Machines Of Loving Grace

John Markoff, HarperCollins 2015, Bvtn Lib 303.483 MAR

Markoff is a smart guy, and has followed these developments from the beginning. The first half of the book is excellent, but it bogs down between pages 120 to 270 (approximately); although much is being said about artificial intelligence, there is less there than the broadcast media would lead us to believe. If there is a second edition, much less about the history of AI, and more about the details of augmented reality and neural nets might be informative (assuming those don't hit a wall).

• AI vs IA (Intelligence Amplification) - many AI pioneers shifted to enhancing human capability

• xii : Stanford area, 1964: John McCarthy, Doug Englebart

• 004 : 1966 SRI, Shakey - robot w cameras on cart, tethered to racks of computers, minutes between moves
• 005 : 1966 SRI, oN Line System - Englebart lab
• 007 : 1969 Bill Duvall, network link to LA
• 010 : Paul Saffo, "Never mistake a clear view for a short distance"

  • labor force continues to expand, between 1964 and 2012 the economy added 74M jobs

• 010 : Job destruction for routinized middle-class jobs, expansion at the bottom and top of pyramid
• 021 : Tony Tether, 2004 director DARPA
• 032 : Sebastian Thrun ... 039 : Google self-driving car modified Prius
• 045 : Google car, commutes to Berkeley, weekend to Tahoe
• 046 : Tesla autopilot announcement
• 057 : Handoff problem, "Google decided that while in some distant future that might be a solvable problem, it wasn't possible now with existing technology."
• 058 : "golf cart" cars, less than 25 MPH for low speed urban driving

  • average in NY 17mph, SF 18mph - but what is averaged with zero - what is the distribution and what happens when you clip off the top??

• 059 : planned communities, vehicle sharing
• 060 : trolley problem

• 061 : 90% of accidents caused by driver error - but which drivers?

• 061 : V2X - transmits location of nearby vehicles
• 062 : Englebart's Mother of All Demos
• 065 : Philips shaver factory Drachten Netherlands, ... with human rework
• 069 : 1949 Norbert Weiner, human consequences, "The Human Use of Human Beings", "God and Golem, Inc"
• 076 : Luddite Fallacy, 1995 Rifkin "The End of Work" - but jobs 115M to 137M by 2005 (19% vs 11% pop. growth)
• 078 : AI impact on legal discovery
• 080 : Skill mismatch: transactions and production decline, interactions and problem solving increase by 4.8M jobs
• 081 : 1985 to 2004: 60k ATMs, 485k tellers to 352k ATMs, 527k tellers, 2011: 601k tellers, 152k repairers

• 084 : McKinsey 2011, internet created 2.6 jobs for every job lost

• 084 : Kurzweil: Humans transcend biology in 2045, singularity movement

• 087 : 2013 International federation of robotics 3.6 jobs created per robot

• 088 : 2014, Robert J. Gordon Northwestern University economist, gains do not show up in conventional productivity figures. peak improvement in 1998

• 090 : Toyota - automated factories do not improve themselves
• 093 : Aging populations in China, Europe. US is younger because of immigration
• 095-158 : Rise, fall, and resurrection of AI: "AI winter" followed by 2012 Hinton neural networks
• 116 : Hans Moravec's "hideway office", age 64 (1950?), survive until 2050 by eating well and walking
• 211 : Lee Felsenstein 1973, free public computer terminals in SF and Berkeley, 1976 Homebrew Computer Club, Sol-20. Osborne 1
• 217 : Eric Horvitz, The Office Assistant, AKA "The Fucking Clown", dumbed down to "Clippy" to fit on distro disk
• 220 : "Her" ... Liesl Capper's "My Perfect Girlfriend" shut down in 2014
• 229 : Boston Dynamics, Marc Raibert, Atlas robots
• 260 : Scott Hassan, Willow Garage 2006 to 2014
• 272 : Augmented Reality, 2013 "Magic Leap"
• 282 : Tom Gruber, Hearsay II to SIRI

• 343 : Bill Duvall, Tom Gruber, Adam Cheyer, Terry Winograd, and Gary Bradsky -> Human centered design

• 344 : "This is about us, about humans and the kind of world we will create. It's not about the machines"