The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier • Hacker News Board

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#41

Post by IanDrake » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 5:41 PM UTC

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…

The real question for me is:

What is motivating otherwise very intelligent people to promote the idea that AI will take all our jobs and/or enslave us?

Possible answers:

1) To prop up their investments in AI to get higher valuation.

2) To reach a political goal, such as basic income, which is often justified as necessary in a world where computers and robots take over the work force.

3) ?

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#42

Post by ghaff » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 5:47 PM UTC

randallsquared wrote: post #39

ghaff wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm a little confused. We have self-driving cars. Of course there are still corner cases and bugs and regulatory issues, but cars have driven for fair distances on existing roads without a human driving. I had assumed, therefore, that the point @VLM was making was that, like self-driving cars, we already have AI by many of the standards of earlier AI researchers (the "when it works, it's not called AI any longer" arg…

I was reading "self-driving cars" as "Level 4 autonomy" under general conditions. Which IMO is many decades away.

But we're in violent agreement about the "when it works, it's not called AI any longer" argument.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#43

Post by VLM » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 5:47 PM UTC

pron wrote: post #22

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…

I fully agree with the religious aspect of it (religion doesn't have to be theistic at all, but the particular beliefs in an after-life/resurrection/omniscient-omnipotent being do resemble the theistic, and indeed, monotheistic religions), but I think there's another aspect to the "AI threat" belief that is more than just "vestigial monotheism". I think this is (in part) a power fantasy. The believers in the AI threa…

"A super-charming machine"

A television, or a tablet with facebook and youtube apps?

Its interesting to think of mass propaganda a la Bernays as an example of "super charming machine". In the old days the cogs and wheels in the marketing business are/were humans, just like in the old days "math calculator" was a job description but it got automated and accelerated into computers.

Populist political machine might be another example.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#44

Post by hyperbovine » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 5:51 PM UTC

IanDrake wrote: post #41

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…

The real question for me is: What is motivating otherwise very intelligent people to promote the idea that AI will take all our jobs and/or enslave us? Possible answers: 1) To prop up their investments in AI to get higher valuation. 2) To reach a political goal, such as basic income, which is often justified as necessary in a world where computers and robots take over the work force. 3) ?

A lot of intelligent people are promoting the idea that AI will take a lot of our jobs, for the simple reason that a lot our jobs do not require that much I. Whether it's driving a truck, plowing a field, or making food at a McEatery, a frighteningly large proportion of our economy consists of tasks which can be automated by technology coming online in the next decade or two.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#45

Post by AndrewKemendo » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 5:51 PM UTC

moron4hire wrote: post #37

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? We are actually building this stuff... It's about as much faith as Doug Englebart had about the PC.

No, we're building ELIZA with larger databases. You can't take any research we have on hand today and say "a natural extension of this leads to consciousness". Part of that is because we don't even understand what consciousness is. Part of that is because we don't have any realistic work beyond pattern matching. That's why it's not rational. There is no fact you can exploit to come to this conclusion. That's called "…

"a natural extension of this leads to consciousness"

Did I say that? In fact I didn't.

I don't care what you call anything, the fact remains that AGI doesn't exist today, but we can work on the best guesses at what we think will get us there. That is the exact OPPOSITE of faith if there ever was one.

We are working on computer vision with segmentation. That's a tiny subsection of supervised learning. By the way you say pattern matching as though it's some trivial thing. In fact that's what a hefty portion of our brain does to understand anything - so it's actually very important and our visual system (eyeball to cortex to representation) is arguably the most important part of that.

I couldn't care less about whether a computer has consciousness anyway. I think the whole consciousness argument is a waste of time (which is why I called it a rabbit hole previously).

I think you're hung up on this religious thing and not able to discriminate between actually building things that may be able to lead to AGI versus writing novels and daydreaming like so many "futurists."

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#46

Post by chishaku » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 5:52 PM UTC

IanDrake wrote: post #41

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…

The real question for me is: What is motivating otherwise very intelligent people to promote the idea that AI will take all our jobs and/or enslave us? Possible answers: 1) To prop up their investments in AI to get higher valuation. 2) To reach a political goal, such as basic income, which is often justified as necessary in a world where computers and robots take over the work force. 3) ?

Imagination.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#47

Post by VLM » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 5:54 PM UTC

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…

I'll take your analogy and run with it, to note the extreme focus on symbolism in programming.

Its all about the copy by reference vs copy by value, type systems, etc.

Now when the medieval mystics wanted to talk enlightenment values, politics, psychology, political science, but the local powers that be were not down with the cool new stuff, they got obscurely alchemical, astrological, or divinational to avoid having the local leaders figure out what they were saying and therefore separate head from body via guillotine. Long after both the topics, and schemes they used to obscure the topics, were no longer contemporary and relevant, we laugh at the ancient alchemists.

Come to think of it, don't the cool kids programmers laugh at BASIC, assembly, C++, perl? Yet another similarity. Ha ha those ancient mystics trying to write quicksort in BASIC, LOL.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#48

Post by tim333 » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 6:00 PM UTC

IanDrake wrote: post #41

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…

The real question for me is: What is motivating otherwise very intelligent people to promote the idea that AI will take all our jobs and/or enslave us? Possible answers: 1) To prop up their investments in AI to get higher valuation. 2) To reach a political goal, such as basic income, which is often justified as necessary in a world where computers and robots take over the work force. 3) ?

3) Because it's a real possibility. What makes you think the otherwise very intelligent people are wrong? Maybe we should look to the stupid and to philosophers who don't understand computers for answers?

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#49

Post by pron » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 6:01 PM UTC

IanDrake wrote: post #41

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…

The real question for me is: What is motivating otherwise very intelligent people to promote the idea that AI will take all our jobs and/or enslave us? Possible answers: 1) To prop up their investments in AI to get higher valuation. 2) To reach a political goal, such as basic income, which is often justified as necessary in a world where computers and robots take over the work force. 3) ?

My explanation is that it's a power fantasy of people who believe they possess superior intelligence and like to dream-up a scenario where super-intelligence becomes a super-power.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#50

Post by Houshalter » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 6:15 PM UTC

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…

I understand how the technology works, and I still believe it's amazing and rapidly progressing. Certainly it isn't human level now, and it might take a decade or two to get there. But it's still an incredible advancement.

AI has gotten way better than anyone expected in the last 5 years or so. Progress in many of these areas like image recognition was super slow and challenging. And all of a sudden computers are approaching human level performance with a relatively general algorithm.

For decades robotics has been limited by AI tech. We didn't have the ability to do object recognition, control was really hard, teaching the robot to do things was nearly impossible, etc. Now those limitations are gone, and in the next 10 years it's likely there will be a huge explosion in robotics and automation.

Regardless of the success of current developments, in the long term AI is still inevitable. I have no doubt we will eventually figure it out.

I have no idea why people confuse long term predictions about something with short term ones. Someone saying "we will invent AI by the end of the century" is not saying that they it's definitely going to happen in 5 years and you should invest heavily now. Every time Bostrom and AI risk stuff comes up, there's a bunch of confused comments about how AI isn't that good currently, which misses the point entirely.