Executive Summary
Curiosity has been hailed as one of the most critical competencies for the modern workplace. As the workplace becomes more and more automated, it begs the question: Can artificial intelligence ever be curious as human beings? AIs desire to learn a directed task cannot be overstated. Most AI problems comprise defining an objective or goal that becomes the computers number one priority.At the same time, AI is also constrained in what it can learn. AI is increasinglybecoming a substitute for tasks that once required a great deal of human curiosity, and when it comes to performance, AI will have an edge over humans in a growing number of tasks. But the capacity to remain capriciously curious about anything, including random things, and pursue ones interest with passion, may remain exclusively human.
Curiosity has been hailed as one of the most critical competencies for the modern workplace. Its been shown to boost peoples employability. Countries with higher curiosity enjoy more economic and political freedom, as well as higher GDPs. It is therefore not surprising that, as future jobs become less predictable, a growing number of organizations will hire individuals based on what they could learn, rather than on what they already know.
Of course, peoples careers are still largely dependent on their academic achievements, which are (at least partly) a result of their curiosity. Since no skill can be learned without a minimum level of interest, curiosity may be considered one of the critical foundations of talent. AsAlbert Einstein famously noted,I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.
How it will impact business, industry, and society.
Curiosity is only made more important for peoples careers by the growing automation of jobs. At this years World Economic Forum, ManpowerGroup predicted that learnability, the desire to adapt ones skill set to remain employable throughout ones working life, is a key antidote to automation. Those who are more willing and able to upskill and develop new expertise are less likely to be automated. In other words, the wider the range of skills and abilities you acquire, the more relevant you will remain in the workplace. Conversely, if youre focused on optimizing your performance, your job will eventually consist of repetitive and standardized actions that could be better executed by a machine.
But what if AI were capable of being curious?
As a matter of fact, AIs desire to learn a directed task cannot be overstated. Most AI problems comprise defining an objective or goal that becomes the computers number one priority. To appreciate the force of this motivation, just imagine if your desire to learn something ranked highest among all your motivational priorities, above any social status or even your physiological needs. In that sense, AI is way more obsessed with learning than humans are.
At the same time, AI is constrained in what it can learn. Its focus and scope are very narrow compared to that of a human, and its insatiable learning appetite applies only to extrinsic directives learn X, Y, or Z. This is in stark contrast to AIs inability to self-direct or be intrinsically curious. In that sense, artificial curiosity is the exact opposite of human curiosity; people are rarely curious about something because they are told to be. Yet this is arguably the biggest downside to human curiosity: It is free-flowing and capricious, so we cannot boost it at will, either in ourselves or in others.
To some degree, most of the complex tasks that AI has automated have exposed the limited potential of human curiosity vis-a-vis targeted learning. In fact, even if we dont like to describe AI learning in terms of curiosity, it is clear that AI is increasingly a substitute for tasks that once required a great deal of human curiosity. Consider the curiosity that went into automobile safety innovation, for example. Remember automobile crash tests? Thanks to the dramatic increase in computing power, a car crash can now be simulated bya computer. In the past, innovative ideas required curiosity, followed by design and testing in a lab. Today, computers can assist curiosity efforts by searching for design optimizations on their own. With this intelligent design process, the computer owns the entire life cycle of idea creation, testing, and validation. The final designs, if given enough flexibility, can often surpass whats humanly possible.
Similar AI design processes are becoming more common across many different industries. Google has used it to optimize cooling efficiency with itsdata centers. NASA engineers have used it to improve antennae quality for maximum sensitivity. With AI, the process of design-test-feedback can happen in milliseconds instead of weeks. In the future, the tunable design parameters and speed will only increase, thus broadening our possible applications for human-inspired design.
A more familiar example might be the face-to-face interview, since nearly every working adult has had to endure one. Improving the quality of hires is a constant goal for companies, but how do you do it? A human recruiters curiosity could inspire them to vary future interviews by question or duration. In this case, the process for testing new questions and grading criteria is limited by the number of candidates and observations. In some cases, a company may lack the applicant volume to do any meaningful studies to perfect itsinterview process. But machine learning can be applied directly to recorded video interviews, and the learning-feedback process can be tested in seconds. Candidates can be compared based on features related to speech and social behavior. Microcompetencies that matter such as attention, friendliness, and achievement-based language can be tested and validated from video, audio, and language in minutes, while controlling for irrelevant variables and eliminating the effects of unconscious (and conscious) biases. In contrast, human interviewers are often not curious enough to ask candidates important questions or they are curious about the wrong things, so they end up paying attention to irrelevant factors and making unfair decisions.
Lastly, consider a human playing a computer game. Many games start out with repeated trial and error, sohumans must attempt new things and innovate to succeed in the game: If I try this, then what? What if I go here? Early versions of game robots were not very capable because they were using the full game state information; they knew where their human rivals were and what they were doing. But since 2015something new has happened: Computers can beat us on equal grounds, without any game state information, thanks to deep learning. Both humans and the computers can make real-time decisions about their next move. (As an example, see this video of a deep network learning to play the game Super Mario World.)
From the above examples, it may seem that computers have surpassed humans when it comes to specific (task-related) curiosity. It is clear that computers can constantly learn and test ideas faster than we can, so long as they have a clear set of instructions and a clearly defined goal. However, computers still lack the ability to venture into new problem domains and connect analogous problems, perhaps because of their inability to relate unrelated experiences. For instance, the hiring algorithms cant play checkers, and the car design algorithms cant play computer games. In short, when it comes to performance, AI will have an edge over humans in a growing number of tasks, but the capacity to remain capriciously curious about anything, including random things, and pursue ones interest with passion may remain exclusively human.
