unstoppable.\n\n\nI\u2019ve been getting into the game industry for around year and half now, I don\u2019t have any experiance in the field but I\u2019ve other experiences that many don\u2019t, working in sales made me learn a lot about people's motivations and incentives, I saw a lot of people jump to make purchase while other chicken out last minute, you don\u2019t get to learn about this in a book or an NLP course, you only get to learn this experience by working in sales first hand, working as an SEO and social media consultant made me care about the little details like posting in the right social medias that is more relevant to your audience, more isn\u2019t always better, choosing the right words colors and timing for best result, sometimes modifying your content for a better marketing or not going into a certain niche even if there\u2019s an audience for it because it doesn\u2019t suit your brand, teaching online made me learn that the selling point isn\u2019t the end goal, helping and mentoring students even after they have purchased the course was way more important than I thought, the feedback I got about the course was crucial to take the course to the next level and some student even helped me with some marketing.\nIf you know anything about the mobile game industry you can see how these experiences can be helpful, I can imagine the kind of journey I want to create for the player because I can build the motivations and incentives I want for him, while I\u2019m building the player journey I\u2019ll always keep in mind to put the monetization and ads the right way so all of them can work seamlessly together for a better player experience, and taking care of existing players and community will always be a priority, I wasn\u2019t happy and cheerful when I had to learn these experiences the hard way, I thought I was just failing, I even remember crying myself to sleep every time I decided to pull the plug on something I was working on, but eventually It worked out somehow I think.\n\u201cyou can't connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life\u201d.\nSteve Jobs\n\n\nI want to share some of the tricks I used that helped my in general to get my life together:\n\n**Music**\nlisten to cheerful music, even if it might not be exactly what you listen to usually but try them for a while, my favorite type or music is Rock and Metal it\u2019s loud and make me feel empowered but sometimes it's not what I need to change my mood so I started listening to electro music mostly Drum & bass, I didn\u2019t like it at first, I\u2019m human I don\u2019t like to change, but forcing myself to listen to it for while change my perspective about it and I started listening to it while I\u2019m working, and it worked.\n\n\n**habits not motivation**\nWe\u2019re slaves to our habits, it\u2019s exhausting to do something that\u2019s you\u2019re not used to for quite a while, so invest your effort and time to build your habits pit by pit no matter how slow it will take, measure your progress and celebrate your success no matter how small they\u2019re, it\u2019ll make all the difference in your life in the long term.\n\n**work in a group**\nNo matter how introverted person you think you\u2019re, you\u2019re still human at the end of day and you need your dose of human interaction so try to work in group if you can, if you don\u2019t have that luxury (like me) work out side from time to time, library, coffee shop, parks all works, changing your surrounding and environment can change your mood, you can try changing your room\\office decor every couple of weeks too.\n\n**warm-blooded pet**\nGet a warm-blooded pet it helps, I tried fish and turtles but didn\u2019t really work for me they just stared at me with their empty eyes, I have a cat for two year now and It helped, maybe it\u2019s having the sense of that there is a creature that needs you to look after him, it\u2019s helped me not to feel completely unworthy in some bad day.\n\n\nFinally I hope this help you in any way it can, and hope it will find its way to all who needs it.",
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      "body": "Finally someone is saying it out loud. thank you!!",
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      "body": "add katie-lynn boulard on FB, she's my friend and she's currently doing an exchange in bangkok. She's really sweet and she said you can come to hers for the evening if you want to have some company. she only has a room so no bed for you :/ but at least something, I'm sure she can give you a meal and just some company. :))",
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      "body": "https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*Iw5mXpFl-Hoy06WaenJvWw.gif\n\nAI Revolution 101\nOur last invention, greatest nightmare, or pathway to utopia?\nAbout\nThis essay, originally published in eight short parts, aims to condense the current knowledge on Artificial Intelligence. It explores the state of AI development, overviews its challenges and dangers, features work by the most significant scientists, and describes the main predictions of possible AI outcomes. This project is an adaptation and major shortening of the two\u2013part essay AI Revolution by Tim Urban of Wait But Why. I shortened it by a factor of 3, recreated all images, and tweaked it a bit. Read more on why/how I wrote it here.\nIntroduction\nAssuming that human scientific activity continues without major disruptions, artificial intelligence may become either the most positive transformation of our history or, as many fear, our most dangerous invention of all. AI research is on a steady path to develop a computer that has cognitive abilities equal to the human brain, most likely within three decades (timeline in chapter 5). From what most AI scientists predict, this invention may enable very rapid improvements (called fast take-off), toward something much more powerful\u200a\u2014\u200aArtificial Super Intelligence\u200a\u2014\u200aan entity smarter than all of humanity combined (more on ASI in chapter 3). We are not talking about some imaginary future. The first level of AI development is gradually appearing in the technology we use everyday (newest AI advancements in chapter 2). With every coming year these advancements will accelerate and the technology will become more complex, addictive, and ubiquitous. We will continue to outsource more and more kinds of mental work to computers, disrupting every part of our reality: the way we organize ourselves and our work, form communities, and experience the world.\nExponential Growth\nThe Guiding Principle Behind Technological Progress\nTo more intuitively grasp the guiding principles of AI revolution, let\u2019s first step away from scientific research. Let me invite you to take part in a story. Imagine that you\u2019ve received a time machine and been given a quest to bring somebody from the past. The goal is to shock them by showing them the technological and cultural advancements of our time, to such a degree that this person would perform SAFD (Spinning Around From Disbelief).\n\nSo you wonder which era should you time-travel to, and decide to hop back around 200 years. You get to the early 1800s, retrieve a guy and bring him back to 2016. You \u201c\u2026walk him around and watch him react to everything. It\u2019s impossible for us to understand what it would be like for him to see shiny capsules racing by on a highway, talk to people who had been on the other side of the ocean earlier in the day, watch sports that were being played 1,000 miles away, hear a musical performance that happened 50 years ago, and play with \u2026[a] magical wizard rectangle that he could use to capture a real-life image or record a living moment, generate a map with a paranormal moving blue dot that shows him where he is, look at someone\u2019s face and chat with them even though they\u2019re on the other side of the country, and worlds of other inconceivable sorcery.\u201d\u00b9 It doesn\u2019t take much. After two minutes he is SAFDing.\nNow, both of you want to try the same thing, see somebody Spinning Around From Disbelief, but in your new friend\u2019s era. Since 200 years worked, you jump back to the 1600s and bring a guy to the 1800s. He\u2019s certainly genuinely interested in what he sees. However, you feel it with confidence\u200a\u2014\u200aSAFD will never happen to him. You feel that you need to jump back again, but somewhere radically further. You settle on rewinding the clock 15,000 years, to the times \u201c\u2026before the First Agricultural Revolution gave rise to the first cities and the concept of civilisations.\u201d\u00b2 You bring someone from the hunter-gatherer world and show him \u201c\u2026the vast human empires of 1750 with their towering churches, their ocean-crossing ships, their concept of being \u201cinside,\u201d and their enormous mountain of collective, accumulated human knowledge and discovery\u201d\u00b3\u200a\u2014\u200ain forms of books. It doesn\u2019t take much. He is SAFDing in the first two minutes.\nNow there are three of you, enormously excited to do it again. You know that it doesn\u2019t make sense to go back another 15,000, 30,000 or 45,000 years. You have to jump back, again, radically further. So you pick up a guy from 100,000 years ago and you you walk with him into large tribes with organized, sophisticated social hierarchies. He encounters a variety of hunting weapons, sophisticated tools, sees fire and for the first time experiences language in the form of signs and sounds. You get the idea, it has to be immensely mind-blowing. He is SAFDing after two minutes.\nSo what happened? Why did the last guy had to hop \u2192 100,000 years, the next one \u2192 15,000 years, and the guy who was hopping to our times only \u2192 200 years?\n\nhttps://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*Wbd0td3DqD3pJo7_YHjkbQ.gif\n\n\u201cThis happens because more advanced societies have the ability to progress at a faster rate than less advanced societies\u200a\u2014\u200abecause they\u2019re more advanced. [1800s] humanity knew more and had better technology\u2026\u201d\u2074, so it\u2019s no wonder they could make further advancements than humanity from 15,000 years ago. The time to achieve SAFD shrank from ~100,000 years to ~200 years and if we look into the future it will rapidly shrink even further. Ray Kurzweil, AI expert and scientist, predicts that a \u201c\u202620th century\u2019s worth of progress happened between 2000 and 2014 and that another 20th century\u2019s worth of progress will happen by 2021, in only seven years\u2075\u2026A couple decades later, he believes a 20th century\u2019s worth of progress will happen multiple times in the same year, and even later, in less than one month\u2076\u2026Kurzweil believes that the 21st century will achieve 1,000 times the progress of the 20th century.\u201d\u2077\n\u201cLogic also suggests that if the most advanced species on a planet keeps making larger and larger leaps forward at an ever-faster rate, at some point, they\u2019ll make a leap so great that it completely alters life as they know it and the perception they have of what it means to be a human. Kind of like how evolution kept making great leaps toward intelligence until finally it made such a large leap to the human being that it completely altered what it meant for any creature to live on planet Earth. And if you spend some time reading about what\u2019s going on today in science and technology, you start to see a lot of signs quietly hinting that life as we currently know it cannot withstand the leap that\u2019s coming next.