Книга: The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

CHAPTER TEN: This Is the World on Machine Learning

CHAPTER TEN: This Is the World on Machine Learning

Now that you’ve toured the machine learning wonderland, let’s switch gears and see what it all means to you. Like the red pill in The Matrix, the Master Algorithm is the gateway to a different reality: the one you already live in but didn’t know it yet. From dating to work, from self-knowledge to the future of society, from data sharing to war, and from the dangers of AI to the next step in evolution, a new world is taking shape, and machine learning is the key that unlocks it. This chapter will help you make the most of it in your life and be ready for what comes next. Machine learning will not single-handedly determine the future, any more than any other technology; it’s what we decide to do with it that counts, and now you have the tools to decide.

Chief among these tools is the Master Algorithm. Whether it arrives sooner or later, and whether or not it looks like Alchemy, is less important than what it encapsulates: the essential capabilities of a learning algorithm, and where they’ll take us. We can equally well think of the Master Algorithm as a composite picture of current and future learners, which we can conveniently use in our thought experiments in lieu of the specific algorithm inside product X or website Y, which the respective companies are unlikely to share with us anyway. Seen in this light, the learners we interact with every day are embryonic versions of the Master Algorithm, and our task is to understand them and shape their growth to better serve our needs.

In the coming decades, machine learning will affect such a broad swath of human life that one chapter of one book cannot possibly do it justice. Nevertheless, we can already see a number of recurring themes, and it’s those we’ll focus on, starting with what psychologists call theory of mind-the computer’s theory of your mind, that is.

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