Machine Learning for Humans

Part 1: Introduction.

Who should read this?

Technical people who want to get up to speed on machine learning quickly

Non-technical people who want a primer on machine learning and are willing
to engage with technical concepts

Anyone who is curious about how machines think

This guide is intended to be accessible to anyone. Basic concepts in probability,

statistics, programming, linear algebra, and calculus will be discussed, but it isn’t
necessary to have prior knowledge of them to gain value from this series.

If you're more interested in figuring out which courses to take, textbooks to read,
projects to attempt, etc. Take a look at our top picks in the Appendix: The Best
Machine Learning Resources.

Why machine learning matters

Artificial intelligence will shape our future more powerfully than any other innovation
this century. Anyone who does not understand it will soon find themselves feeling left
behind, waking up in a world full of technology that feels more and more like magic.

The rate of acceleration is already astounding. After a couple of AI winters and periods
of false hope over the past four decades, rapid advances in data storage and computer
processing power have dramatically changed the game in recent years.

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In 2015, Google trained a conversational agent (AI) that could not only convincingly
interact with humans as a tech support helpdesk, but also discuss morality, express
opinions, and answer general facts-based questions.

(Vinyals & Le, 2017)

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The same year, DeepMind developed an agent that surpassed human-level

performance at 49 Atari games, receiving only the pixels and game score as inputs.
Soon after, in 2016, DeepMind obsoleted their own this achievement by releasing a
new state-of-the-art gameplay method called A3C.

Meanwhile, AlphaGo defeated one of the best human players at Go — an extraordinary

achievement in a game dominated by humans for two decades after machines first
conquered chess. Many masters could not fathom how it would be possible for a
machine to grasp the full nuance and complexity of this ancient Chinese war strategy
game, with its 10170 possible board positions (there are only 1080 atoms in the universe).

Professional Go player Lee Sedol reviewing his match with AlphaGo after defeat.
Photo via The Atlantic.

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In March 2017, OpenAI created agents that invented their own language to cooperate
and more effectively achieve their goal. Soon after, Facebook reportedly successfully
training agents to negotiate and even lie.

Just a few days ago (as of this writing), on August 11, 2017, OpenAI reached yet
another incredible milestone by defeating the world’s top professionals in 1v1 matches
of the online multiplayer game Dota 2.

See the full match at The International 2017, with Dendi (human) vs. OpenAI (bot), on YouTube.

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Much of our day-to-day technology is powered by artificial intelligence. Point your

camera at the menu during your next trip to Taiwan and the restaurant’s selections will
magically appear in English via the Google Translate app.

Google Translate overlaying English translations on a drink menu in real time using convolutional neural networks.

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Today AI is used to design evidence-based treatment plans for cancer patients,

instantly analyze results from medical tests to escalate to the appropriate specialist
immediately, and conduct scientific research for drug discovery.

A bold proclamation by London-based BenevolentAI (screenshot from About Us page, August 2017).

Law enforcement uses visual recognition and natural language processing to process
footage from body cameras. The Mars rover Curiosity even utilizes AI to autonomously
select inspection-worthy soil and rock samples with high accuracy.

In everyday life, it’s increasingly commonplace to discover machines in roles

traditionally occupied by humans. Really, don’t be surprised if a little housekeeping
delivery bot shows up instead of a human next time you call the hotel desk to send up
some toothpaste.

In this series, we’ll explore the core machine learning concepts behind these
technologies. By the end, you should be able to describe how they work at a conceptual
level and be equipped with the tools to start building similar applications yourself.

The semantic tree: artificial intelligence and machine learning

One bit of advice: it is important to view knowledge as sort of
a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental
principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the
leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to. — Elon Musk,
Reddit AMA

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Machine learning is one of many subfields of artificial intelligence, concerning the ways that computers learn from
experience to improve their ability to think, plan, decide, and act.

Artificial intelligence is the study of agents that perceive the world around them, form
plans, and make decisions to achieve their goals. Its foundations include mathematics,
logic, philosophy, probability, linguistics, neuroscience, and decision theory. Many
fields fall under the umbrella of AI, such as computer vision, robotics, machine learning,
and natural language processing.

Machine learning is a subfield of artificial intelligence. Its goal is to enable computers

to learn on their own. A machine’s learning algorithm enables it to identify patterns in
observed data, build models that explain the world, and predict things without having
explicit pre-programmed rules and models.

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The AI effect: what actually qualifies as “artificial intelligence”?

The exact standard for technology that qualifies as “AI” is a bit fuzzy, and interpretations
change over time. The AI label tends to describe machines doing tasks traditionally in the
domain of humans. Interestingly, once computers figure out how to do one of these tasks,
humans have a tendency to say it wasn’t really intelligence. This is known as the AI effect.

For example, when IBM’s Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997,
people complained that it was using "brute force" methods and it wasn’t “real” intelligence
at all. As Pamela McCorduck wrote, “It’s part of the history of the field of artificial intelligence
that every time somebody figured out how to make a computer do something — play good
checkers, solve simple but relatively informal problems — there was chorus of critics to say,
‘that’s not thinking’”(McCorduck, 2004).

Perhaps there is a certain je ne sais quoi inherent to what people will reliably accept as

“artificial intelligence”:

"AI is whatever hasn't been done yet." - Douglas Hofstadter

So does a calculator count as AI? Maybe by some interpretation. What about a self-driving
car? Today, yes. In the future, perhaps not. Your cool new chatbot startup that automates a
flow chart? Sure… why not.

Strong AI will change our world forever; to understand how, studying

machine learning is a good place to start

The technologies discussed above are examples of artificial narrow intelligence (ANI),
which can effectively perform a narrowly defined task.

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Meanwhile, we’re continuing to make foundational advances towards human-level

artificial general intelligence (AGI), also known as strong AI. The definition of an AGI
is an artificial intelligence that can successfully perform any intellectual task that a
human being can, including learning, planning and decision-making under uncertainty,
communicating in natural language, making jokes, manipulating people, trading
stocks, or… reprogramming itself.

And this last one is a big deal. If we create an AI that can improve itself, it would unlock
a cycle of recursive self-improvement that could lead to an intelligence explosion over
some unknown time period, ranging from many decades to a single day.

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine

that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any
man however clever. Since the design of machines is one
of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine
could design even better machines; there would then
unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the
intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first
ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need
ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to
tell us how to keep it under control. — I.J. Good, 1965

You may have heard this point referred to as the singularity. The term is borrowed
from the gravitational singularity that occurs at the center of a black hole, an infinitely
dense one-dimensional point where the laws of physics as we understand them start
to break down.

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We have zero visibility into what happens beyond the event horizon of a black hole
because no light can escape. Similarly, after we unlock AI’s ability to recursively
improve itself, it’s impossible to predict what will happen, just as mice who
intentionally designed a human might have trouble predicting what the human would
do to their world. Would it keep helping them get more cheese, as they originally
intended? (Image via WIRED)

A recent report by the Future of Humanity Institute surveyed a panel of AI researchers

on timelines for AGI, and found that “researchers believe there is a 50% chance of AI
outperforming humans in all tasks in 45 years” (Grace et al, 2017). We’ve personally
spoken with a number of sane and reasonable AI practitioners who predict much
longer timelines (the upper limit being “never”), and others whose timelines are
alarmingly short — as little as a few years.

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