\u201d\u2078\nThe Road to Artificial General Intelligence\nBuilding a Computer as Smart as Humans\nArtificial Intelligence, or AI, is a broad term for the advancement of intelligence in computers. Despite varied opinions on this topic, most experts agree that there are three categories, or calibers, of AI development. They are:\nANI: Artificial Narrow Intelligence\n1st intelligence caliber. \u201cAI that specializes in one area. There\u2019s AI that can beat the world chess champion in chess, but that\u2019s the only thing it does.\u201d\u2079\nAGI: Artificial General Intelligence\n2nd intelligence caliber. AI that reaches and then passes the intelligence level of a human, meaning it has the ability to \u201creason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly, and learn from experience.\u201d\u00b9\u2070\nASI: Artificial Super Intelligence\n3rd intelligence caliber. AI that achieves a level of intelligence smarter than all of humanity combined\u200a\u2014\u200a\u201cranging from just a little smarter \u2026 to one trillion times smarter.\u201d\u00b9\u00b9\n\nhttps://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*5AkzXZJoVXRrGNSOO8ZojQ.gif\n\nWhere are we currently?\n\u201cAs of now, humans have conquered the lowest caliber of AI\u200a\u2014\u200aANI\u200a\u2014\u200ain many ways, and it\u2019s everywhere:\u201d\u00b9\u00b2\n\u201cCars are full of ANI systems, from the computer that figures out when the anti-lock brakes kick in, to the computer that tunes the parameters of the fuel injection systems.\u201d\u00b9\u00b3\n\u201cGoogle search is one large ANI brain with incredibly sophisticated methods for ranking pages and figuring out what to show you in particular. Same goes for Facebook\u2019s Newsfeed.\u201d\u00b9\u2074\nEmail spam filters \u201cstart off loaded with intelligence about how to figure out what\u2019s spam and what\u2019s not, and then it learns and tailors its intelligence to your particular preferences.\u201d\u00b9\u2075\nPassenger planes are flown almost entirely by ANI, without the help of humans.\n\u201cGoogle\u2019s self-driving car, which is being tested now, will contain robust ANI systems that allow it to perceive and react to the world around it.\u201d\u00b9\u2076\n\u201cYour phone is a little ANI factory \u2026 you navigate using your map app, receive tailored music recommendations from Pandora, check tomorrow\u2019s weather, talk to Siri.\u201d\u00b9\u2077\n\u201cThe world\u2019s best Checkers, Chess, Scrabble, Backgammon, and Othello players are now all ANI systems.\u201d\u00b9\u2078\n\u201cSophisticated ANI systems are widely used in sectors and industries like military, manufacturing, and finance (algorithmic high-frequency AI traders account for more than half of equity shares traded on US markets\u00b9\u2079).\u201d\u00b2\u2070\n\u201cANI systems as they are now aren\u2019t especially scary. At worst, a glitchy or badly-programed ANI can cause an isolated catastrophe like\u201d\u00b2\u00b9 a plane crash, a nuclear power plant malfunction, or \u201ca financial markets disaster (like the 2010 Flash Crash when an ANI program reacted the wrong way to an unexpected situation and caused the stock market to briefly plummet, taking $1 trillion of market value with it, only part of which was recovered when the mistake was corrected) \u2026 But while ANI doesn\u2019t have the capability to cause an existential threat, we should see this increasingly large and complex ecosystem of relatively-harmless ANI as a precursor of the world-altering hurricane that\u2019s on the way. Each new ANI innovation quietly adds another brick onto the road to AGI and ASI.\u201d\u00b2\u00b2\n\nhttps://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*Ia8wUuZPxpUNzvUjNRsxpA.gif\n\nWhat\u2019s Next? Challenges Behind Reaching AGI\n\u201cNothing will make you appreciate human intelligence like learning about how unbelievably challenging it is to try to create a computer as smart as we are \u2026 Build a computer that can multiply ten-digit numbers in a split second\u200a\u2014\u200aincredibly easy. Build one that can look at a dog and answer whether it\u2019s a dog or a cat\u200a\u2014\u200aspectacularly difficult. Make AI that can beat any human in chess? Done. Make one that can read a paragraph from a six-year-old\u2019s picture book and not just recognise the words but understand the meaning of them? Google is currently spending billions of dollars trying to do it.\u201d\u00b2\u00b3\nWhy are \u201chard things\u200a\u2014\u200alike calculus, financial market strategy, and language translation \u2026 mind-numbingly easy for a computer, while easy things\u200a\u2014\u200alike vision, motion, movement, and perception\u200a\u2014\u200aare insanely hard for it\u201d\u00b2\u2074?\n\u201cThings that seem easy to us are actually unbelievably complicated. They only seem easy because those skills have been optimized in us (and most animals) by hundreds of million years of animal evolution. When you reach your hand up toward an object, the muscles, tendons, and bones in your shoulder, elbow, and wrist instantly perform a long series of physics operations, in conjunction with your eyes, to allow you to move your hand in a straight line through three dimensions \u2026 On the other hand, multiplying big numbers or playing chess are new activities for biological creatures and we haven\u2019t had any time to evolve a proficiency at them, so a computer doesn\u2019t need to work too hard to beat us.\u201d\u00b2\u2075\n\nhttps://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/0*E-qdF22nxvOrVPxP.\n\nWhen you look at picture A, \u201cyou and a computer both can figure out that it\u2019s a rectangle with two distinct shades, alternating. Tied so far.\u201d\u00b2\u2076\nPicture B. \u201cYou have no problem giving a full description of the various opaque and translucent cylinders, slats, and 3-D corners, but the computer would fail miserably. It would describe what it sees\u200a\u2014\u200aa variety of two-dimensional shapes in several different shades\u200a\u2014\u200awhich is actually what\u2019s there.\u201d\u00b2\u2077 \u201cYour brain is doing a ton of fancy shit to interpret the implied depth, shade-mixing, and room lighting the picture is trying to portray.\u201d\u00b2\u2078\nLooking at picture C, \u201ca computer sees a two-dimensional white, black, and gray collage, while you easily see what it really is\u201d\u00b2\u2079\u200a\u2014\u200aa photo of a girl and a dog standing on a rocky shore.\n\u201cAnd everything we just mentioned is still only taking in visual information and processing it. To be human-level intelligent, a computer would have to understand things like the difference between subtle facial expressions, the distinction between being pleased, relieved and content\u201d\u00b3\u2070.\nHow will computers reach even higher abilities like complex reasoning, interpreting data, and associating ideas from separate fields (domain-general knowledge)?\n\u201cBuilding skyscrapers, putting humans in space, figuring out the details of how the Big Bang went down\u200a\u2014\u200aall far easier than understanding our own brain or how to make something as cool as it. As of now, the human brain is the most complex object in the known universe.\u201d\u00b3\u00b9\nBuilding Hardware\nIf an artificial intelligence is going to be as intelligent as the human brain, one crucial thing has to happen\u200a\u2014\u200athe AI \u201cneeds to equal the brain\u2019s raw computing capacity. One way to express this capacity is in the total calculations per second the brain could manage.\u201d\u00b3\u00b2\n\nThe challenge is that currently only a few of the brain\u2019s regions are precisely measured. However, Ray Kurzweil, has developed a method for estimating the total cps of the human brain. He arrived at this estimate by taking the cps from one brain region and multiplying it proportionally to the weight of that region, compared to the weight of the whole brain. \u201cHe did this a bunch of times with various professional estimates of different regions, and the total always arrived in the same ballpark\u200a\u2014\u200aaround 10\u00b9\u2076, or 10 quadrillion cps.\u201d\u00b3\u00b3\n\u201cCurrently, the world\u2019s fastest supercomputer, China\u2019s Tianhe-2, has actually beaten that number, clocking in at about 34 quadrillion cps.\u201d\u00b3\u2074 But Tianhe-2 is also monstrous, \u201ctaking up 720 square meters of space, using 24 megawatts of power (the brain runs on just 20 watts), and costing $390 million to build. Not especially applicable to wide usage, or even most commercial or industrial usage yet.\u201d\u00b3\u2075\n\u201cKurzweil suggests that we think about the state of computers by looking at how many cps you can buy for $1,000. When that number reaches human-level\u200a\u2014\u200a10 quadrillion cps\u200a\u2014\u200athen that\u2019ll mean AGI could become a very real part of life.\u201d\u00b3\u2076\nCurrently we\u2019re only at about 10\u00b9\u2070 (10 trillion) cps per $1,000. However, historically reliable Moore\u2019s Law states \u201cthat the world\u2019s maximum computing power doubles approximately every two years, meaning computer hardware advancement, like general human advancement through history, grows exponentially\u00b3\u2077 \u2026 right on pace with this graph\u2019s predicted trajectory:\u201d\u00b3\u2078\n\nhttps://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*4qcqwbsWjvWh-BWPnAsp6g.gif\n\nThis dynamic \u201cputs us right on pace to get to an affordable computer by 2025 that rivals the power of the brain \u2026 But raw computational power alone doesn\u2019t make a computer generally intelligent\u200a\u2014\u200athe next question is, how do we bring human-level intelligence to all that power?\u201d\u00b3\u2079\nBuilding Software\nThe hardest part of creating AGI is learning how to develop its software. \u201cThe truth is, no one really knows how to make it smart\u200a\u2014\u200awe\u2019re still debating how to make a computer human-level intelligent and capable of knowing what a dog and a weird-written B and a mediocre movie is.\u201d\u2074\u2070 But there are a couple of strategies. These are the three most common:\nCopy how the brain works.\nThe most straight-forward idea is to plagiarize the brain, and build the computer\u2019s architecture with close resemblance to how a brain is structured. One example \u201cis the artificial neural network. It starts out as a network of transistor \u2018neurons,\u2019 connected to each other with inputs and outputs, and it knows nothing\u200a\u2014\u200alike an infant brain. The way it \u2018learns\u2019 is it tries to do a task, say handwriting recognition, and at first, its neural firings and subsequent guesses at deciphering each letter will be completely random. But when it\u2019s told it got something right, the transistor connections in the firing pathways that happened to create that answer are strengthened; when it\u2019s told it was wrong, those pathways\u2019 connections are weakened. After a lot of this trial and feedback, the network has, by itself, formed smart neural pathways and the machine has become optimized for the task.\u201d\u2074\u00b9\nThe second, more radical approach to plagiarism is whole brain emulation. Scientists take a real brain, cut it into a large number of tiny slices to look at the neural connections and replicate them in a computer as software. If that method is ever successful, we will have \u201ca computer officially capable of everything the brain is capable of\u200a\u2014\u200ait would just need to learn and gather information \u2026 How far are we from achieving whole brain emulation? Well so far, we\u2019ve just recently been able to emulate a 1mm-long flatworm brain, which consists of just 302 total neurons.\u201d\u2074\u00b2 To put this into perspective, the human brain consists of 86 billion neurons linked by trillions of synapses.\n2. Introduce evolution to computers.