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Asides
Things we might cover if there is time:
Machine Learning is a subset of Artificial Intelligence, focused on the slightly smaller goal of making machines learn things without human intervention. But really, it's about AI. It can be very useful, but often doesn't live up to the hype, just as the first push to AI failed years ago.
In general, Machine Learning is based on applied mathematics and logic.
For more, see Machine Learning
As computers get more and more powerful, the chance of developing (on purpose or accidentally) an AI (Artificial Intelligence) with the ability to process at or above the general reasoning ability of the average human becomes more and more likely. But it won't be human, and that is VERY important to understand. It will not have human goals. It would be a huge mistake to assume that an AI would want what we want. Don't assume it "wants" to live. Or wants to kill us. Or NOT kill us. It's goals are whatever we program them to be... but...
Even if we tell a general AI to do what we want, to care about what we asked it to do, it will not care about ALL the things we care about; in fact, it will only care about whatever we tell it to care about and nothing else. And that is the most dangerous point of all. Not because someone will tell it to do bad things, but because we will tell it to do something good, without realizing that the surest way for that AI to do the good thing is to do things we would think are bad.
And as AI's become faster and deeper and "smarter", figuring out how to order them to NOT do any of the bad things becomes increasingly difficult, and success (without side effects) becomes increasingly unlikely. Despite our best efforts, humans do not have a perfect record making, raising, things that always do good. We have seen many times that children raised by apparently loving parents grow to become mass murderers or worse. But they were all limited by human intelligence... and AI's will not be.
For more on this critical topic, see: AISafety
- https://www.amazon.com/Stuff-Matters-Exploring-Marvelous-Materials/dp/0544236041
- https://blog.bitsrc.io/a-beginners-guide-to-regular-expressions-regex-in-javascript-9c58feb27eb4 "A programmer has a problem and thinks, 'I know! I'll use regular expressions'. Now they have two problems."