Google’s Deep Mind and The Future of Artificial Intelligence

Deep mind was a startup founded in 2010. Their goal is to “solve intelligence” through machine learning and mimicking how the human mind works by building a self-learning algorithm. The deep mind project is attempting to create a computer program that is completely self-taught and eventually will have the ability to solve complex problems without human intervention.

Artificial Intelligence or AI has been a topic of discussion ever since the invention of computers and in the past decade or so the creation of AI has become more and more of a reality. Googles deep mind has had a recent success by successfully being creating a program called Alpha Go. The purpose of this program is to have the program successfully beat a grandmaster Go player in the worlds hardest and most complex game called Go.

Go is an ancient Chinese board game that has been played for centuries and is the most complicated board game in the world. This is not the first time a computer has been able to beat a grandmaster in a board game. We have seen this done before in the game chess in the chess example what was done was to input all possible outcomes from of game of chess and from that the computer could beat even the best player by always selecting the most optimal solution. What makes the fact that the program was able to beat a Go grandmaster so significant is the sheer complexity of the game itself. The game of has as many possible moves to chess as there are atoms in the entire universe. Where it was possible in chess to map all possible outcomes in the game the complexity of the game Go makes mapping out all outcomes essentially impossible.

So if it’s impossible to code in every possible outcome into to the program how did a computer beat the Grand Master? The Alpha Go program was taught how to play the game of Go by exposing it to hundreds of thousands of games. By exposing it to all of these games gave it the ability to learn how the game worked. After the program learned from all of these games it had the same skill set as an amateur player by being able to mimic how all of those players were able to play. But the goal is not to mimic the players its goal is to become the best player in the game so in order to do this they had the program play itself in the game over 30 million times. By playing it learns from its own mistakes and is able to incrementally grow better every game. By learning from its own mistakes and playing itself it makes the program learn how to play better. Compounding this self-learning process over 30 million times gives it the ability to beat even the best of players.

What Makes This So Significant?

This program isn’t designed just to play the game of Go, it is possible to apply this same self-learning technique to any problem that you expose it to. Deep Mind is now being used in industries such as scientific research, mathematics, finance, and healthcare and through this machine learning technique it can solve any number of problems that Humans haven’t been able to solve for themselves. This will lead to an infinite amount of scientific breakthroughs and Deep Dream will be able to solve problems that mankind would have never been able to solve for itself. The possibilities are endless and self-learning AI is proving to be one of the biggest technological breakthroughs in mankind. Through machine learning, we will be soon be experiencing exponential growth in technology beyond our imagination.

Tech Briefing Example

Here is an example of what you can post on the blog prior to presenting your tech briefing. We recently saw how vulnerable the Internet of Things is because they are developed with little security. Here is a short 11 minute interview with Avi Rubin on "What Happens when Hackers Hijack Our Smart Devices" (there is a video link there for a different Ted Talk - 16mins, but kinda scary examples). Given this vulnerabilty, it speaks to devices that do not have a lot of regulation (or security) in place. For example, police in Arkansas are trying to use Amazon's Echo data in a murder investigation. Based on court documents in November 2015, a man in Arkansas had some friends over at his house to watch a football game and in the morning, one of the friends was found dead in a hot tub in the backyard. Police later charged the man who lived in the house, James Bates, with murder. He has pleaded not guilty.

As the police were investigating the crime, they found a number of digital devices in the suspect's house, including an Amazon Echo device that was in the kitchen. They have since seized the device and have apparently gotten some information from it, but what they want to check is what — if anything — the device may have recorded around the time of the murder.

What kind of data are companies collecting about what goes on inside the home? What prevents these companies from giving up these data to law enforcement (including hackers or spies) any time they ask for (or take) it? Is anything being done to secure IoT?