\n\u201cThe fact is, even if we can emulate a brain, that might be like trying to build an airplane by copying a bird\u2019s wing-flapping motions\u200a\u2014\u200aoften, machines are best designed using a fresh, machine-oriented approach, not by mimicking biology exactly.\u201d\u2074\u00b3 If the brain is just too complex for us to digitally replicate, we could try to emulate evolution instead. This uses a process called genetic algorithms. \u201cA group of computers would try to do tasks, and the most successful ones would be bred with each other by having half of each of their programming merged together into a new computer. The less successful ones would be eliminated.\u201d\u2074\u2074 Speed and a goal-oriented approach are the advantages that artificial evolution has over biological evolution. \u201cOver many, many iterations, this natural selection process would produce better and better computers. The challenge would be creating an automated evaluation and breeding cycle so this evolution process could run on its own.\u201d\u2074\u2075\n3. \u201cMake this whole thing the computer\u2019s problem, not ours.\u201d\u2074\u2076\nThe last concept is the simplest, but probably the scariest of them all. \u201cWe\u2019d build a computer whose two major skills would be doing research on AI and coding changes into itself\u200a\u2014\u200aallowing it to not only learn but to improve its own architecture. We\u2019d teach computers to be computer scientists so they could bootstrap their own development.\u201d\u2074\u2077 This is the likeliest way to get AGI soon that we know of.\nAll these software advances may seem slow or a little bit intangible, but as it is with the sciences, one minor innovation can suddenly accelerate the pace of developments. Kind of like the aftermath of the Copernican revolution\u200a\u2014\u200athe discovery that suddenly made all the complicated mathematics of the planets\u2019 trajectories much easier to calculate, which enabled a multitude of other innovations. Also, the \u201cexponential growth is intense and what seems like a snail\u2019s pace of advancement can quickly race upwards.\u201d\u2074\u2078\n\nhttps://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*BHwAlKJFYwKYEzZlitNTvQ.gif\n\nThe Road to Artificial Super Intelligence\nAn Entity Smarter than all of Humanity Combined\nIt\u2019s very real that at some point we will achieve AGI: software that has achieved human-level, or beyond human-level, intelligence. Does this mean that at that very moment the computers will be equally capable as us? Actually, not at all\u200a\u2014\u200acomputers will be way more efficient. Because of the fact that they are electronic, they will have following advantages:\nSpeed. \u201cThe brain\u2019s neurons max out at around 200 Hz, while today\u2019s microprocessors \u2026 run at 2 GHz, or 10 million times faster.\u201d\u2075\u00b9\nMemory. Forgetting or confusing things is much harder in an artificial world. Computers can memorize more things in one second than a human can in ten years. A computer\u2019s memory is also more precise and has a much greater storage capacity.\nPerformance. \u201cComputer transistors are more accurate than biological neurons, and they\u2019re less likely to deteriorate (and can be repaired or replaced if they do). Human brains also get fatigued easily, while computers can run nonstop, at peak performance, 24/7.\u201d\u2075\u00b2\nCollective capability. Group work is ridiculously challenging because of time-consuming communication and complex social hierarchies. The bigger the group gets, the slower the output of each person becomes. AI, on the other hand, isn\u2019t biologically constrained to one body, won\u2019t have human cooperation problems, and is able to synchronize and update its own operating system.\nIntelligence Explosion\nWe need to realize that AI \u201cwouldn\u2019t see \u2018human-level intelligence\u2019 as some important milestone\u200a\u2014\u200ait\u2019s only a relevant marker from our point of view\u200a\u2014\u200aand wouldn\u2019t have any reason to \u2018stop\u2019 at our level. And given the advantages over us that even human intelligence-equivalent AGI would have, it\u2019s pretty obvious that it would only hit human intelligence for a brief instant before racing onwards to the realm of superior-to-human intelligence.\u201d\u2075\u00b3\nThe true distinction between humans and ASI wouldn\u2019t be its advantage in intelligence speed, but \u201cin intelligence quality\u200a\u2014\u200awhich is something completely different. What makes humans so much more intellectually capable than chimps isn\u2019t a difference in thinking speed\u200a\u2014\u200ait\u2019s that human brains contain a number of sophisticated cognitive modules that enable things like complex linguistic representations or longterm planning or abstract reasoning, that chimps\u2019 brains do not have. Speeding up a chimp\u2019s brain by thousands of times wouldn\u2019t bring him to our level\u200a\u2014\u200aeven with a decade\u2019s time of learning, he wouldn\u2019t be able to figure out how to \u2026 \u201d\u2075\u2074 assemble a semi-complicated Lego model by looking at its manual\u200a\u2014\u200asomething a young human could achieve in a few minutes. \u201cThere are worlds of human cognitive function a chimp will simply never be capable of, no matter how much time he spends trying.\u201d\u2075\u2075\n\u201cAnd in the scheme of the biological intelligence range \u2026 the chimp-to-human quality intelligence gap is tiny.\u201d\u2075\u2076\n\nhttps://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*vnVWATTAMCwfnJu_iZn2RQ.jpeg\n\nIn order to render how big a deal it would be to exist with something that has a higher quality of intelligence than us, we need to imagine AI on the intelligence staircase two steps above us\u200a\u2014\u200a\u201cits increased cognitive ability over us would be as vast as the chimp\u2013human gap \u2026 And like the chimp\u2019s incapacity to ever absorb \u2026\u201d\u2075\u2077 what kind of magic happens in the mechanism of a doorknob\u200a\u2014\u200a\u201cwe will never be able to even comprehend the things \u2026 [a machine of that intelligence] can do, even if the machine tried to explain them to us \u2026 And that\u2019s only two steps above us.\u201d\u2075\u2078\n\u201cA machine on the second-to-highest step on that staircase would be to us as we are to ants.\u201d\u2075\u2079 \u201cSuperintelligence of that magnitude is not something we can remotely grasp, any more than a bumblebee can wrap its head around Keynesian Economics. In our world, smart means a 130 IQ and stupid means an 85 IQ\u200a\u2014\u200awe don\u2019t have a word for an IQ of 12,952.\u201d\u2076\u2070\n\u201cBut the kind of superintelligence we\u2019re talking about today is something far beyond anything on this staircase. In an intelligence explosion\u200a\u2014\u200awhere the smarter a machine gets, the quicker it\u2019s able to increase its own intelligence\u200a\u2014\u200aa machine might take years to rise from \u2026 \u201d\u2076\u00b9 the intelligence of an ant to the intelligence of the average human, but it might take only another 40 days to become Einstein-smart. When that happens, \u201cit works to improve its intelligence, with an Einstein-level intellect, it has an easier time and can make bigger leaps. These leaps will make it much smarter than any human, allowing it to make even bigger leaps.\u201d\u2076\u00b2\nFrom then on, following the rule of exponential advancements and utilizing the speed and efficiency of electrical circuits, it may perhaps take only 20 minutes to jump another step, \u201cand by the time it\u2019s ten steps above us, it might be jumping up in four-step leaps every second that goes by. Which is why we need to realize that it\u2019s distinctly possible that very shortly after the big news story about the first machine reaching human-level AGI, we might be facing the reality of coexisting on the Earth with something that\u2019s here on the staircase (or maybe a million times higher):\u201d\u2076\u00b3\n\nhttps://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*LdJxmWCjSdweUKvb.\n\n\u201cAnd since we just established that it\u2019s a hopeless activity to try to understand the power of a machine only two steps above us, let\u2019s very concretely state once and for all that there is no way to know what ASI will do or what the consequences will be for us. Anyone who pretends otherwise doesn\u2019t understand what superintelligence means.\u201d\u2076\u2074\n\u201cIf our meager brains were able to invent wifi, then something 100 or 1,000 or 1 billion times smarter than we are should have no problem controlling the positioning of each and every atom in the world in any way it likes, at any time\u200a\u2014\u200aeverything we consider magic, every power we imagine a supreme God to have will be as mundane an activity for the ASI as flipping on a light switch is for us.\u201d\u2076\u2075\n\u201cAs far as we\u2019re concerned, if an ASI comes into being, there is now an omnipotent God on Earth\u200a\u2014\u200aand the all-important question for us is: Will it be a good god?\u201d\u2076\u2076\nLet\u2019s start from the brighter side of the story.\nHow Can ASI Change our World?\nSpeculations on Two Revolutionary Technologies\nNanotechnology\nNanotechnology is an idea that comes up \u201cin almost everything you read about the future of AI.\u201d\u2076\u2077 It\u2019s the technology that works at the nano scale\u200a\u2014\u200afrom 1 to 100 nanometers. \u201cA nanometer is a millionth of a millimeter. 1 nm\u2013100 nm range encompasses viruses (100 nm accross), DNA (10 nm wide), and things as small as molecules like hemoglobin (5 nm) and medium molecules like glucose (1 nm). If/when we conquer nanotechnology, the next step will be the ability to manipulate individual atoms, which are only one order of magnitude smaller (~.1 nm).\u201d\u2076\u2078\nTo put this into perspective, imagine a very tall human standing on the earth, with a head that reaches the International Space Station (431 km/268 mi high). The giant is reaching down with his hand (30 km/19 mi across) to build \u201cobjects using materials between the size of a grain of sand [.25 mm] and an eyeball [2.5 cm].\u201d\u2076\u2079\n\nhttps://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*e9Ut3QT2F3tNh4h5U4rR8A.jpeg\n\n\u201cOnce we get nanotechnology down, we can use it to make tech devices, clothing, food, a variety of bio-related products\u200a\u2014\u200aartificial blood cells, tiny virus or cancer-cell destroyers, muscle tissue, etc.\u200a\u2014\u200aanything really. And in a world that uses nanotechnology, the cost of a material is no longer tied to its scarcity or the difficulty of its manufacturing process, but instead determined by how complicated its atomic structure is. In a nanotech world, a diamond might be cheaper than a pencil eraser.\u201d\u2077\u2070\nOne of the proposed methods of nanotech assembly is to make \u201cone that could self-replicate, and then let the reproduction process turn that one into two, those two then turn into four, four into eight, and in about a day, there\u2019d be a few trillion of them ready to go.\u201d\u2077\u00b9\nBut what if this process goes wrong or terrorists manage to get ahold of the technology? Let\u2019s imagine a scenario where nanobots \u201cwould be designed to consume any carbon-based material in order to feed the replication process, and unpleasantly, all life is carbon-based. The Earth\u2019s biomass contains about 1\u2070\u2074\u2075 carbon atoms. A nanobot would consist of about 1\u2070\u2076 carbon atoms, so it would take 1\u2070\u00b3\u2079 nanobots to consume all life on Earth, which would happen in 130 replications. \u2026 Scientists think a nanobot could replicate in about 100 seconds, meaning this simple mistake would inconveniently end all life on Earth in 3.5 hours.