Press Failure: The Guardian’s “Meet Erica”

Meet Erica, the world’s most human-like autonomous android. From its title alone, this documentary promises a sensational encounter. As the screen fades in from black, a marimba tinkles lightly in the background and a Japanese alleyway appears. Various narrators ask us:

“What does it mean to think?”

“What is human creativity?”

“What does it mean to have a personality?”

“What is an interaction?”

“What is a minimal definition of humans?”

The title, these questions, and nearly everything that follows mislead. This article is an installment in a series of posts addressing the various sources of misinformation feeding the present AI hype cycle.

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DeepMind Solves AGI, Summons Demon

In recent years, the rapid advance of artificial intelligence has evoked cries of alarm from billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk and legendary physicist Stephen Hawking. Others, including the eccentric futurist Ray Kurzweil, have embraced the coming of true machine intelligence, suggesting that we might merge with the computers, gaining superintelligence and immortality in the process. As it turns out, we may not have to wait much longer.

This morning, a group of research scientists at Google DeepMind announced that they had inadvertently solved the riddle of artificial general intelligence (AGI). Their approach relies upon a beguilingly simple technique called symmetrically toroidal asynchronous  bisecting convolutions. By the year’s end, Alphabet executives expect that these neural networks will exhibit fully autonomous self-improvement. What comes next may affect us all.

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