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The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

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Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#11

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #7
VLM wrote: post #3

"There has been a domineering subculture—that's been the most wealthy, prolific, and influential subculture in the technical world—that for a long time has not only promoted the idea that there's an equivalence between algorithms and life, and certain algorithms and people, but a historical determinism that we're inevitably making computers that will be smarter and better than us and will take over from us." On a dif…

vestigial monotheism That's a fantastic metaphor. I'm curious though how someone could act in a religious manner about a self-driving car. To the original point though, I am very much in the camp of "historical determinism that we're inevitably making computers that will be smarter and better than us" and here is why: I believe that intelligence (and "consciousness" if you want to go down that rabbit hole) is complet…

That's a religious position. We have absolutely no idea what consciousness is or how it works.

More than that, we have don't even have ad hoc good models for motivation and personality, never mind useful formal and explicit models.

I think Lanier is absolutely right, and I think there's a strong quasi-theological element running through all of AI and programming.

Programming is a lot like making spells and incantations. If you get them just so you get the outcome you want. But you have to speak the language of the system to make that possible. And you have to be very careful about unintended consequences.

There's something very medieval about this - both in the sense of the pure scholasticism of academic CS, but also in the practical sense of knowing how to formulate the correct "prayers" to make useful things happen.

Lanier seems to be pointing out that CS is still haunted and influenced by these religious metaphors, and that AI is the most visible example of that.

I think he's right - and more, I think that real AI, in the sense of autonomous personalities, won't be possible until that's no longer true.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#12

Post by kfk »

Well, at a logical level, it's one of the biggest existential threats, if 1. it can be done; 2. humans are intelligent enough to pull it off. There is a non 0 chance of AI (and related existential threat), as there is a non 0 chance of a meteorite coming down and wiping all of us off the Earth. But my guess is that most of us would say "YES" to a meteorite deviation project, while "Meh" to any attempt to better understand the AI problem.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#13

Post by qbrass »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #7
VLM wrote: post #3

"There has been a domineering subculture—that's been the most wealthy, prolific, and influential subculture in the technical world—that for a long time has not only promoted the idea that there's an equivalence between algorithms and life, and certain algorithms and people, but a historical determinism that we're inevitably making computers that will be smarter and better than us and will take over from us." On a dif…

vestigial monotheism That's a fantastic metaphor. I'm curious though how someone could act in a religious manner about a self-driving car. To the original point though, I am very much in the camp of "historical determinism that we're inevitably making computers that will be smarter and better than us" and here is why: I believe that intelligence (and "consciousness" if you want to go down that rabbit hole) is complet…

Self-driving cars will come and save humanity from driving related deaths and ensure a new era of prosperity as humans get to relax while self-driving cars do everything for them.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#14

Post by AndrewKemendo »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #11
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

vestigial monotheism That's a fantastic metaphor. I'm curious though how someone could act in a religious manner about a self-driving car. To the original point though, I am very much in the camp of "historical determinism that we're inevitably making computers that will be smarter and better than us" and here is why: I believe that intelligence (and "consciousness" if you want to go down that rabbit hole) is complet…

That's a religious position. We have absolutely no idea what consciousness is or how it works. More than that, we have don't even have ad hoc good models for motivation and personality, never mind useful formal and explicit models. I think Lanier is absolutely right, and I think there's a strong quasi-theological element running through all of AI and programming. Programming is a lot like making spells and incantatio…

How is it a religious position? A religious position would be thinking that some unknowable process would deliver some kind of techno-rapture.

So because we don't know how something works now, we will never know? C'mon.

Programming is a lot like making spells and incantations.

No, it's not. Maybe for laymen it looks like that, but for us developers it is definitely not the case. Granted, sometimes something works and you don't realize why, but that just means you have a big debug problem on your hands - not that it's unknowable. Usually only happens when you port something or copy code over from one system to the next.

Not sure how you come to those conclusions.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#15

Post by conjectures »

kfk wrote: post #12

Well, at a logical level, it's one of the biggest existential threats, if 1. it can be done; 2. humans are intelligent enough to pull it off. There is a non 0 chance of AI (and related existential threat), as there is a non 0 chance of a meteorite coming down and wiping all of us off the Earth. But my guess is that most of us would say "YES" to a meteorite deviation project, while "Meh" to any attempt to better under…

Compared to nuclear war, superbugs, volcanoes, meteorites or catastrophic climate change, naughty-AI is a very distant threat. It's like worrying the geneticists are going to breed Ridley Scott's alien sometime in the relevant future.

