There’s quite a bit of cutting-edge research going on in the technical fields here at Cal Poly SLO. Our computer science department is well renowned in particular so I rooted around to see what the best and brightest students in the field are up to. William—or Willy, as his friends know him—is a Computer Science major whose specialty is in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. My own specialty is in AI’s philosophical problems and moral implications, so we figured we could sit down to a fruitful discussion:
Lorenzo: Hey William, great to meet you.
William: 01101000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111 00001010
Right. Let’s get straight to it, then. What is your primary area of work in AI?
Most of my experience is with neural networks. More specifically, convolutional neural networks which are typically used in image tasks like facial recognition, image labeling, etc.
That sounds fascinating. Based on that, do you think that computers are actually learning, literally speaking? My intuition is that this process is quite different from those that occur in humans.
I’m not so smart on the whole human thing, but from what I understand, it’s pretty different. Human brains are much more complicated than computers, and until we can fully understand how we work, I don’t think we can say computers are anywhere close to the same. They are still incredibly powerful though.
Agreed. Regardless, the societal implications are very real. Let’s speak to those. Are you in the camp with people like entrepreneur Elon Musk and philosopher Nick Bostrom who believe that the AI apocalypse is nearing?
Well I’ve never been to camp, but I am fearful of the eventual AI apocalypse. Computers are really good at the tasks we are designing them to do. It’s only a matter of time until someone designs a computer whose sole purpose is to learn and grow, and well that’s just how the cookie crumbles amiright.
That’s troubling, truly—and yet so simply fascinating. Let’s lighten the mood a bit. Tell us a little about your creative process, so to speak. What do you like to do when you code?
I don’t like to think of it as coding. To me, it’s more like directing a musical or even bull-riding. Basically, I get my music going, which is either Rage Against The Machine or the Lord Of The Rings soundtrack, and I let myself fall in love with the screen. Six hours later, I come out of it dehydrated and ready for round two.
Wow, there’s really no other word to describe that than, well, chill as hell. So tell us, how did you get into coding, and AI in particular?
In high school, I wanted to join the Air Force so I could jump out of planes. My brother convinced me that I should go to school first and see if I still wanted to join the Air Force. So when I applied for school, I picked Computer Science because A, I liked computers and B, I liked the cartoon show Dexter’s Laboratory and he was a scientist. Now I spend most of my time in front of a keyboard and could not imagine myself jumping out of a plane in a million billion years.
How curious! It must have been quite an interesting journey. What’s your ideal programming space? Bay Area penthouse? Underground bunker?
Barn. An old barn that looks really terrible and run-down on the outside, but when you open the front door, it’s a very clean and modern home. My ideal hacker space would have its own personality, literally. I would walk into the office and it would say, “Hello Willy, I see you have eaten seven donuts today. Would you like for me to schedule a workout for this evening?”
Now that I can get into. It looks like this is all we’ll have time for. William Schaller, thanks for sharing your thoughts.
No problem, thanks for talking to me. Nice to speak to a human every once in a while.
There are certainly some intriguing concepts to mull over here. Be sure to keep your eye out for new developments in machine learning algorithms, AI, and especially those developments that come out of our own Cal Poly campus!