6.6: On the future of neural networks

Intention-driven user interfaces: There's an old joke in which an impatient professor tells a confused student: "don't listen to what I say; listen to what I mean". Historically, computers have often been, like the confused student, in the dark about what their users mean. But this is changing. I still remember my surprise the first time I misspelled a Google search query, only to have Google say "Did you mean [corrected query]?" and to offer the corresponding search results. Google CEO Larry Page once described the perfect search engine as understanding exactly what [your queries] mean and giving you back exactly what you want.

This is a vision of an intention-driven user interface. In this vision, instead of responding to users' literal queries, search will use machine learning to take vague user input, discern precisely what was meant, and take action on the basis of those insights.

The idea of intention-driven interfaces can be applied far more broadly than search. Over the next few decades, thousands of companies will build products which use machine learning to make user interfaces that can tolerate imprecision, while discerning and acting on the user's true intent. We're already seeing early examples of such intention-driven interfaces: Apple's Siri; Wolfram Alpha; IBM's Watson; systems which can annotate photos and videos; and much more.

Most of these products will fail. Inspired user interface design is hard, and I expect many companies will take powerful machine learning technology and use it to build insipid user interfaces. The best machine learning in the world won't help if your user interface concept stinks. But there will be a residue of products which succeed. Over time that will cause a profound change in how we relate to computers. Not so long ago - let's say, 2005 - users took it for granted that they needed precision in most interactions with computers. Indeed, computer literacy to a great extent meant internalizing the idea that computers are extremely literal; a single misplaced semi-colon may completely change the nature of an interaction with a computer. But over the next few decades I expect we'll develop many successful intention-driven user interfaces, and that will dramatically change what we expect when interacting with computers.

Machine learning, data science, and the virtuous circle of innovation: Of course, machine learning isn't just being used to build intention-driven interfaces. Another notable application is in data science, where machine learning is used to find the "known unknowns" hidden in data. This is already a fashionable area, and much has been written about it, so I won't say much. But I do want to mention one consequence of this fashion that is not so often remarked: over the long run it's possible the biggest breakthrough in machine learning won't be any single conceptual breakthrough. Rather, the biggest breakthrough will be that machine learning research becomes profitable, through applications to data science and other areas. If a company can invest 1 dollar in machine learning research and get 1 dollar and 10 cents back reasonably rapidly, then a lot of money will end up in machine learning research. Put another way, machine learning is an engine driving the creation of several major new markets and areas of growth in technology. The result will be large teams of people with deep subject expertise, and with access to extraordinary resources. That will propel machine learning further forward, creating more markets and opportunities, a virtuous circle of innovation.

The role of neural networks and deep learning: I've been talking broadly about machine learning as a creator of new opportunities for technology. What will be the specific role of neural networks and deep learning in all this?

To answer the question, it helps to look at history. Back in the 1980s there was a great deal of excitement and optimism about neural networks, especially after backpropagation became widely known. That excitement faded, and in the 1990s the machine learning baton passed to other techniques, such as support vector machines. Today, neural networks are again riding high, setting all sorts of records, defeating all comers on many problems. But who is to say that tomorrow some new approach won't be developed that sweeps neural networks away again? Or perhaps progress with neural networks will stagnate, and nothing will immediately arise to take their place?

For this reason, it's much easier to think broadly about the future of machine learning than about neural networks specifically. Part of the problem is that we understand neural networks so poorly. Why is it that neural networks can generalize so well? How is it that they avoid overfitting as well as they do, given the very large number of parameters they learn? Why is it that stochastic gradient descent works as well as it does? How well will neural networks perform as data sets are scaled? For instance, if ImageNet was expanded by a factor of \(10\), would neural networks' performance improve more or less than other machine learning techniques? These are all simple, fundamental questions. And, at present, we understand the answers to these questions very poorly. While that's the case, it's difficult to say what role neural networks will play in the future of machine learning.

