Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Great A.I. Awakening

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 147 posts

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#101

Post by gaius »

simonh wrote: post #70
gaius wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we literally only just now managed to build a technological society because we only just got smart enough to do it. We are by definition at the absolute minimum level of intelligence that's able to do that, otherwise we'd have done it sooner. I don't think that's true - you could get a bunch of contemporary humans and drop them on a pre-industrialized planet and tell them to bootstrap a technological civilization yet…

> you could get a bunch of contemporary humans and drop them on a pre-industrialized planet and tell them to bootstrap a technological civilization yet they'd probably all have died of old age before scratching the surfac You're not selling me on the idea that these people are particularly bright, on a cosmic scale.

My point is that "soonness" is not just a matter of intelligence; no matter how smart you are it still takes time.

Let's take your typical HN'er who probably thinks of themselves as very smart indeed and put them in this scenario. Then they will quickly learn that in order to make Angular.js, you must first locate a supply of clean drinking water and make a fire and last the first night...

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#102

Post by panoptican »

delegate wrote: post #30

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…

It's terribly long and incredibly riveting. I read the whole thing.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#103

Post by pasquinelli »

BeingIncubated wrote: post #9
apsec112 wrote: post #8

Sundar seems very confused here. The idea that we should invent AGI to make "personal digital assistants" is like Hogwarts students inventing time machines so they can take two classes at once. I mean, yes, it would technically enable you to do that, but it doesn't matter because at that point you have way, way bigger problems. If a fleet of alien spaceships arrived in the sky over Manhattan tomorrow, our first react…

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.

Intelligence isn't itself power. Smart people have been tamed by people of lesser intelligence as a matter of course, for example.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#104

Post by computerphage »

Retric wrote: post #78
nopinsight wrote: post #21

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…

Airgapped systems have been attacked in the past. Stuxnet is a good example. No magic required.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#105

Post by computerphage »

ClassyJacket wrote: post #11
BeingIncubated wrote: post #9

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.

You don't have the ability to edit to your own source code.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#106

Post by pasquinelli »

smhost wrote: post #25
Fricken wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're an iteration of an AGI system that has been improving itself for hundreds of millions of years. The rate at which biological AGIs improve over time is very slow, but it's not like nature has any good reason to be in a hurry. But interesting things happen when you network billions of biological AGIs together, it leads to all sorts of emergent phenomenon, and now the biological AGIs are working on these newfangl…

That gives me some really strong existential heebie jeebies. I mean, what then even is our value? Why exist at all, at that point? I don't know about other people, but I get my sense of purpose in believing that we're the captains of this Spaceship Earth, and that we're making progress towards something significant. I don't know what that something is, but I have a vague idea, and at the very least we seem to be the…

So, whether agi is ever actually developed or not, I think you are thinking of all of this wrong, because if your sense of value can be disappeared by the creation of a computer program having certain properties then your sense of value rests on a hopelessly flawed foundation.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#107

Post by sjbase »

delegate wrote: post #30

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…

I read your comment before the article. I decided that if this had some "it was a dark and stormy night" opening I wasn't gonna bother. Made it 1 sentence into the piece.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#109

Post by zardo »

iandanforth wrote: post #75
aedron wrote: post #24

And the pattern of overselling A.I. continues. What we have accomplished in this generation is pretty good pattern recognition. Nice, but limited in its usefulness to obvious applications, like translation and image and audio classification. Go and Chess games are rule-constrained enough to be reducible to patterns, so it works for them too, giving a false impression of 'general AI'. What's worse is that this approac…

If we only looked at feed forward conv nets, then you'd be correct. However curriculum learning in environments like Universe and Labs are a critical step toward generality and planning based AIs. Solving catastrophic forgetting and increasing the time interval between behavior and reward are non-trivial steps. I'm not saying it's raining right now, but yeah I'm saying you should buy an umbrella.

Yeah... I don't see how anyone can do a survey of the current state of the art and come to the conclusion that we are definitively not approaching a general solution to AI.

It's just not credible to claim that you know what can be done with all possible combinations of current ideas, much less those that will be had tomorrow.

Re: The Great A.I. Awakening

#110

Post by drabiega »

zer0gravity wrote: post #20
apsec112 wrote: post #8

Sundar seems very confused here. The idea that we should invent AGI to make "personal digital assistants" is like Hogwarts students inventing time machines so they can take two classes at once. I mean, yes, it would technically enable you to do that, but it doesn't matter because at that point you have way, way bigger problems. If a fleet of alien spaceships arrived in the sky over Manhattan tomorrow, our first react…

The tricky part is to prevent AGI from developing goals of its own. You want it omnipresent and allknowing but dormant, and only react to inputs from the user. But such thing cannot be tamed. As the AGI is democratized, it's bound to happen that someone somewhere will make it evolve goals. The future of the human kind will be decided in a great measure by what kind of goals such an AGI will set first.

I'm pretty sure you can't get to AGI in the first place without it being to develop it's own goals. Even if you want a straight question answering machine, it's going to have to be able to form it's own sub-goals in order for it to be able to answer your question. Otherwise it's just following a mechanistic process of question answering and a normal computer we have now can do that.
Post reply on HN