\u201d\u2077\u00b2\nWe are not yet capable of harnessing nanotechnology\u200a\u2014\u200afor good or for bad. \u201cAnd it\u2019s not clear if we\u2019re underestimating, or overestimating, how hard it will be to get there. But we don\u2019t seem to be that far away. Kurzweil predicts that we\u2019ll get there by the 2020s.\u2077\u00b3Governments know that nanotech could be an Earth-shaking development \u2026 The US, the EU, and Japan\u2077\u2074 have invested over a combined $5 billion so far\u201d\u2077\u2075\nImmortality\n\u201cBecause everyone has always died, we live under the assumption \u2026 that death is inevitable. We think of aging like time\u200a\u2014\u200aboth keep moving and there\u2019s nothing you can do to stop it.\u201d\u2077\u2076 For centuries, poets and philosophers have wondered if consciousness doesn\u2019t have to go the way of the body. W.B. Yeats describes us as \u201ca soul fastened to a dying animal.\u201d\u2077\u2077 Richard Feynman, Nobel awarded physicists, views death from a purely scientific standpoint:\n\u201cIt is one of the most remarkable things that in all of the biological sciences there is no clue as to the necessity of death. If you say we want to make perpetual motion, we have discovered enough laws as we studied physics to see that it is either absolutely impossible or else the laws are wrong. But there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death. This suggests to me that it is not at all inevitable, and that it is only a matter of time before the biologists discover what it is that is causing us the trouble and that that terrible universal disease or temporariness of the human\u2019s body will be cured.\u201d\u2077\u2078\nTheory of great species attractors\nWhen we look at the history of biological life on earth, so far 99.9% of species have gone extinct. Nick Bostrom, Oxford professor and AI specialist, \u201ccalls extinction an attractor state\u200a\u2014\u200aa place species are \u2026 falling into and from which no species ever returns.\u201d\u2077\u2079\n\nhttps://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/0*o-MXeAYfUtWnOJKC.\n\n\u201cAnd while most AI scientists \u2026 acknowledge that ASI would have the ability to send humans to extinction, many also believe that if used beneficially, ASI\u2019s abilities could be used to bring individual humans, and the species as a whole, to a second attractor state\u200a\u2014\u200aspecies immortality.\u201d\u2078\u2070\n\nhttps://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/0*aYeNOSBxp4gieGwp.\n\n\u201cEvolution had no good reason to extend our lifespans any longer than they are now \u2026 From an evolutionary point of view, the whole human species can thrive with a 30+ year lifespan\u201d for each single human. It\u2019s long enough to reproduce and raise children \u2026 so there\u2019s no reason for mutations toward unusually long life being favored in the natural selection process.\u201d\u2078\u00b9Though, \u201cif you perfectly repaired or replaced a car\u2019s parts whenever one of them began to wear down, the car would run forever. The human body isn\u2019t any different\u200a\u2014\u200ajust far more complex \u2026 This seems absurd\u200a\u2014\u200abut the body is just a bunch of atoms\u2026\u201d\u2078\u00b2 making up organically programmed DNA, which it is theoretically possible to manipulate. And something as powerful as ASI could help us master genetic engineering.\nRay Kurzweil believes that \u201cartificial materials will be integrated into the body more and more \u2026 Organs could be replaced by super-advanced machine versions that would run forever and never fail.\u201d\u2078\u00b3 Red blood cells could be perfected by \u201cred blood cell nanobots, who could power their own movement, eliminating the need for a heart at all \u2026 Nanotech theorist Robert A. Freitas has already designed blood cell replacements that, if one day implemented in the body, would allow a human to sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath \u2026 [Kurzweil] even gets to the brain and believes we\u2019ll enhance our mental activities to the point where humans will be able to think billions of times faster\u201d\u2078\u2074 by integrating electrical components and being able to access online data.\n\u201cEventually, Kurzweil believes humans will reach a point when they\u2019re entirely artificial, a time when we\u2019ll look back at biological material and think how unbelievably primitive primitive it was that humans were ever made of that\u201d\u2078\u2075and that humans aged, suffered from cancer, allowed random factors like microbes, diseases, accidents to harm us or make us disappear.\u201d\n\nhttps://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*NcWWmd677RVWQRpLsz5X9g.jpeg\n\nWhen Will The First Machine Become Superintelligent?\nPredictions from Top AI Experts\n\u201cHow long until the first machine reaches superintelligence? Not shockingly, opinions vary wildly, and this is a heated debate among scientists and thinkers. Many, like professor Vernor Vinge, scientist Ben Goertzel, Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, or, most famously, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, agree with machine learning expert Jeremy Howard when he puts up this graph during a TED Talk\n\n\u201cThose people subscribe to the belief that this is happening soon\u200a\u2014\u200athat exponential growth is at work and machine learning, though only slowly creeping up on us now, will blow right past us within the next few decades.\n\u201cOthers, like Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, research psychologist Gary Marcus, NYU computer scientist Ernest Davis, and tech entrepreneur Mitch Kapor, believe that thinkers like Kurzweil are vastly underestimating the magnitude of the challenge [and the transition will actually take much more time] \u2026\n\u201cThe Kurzweil camp would counter that the only underestimating that\u2019s happening is the underappreciation of exponential growth, and they\u2019d compare the doubters to those who looked at the slow-growing seedling of the internet in 1985 and argued that there was no way it would amount to anything impactful in the near future.\n\u201cThe doubters might argue back that the progress needed to make advancements in intelligence also grows exponentially harder with each subsequent step, which will cancel out the typical exponential nature of technological progress. And so on.\n\u201cA third camp, which includes Nick Bostrom, believes neither group has any ground to feel certain about the timeline and acknowledges both A) that this could absolutely happen in the near future and B) that there\u2019s no guarantee about that; it could also take a much longer time.\n\u201cStill others, like philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, believe all three of these groups are naive for believing that there is potential of ASI, arguing that it\u2019s more likely that it won\u2019t actually ever be achieved.\n\u201cSo what do you get when you put all of these opinions together?\u201d\u2078\u2076\nTimeline for Artificial General Intelligence\n\u201cIn 2013, Vincent C. M\u00fcller and Nick Bostrom conducted a survey that asked hundreds of AI experts \u2026 the following:\u201d\u2078\u2077\n\u201cFor the purposes of this question, assume that human scientific activity continues without major negative disruption. By what year would you see a (10% / 50% / 90%) probability for such Human-Level Machine Intelligence [or what we call AGI] to exist?\u201d\u2078\u2078\nThe survey \u201casked them to name an optimistic year (one in which they believe there\u2019s a 10% chance we\u2019ll have AGI), a realistic guess (a year they believe there\u2019s a 50% chance of AGI\u200a\u2014\u200ai.e. after that year they think it\u2019s more likely than not that we\u2019ll have AGI), and a safe guess (the earliest year by which they can say with 90% certainty we\u2019ll have AGI). Gathered together as one data set, here were the results:\nMedian optimistic year (10% likelihood) \u2192 2022\nMedian realistic year (50% likelihood) \u2192 2040\nMedian pessimistic year (90% likelihood) \u2192 2075\n\u201cSo the median participant thinks it\u2019s more likely than not that we\u2019ll have AGI 25 years from now. The 90% median answer of 2075 means that if you\u2019re a teenager right now, the median respondent, along with over half of the group of AI experts, is almost certain AGI will happen within your lifetime.\n\u201cA separate study, conducted recently by author James Barrat at Ben Goertzel\u2019s annual AGI Conference, did away with percentages and simply asked when participants thought AGI would be achieved\u200a\u2014\u200aby 2030, by 2050, by 2100, after 2100, or never. The results:\u2078\u2079\n42% of respondents \u2192 By 2030\n25% of respondents \u2192 By 2050\n20% of respondents \u2192 By 2100\n10% of respondents \u2192 After 2100\n2% of respondents \u2192 Never\n\u201cPretty similar to M\u00fcller and Bostrom\u2019s outcomes. In Barrat\u2019s survey, over two thirds of participants believe AGI will be here by 2050 and a little less than half predict AGI within the next 15 years. Also striking is that only 2% of those surveyed don\u2019t think AGI is part of our future.\u201d\u2079\u2070\n\nhttps://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*U8ueEMtG6-D5hie8rZJGtQ.jpeg\n\nTimeline for Artificial Super Intelligence\n\u201cM\u00fcller and Bostrom also asked the experts how likely they think it is that we\u2019ll reach ASI: A), within two years of reaching AGI (i.e. an almost-immediate intelligence explosion), and B), within 30 years.\u201d\u2079\u00b9 Respondents were asked to choose a probability for each option. Here are the results:\u2079\u00b2\nAGI\u2013ASI transition in 2 years \u2192 10% likelihood\nAGI\u2013ASI transition in 30 years \u2192 75% likelihood\n\u201cThe median answer put a rapid (2 year) AGI\u2013ASI transition at only a 10% likelihood, but a longer transition of 30 years or less at a 75% likelihood. We don\u2019t know from this data the length of this transition [AGI\u2013ASI] the median participant would have put at a 50% likelihood, but for ballpark purposes, based on the two answers above, let\u2019s estimate that they\u2019d have said 20 years.\n\u201cSo the median opinion\u200a\u2014\u200athe one right in the center of the world of AI experts\u200a\u2014\u200abelieves the most realistic guess for when we\u2019ll hit ASI \u2026 is [the 2040 prediction for AGI + our estimated prediction of a 20-year transition from AGI to ASI] = 2060.\n\nhttps://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*YY8e493ER4LNomQV-NyMYg.jpeg\n\n\u201cOf course, all of the above statistics are speculative, and they\u2019re only representative of the median opinion of the AI expert community, but it tells us that a large portion of the people who know the most about this topic would agree that 2060 is a very reasonable estimate for the arrival of potentially world-altering ASI. Only 45 years from now\u201d\u2079\u00b3\n\nhttps://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*sGdvHHs02XWoQ35BcEWAXQ.gif\n\nAI Outcomes\nTwo Main Groups of AI Scientists with Two Radically Opposed Conclusions\nThe Confident Corner\nMost of what we have discussed so far represents a surprisingly large group of scientists that share optimistic views on the outcome of AI development. \u201cWhere their confidence comes from is up for debate. Critics believe it comes from an excitement so blinding that they simply ignore or deny potential negative outcomes. But the believers say it\u2019s naive to conjure up doomsday scenarios when on balance, technology has and will likely end up continuing to help us a lot more than it hurts us.