More:
Can AI Ever Be as Curious as Humans? - Harvard Business Review
- Classic reasoning systems like Loom and PowerLoom vs. more modern systems based on probalistic networks - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Using Amazon's cloud service for computationally expensive calculations - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Software environments for working on AI projects - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- New version of my NLP toolkit - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Semantic Web: through the back door with HTML and CSS - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Java FastTag part of speech tagger is now released under the LGPL - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Defining AI and Knowledge Engineering - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Great Overview of Knowledge Representation - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Something like Google page rank for semantic web URIs - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- My experiences writing AI software for vehicle control in games and virtual reality systems - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The URL for this blog has changed - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- I have a new page on Knowledge Management - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- N-GRAM analysis using Ruby - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Good video: Knowledge Representation and the Semantic Web - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Using the PowerLoom reasoning system with JRuby - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Machines Like Us - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- RapidMiner machine learning, data mining, and visualization tool - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- texai.org - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- NLTK: The Natural Language Toolkit - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- My OpenCalais Ruby client library - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Ruby API for accessing Freebase/Metaweb structured data - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Protégé OWL Ontology Editor - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- New version of Numenta software is available - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Very nice: Elsevier IJCAI AI Journal articles now available for free as PDFs - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Verison 2.0 of OpenCyc is available - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- What’s Your Biggest Question about Artificial Intelligence? [Article] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Minimax Search [Knowledge] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Decision Tree [Knowledge] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- More AI Content & Format Preference Poll [Article] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- New Planners Solve Rescue Missions [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Neural Network Learns to Bluff at Poker [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Pushing the Limits of Game AI Technology [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Mining Data for the Netflix Prize [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Interview with Peter Denning on the Principles of Computing [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Decision Making for Medical Support [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Neural Network Creates Music CD [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- jKilavuz - a guide in the polygon soup [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial General Intelligence: Now Is the Time [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Apply AI 2007 Roundtable Report [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- What Would You do With 80 Cores? [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Software Finds Learning Language Child's Play [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial Intelligence in Games [Article] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial Intelligence Resources - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Alan Turing: Mathematical Biologist? - April 25th, 2012 [April 25th, 2012]
- BBC Horizon: The Hunt for AI ( Artificial Intelligence ) - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Can computers have true artificial intelligence" Masonic handshake" 3rd-April-2012 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Kevin B. Korb - Interview - Artificial Intelligence and the Singularity p3 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence - 6 Month Anniversary - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Science Breakthroughs - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Hitman: Blood Money - Part 49 - Stupid Artificial Intelligence! - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Research Members Turned Off By HAARP Artificial Intelligence - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence Lecture No. 5 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- The Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, 2012 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Charlie Rose - Artificial Intelligence - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Expert on artificial intelligence to speak at EPIIC Nights dinner - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- Filipino software engineers complete and best thousands on Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Course - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- Vodafone xone™ Hackathon Challenges Developers and Entrepreneurs to Build a New Generation of Artificial Intelligence ... - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- Rocket Fuel Packages Up CPG Booster - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- 2 Filipinos finishes among top in Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence course - May 5th, 2012 [May 5th, 2012]
- Why Your Brain Isn't A Computer - May 5th, 2012 [May 5th, 2012]
- 2 Pinoy software engineers complete Stanford's AI course - May 7th, 2012 [May 7th, 2012]
- Percipio Media, LLC Proudly Accepts Partnership With MIT's Prestigious Computer Science And Artificial Intelligence ... - May 10th, 2012 [May 10th, 2012]
- Google Driverless Car Ok'd by Nevada - May 10th, 2012 [May 10th, 2012]
- Moving Beyond the Marketing Funnel: Rocket Fuel and Forrester Research Announce Free Webinar - May 10th, 2012 [May 10th, 2012]
- Rocket Fuel Wins 2012 San Francisco Business Times Tech & Innovation Award - May 13th, 2012 [May 13th, 2012]
- Internet Week 2012: Rocket Fuel to Speak at OMMA RTB - May 16th, 2012 [May 16th, 2012]
- How to Get the Most Out of Your Facebook Ads -- Rocket Fuel's VP of Products, Eshwar Belani, to Lead MarketingProfs ... - May 16th, 2012 [May 16th, 2012]
- The Digital Disruptor To Banking Has Just Gone International - May 16th, 2012 [May 16th, 2012]
- Moving Beyond the Marketing Funnel: Rocket Fuel Announce Free Webinar Featuring an Independent Research Firm - May 23rd, 2012 [May 23rd, 2012]
- MASA Showcases Latest Version of MASA SWORD for Homeland Security Markets - May 23rd, 2012 [May 23rd, 2012]
- Bluesky Launches Drones for Aerial Surveying - May 23rd, 2012 [May 23rd, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence: What happened to the hunt for thinking machines? - May 25th, 2012 [May 25th, 2012]
- Bubble Robots Move Using Lasers [VIDEO] - May 25th, 2012 [May 25th, 2012]
- UHV assistant professors receive $10,000 summer research grants - May 27th, 2012 [May 27th, 2012]
- Artificial intelligence: science fiction or simply science? - May 28th, 2012 [May 28th, 2012]
- Exetel taps artificial intelligence - May 29th, 2012 [May 29th, 2012]
- Software offers brain on the rain - May 29th, 2012 [May 29th, 2012]
- New Dean of Science has high hopes for his faculty - May 30th, 2012 [May 30th, 2012]
- Cognitive Code Announces "Silvia For Android" App - May 31st, 2012 [May 31st, 2012]
- A Rat is Smarter Than Google - June 5th, 2012 [June 5th, 2012]