I will make one prediction: I believe deep learning is here to stay. The ability to learn hierarchies of concepts, building up multiple layers of abstraction, seems to be fundamental to making sense of the world. This doesn't mean tomorrow's deep learners won't be radically different than today's. We could see major changes in the constituent units used, in the architectures, or in the learning algorithms. Those changes may be dramatic enough that we no longer think of the resulting systems as neural networks. But they'd still be doing deep learning.

Will neural networks and deep learning soon lead to artificial intelligence? In this book we've focused on using neural nets to do specific tasks, such as classifying images. Let's broaden our ambitions, and ask: what about general-purpose thinking computers? Can neural networks and deep learning help us solve the problem of (general) artificial intelligence (AI)? And, if so, given the rapid recent progress of deep learning, can we expect general AI any time soon?

Addressing these questions comprehensively would take a separate book. Instead, let me offer one observation. It's based on an idea known as Conway's law:

Any organization that designs a system... will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.

So, for example, Conway's law suggests that the design of a Boeing 747 aircraft will mirror the extended organizational structure of Boeing and its contractors at the time the 747 was designed. Or for a simple, specific example, consider a company building a complex software application. If the application's dashboard is supposed to be integrated with some machine learning algorithm, the person building the dashboard better be talking to the company's machine learning expert. Conway's law is merely that observation, writ large.

Upon first hearing Conway's law, many people respond either "Well, isn't that banal and obvious?" or "Isn't that wrong?" Let me start with the objection that it's wrong. As an instance of this objection, consider the question: where does Boeing's accounting department show up in the design of the 747? What about their janitorial department? Their internal catering? And the answer is that these parts of the organization probably don't show up explicitly anywhere in the 747. So we should understand Conway's law as referring only to those parts of an organization concerned explicitly with design and engineering.

What about the other objection, that Conway's law is banal and obvious? This may perhaps be true, but I don't think so, for organizations too often act with disregard for Conway's law. Teams building new products are often bloated with legacy hires or, contrariwise, lack a person with some crucial expertise. Think of all the products which have useless complicating features. Or think of all the products which have obvious major deficiencies - e.g., a terrible user interface. Problems in both classes are often caused by a mismatch between the team that was needed to produce a good product, and the team that was actually assembled. Conway's law may be obvious, but that doesn't mean people don't routinely ignore it.

Conway's law applies to the design and engineering of systems where we start out with a pretty good understanding of the likely constituent parts, and how to build them. It can't be applied directly to the development of artificial intelligence, because AI isn't (yet) such a problem: we don't know what the constituent parts are. Indeed, we're not even sure what basic questions to be asking. In others words, at this point AI is more a problem of science than of engineering. Imagine beginning the design of the 747 without knowing about jet engines or the principles of aerodynamics. You wouldn't know what kinds of experts to hire into your organization. As Wernher von Braun put it, "basic research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing". Is there a version of Conway's law that applies to problems which are more science than engineering?

To gain insight into this question, consider the history of medicine. In the early days, medicine was the domain of practitioners like Galen and Hippocrates, who studied the entire body. But as our knowledge grew, people were forced to specialize. We discovered many deep new ideas**My apologies for overloading "deep". I won't define "deep ideas" precisely, but loosely I mean the kind of idea which is the basis for a rich field of enquiry. The backpropagation algorithm and the germ theory of disease are both good examples.: think of things like the germ theory of disease, for instance, or the understanding of how antibodies work, or the understanding that the heart, lungs, veins and arteries form a complete cardiovascular system. Such deep insights formed the basis for subfields such as epidemiology, immunology, and the cluster of inter-linked fields around the cardiovascular system. And so the structure of our knowledge has shaped the social structure of medicine. This is particularly striking in the case of immunology: realizing the immune system exists and is a system worthy of study is an extremely non-trivial insight. So we have an entire field of medicine - with specialists, conferences, even prizes, and so on - organized around something which is not just invisible, it's arguably not a distinct thing at all.

