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The Great A.I. Awakening

nytimes.com

91–100 of 147 posts

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#91

Honest question - have you read this entire article ? ... I'm sure it's written by a smart and talented journalist - but it's just too long. I cannot possibly allocate so much of my time to read a single news article! I know it's kind of my problem, but I'm sure lots of others are just like me - it's just the nature of our tech-provoked ADD. I skimmed through it all right, but I didn't get too much out of that. If I…

The NY Times Magazine does this every week. Each issue's big story is the length of a book chapter.

Frankly I love it. It reminds me of the gogo days of WiReD Magazine, when so much was new in the Net it was impossible to do justice to a topic in fewer than 6000 words.

And now due to Deep Learning, AI/ML is gogo too.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#92

It occurs to me that the thing that will probably limit advancements in AGI will be the availability of data to feed these systems. If you believe that Moore's law is only on life support and not totally dead, there will be more processing power to harness in the future. The number of researchers and investment are clearly growing very quickly. The models used can endlessly be improved. But on the other hand there ar…

I think you're mistaken about this. Once the philosophical and technical breakthroughs are made that allow us to build an AGI then it will get all the data it needs from its environment. It would be 'unsupervised' in the sense that human children are i.e. no pre-processing of data required but it would still need parenting.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#93

A lot of AI is about vector space these days. https://www.kaggle.com/c/word2vec-nlp-tutorial/forums/t/1234... "That interim also saw dedicated attempts on the part of Google’s competitors to catch up. (As Le told me about his close collaboration with Tomas Mikolov, he kept repeating Mikolov’s name over and over, in an incantatory way that sounded poignant." "Just as the chip-design process was nearly complete, Le and…

>> When you summarize language in a similar way, you essentially produce multidimensional maps of the distances, based on common usage, between one word and every single other word in the language. The problem with word embeddings, or any distance-based model really, is that language doesn't work that way. Chomsky has a standard example he uses to make this point: "Instinctively, Eagles that fly swim". He points out…

The "distance" referenced in your quote is not distance in a sentence, it's the distance between points in this abstract embedding space. Two completely different things. The Chomsky argument isn't really relevant here.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#94
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I doubt if efforts like OpenAI will ultimately turn out to be beneficial or catastrophic. I understand their purpose of democratizing the power and benefits of AI technology broadly. However, if their platform can provide a critical component or developmental path to AGI in the future, the unrestrained distribution of the technology is similar to spreading the blueprint of nuclear warheads. It could resul…

Repeat after me, "AI is not Magic." A super intelligent AI does not change the laws of physics or even get to predict the weather two weeks from now. Sure, they could learn to be a good hacker but the worlds best hacker can't get into air gaped systems. More importantly, flawless security trumps hacking. If there is nothing to exploit there is no way in, which means a lone AI is much more powerful than lot's of AI's…

I have read some stories where various airgapped systems were "compromised" in some way (microphone picking up CPU harmonics,etc). See here for example: https://thestack.com/security/2016/06/24/even-speakerless-ai... Obviously those are fringe cases and not practically exploitable outside of a specific environment today.

What I think the danger with a super intelligent AI is being able to correlate massive amounts of data to see patterns we miss or things to try, and never being bored. Look at automated exploits today vs the old "hacking by hand". Brute force attempts not just on known patterns, but being able to create new tests and analysis.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#95
post #90
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Repeat after me, "AI is not Magic." A super intelligent AI does not change the laws of physics or even get to predict the weather two weeks from now. Sure, they could learn to be a good hacker but the worlds best hacker can't get into air gaped systems. More importantly, flawless security trumps hacking. If there is nothing to exploit there is no way in, which means a lone AI is much more powerful than lot's of AI's…

There's a subtle argument here philosophically that I think is crucially tied to AI: determinism. If the world is deterministic, a sufficiently powered and advanced AI with enough data could actually predict the weather, not just for two weeks, but for years. This also enables many other things viewed as magic. This, of course, is incredibly far off. And I don't see a flaw in your point on flawless security. Though,…

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Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#96
post #90
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Repeat after me, "AI is not Magic." A super intelligent AI does not change the laws of physics or even get to predict the weather two weeks from now. Sure, they could learn to be a good hacker but the worlds best hacker can't get into air gaped systems. More importantly, flawless security trumps hacking. If there is nothing to exploit there is no way in, which means a lone AI is much more powerful than lot's of AI's…

There's a subtle argument here philosophically that I think is crucially tied to AI: determinism. If the world is deterministic, a sufficiently powered and advanced AI with enough data could actually predict the weather, not just for two weeks, but for years. This also enables many other things viewed as magic. This, of course, is incredibly far off. And I don't see a flaw in your point on flawless security. Though,…

[deleted]

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#97
post #68
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Compared to every other life form on Earth you are super intelligence. This super intelligence thing has already happened once. You extrapolate the trend from one data point. There is no indication that we have some matyoshka type hierarchy of intelligence. It could well be binary, either intelligent or not. No reason so far to think otherwise. > You can't beat chess in one move because mathematics does not allow i…

> So what superintelligence can do that "ordinary" intelligence in right quantities couldn't? Conceive of answers to this question that we can't. Do you really believe the human imagination captures all of possibility? Why?

Human imagination is Turing-complete.

If the AI runs on a normal computer, it is also Turing-complete and not beyond.

So they have the same limits

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#98
post #90
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Repeat after me, "AI is not Magic." A super intelligent AI does not change the laws of physics or even get to predict the weather two weeks from now. Sure, they could learn to be a good hacker but the worlds best hacker can't get into air gaped systems. More importantly, flawless security trumps hacking. If there is nothing to exploit there is no way in, which means a lone AI is much more powerful than lot's of AI's…

There's a subtle argument here philosophically that I think is crucially tied to AI: determinism. If the world is deterministic, a sufficiently powered and advanced AI with enough data could actually predict the weather, not just for two weeks, but for years. This also enables many other things viewed as magic. This, of course, is incredibly far off. And I don't see a flaw in your point on flawless security. Though,…

Even with a totally deterministic model, you can't predict weather very far out because it's chaotic. In other words, you'd need to measure the parameters with arbitrarily high accuracy, which even an advanced AI can't do. To oversimplify, if you need one more bit of accuracy in the measurements for each hour you forecast, it's impossible to get enough accuracy to forecast a week out.

For a detailed discussion of chaos and weather prediction, see: http://www.ecmwf.int/sites/default/files/Chaos%20and%20weath... The "trick" for dealing with chaos is to do a bunch of predictions with perturbed values. If they all end up the same, then the forecast is probably okay. If they vary widely, then you know not to assign much accuracy to the forecast.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the time AGI is developed, it would be able to improve itself/build improvements, causing the runway effect that leads to superintelligence. The idea of making "personal digital assistants" is humans thinking they can tame a god to be a servant. Taming a superintelligence would be like a dog taming human civilization, and perhaps the gap between man and ASI is larger than the gap between dog and man.

>By the time AGI is developed, it would be able to improve itself/build improvements, I see no reason that's necessarily true. I'm a general intelligence, and I can't make myself smarter.

We have genetic engineering, and we're general intelligences, but we haven't figured out how to build better humans yet.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#100
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So what superintelligence can do that "ordinary" intelligence in right quantities couldn't? Conceive of answers to this question that we can't. Do you really believe the human imagination captures all of possibility? Why?

Human imagination is Turing-complete. If the AI runs on a normal computer, it is also Turing-complete and not beyond. So they have the same limits

The difference is in the usual practical constraints of time and space.
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