Pluribus – Impact Lab

By Futurist Thomas Frey

The Question Vince Gilligan Forces Us to Face

I turned on Pluribus expecting another dystopian sci-fi thriller. What I got instead was shocking—and immediately captivating. Within minutes, humanity transforms into a peaceful, content hive mind that shares all knowledge, fulfills every desire, and operates with perfect efficiency. No build-up. No gradual descent. Just an alien virus, instant transformation, and thirteen immune individuals clinging desperately to their messy, contradictory, deeply human autonomy.

The storytelling is unlike anything I’ve encountered. There’s no traditional plot arc of discovery and rising action. The catastrophe has already happened. The world has already ended—or been perfected, depending on your perspective. What remains is something more unsettling than any monster: a genuinely benevolent collective consciousness that can’t understand why anyone would resist joining.

How to deal with a breakdown in theoretical support in machine learning? Researchers from Carnegie Mellon and Facebook describe winning many hands against the world’s top poker players by inventing smart search strategies to counter a lack of theoretical math used in most game-playing AI.

Among the many achievements of machine learning in recent years, some of the most striking are the victories of the machine against human players in games, such as Google’s DeepMind group’s conquest of Go in 2016. In such milestones, researchers are often guided by theoretical math that says there can be an optimal strategy to be found, given a good algorithm and enough compute.

Continue reading… “Machine learning goes beyond theory to beat human poker champs”

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Pluribus Gets the AI Question Right (And Terrifyingly Wrong): Why the Hive Mind Is Our Best Warning Yet

The Question Vince Gilligan Forces Us to Face

Machine learning goes beyond theory to beat human poker champs