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Artificial Intelligence Is Already Weirdly Inhuman

nautil.us

31–40 of 84 posts

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Already Weirdly Inhuman

#31

Neural Networks do not think. They perform a series of computations, and arrive at a result. It is not intelligence. It is a very useful tool for solving problems that can be quantified and that we can generate a lot of data from, but ultimately, it is still human intelligence that is interpreting the problem and result.

Human brains do not think. They perform a series of computations, and arrive at a result. It is not intelligence. It is a very useful tool for solving problems that can be translated into neural inputs.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Already Weirdly Inhuman

#32

I do have my doubts that plain neural networks will ever be able to achieve conceptual understanding. I have an affinity for classical, rational AI in that you can correct it and it will take that correction and instantly apply it to is knowledge base. It can also explain why it came to a conclusion. (though obviously this style has its very real limitations) NNs and other current statistical/connectionist approaches…

At the risk of nitpicking, I'm going to specifically address your statement of "It feels like an ostrich"

To my mind, that's EXACTLY how humans do it. A baby is not instructed, "it has 2 legs, feathers, and is tall, therefore it is an ostrich", there's quite a bit more "LOOK OSTRICH /present input of ostrich/" prior to the point of being able to generate any justification.

As sister posts have pointed out, I tend to believe that the ability to justify the classification is another learned skillset that comes later developmentally, the ability for higher primates (and babies) to perform classification without the (as far as I know) ability to do the higher order reasoning lends itself to this theory.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Already Weirdly Inhuman

#33

(My take on this problem, feel free to correct any assumptions I make that are wrong) I think this is because neural nets are not actually "intelligent" in terms of the commonly accepted definition of intelligence. They are dumb. They try, usually with simple probabilistic techniques and input element-wise transforms, to mimic some function that produces approximations for a given set of inputs and outputs. The train…

> They try, usually with simple probabilistic techniques and input element-wise transforms, to mimic some function that produces approximations for a given set of inputs and outputs It's my understanding that this is basically how the brain works. My personal theory is that enough of these "dumb" inputs, wired correctly together, leads to emergent behavior that is consciousness.

I imagine the brain more like hundreds (thousands, millions, I'm not sure the magnitude) of different specialized neural networks. So you have a specific neural network for picking out colors and that feeds (along with a bunch of other inputs) into the neural network for picking out object boundaries and that feeds into the neural network for object recognition and so on. In comparison, most neural networks that are used in computer vision are generally trying to do the entire process in a single network (although they also use feedforward, so the difference is more complex than just composing the various layers). I think there is something to the idea that we need the neural network to have points where it can spit out a partial piece of the eventual goal model, things like object boundaries before recognizing the object, recognizing eyes before the entire face, etc. The key is being able to get those logical partial model results at various layers of the network.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Already Weirdly Inhuman

#34

(My take on this problem, feel free to correct any assumptions I make that are wrong) I think this is because neural nets are not actually "intelligent" in terms of the commonly accepted definition of intelligence. They are dumb. They try, usually with simple probabilistic techniques and input element-wise transforms, to mimic some function that produces approximations for a given set of inputs and outputs. The train…

> They try, usually with simple probabilistic techniques and input element-wise transforms, to mimic some function that produces approximations for a given set of inputs and outputs It's my understanding that this is basically how the brain works. My personal theory is that enough of these "dumb" inputs, wired correctly together, leads to emergent behavior that is consciousness.

[deleted]

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Already Weirdly Inhuman

#35

Sigh. The phrase "neural network" is getting tossed around these days with some type of sensationalist flair, an almost romanticized notion of this impending explosion of super-human phenomena. As Alex Smola says with much frustration in one his classes, "it's only math!" It's a fancy term for straightforward mathematics. Bloggers are so often making them out to be much more than they are.

There's something to be said for both sides of this. I think you're right about the way NN's have been blown out of proportion. I find as I work across fields they're the most abused and misunderstood ML technique, since everyone and their dog has heard of NN's at this point. But on the other hand, there's a lot that can be said for simple building blocks combining to form something very complex. The biological "inspiration" behind NN's make them an attractive starting point for investigating this line of thought.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Already Weirdly Inhuman

#36

I do have my doubts that plain neural networks will ever be able to achieve conceptual understanding. I have an affinity for classical, rational AI in that you can correct it and it will take that correction and instantly apply it to is knowledge base. It can also explain why it came to a conclusion. (though obviously this style has its very real limitations) NNs and other current statistical/connectionist approaches…

At the risk of nitpicking, I'm going to specifically address your statement of "It feels like an ostrich" To my mind, that's EXACTLY how humans do it. A baby is not instructed, "it has 2 legs, feathers, and is tall, therefore it is an ostrich", there's quite a bit more "LOOK OSTRICH /present input of ostrich/" prior to the point of being able to generate any justification. As sister posts have pointed out, I tend to…

I find how my two-year old classifies birds to be amusing:

1) He called all birds ducks for the longest time, presumably based on being exposed to a bath duck, and this weird Youtube video about ducks swimming in the water.