This is a common pattern that has been repeated in many well-established sciences: not just medicine, but physics, mathematics, chemistry, and others. The fields start out monolithic, with just a few deep ideas. Early experts can master all those ideas. But as time passes that monolithic character changes. We discover many deep new ideas, too many for any one person to really master. As a result, the social structure of the field re-organizes and divides around those ideas. Instead of a monolith, we have fields within fields within fields, a complex, recursive, self-referential social structure, whose organization mirrors the connections between our deepest insights. And so the structure of our knowledge shapes the social organization of science. But that social shape in turn constrains and helps determine what we can discover. This is the scientific analogue of Conway's law.

So what's this got to do with deep learning or AI?

Well, since the early days of AI there have been arguments about it that go, on one side, "Hey, it's not going to be so hard, we've got [super-special weapon] on our side", countered by "[super-special weapon] won't be enough". Deep learning is the latest super-special weapon I've heard used in such arguments**Interestingly, often not by leading experts in deep learning, who have been quite restrained. See, for example, this thoughtful post by Yann LeCun. This is a difference from many earlier incarnations of the argument.; earlier versions of the argument used logic, or Prolog, or expert systems, or whatever the most powerful technique of the day was. The problem with such arguments is that they don't give you any good way of saying just how powerful any given candidate super-special weapon is. Of course, we've just spent a chapter reviewing evidence that deep learning can solve extremely challenging problems. It certainly looks very exciting and promising. But that was also true of systems like Prolog or Eurisko or expert systems in their day. And so the mere fact that a set of ideas looks very promising doesn't mean much. How can we tell if deep learning is truly different from these earlier ideas? Is there some way of measuring how powerful and promising a set of ideas is? Conway's law suggests that as a rough and heuristic proxy metric we can evaluate the complexity of the social structure associated to those ideas.

So, there are two questions to ask. First, how powerful a set of ideas are associated to deep learning, according to this metric of social complexity? Second, how powerful a theory will we need, in order to be able to build a general artificial intelligence?

As to the first question: when we look at deep learning today, it's an exciting and fast-paced but also relatively monolithic field. There are a few deep ideas, and a few main conferences, with substantial overlap between several of the conferences. And there is paper after paper leveraging the same basic set of ideas: using stochastic gradient descent (or a close variation) to optimize a cost function. It's fantastic those ideas are so successful. But what we don't yet see is lots of well-developed subfields, each exploring their own sets of deep ideas, pushing deep learning in many directions. And so, according to the metric of social complexity, deep learning is, if you'll forgive the play on words, still a rather shallow field. It's still possible for one person to master most of the deepest ideas in the field.

On the second question: how complex and powerful a set of ideas will be needed to obtain AI? Of course, the answer to this question is: no-one knows for sure. But in the appendix I examine some of the existing evidence on this question. I conclude that, even rather optimistically, it's going to take many, many deep ideas to build an AI. And so Conway's law suggests that to get to such a point we will necessarily see the emergence of many interrelating disciplines, with a complex and surprising structure mirroring the structure in our deepest insights. We don't yet see this rich social structure in the use of neural networks and deep learning. And so, I believe that we are several decades (at least) from using deep learning to develop general AI.

I've gone to a lot of trouble to construct an argument which is tentative, perhaps seems rather obvious, and which has an indefinite conclusion. This will no doubt frustrate people who crave certainty. Reading around online, I see many people who loudly assert very definite, very strongly held opinions about AI, often on the basis of flimsy reasoning and non-existent evidence. My frank opinion is this: it's too early to say. As the old joke goes, if you ask a scientist how far away some discovery is and they say "10 years" (or more), what they mean is "I've got no idea". AI, like controlled fusion and a few other technologies, has been 10 years away for 60 plus years. On the flipside, what we definitely do have in deep learning is a powerful technique whose limits have not yet been found, and many wide-open fundamental problems. That's an exciting creative opportunity.