The world is actually pretty messed up with problems right now; some of which we could actually do something meaningful about. Continuing the naughty-AI bunfight isn't one of them.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#16

Post by pron »

kfk wrote: post #12

Well, at a logical level, it's one of the biggest existential threats, if 1. it can be done; 2. humans are intelligent enough to pull it off. There is a non 0 chance of AI (and related existential threat), as there is a non 0 chance of a meteorite coming down and wiping all of us off the Earth. But my guess is that most of us would say "YES" to a meteorite deviation project, while "Meh" to any attempt to better under…

Well, we can predict more-or-less what will happen when a large meteorite hits earth, but we have no clue (other than sci-fi scenarios) for the nature of the threat AI poses, if only because we are so far away from understanding what AI is. We don't know if intelligence can be separated from agency and agenda, we don't know if intelligence can be separated from emotions, and we don't even know if intelligence can even exceed our own (the argument for "human intelligence at a higher speed" fails on several grounds). Hell, we don't even know what intelligence is (and the definition of "a general ability to solve problem" doesn't work, as there are problems that what we generally regard as intelligence clearly cannot solve while other qualities do).

What's the point of arguing about the potential threats something we have so little knowledge of? Maybe it will come too fast, but maybe that unkillable virus will, too. At this point in time, we simply have too little information to have an intelligent assessment of the risks posed by AI. We can and should, however, discuss the more immediate related dangers of our real-world machine learning, such as self-reinforcing bias.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#17

Post by moron4hire »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #14
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a religious position. We have absolutely no idea what consciousness is or how it works. More than that, we have don't even have ad hoc good models for motivation and personality, never mind useful formal and explicit models. I think Lanier is absolutely right, and I think there's a strong quasi-theological element running through all of AI and programming. Programming is a lot like making spells and incantatio…

How is it a religious position? A religious position would be thinking that some unknowable process would deliver some kind of techno-rapture. So because we don't know how something works now, we will never know? C'mon. Programming is a lot like making spells and incantations. No, it's not. Maybe for laymen it looks like that, but for us developers it is definitely not the case. Granted, sometimes something works and…

Because it's based in faith that something will happen, not a rational determination based on facts on hand.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#18

Post by tsunamifury »

I think Jaron knows what many engineers who have worked on AI know: That the external promise of AI is far more inflated than the capability of the actual technology. It's simply that when the current technology gets just complicated enough for the above-average person to no longer understand, everyone starts assigning magical properties and expectations to it. This results in short term over-valuations, which inevitably lead to disappointment [1].

Jaron has observed this several times and rightly seems to be tired of repeating the same naive cycle.

As I'm just now entering my second cycle and watching tech repeat itself again -- I'm beginning to understand his weariness.

[1] https://hbr.org/2015/12/the-overvaluation-trap

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#19

Post by ryanmarsh »

tsunamifury wrote: post #18

I think Jaron knows what many engineers who have worked on AI know: That the external promise of AI is far more inflated than the capability of the actual technology. It's simply that when the current technology gets just complicated enough for the above-average person to no longer understand, everyone starts assigning magical properties and expectations to it. This results in short term over-valuations, which inevit…

Relevant: Clark's Third Law

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#20

Post by ghaff »

randallsquared wrote: post #5
VLM wrote: post #3

"There has been a domineering subculture—that's been the most wealthy, prolific, and influential subculture in the technical world—that for a long time has not only promoted the idea that there's an equivalence between algorithms and life, and certain algorithms and people, but a historical determinism that we're inevitably making computers that will be smarter and better than us and will take over from us." On a dif…

While I don't agree with Lanier, being an AI skeptic isn't quite the same as saying that self driving cars can't happen: we don't yet have a good understanding of either consciousness or tractable general optimization algorithms, so it's still possible that there's something that will make it impossible. Unlikely, perhaps, but possible. Also, your sarcasm about the self driving car might have been too subtle. ;)

What you see with respect to self-driving cars IMO is a lot of people who SO want them to exist that they assign timelines that are so optimistic they'd be rolling on the floor laughing if applied to projects they had direct familiarity with. Of course, it's also fueled by a lot of hype and hand-wavy statements about exponential growth and the like.

Like many other aspects of AI, I'm not sure just about anyone thinks we need to have strong AI to make self-driving cars work under the vast majority of conditions. We "just" need to create automation that can handle a reasonable number of corner cases without flipping out or grinding to a halt. But that's a debate about engineering timelines not something more philosophical.

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