2) Then he called some of them bird, based on being exposed to a bath toy bird.

3) Then he split them up a bit more... parrot, chicken, rooster, etc. He started seeing them in books and real life.

4) At no point could he explain the difference. Still can't.

5) And he definitely thinks the only difference between a rooster and a chicken is colorful feathers.

6) And he's not quite sure about ducks and geese, but usually gets it right.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Already Weirdly Inhuman

#37

I do have my doubts that plain neural networks will ever be able to achieve conceptual understanding. I have an affinity for classical, rational AI in that you can correct it and it will take that correction and instantly apply it to is knowledge base. It can also explain why it came to a conclusion. (though obviously this style has its very real limitations) NNs and other current statistical/connectionist approaches…

I'm a firm believer that it's a mistake to ask machines to do X in the hope that they'll do Y. We can't train an ANN to classify images then ask it to explain its reasoning; that's not the task we trained it for! How might we train an ANN to explain its reasoning? One approach would be to learn programs: have the ANN write programs which classify images. Then we have a classifier (run the program) and an explanation…

The biggest problem I see to training a network to program is that it would require a lot of example programs to serve as training data. Which means we need a lot of really good, bug free programs that already accomplish similar tasks. And in my opinion, we do not have enough reliable seed programs to make anything useful, at least currently.

It is very easy to take a picture of a car and tell a computer what it is, not so easy to write a program and explain to a computer what it does.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Already Weirdly Inhuman

#38

I do have my doubts that plain neural networks will ever be able to achieve conceptual understanding. I have an affinity for classical, rational AI in that you can correct it and it will take that correction and instantly apply it to is knowledge base. It can also explain why it came to a conclusion. (though obviously this style has its very real limitations) NNs and other current statistical/connectionist approaches…

IANANR (I Am Not A Neuro-Researcher), but it seems to me the "only" step you're requiring is that of self-consciousness. We can explain why we think it's an ostrich because we can point our neural networks at themselves, and say, "what sort of thinking process does this look like? Oh, it looks like visual pattern recognition of certain features like a long hairless neck, bird features, etc, so that's why I think it's an ostrich."

We are capable of conceptual thinking because we can think about our own thoughts, and further think about our own thoughts about our own thoughts, etc, in an endless cascade of meta-thinking (which is in fact what thinking is). The ability to experience a gestalt, and the ability to think about it, are two major steps. We seem to have achieved the first, with current NNs. That's pretty amazing already!

I think the ability to be pointed at itself is a necessary step for those NNs to develop self-consciousness and, thereby, conceptual understanding. We're not there yet, for sure, but how much further are we? A few years? A decade? A few decades? The latter is no doubt a very pessimistic estimate (conservative AI researchers agree on this).

Human-style intelligence is certainly not here yet. But it is almost certainly just around the corner.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Already Weirdly Inhuman

#39

I do have my doubts that plain neural networks will ever be able to achieve conceptual understanding. I have an affinity for classical, rational AI in that you can correct it and it will take that correction and instantly apply it to is knowledge base. It can also explain why it came to a conclusion. (though obviously this style has its very real limitations) NNs and other current statistical/connectionist approaches…

At the risk of nitpicking, I'm going to specifically address your statement of "It feels like an ostrich" To my mind, that's EXACTLY how humans do it. A baby is not instructed, "it has 2 legs, feathers, and is tall, therefore it is an ostrich", there's quite a bit more "LOOK OSTRICH /present input of ostrich/" prior to the point of being able to generate any justification. As sister posts have pointed out, I tend to…

I agree that the initial human classifier is the "general feel". My distinguishing point is in the retraining. We can form conceptual constructions of what we see to resolve training correction, and once that is bootstrapped, carry the formed concepts and the meta-cognitive capability of concept creation over into new contexts.

If we've only seen automobiles, then all of a sudden are introduced to trains, 18-wheelers, motorcycles, etc, we are challenged to conceptually organize and discover the differences between these classifications. There's still a fair amount of "feel" in weird overlap cases, but the conceptual distinction is created after the fact. There is no mechanism for that in NNs.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Already Weirdly Inhuman

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the risk of nitpicking, I'm going to specifically address your statement of "It feels like an ostrich" To my mind, that's EXACTLY how humans do it. A baby is not instructed, "it has 2 legs, feathers, and is tall, therefore it is an ostrich", there's quite a bit more "LOOK OSTRICH /present input of ostrich/" prior to the point of being able to generate any justification. As sister posts have pointed out, I tend to…

I find how my two-year old classifies birds to be amusing: 1) He called all birds ducks for the longest time, presumably based on being exposed to a bath duck, and this weird Youtube video about ducks swimming in the water. 2) Then he called some of them bird, based on being exposed to a bath toy bird. 3) Then he split them up a bit more... parrot, chicken, rooster, etc. He started seeing them in books and real life.…

I guess he still needs to develop the advanced bullshitting (sorry, I meant "rationalisation") skills required to say, "Well, I think it's a duck, because it looks like my internal picture of what ducks are supposed to look like, dear sir!"
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