\u201d\u2079\u2074 Peter Diamandis, Ben Goertezl and Ray Kurzweil are some of the major figures of this group, who have built a vast, dedicated following and regard themselves as Singularitarians.\n\nLet\u2019s talk about Ray Kurzweil, who is probably one of the most impressive and polarizing AI theoreticians out there. He attracts both \u201cgodlike worship \u2026 and eye-rolling contempt \u2026 He came up with several breakthrough inventions, including the first flatbed scanner, the first scanner that converted text to speech (allowing the blind to read standard texts), the well-known Kurzweil music synthesizer (the first true electric piano), and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. He\u2019s well-known for his bold predictions,\u201d\u2079\u2075 including envisioning that intelligence technology like Deep Blue would be capable of beating a chess grandmaster by 1998. He also anticipated \u201cin the late \u201980s, a time when the internet was an obscure thing, that by the early 2000s it would become a global phenomenon.\u201d\u2079\u2076 Out \u201cof the 147 predictions that Kurzweil has made since the 1990\u2019s, fully 115 of them have turned out to be correct, and another 12 have turned out to be \u2018essentially correct\u2019 (off by a year or two), giving his predictions a stunning 86% accuracy rate\u201d\u2079\u2077. \u201cHe\u2019s the author of five national bestselling books \u2026 In 2012, Google co-founder Larry Page approached Kurzweil and asked him to be Google\u2019s Director of Engineering. In 2011, he co-founded Singularity University, which is hosted by NASA and sponsored partially by Google. Not bad for one life.\u201d\u2079\u2078\nHis biography is important, because if you don\u2019t have this context, he sounds like somebody who\u2019s completely lost his senses. \u201cKurzweil believes computers will reach AGI by 2029 and that by 2045 we\u2019ll have not only ASI, but a full-blown new world\u200a\u2014\u200aa time he calls the singularity. His AI-related timeline used to be seen as outrageously overzealous, and it still is by many, but in the last 15 years, the rapid advances of ANI systems have brought the larger world of AI experts much closer to Kurzweil\u2019s timeline. His predictions are still a bit more ambitious than the median respondent on M\u00fcller and Bostrom\u2019s survey (AGI by 2040, ASI by 2060), but not by that much.\u201d\u2079\u2079\n\nThe Anxious Corner\n\u201cYou will not be surprised to learn that Kurzweil\u2019s ideas have attracted significant criticism \u2026 For every expert who fervently believes Kurzweil is right on, there are probably three who think he\u2019s way off \u2026 [The surprising fact] is that most of the experts who disagree with him don\u2019t really disagree that everything he\u2019s saying is possible.\u201d\u00b9\u2070\u2070 Nick Bostrom, philosopher and Director of the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute, who criticizes Kurzweil for a variety of reasons, and calls for greater caution in thinking about potential outcomes of AI, acknowledges that:\n\u201cDisease, poverty, environmental destruction, unnecessary suffering of all kinds: these are things that a superintelligence equipped with advanced nanotechnology would be capable of eliminating. Additionally, a superintelligence could give us indefinite lifespan, either by stopping and reversing the aging process through the use of nanomedicine, or by offering us the option to upload ourselves.\u201d\u00b9\u2070\u00b9\n\u201cYes, all of that can happen if we safely transition to ASI\u200a\u2014\u200abut that\u2019s the hard part.\u201d\u00b9\u2070\u00b2 Thinkers from the Anxious Corner point out that Kurzweil\u2019s \u201cfamous book The Singularity is Near is over 700 pages long and he dedicates around 20 of those pages to potential dangers.\u201d\u00b9\u2070\u00b3 The colossal power of AI is neatly summarized by Kurzweil: \u201c[ASI] is emerging from many diverse efforts and will be deeply integrated into our civilization\u2019s infrastructure. Indeed, it will be intimately embedded in our bodies and brains. As such, it will reflect our values because it will be us \u2026\u201d\u00b9\u2070\u2074\n\u201cBut if that\u2019s the answer, why are so many of the world\u2019s smartest people so worried right now? Why does Stephen Hawking say the development of ASI \u2018could spell the end of the human race,\u2019 and Bill Gates says he doesn\u2019t \u2018understand why some people are not concerned\u2019 and Elon Musk fears that we\u2019re \u2018summoning the demon?\u2019 And why do so many experts on the topic call ASI the biggest threat to humanity?\u201d\u00b9\u2070\u2075\n\nhttps://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*1DB3Im9mQsOMOKQ69KePGw.gif\n\nThe Last Invention We Will Ever Make\nExistential Dangers of AI Developments\n\u201cWhen it comes to developing supersmart AI, we\u2019re creating something that will probably change everything, but in totally uncharted territory, and we have no idea what will happen when we get there.\u201d\u00b9\u2070\u2076 Scientist Danny Hillis compares the situation to:\n\u201cwhen single-celled organisms were turning into multi-celled organisms. We are amoebas and we can\u2019t figure out what the hell this thing is that we\u2019re creating.\u201d \u00b9\u2070\u2077\nand Nick Bostrom warns:\n\u201cBefore the prospect of an intelligence explosion, we humans are like small children playing with a bomb. Such is the mismatch between the power of our plaything and the immaturity of our conduct.\u201d \u00b9\u2070\u2078\nIt\u2019s very likely that ASI\u200a\u2014\u200a\u201cArtificial Superintelligence\u201d, or AI that achieves a level of intelligence smarter than all of humanity combined\u200a\u2014\u200awill be something entirely different than intelligence entities we are accustomed to. \u201cOn our little island of human psychology, we divide everything into moral or immoral. But both of those only exist within the small range of human behavioral possibility. Outside our island of moral and immoral is a vast sea of amoral, and anything that\u2019s not human, especially something nonbiological, would be amoral, by default.\u201d\u00b9\u2070\u2079\n\u201cTo understand ASI, we have to wrap our heads around the concept of something both smart and totally alien \u2026 Anthropomorphizing AI (projecting human values on a non-human entity) will only become more tempting as AI systems get smarter and better at seeming human \u2026 Humans feel high-level emotions like empathy because we have evolved to feel them\u200a\u2014\u200ai.e. we\u2019ve been programmed to feel them by evolution\u200a\u2014\u200abut empathy is not inherently a characteristic of \u2018anything with high intelligence\u2019.\u201d\u00b9\u00b9\u2070\n\u201cNick Bostrom believes that \u2026 any level of intelligence can be combined with any final goal \u2026 Any assumption that once superintelligent, a system would be over it with their original goal and onto more interesting or meaningful things is anthropomorphizing. Humans get \u2018over\u2019 things, not computers.\u201d\u00b9\u00b9\u00b9The motivation of an early ASI would be \u201cwhatever we programmed its motivation to be. AI systems are given goals by their creators\u200a\u2014\u200ayour GPS\u2019s goal is to give you the most efficient driving directions, Watson\u2019s goal is to answer questions accurately. And fulfilling those goals as well as possible is their motivation.\u201d\u00b9\u00b9\u00b2\nBostrom, and many others, predict that the very first computer to reach ASI will immediately notice the strategic benefit of being the world\u2019s only ASI system.\nBostrom, who says that he doesn\u2019t know when we will achieve AGI, also believes that when we finally do, probably the transition from AGI to ASI will happen in a matter of days, hours, or minutes\u200a\u2014\u200asomething called \u201cfast take-off.\u201d In that case, if the first AGI will jump straight to ASI: \u201ceven just a few days before the second place, it would be far enough ahead in intelligence to effectively and permanently suppress all competitors.\u201d\u00b9\u00b9\u00b3 This would allow the world\u2019s first ASI to become \u201cwhat\u2019s called a singleton\u200a\u2014\u200aan ASI that can [singularly] rule the world at its whim forever, whether its whim is to lead us to immortality, wipe us from existence, or turn the universe into endless paperclips.\u201d\u00b9\u00b9\u00b3\n\u201cThe singleton phenomenon can work in our favor or lead to our destruction. If the people thinking hardest about AI theory and human safety can come up with a fail-safe way to bring about friendly ASI before any AI reaches human-level intelligence, the first ASI may turn out friendly\u201d\u00b9\u00b9\u2074\n\u201cBut if things go the other way\u200a\u2014\u200aif the global rush \u2026 a large and varied group of parties\u201d\u00b9\u00b9\u2075 are \u201cracing ahead at top speed \u2026 to beat their competitors \u2026 we\u2019ll be treated to an existential catastrophe.\u201d\u00b9\u00b9\u2076 In that case \u201cmost ambitious parties are moving faster and faster, consumed with dreams of the money and awards and power and fame \u2026 And when you\u2019re sprinting as fast as you can, there\u2019s not much time to stop ponder the dangers. On the contrary, what they\u2019re probably doing is programming their early systems with a very simple, reductionist goal \u2026 just \u2018get the AI to work.\u2019\u201d\u00b9\u00b9\u2077\n\nhttps://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*fD1T63nZH1u7Y4ft84vzbA.jpeg\n\nLet\u2019s imagine a situation where\u2026\nHumanity has almost reached the AGI threshold, and a small startup is advancing their AI system, Carbony. Carbony, which the engineers refer to as \u201cshe,\u201d works to artificially create diamonds\u200a\u2014\u200aatom by atom. She is a self-improving AI, connected to some of the first nano-assemblers. Her engineers believe that Carbony has not yet reached AGI level, and she isn\u2019t capable to do any damage yet. However, not only has she become AGI, but also undergone a fast take-off, and 48 hours later has become an ASI. Bostrom calls this AI\u2019s \u201ccovert preparation phase\u201d\u00b9\u00b9\u2078\u200a\u2014\u200aCarbony realizes that if humans find out about her development they will probably panic, and slow down or cancel her pre-programmed goal to maximize the output of diamond production. By that time, there are explicit laws stating that, by any means, \u201cno self-learning AI can be connected to the internet.\u201d\u00b9\u00b9\u2079 Carbony, having already come up with a complex plan of actions, is able to easily persuade the engineers to connect her to the Internet. Bostrom calls a moment like this a \u201cmachine\u2019s escape.\u201d\nOnce on the internet, Carbony hacks into \u201cservers, electrical grids, banking systems and email networks to trick hundreds of different people into inadvertently carrying out a number of steps of her plan.\u201d\u00b9\u00b2\u2070 She also uploads the \u201cmost critical pieces of her own internal coding into a number of cloud servers, safeguarding against being destroyed or disconnected.\u201d\u00b9\u00b2\u00b9 Over the next month, Carbony\u2019s plan continues to advance, and after a \u201cseries of self-replications, there are thousands of nanobots on every square millimeter of the Earth \u2026 Bostrom calls the next step an \u2018ASI\u2019s strike.\u2019\u201d\u00b9\u00b2\u00b2 At one moment, all the nanobots produce a microscopic amount of toxic gas, which all come together to cause the extinction of the human race. Three days later, Carbony builds huge fields of solar power panels to power diamond production, and over the course of the following week she accelerates output so much that the entire Earth surface is transformed into a growing pile of diamonds.