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Yann LeCun's comment on AlphaGo and true AI

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Re: Yann LeCun's comment on AlphaGo and true AI

#41

It seems to me one of the higher hurdles for creating a general purpose intelligence, is human empathy. Without it you are left with creating a nearly infinite-length rules engine. When you ask your AI maid to vacuum your house, you would prefer it not to plow through closet door to grab the vacuum, rip your battery out of your car and hardwire to the vacuum, and then proceed to clean your carpets. If you don't want…

I'm not sure why you connect that behaviour to empathy. There are two simple rules here that apply to almost every possible situation, as well as the one you presented. They aren't even connected to human emotions. That's pure economy.

1. Minimise work (plugging into socket has lower cost / effort than what you described)

2. Minimise irreversible changes (or cost of reversing them)

There are so many people with low empathy who are useful, I don't think this is an issue until someone needs a personal companion rather than general purpose AI.

Re: Yann LeCun's comment on AlphaGo and true AI

#42

It seems to me one of the higher hurdles for creating a general purpose intelligence, is human empathy. Without it you are left with creating a nearly infinite-length rules engine. When you ask your AI maid to vacuum your house, you would prefer it not to plow through closet door to grab the vacuum, rip your battery out of your car and hardwire to the vacuum, and then proceed to clean your carpets. If you don't want…

If you don't want to create a list of rules for every conceivable situation, the AI will need to have some understanding human emotions and desires

My roomba does a good job vacuuming around table legs. Also sofa legs. Also stationary human legs. Also lamps. Also random poles sticking out of the floor. I imagine it would even do a good job vacuuming around a stalactite that made it to the floor. Are you saying someone programmed every one of these situations into it? Or does it instead have some understanding of human emotions? Either way, I'm surprised because it was so cheap I figured it has some generalizable built-in rules that applied to some categories of inputs, the infinite possible instances/variations of members of these categories not having to be enumerated. :)

Re: Yann LeCun's comment on AlphaGo and true AI

#43
post #29
post #5

I think we need more advances in neuroscience and, I know this will be controversial, psychology before we really know what the cake even is. Edit: I actually think the major AI breakthrough will come from either of those two fields, not computer science.

Just like ornithologists invented the first airplane, and horse vets built the first automobile, etc.

Though airplane designers probably looked at bird wings for inspiration. Similar to how Deep Mind are looking at the brain.

Re: Yann LeCun's comment on AlphaGo and true AI

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like saying there has been no development in automobiles since 1890. Sure, at first glance the cars from then are still like the cars from now. ICE (or electrical) power source, maybe a gearbox, some seats, a steering wheel and something to keep you out of the weather. But that's at the same time ignoring many years of work on those concepts in order to further refine them. The neural networks that were taken…

This analogy doesn't make any sense. Since automobiles were never patterned off anything in biology (they were the improvement of horse drawn carriages), I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with the analogy. I never said there weren't any developments in neural nets, I'm just saying that few ideas have been taken from neuroscience (there certainly have been some ideas, like convolutions). In fact most thing…

All it took for us to make aircraft was to look at birds and to realize something could be done (flying even though you weigh more than the air). The first wanna-be aircraft looked like birds, and some even attempted to work like them. Most of those designs went nowhere. Just like legs got replaced by the wheel in ground transportation aircraft engines and eventually jets replaced the muscles of birds. It doesn't really matter what sets you on a particular part, what matters is the end result.

Right now, we have a state of AI that is very much limited by what we know about how our own machinery works. Better understanding of that machinery (just like better understanding of things like aerodynamics, rolling resistance and explosions led to better transportation) will help us in some way or other. And it may take another 50 years before we hit that next milestone, but the current progress all leads more or less directly back to one poor analogy with biological systems. Quite probably there are more waiting in the wings, whether through literal re-implementation or merely as inspiration it doesn't really matter.

Re: Yann LeCun's comment on AlphaGo and true AI

#45
post #36

Can someone more knowledgeable explain why biological systems are considered unsupervised instead of reinforcement based systems? While it seems intuitive that most individual "intelligent" systems in animals can be seen as unsupervised, isn't life itself driven in a reinforced manner?

The brain needs to form structure before any sort of reinforcement learning is even possible. This structure comes from an "unsupervised" process we don't understand well.

Re: Yann LeCun's comment on AlphaGo and true AI

#46
post #43
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like ornithologists invented the first airplane, and horse vets built the first automobile, etc.

Though airplane designers probably looked at bird wings for inspiration. Similar to how Deep Mind are looking at the brain.

Early airplane inventors tried very hard to imitate flapping bird wings for propulsion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornithopter

Some even worked.

Re: Yann LeCun's comment on AlphaGo and true AI

#47

It seems to me one of the higher hurdles for creating a general purpose intelligence, is human empathy. Without it you are left with creating a nearly infinite-length rules engine. When you ask your AI maid to vacuum your house, you would prefer it not to plow through closet door to grab the vacuum, rip your battery out of your car and hardwire to the vacuum, and then proceed to clean your carpets. If you don't want…

i don't think empathy is an appropriate word for this. It is defined as the ability to share the feelings of others. While in this case, what you want the robots to know is what most people would call 'common sense'.

Re: Yann LeCun's comment on AlphaGo and true AI

#48
I wish the term "true AI" were replaced with "strong AI" or "artificial general intelligence" or some such term. We already have true AI - it's a vast, thriving industry. AlphaGo is obviously a true, legitimate, actual, real, nonfictional example of artificial intelligence, as are Google Search, the Facebook Newsfeed, Siri, the Amazon Echo, etc.

Re: Yann LeCun's comment on AlphaGo and true AI

#49
post #35
post #5

I think we need more advances in neuroscience and, I know this will be controversial, psychology before we really know what the cake even is. Edit: I actually think the major AI breakthrough will come from either of those two fields, not computer science.

I disagree. I think we need advances in philosophy to truly answer these questions in depth.

I'm not so sure about this. If I had to guess, I suspect things will go like this:

1. Scientists get a really good understanding of how learning works.

2. One third of the philosophers claim that their philosophical ideas are vindicated, another third claim that their models aren't really contradicted by this new scientific model, and the final third claim that the scientists have somehow missed the point, and that special philosophical learning is still unexplained.

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