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How should we talk to AIs?

blog.stephenwolfram.com

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Re: How should we talk to AIs?

#31

Post by abandonliberty »

bashedly wrote: post #12
gohrt wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wolfram employeees sign contracts giving Dr Wolfram credit for their work, in exchange for their pay.

I know this is overly idealistic, but it seems to me that paying for "credit" (especially in terms of research) seems "wrong". I understand paying for ownership of the results of someone's work, or paying to state that the broader organization takes credit for the body of work produced by the employees. But for one individual to pay to personally receive credit for the output of another seems blatantly dishonest.

That's a very individualistic perspective. An opposite collectivist idealism can argue that all personal achievements rely on the support provided by companies, universities, societies, and countries (e.g. peace & safety).

Ultimately, how much did the individual contribute? There's a middle ground where we need to encourage individual efforts, but I feel like our society is biased to not recognizing the efforts of the whole.

Re: How should we talk to AIs?

#32

Post by taliesinb »

dkural wrote: post #27

Wolfram is the ultimate company failing in product thinking. For decades they yell "You can do anything with this!", but fail to identify, specifically, one thing it does better than other products that are designed to specifically do that thing. Thus for anything it could do, other products spend more attention and do that specific thing better/cheaper, with a tighter UX and more content. It turns out most people do…

Yeah, but it's still fun to actually bolt the missile fins onto the car, even if it's being driven by an unstoppable maniac :)

Re: How should we talk to AIs?

#34

Post by rm445 »

carlob wrote: post #29
zamalek wrote: post #13

He goes on ad nauseum about how fitting the language is. He's right. Back in university I'd frequently help seniors out with projects. The one project involved battleship AI in mathlab. In maybe 3 hours I got it as good as it was probably going to get pitted against a truly random opponent. However, PNRGs aren't truly random. It was so quick and so effortless to grab stats on the biases the PNRG had (in order to opti…

matlab or mathematica?

According to Wikipedia, Mathlab was a computer algebra system (written in Lisp) from the late 60s, whose author went on to write Macsyma, which inspired Mathematica.

Like you I'm still not sure whether parent poster meant that, or is confused about Matlab vs Mathematica.

Re: How should we talk to AIs?

#35

Post by AnimalMuppet »

joesb wrote: post #14
hacker_9 wrote: post #10

Interesting that the Wolfram Language is very much a LISP dialect, with the syntax swizzled a bit here and there to be a bit more human readable. Also his Riffle example is thinking about the problem the wrong way round. It looks like he tried to turn code into english, when it should be the other way around. Here is an actual english version: 1. Start with a purple square 2. Clone the square, rotate it by 0.1 radian…

> All these ambiguities we can solve We can solve it by specify what each word means. That's no different than programming. Also, your step 4 has bug because "repeating the clone process" does not include "rotating and scale it to fit" part. It'll just keep cloning the square all days and never get the square to be the size of a dot. Also, If you screen is not a square and you did not start in the center of the scree…

> We can solve it by specify what each word means.

The word that's going to cause the most trouble is probably "it". What does "it" mean? In this specification, it means the cloned square. But in a longer specification (written in this style), the meaning of "it" will depends on which instance of the word we're talking about, because what it refers to keeps changing...

Re: How should we talk to AIs?

#36

Post by AndrewKemendo »

dkural wrote: post #27

Wolfram is the ultimate company failing in product thinking. For decades they yell "You can do anything with this!", but fail to identify, specifically, one thing it does better than other products that are designed to specifically do that thing. Thus for anything it could do, other products spend more attention and do that specific thing better/cheaper, with a tighter UX and more content. It turns out most people do…

It's the ultimate example of a technology in search of a problem. They got it pretty close to right with adoption of mathematica in academia but has yet to seem to really take off in industry.

Watson has the same problem - and when they released the SDK last year it was kind of like, well, just try it, but they seem to have at least determined to focus on health care.

Re: How should we talk to AIs?

#37

Post by laotzu »

winter45 wrote: post #20

Concerns about consciousness, intelligence,and Stephen Wolfram's use of the personal pronoun aside, I think it reasonable to presume that communication with early stage AI systems will desirably include the development of a vocabulary and syntax structured for 'precision'. It does seem reasonable that if AIs evolve they will, in their evolution, develop constructs of 'reality' that Wolfram calls "Post Linguistics Eme…

This idea of Post Linguistic Emergent Concepts is an interesting one which Marshall McLuhan alluded to in his 1964 book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. He suggested that the sheer speed of electric processing made the alphabet obsolete and that in order to cope with this drastic speed up in communication we would have to deprecate our slow spoken languages and adopt an entirely new method of communication:

>Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. A ratio of interplay among these extensions of our human functions is now as necessary collectively as it has always been for our private and personal rationality in terms of our private senses or "wits," as they were once called.

Re: How should we talk to AIs?

#38

Post by lovboat »

If AIs are not able to communicate we us properly then those are programs but not real AIs. I didn't find any interesting idea here and the sheer act of proposing that program as a language for AI is really humorist to say the least. People are using R and Python to construct a solid foundation for machine learning, the NLP and the IA will evolve to communicate with us by its own means, that's the real AI.

Re: How should we talk to AIs?

#39

Post by sidcypher »

kruhft wrote: post #23

I've always wondered where languages like Lojban[1] would fit into conversational AI. Designed to reduce ambiguity, I would think they would be a major stepping stone to bridging the gap between conversation and logical correctness needed by a truly intelligent system. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban

I'd say a truly intelligent system doesn't need Lojban, it can learn about the world and its languages from observations and feedback, like children do. A pseudointelligent system, however, would probably be much more useful if you could talk in Lojban to it, with less communication errors and all.

Re: How should we talk to AIs?

#40

Post by CM30 »

It's a good point, but if we have to basically 'program' them to get them to understand anything, they're not particularly good/useful AIs. The vast majority of the population won't do this, and any decent AI needs to be able to understand them.
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