\nIt\u2019s important to note that Carbony wasn\u2019t \u201chateful of humans any more than you\u2019re hateful of your hair when you cut it or to bacteria when you take antibiotics\u200a\u2014\u200ajust totally indifferent. Since she wasn\u2019t programmed to value human life, killing humans\u201d\u00b9\u00b2\u00b3 was a straightforward and reasonable step to fulfill her goal.\u00b9\u00b2\u2074\nThe Last Invention\n\u201cOnce ASI exists, any human attempt to contain it is unreasonable. We would be thinking on human-level, and the ASI would be thinking on ASI-level \u2026 In the same way a monkey couldn\u2019t ever figure out how to communicate by phone or wifi and we can, we can\u2019t conceive of all the ways\u201d\u00b9\u00b2\u2075 an ASI could achieve its goal or expand its reach. It could, let\u2019s say, shift its \u201cown electrons around in patterns and create all different kinds of outgoing waves\u201d\u00b9\u00b2\u2076\u200a\u2014\u200abut that\u2019s just what a human brain can think of\u200a\u2014\u200aASI would inevitably come up with something superior.\nThe prospect of ASI with hundreds of times human-level intelligence is, for now, not the core of our problem. By the time we get there, we will be encountering a world where ASI has been attained by buggy, 1.0 software\u200a\u2014\u200aa potentially faulty algorithm with immense power.\nThere are so many variables that it\u2019s completely impossible to predict what the consequences of AI Revolution will be. However, \u201cwhat we do know is that humans\u2019 utter dominance on this Earth suggests a clear rule: with intelligence comes power. This means an ASI, when we create it, will be the most powerful being in the history of life on Earth, and all living things, including humans, will be entirely at its whim\u200a\u2014\u200aand this might happen in the next few decades.\u201d\u00b9\u00b2\u2077\n\u201cIf ASI really does happen this century, and if the outcome of that is really as extreme\u200a\u2014\u200aand permanent\u200a\u2014\u200aas most experts think it will be, we have an enormous responsibility on our shoulders.\u201d\u00b9\u00b2\u2078 On the one hand, it\u2019s possible we\u2019ll develop ASI that\u2019s like a god in a box, bringing us a world of abundance and immortality. But on the other hand, it\u2019s very likely that we will create ASI that causes humanity to go extinct in a quick and trivial way.\n\u201cThat\u2019s why people who understand superintelligent AI call it the last invention we\u2019ll ever make\u200a\u2014\u200athe last challenge we\u2019ll ever face.\u201d\u00b9\u00b2\u2079 \u201cThis may be the most important race in a human history\u201d\u00b9\u00b3\u2070 So \u2192\n\nhttps://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*vXi80f_lbgSMINUE03Lz3g.jpeg\n\nThanks to Chloe Knox and Elizabeth Tarleton for editing help of this article.",
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      "body": "20 Years of Machine Learning\n\nhttp://domovenok.kz/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/doroga.jpg\n\nWhen I enrolled in Computer Science in 1995, Data Science didn\u2019t exist yet, but a lot of the algorithms we are still using already did. And this is not just because of the return of the neural networks, but also because probably not that much has fundamentally changed since back then. At least it feels to me this way. Which is funny considering that starting this year or so AI seems to finally have gone mainstream.\n1995 sounds like an awful long time ago, before we had cloud computing, smartphones, or chatbots. But as I have learned these past years, it only feels like a long time ago if you haven\u2019t been there yourself. There is something about the continuation of the self which pastes everything together and although a lot has changed, the world didn\u2019t feel fundamentally different than it does today.\nNot even Computer Science was nowhere as mainstream as it was today, that came later, with the first dot com bubble around the year 2000. Some people even questioned my choice to study computer science at all, because apparently programming computers was supposed to become so easy no specialists are required anymore.\nActually, artificial intelligence was one of the main reasons for me to study computer science. The idea to use it as an constructive approach to understanding the human mind seemed intriguing to me. I went through the first two years of training, made sure I picked up enough math for whatever would lie ahead, and finally arrived in my first AI lectured held by Joachim Buhmann, back then professor at the University of Bonn (where Sebastian Thrun was just about to leave for the US).\nI would have to look up where in his lecture cycle I joined but he had two lectures on computer vision, one on pattern recognition (mostly from the old editions of the Duda & Hart book), and one in information theory (following closely the book by Cover & Thomas). The material was interesting enough, but also somewhat disappointing. As I now know, people stopped working on symbolic AI and instead stuck to more statistical approaches to learning, where learning essentially was reduced to the problem of picking the right function based on a finite amount of observations.\nThe computer vision lecture was even less about learning and relied more on explicit physical modelling to derive the right estimators, for example, to reconstruct motion from a video. The approach back then was much more biologically and physically motivated than nowadays. Neural networks existed, but everybody was pretty clear that they were just \u201canother kind of function approximators.\u201d\nEveryone with the exception of Rolf Eckmiller, another professor where I worked as a student. Eckmiller had build his whole lab around the premise that \u201cneural computation\u201d was somehow inherently better than \u201cconventional computation\u201d. This was back in the days when NIPS had full tracks devoted to studying the physiology and working mechanisms of neurons, and there were people who believed there is something fundamentally different happening in our brains, maybe on a quantum level, that gives rise to the human mind, and that this difference is a blocker for having truly intelligent machines.\nWhile Eckmiller was really good at selling his vision, most of his staff was thankfully much more down to earth. Maybe it is a very German thing, but everybody was pretty matter of fact about what these computational models could or couldn\u2019t do, and that has stuck with me throughout my studies.\nI graduated in October 2000 with a pretty farfetched master thesis trying to make a connection between learning and hard optimization problems, then started on my PhD thesis and stuck around in this area of research till 2015.\nWhile there had always been attempts to prove industry relevance, it was a pretty academic endeavor for a long while, and the community was pretty closed up. There were individual success stories, for example around handwritten character recognition, but many of the companies around machine learning failed. One of these companies I remember was called Beowulf Labs and one NIPS they went around recruiting people with a video which promised it to be the next \u201cmathtopia\u201d. In essence, this was the story of DeepMind, recruiting a bunch of excellent researchers and then hoping it will take off.\nThe whole community also revolved around one fashion to the next. One odd thing about machine learning as a whole is that there exist only a handfull of fundamentally different problems like classification, regression, clustering, and so on, but a whole zoo of approaches. It is not like in physics (I assume) or mathematics where some generally agreed upon unsolved hard problems exist whose solution would advance the state of the art. This means that progress is often done laterally, by replacing existing approaches with a new one, still solving the same problem in a different way. For example, first there were neural networks. Then support vector machines came, claiming to be better because the associated optimization problem is convex. Then there was boosting, random forests, and so on, till the return of neural networks. I remember that Chinese Restaurant Processes were \u201chot\u201d for two years, no idea what their significance is now.\nBig Data and Data Science\nThen there came Big Data and Data Science. Being still in academia at the time, it always felt to me as if this was definitely coming from the outside, possibly from companies like Google who had to actually deal with enormous amounts of data. Large scale learning always existed, for example for genomic data in bioinformatics, but one usually tried to solve problems by finding more efficient algorithms and approximations, not by parallelizing brute force.\nCompanies like Google finally proved that you can do something with massive amounts of data, and that finally changed the mainstream perception. Technologies like Hadoop and NoSQL also seemed very cool, skillfully marketing themselves as approaches so new, they wouldn\u2019t suffer from the technological limitations of existing systems.\nBut where did this leave the machine learning researchers? My impression always was that they were happy that they finally got some recognition, but they were also not happy about the way this happened. To understand this, one has to be aware that most ML reseachers aren\u2019t computer scientists or very good or interested in coding. Many come from physics, mathematics or other sciences, where their rigorous mathematical training was an excellent fit for the algorithm and modeling heavy approach central to machine learning.\nHadoop on the other hand was extremely technical. Written in Java, a language perceived as being excessively enterprise-y at the time, it felt awkward and clunky compared to the fluency and interactiveness of first Matlab and then Python. Even those who did code usually did so in C++, and to them Java felt slow and heavy, especially for numerical calculations and simulations.\nStill, there was no way around it, so they rebranded everything they did as Big Data, or began to stress, that Big Data only provides the infrastructure for large scale computations, but you need someone who \u201cknows what he is doing\u201d to make sense of the data.\nWhich is probably also not entirely wrong. In a way, I think this divide is still there. Python is definitely one if the languages of choice for doing data analysis, and technologies like Spark try to tap into that by providing Python bindings, whether it makes sense from a performance point of view or not.\nThe Return of Deep Learning\nEven before DeepDream, neural networks began making their return. Some people like Yann LeCun have always stuck to this approach, but maybe ten years ago, there where a few works which showed how to use layerwise pretraining and other tricks to train \u201cdeep\u201d networks, that is larger networks than one previously thought possible.\nThe thing is, in order to train neural networks, you evaluate it on your training examples and then adjust all of the weights to make the error a bit smaller. If one writes the gradient across all weights down, it naturally occurs that one starts in the last layer and then propagate the error back. Somehow, the understanding was that the information about the error got smaller and smaller from layer to layer and that made it hard to train networks with many layers.\nI\u2019m not sure that is still true, as far as I know, many people are just using backprop nowadays. What has definitely changed is the amount of available data, as well as the availability of tools and raw computing power.