{"id":1124,"date":"2017-10-09T17:16:04","date_gmt":"2017-10-09T21:16:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/?p=1124"},"modified":"2017-10-13T17:18:26","modified_gmt":"2017-10-13T21:18:26","slug":"national-ai-strategy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/2017\/10\/national-ai-strategy\/","title":{"rendered":"National AI Strategy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some of my co-workers published a sponsored piece in the Atlantic calling for a national AI strategy<\/a>,\u00a0which was tied in to\u00a0some discussions at the\u00a0Washington Ideas<\/a> event.<\/p>\n

I'm 100% on board with the US having a strategy, but I want to offer one caveat: \"comprehensive national strategies\" are susceptible to becoming top-down, centralized plans, which I think is dangerous.<\/p>\n

I'm generally\u00a0disinclined to centralized planning, for both efficiency and philosophical reasons. I'm not going to take the time now to explain why; I doubt anything I could scratch out here would shift people very much along any kind of Keynes-Hayek<\/a> spectrum<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So why am I bothering to bring this up? Mostly because I think\u00a0it would be especially\u00a0ill-conceived to adopt central planning when it comes to AI. The recent progress in AI has been largely a result of abandoning top-down techniques in favor of bottom-up ones. We've abandoned hand-coded visual feature detectors for convolutional neural networks. We've abandoned human-engineered grammar models for statistical machine translation. In one discipline after another emergent behavior has outpaced decades worth of expert-designed techniques. To layer top-down\u00a0policy-making\u00a0on a field built\u00a0of bottom-up science would be a waste, and an ironic one at that.<\/p>\n

\n

PS<\/em> Having spoken to two of the three authors of this piece, I don't mean to imply that they support centralized planning of the AI industry. This is just something I would be on guard against.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some of my co-workers published a sponsored piece in the Atlantic calling for a national AI strategy,\u00a0which was tied in to\u00a0some discussions at the\u00a0Washington Ideas event. I'm 100% on board with the US having a strategy, but I want to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11,10],"tags":[24,25,26,4,34],"class_list":["post-1124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business-2","category-cs","tag-ai","tag-bottom-up","tag-computation","tag-econ","tag-machine-learning","wpautop"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3sddF-i8","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1500,"url":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/2019\/04\/chollet-on-ai\/","url_meta":{"origin":1124,"position":0},"title":"Chollet on AI","author":"jsylvest","date":"25 April 2019","format":"aside","excerpt":"AI is all about getting rid of the part where you code up solutions, and going straight to the part where you code up problems.\u2014Fran\u00e7ois Chollet On net, this is probably not a good description of what AI is \u2014 and I'd like to post more about why soon \u2014\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Quotes"","block_context":{"text":"Quotes","link":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/category\/quotes\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1043,"url":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/2017\/04\/will-ai-steal-our-jobs\/","url_meta":{"origin":1124,"position":1},"title":"Will AI steal our jobs?","author":"jsylvest","date":"5 April 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"As an AI researcher, I think I am required to have an opinion about this. 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We need to keep thinking of new paradigms because the SotA right now is very useful, but not correct in any\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "CS \/ Science \/ Tech \/ Coding"","block_context":{"text":"CS \/ Science \/ Tech \/ Coding","link":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/category\/cs\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1188,"url":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/2018\/02\/aies-2018\/","url_meta":{"origin":1124,"position":3},"title":"AIES 2018","author":"jsylvest","date":"9 February 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Last week I attended the first annual conference on AI, Ethics & Society where I presented some work on a Decision Tree\/Random Forest algorithm that makes decisions that are less biased or discriminatory. ((In the colloquial rather than technical sense)) You can read all the juicy details in our paper.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "CS \/ Science \/ Tech \/ Coding"","block_context":{"text":"CS \/ Science \/ Tech \/ Coding","link":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/category\/cs\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1098,"url":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/2018\/07\/hume-on-knowledge\/","url_meta":{"origin":1124,"position":4},"title":"Hume on Knowledge","author":"jsylvest","date":"1 July 2018","format":"aside","excerpt":"All knowledge degenerates into probability. \u2014 David Hume, \"A Treatise on Human Nature,\" \u00a7IV.1","rel":"","context":"In "Quotes"","block_context":{"text":"Quotes","link":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/category\/quotes\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1564,"url":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/2019\/06\/bart-barrage-of-random-transforms-for-adversarially-robust-defense\/","url_meta":{"origin":1124,"position":5},"title":"BaRT: Barrage of Random Transforms for Adversarially Robust Defense","author":"jsylvest","date":"19 June 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"This week I'm at CVPR \u2014 the IEEE's Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference, which is a huge AI event. 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