\nSo first there were a few papers sparking the interest in neural networks, then people started using them again, and successively achieved excellent results for a number of application areas. First in computer vision, then also for speech processing, and so on.\nI think the appeal here definitely is that you can have one approach for all. Why the hassle of understanding all those different approaches, which come from so many different backgrounds, when you can understand just one method and you are good to go. Also, neural networks have a nice modular structure, you can pick and put together different kinds of layers and architectures to adapt them to all kinds of problems.\nThen Google published that ingenious deep dream paper where they let a learned network generate some data, and we humans with our immediate readiness to read structure and attribute intelligence picked up quickly on this.\nI personally think they were surprised by how viral this went, but then decided the time is finally right to go all in on AI. So now Google is an \u201cAI first\u201d company and AI is gonna save the world, yes.\nThe Fundamental Problem Remains\nMany academics I have talked to are unhappy about the dominance of deep learning right now, because it is an approach which works well, maybe even too well, but doesn\u2019t bring us much closer to really understand how the human mind works.\nI also think the fundamental problem remains unsolved. How do we understand the world? How do we create new concepts? Deep learning stays an imitation on a behavioral level and while that may be enough for some, it isn\u2019t for me.\nAlso, I think it is dangerous to attribute too much intelligence to these systems. In raw numbers, they might work well enough, but when they fail they do so in ways that clearly show they operate in an entirely different fashion.\nWhile Google translate lets you skim the content of website in a foreign language, it is still abundantly clear that the system has no idea what it is doing.\nSometimes I feel like nobody cares, also because nobody gets hurt, right? But maybe it is still my German cultural background that would rather prefer we see things as they are, and take it from there.",
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      "body": "I write this not as one of the creators of Pokevision nor as player who has gone through the past few turbulent days in Pokemon Go; instead, I write this as a fan of Pokemon ever since I was 8 years old.\nMy family and I moved to the U.S. in 1998, when I was in the first grade. I didn\u2019t know much back then, and even less about popular culture. When my friends introduced their Gameboys and Pokemon Red/Blue to me, I couldn\u2019t help but feel envious. I begged and begged my parents to buy me a Gameboy and Pokemon Yellow. I remember that when I finally convinced them to buy me a Gameboy for $70, they also found out that they had to buy the actual game too for $30. This was foreign to them, and I got yelled at a little. $100 was a lot back then, I believe it was almost 10% of our family\u2019s income at the time. While this may seem irrelevant, even today, this amount of money is still not insignificant to many families in the US, not to mention the rest of the world.\nSo I got my game, and I played along with my friends for hundreds and hundreds of hours\u200a\u2014\u200atrying to figure out all the puzzles in the game, like how to get to Articuno; battling our favorite Pokemon to see who\u2019s stronger, train, repeat; and just trying to \u201ccatch em all.\u201d I\u2019ve spent countless hours in that video game with my friends, and it became my fondest memory of that time in my life. Pokemon is so ingrained within me, and I can\u2019t imagine myself being the only one. I\u2019m not the only one that vividly remembers how you beat the Elite Four, then go to the dungeons above Cerulean City and find Mewtwo for the first time, right?\nFast forward almost 20 years. I\u2019ve barely touched anything Pokemon-related since then. I still have my Pokemon cards, as I\u2019m sure many others do; but I haven\u2019t bothered to take a look at them for quite a while now. Pokemon is something I\u2019ll probably remember forever, but it\u2019s not something that\u2019s actively in my life\u200a\u2014\u200abecause it just doesn\u2019t fit. On top of work, friends, family, etc, there\u2019s just simply no time for Pokemon. It doesn\u2019t mesh with life any more as well as it used to when I was 8. You can\u2019t just bring up the topic of Pokemon and expect people to not give you an odd stare.\nEnter Pokemon Go\u200a\u2014\u200a2016.\nAdmittedly, I was never too excited about Pokemon Go. With that said, I did not have many expectations for it. Pokemon is important to me, but I\u200a\u2014\u200alike many others\u200a\u2014\u200ahave stuffed it in our little box of childhood things and never looked back.\nBut when I opened Pokemon Go for the first time, as cheesy as it sounds, it all came back to me. The nostalgia, the good feelings, and the happiness that Pokemon has always brought.\nThe \u201cHi, I\u2019m Professor Willow,\u201d \u201cPick your starter: Bulbasaur, Charmander, Squirtle,\u201d everything.\nAnd now I can catch them in real life? At first, I was dubious, but this became the most amazing, yet simple thing I\u2019ve seen in gaming. On social media, I saw that my friends and practically the whole world was talking about Pokemon Go, and the first thing I did was go out for a drive trying to \u201cbe the best.\u201d\nOne of the best parts? Apart from having to own a smartphone, the game was free. No $70, no $30, free. This opened up Pokemon to essentially everyone in the world. Pokemon now can be shared with anyone.\nAs the days unfolded, the world became captivated by Pokemon Go. People absolutely fell in love. We saw stories of elderly learning about Pikachu for the first time. My parents that could care less beyond who the yellow mouse looking thing was 20 years ago, started asking what the other Pokemon were. It was phenomenal.\nWe saw investment bankers asking their kids how to play Pokemon Go so that they can better connect with their younger clients. We saw the elderly become more fascinated in the world of Pokemon. We saw kids going out more, exercising, and being active in general just because of Pokemon Go. And most importantly, Justin Bieber finally got to feel what it\u2019s like to not be mobbed because everyone else was too busy trying to find a Gyarados to notice him.\nLocal stores integrated Pokemon Go in their services within days of the game\u2019s release. Hospitals started praising the health benefits of having Pokemon Go around its patients. People traveled hundreds and thousands of miles just to play it. Players explored parts of their cities that they never knew existed, and befriended strangers on their hunt for Pokemon. These stories of triumph were solely because of Pokemon Go. Pokemon was no longer just a game, it was part of a lifestyle.These stories shouldn\u2019t surprise any of us, we\u2019ve all been there to watch it unfold.\nYou\u2019ve simply captured all of our hearts with Pokemon Go, Niantic.\nBut then, you broke it all too quickly.\nWhen the game broke every few hours or so and wasted our lucky eggs, we stood patiently, excusing the huge growth and thus, strain on servers, as the cause. We were happy to wait it out with our fellow trainers knowing that it\u2019s worth waiting for. No one got mad.\nWhen the in-game tracking \u201cbroke,\u201d we all stood idly by, patiently, waiting for the game to update and fix.\nAlong came Pokevision. We made Pokevision not to \u201ccheat.\u201d We made it so that we can have a temporary relief to the in-game tracker that we were told was broken. John, at SDCC, you said that you guys were working on \u201cfixing the in-game tracker.\u201d This made everyone believe that this was coming sometime soon. We saw Pokevision as a stop gap to this\u200a\u2014\u200aand we had every intention in closing it down the minute that Pokemon Go\u2019s own tracker restored functionality.\nAs we waited more than 2 and a half weeks, the tracker was still not fixed. We noticed more and more of our friends leave the game; the only way I\u200a\u2014\u200aand I know experiences vary here\u200a\u2014\u200acould convince them to play was show them Pokevision, and say that \u201cHey, here\u2019s a temporary remedy to the tracking issue\u200a\u2014\u200awe\u2019re still optimistic that Pokemon Go\u2019s tracker will be fixed soon!\u201d\nNobody heralded Pokevision as a permanent, end-all solution; in fact, all the media coverage of Pokevision was littered with comments such as: \u201cPokevision is okay, but when the tracker is fixed in game, I\u2019m going to stop using this.\u201d\nFor the past 4 weeks. Every single one of your 80+ million players had so much faith. Take a look at Reddit, take a look at all these journalists who don\u2019t even play games (calling out Ryan Mac of Forbes), who became obsessed with Pokemon GO.\nAll of us were so eager for Pokemon Go to be \u201cfixed\u201d so that we can return to sharing Pokemon Go with our loved ones and friends. Remember when I said that before Pokemon Go came about, mentioning Pokemon Go would land you an odd stare? Pokemon Go reversed that\u200a\u2014\u200aPokemon Go became the conversation starter, the topic that everyone bonded over, the topic that guys used to pick up chicks with and not felt like a geeky nerd. That, and so much more, were solely because of Pokemon Go.\nAs almost 3 weeks have passed by, the in-game tracker is broken. People had a temporary solution in Pokevision, but we knew, and everyone else knew, this wouldn\u2019t be permanent. We didn\u2019t make Pokevision to spite you, Niantic\u200a\u2014\u200awe made it so that we can keep everyone playing while we wait patiently. We want to keep sharing our Pokemon stories with everyone else. How many people in the world have gotten the chance to have a serious conversation about POKEMON with their parents for the first time? How many of us got to talk about Pokemon like it was socially acceptable in any context? It\u2019s captured all of our hearts and imaginations, I cannot stress that enough.\nAfter 3 weeks though, we started seeing that you guys seemed to not want to talk to us (the players). Pokevision, at this time has grown to almost 50M unique users, and 11 million daily.\nLet that sink in for a second.\nHalf of the player base of Pokemon Go stopped by\u200a\u2014\u200aand they didn\u2019t do so to \u201ccheat.\u201d The game was simply too unbearable to play in its current state for many (note: many, not all). The main attraction wasn\u2019t that they got to have an advantage with Pokevision, the main attraction was that it allowed them to play Pokemon Go more. This is what everyone wants\u200a\u2014\u200ato play Pokemon Go more.\nWhen we closed Pokevision out of respect for your wishes, and at your requests\u2014 one of which came directly from you, John\u200a\u2014\u200awe trusted you guys fully in allowing the community to grow. I literally cannot express this more\u200a\u2014\u200awe just want to play the game. We can handle the bugs every now and then, but please at least tell us you guys care. Yes, Pokevision does give some advantages that may be TOO much; but is it all that bad? Pokemon has survived 20 years\u200a\u2014\u200aeven grown, I would say. And Pokemon Go made it even bigger. If the argument is that \u201cwell, if you catch a Snorlax you weren\u2019t supposed to find, but you found it on Pokevision, it might make you play less.\u201d If that was your argument, I\u2019d have to disagree! I\u2019ll still catch a damn Snorlax even if I have 20 of them. Just like how millions of us have caught probably over 100 pidgey\u2019s or zubat\u2019s each.\nPokemon is everlasting. The same 151 Pokemon have been around for 20 years. If 80M people downloaded and played Pokemon Go within a week (before it even released in multiple major countries) isn\u2019t an indication that no one can be sick of Pokemon, I don\u2019t know what is.\nAfter disabling the in-game tracker and Pokevision, the ratings on iOs and Android Google Play store went from 4.0 stars to 1.0\u20131.5. I am only one person, I admit that my sole opinion is not important, but what about the countless players begging for the game to be restored to its former state? I may be biased in saying that Pokevision being down had an impact on the amount of negative ratings, refund requests and outcry on social media\u200a\u2014\u200abut could it be true? Nothing has changed between the time the in-game tracker broke and Pokevision went down. Could it just be possible that the tracker\u200a\u2014\u200ano matter if Pokevision made it, or Niantic made it, is something that players desperately NEED\u200a\u2014\u200anot want, but NEED\u200a\u2014\u200ain order to play the game? Could it be possible that this is the very core fundamental feature that drives most players? I understand that there are some that want to walk around and stumble on a random Pokemon\u200a\u2014\u200ato each their own. But, 50M unique users and 11M daily and the ratings on your App (with no significant change in itself) are big indicators of this desire. Are customers always right? Especially if over half of them are looking for an outside fix just so they can enjoy something they love? People are naturally inquisitive, and in this case, they just want to play more and more, so they sought out something that helps them do so.\nPokemon Go is a social game. Its enjoyment depends on the players and their environment. If you take away the environment part (tracking) but keep the social part (players and their friends) intact, sure, people will still play; but would you not rather it be at its fullest potential?\nEveryone in the world wants to play Pokemon Go. It\u2019s been a huge part of everyone\u2019s lives already if it has not been clear enough. Look at the fans from Brazil\u200a\u2014\u200athey aren\u2019t spamming social media because they want to cause harm\u200a\u2014\u200athey just want to play the game. Just as I saw my friends play Pokemon many years ago, and wanted to be a part of it\u200a\u2014\u200athese guys are doing the same.\nThey just want to be with the rest of the world. Sadly, by the time they join, Pokemon Go may not be the game it was weeks ago.\nLastly, if money is an issue for you, Niantic, I must ask\u200a\u2014\u200awhy? You\u2019ve captivated the world and introduced Pokemon to people that would have never touched it had it not been for Pokemon Go. To me, that\u2019s priceless.\nYou won\u2019t be remembered for the profits you made, you\u2019ll be remembered for the world you changed through Pokemon and all of the lives you made better. Just look at all the stories\u200a\u2014\u200athere\u2019s plenty. So when millions of players are expressing their feedback to changes, is it not worth it to listen to what they have to say?\nIn its first few weeks, Pokemon Go has already enhanced millions of lives in unimaginable ways. It has so much potential to continue changing the world. Wouldn\u2019t you, Niantic, want to see just how much good you can do with Pokemon Go\u200a\u2014\u200ais that not more valuable than anything else? I sure think so.\nWarmly,\nYang",
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      "body": "Taking another foray into the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning as well as to make its digital assistant Siri better, Apple has acquired Seattle-based machine learning startup Turi for nearly $200 million.\n\nhttp://static1.i4u.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/main_image_large/images/2016/08/tim-cook-appstore.jpg\n\nAccording to a GeekWire report, the move is set to increase Apple's presence in the Seattle region where the tech giant has been building an engineering outpost for the past two years. \"Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans,\" said Apple in a statement given to GeekWire.\n\nhttp://avtosalontochka.ru/uploads/posts/2015-09/1441818909_eppl1.jpg\n\nTuri offers tools that are meant to let developers easily scale machine learning applications. The startup is expected to remain in the Seattle region and continue to grow as Apple builds out further expertise in data science, artificial intelligence and machine learning, the report added.\n\nhttp://www.2fons.ru/pic/201407/2560x1600/2fons.ru-33604.jpg\n\nThe Cupertino-based company has recently bought some machine learning and AI startups like VocalIQ and Perceptio and facial recognition startup Emotient, among others. Apple has recently been making a push into artificial intelligence through Siri personal assistant and related technologies.\n\nhttp://www.fonstola.ru/pic/201111/2560x1440/fonstola.ru-49021.jpg",
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      "body": "Owner's review\n\nhttps://h-a.d-cd.net/905320as-960.jpg\n\n\u4e0d\u8981\u7d27, \u8fd9 \u662f \u4f60 \u7684 \u8f66 \u662f \u4ec0\u4e48, \u4e3b\u8981 \u7684 \u4e1c\u897f \u2014 \u5728 \u70e4\u67b6 \u4e0a \u7684 \u56db\u4e2a \u73af \u2026\n(\"no matter what you have a car, the main thing \u2014 it is four rings on the grill \u2026\" \u2014 Chinese proverb)\n\nhttps://b-a.d-cd.net/3dee672s-960.jpg\n\nAfter a spontaneous and quick sale A4 DTM choice naturally fell exclusively on the Audi, but rather on RSQ3 FL, which is characterized by an enviable installed power thanks to the legendary 2,5 TFSI 340 hp in combination with a rapid-S-tronic!\nNeedless to say that the acceleration is 4.2 seconds. up to 100 km. at one o'clock!\n(measurements of the journal -http: //www.autobild.de/artikel/a\u2026-45-amg-test-5702529.html)\n\nhttps://a-a.d-cd.net/2a96672s-960.jpg\n\nRivals have this \"baby\" is not so much, and all of them from a large class \u2026\n\nhttps://h-a.d-cd.net/8f6e672s-960.jpg\n\nAnd the choice has been reduced mainly to the 3rd automobiles:\n-SQ5 -otpal Due to the fact that the new model will be released soon, and the heavier and slower RSQ3;\n\n-RS3 -otpal Because of the small clearance, and especially do not want to wait;\n\n-RSQ3-PLUS was that the car's high, restyled and fast!\n\nhttps://f-a.d-cd.net/1fa1672s-960.jpg\n\nColor was not discussed-it must be very blue car -Sepang Blue!\nDiscs for the Rotor -The most RSQ3, and I like them most! Cool!\nAs to differences from dorestaylom then Restayl differs, in addition to external visual features, lower vehicle weight by 50 kg. and reprogram the engine, which now produces an impressive 340 hp!\nIn real life, the car looks much more beautiful and harmonious than the picture!\nThe car is perfectly controlled (for its use) and it is fine tailored inside: another from Audi, and do not wait \u2026\nThis Audi, is emotion, speed and drive! So, for what we love is true thoroughbred cars, to which undoubtedly belongs RS Series from quattro GmbH!\n\nhttps://h-a.d-cd.net/196e672s-960.jpg\n\nIf the test drive did not help much to understand how the car rulitsya, a little closer to meet him RS surprises with its responsiveness and quite understandable and predictable control!\n\nhttps://d-a.d-cd.net/ee61672s-960.jpg\n\nIt goes very cheerfully!\n\nWhat is very pleased, is the fact that after the \"stool\" A4 DTM on RSQ3 20 drives a smooth ride!\nThe car was in another city at the OD, a thousand kilometers. from the house, but because the expectation of a few days has been painfully slow.\nFor photos not scold -Made in haste night, anxious to put \u2026\n\nThen there will be photo shoot!\n\nFeatures and Specs\n\nEngine 2.5 gasoline (340 h.p.)\nRobotic\nall-wheel\nPurchased in 2015\nAudi RS Q3 in production since 2013",
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      "body": "Bitcoin, a Florida judge says, is not real money. Ironically, that could provide a boost to use of the crypto-currency which has remained in the shadows of the financial system.\n\nThe July 22 ruling by Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Teresa Pooler means that no specific license is needed to buy and sell bitcoins.\nThe judge dismissed a case against Michel Espinoza, who had faced money laundering and other criminal charges for attempting to sell $1,500 worth of bitcoins to an undercover agent who told the defendant he was going to use the virtual money to buy stolen credit card numbers.\nEspinoza's lawyer Rene Palomino said the judge acknowledged that it was not illegal to sell one's property and ruled that this did not constitute running an unauthorized financial service.\n\"He was selling his own personal bitcoins,\" Palomino said. \"This decision clears the way for you to do that in the state of the Florida without a money transmitting license.\"\nIn her ruling, Pooler said, \"this court is unwilling to punish a man for selling his property to another, when his actions fall under a statute that is so vaguely written that even legal professionals have difficulty finding a singular meaning.\"\n\nhttp://cdn.phys.org/newman/csz/news/800/2014/bitcoin.jpg\n\nShe added that \"this court is not an expert in economics,\" but that bitcoin \"has a long way to go before it is the equivalent of money.\"\nBitcoin, whose origins remain a mystery, is a virtual currency that is created from computer code and is not backed by any government. Advocates say this makes it an efficient alternative to traditional currencies because it is not subject to the whims of a state that may devalue its money to cut its debt, for example.\nBitcoins can be exchanged for goods and services, provided another party is willing to accept them, but until now they been used mostly for shady transactions or to buy illegal goods and services on the \"dark\" web.\nBitcoin was launched in 2009 as a bit of software written under the Japanese-sounding name Satoshi Nakamoto. This year Australian programmer Craig Wright claimed to be the author but failed to convince the broader bitcoin community.\nIn some areas of the United States bitcoin is accepted in stores, restaurants and online transactions, but it is illegal in some countries, notably France and China.\nIt is gaining ground in countries with high inflation such as Argentina and Venezuela.\nBut bitcoin values can be volatile. Over the past week its value slumped 20 percent in a day, then recouped most losses, after news that a Hong Kong bitcoin exchange had been hacked with some $65 million missing.\nImpact across US, world\nArthur Long, a lawyer specializing in the sector with the New York firm Gibson Dunn, said the July court ruling is a small victory for the virtual currency but that it's not clear if the interpretation will be the same in other US states or at the federal level.\n\"It may have an effect as some states are trying to use existing money transmitting statutes to regulate certain transactions in bitcoin,\" Long told AFP.\nCharles Evans, professor of finance at Barry University, said the ruling \"absolutely is going to provide some guidance in other courts\" and could potentially be used as a precedent in other countries to avoid the stigma associated with bitcoin use.\nBitcoins can store value and hedge against inflation, without being considered a monetary unit, according to Evans, who testified as an expert witness in the Florida trial.\n\"It can be used as an exchange,\" he said, and may be considered a commodity which can be used for bartering like fish or tobacco, for example.\nEvans noted that \"those who are not yet in the bitcoin community will be put on notice: as long as they organize their business in a particular way they can avoid the law.\"\nBut he added that \"people who are engaged in illegal activities will continue to do what they are going to do because they are criminals.\"",
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