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AI learns to write its own code by stealing from other programs

newscientist.com

21–30 of 160 posts

Re: AI learns to write its own code by stealing from other programs

#21
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember Buck Rogers in the 1980s, the robots just built other robots and programmed them. No human being built robots because robots were better at it than human beings. They thought the same was true of the robots flying their spaceships to fight the Marauders until Buck Rogers showed them he could fight the Marauders better than the robots. Something to do with red dogging the quarterback and going with gut inst…

> Something to do with red dogging the quarterback and going with gut instincts that robots could not do. There's a lot of hand-wavey wishful thinking about some innate capability humans have that robots/AI somehow will be unable to obtain in sci fi, that will semi-magically ensure we remain superior. It's the same kind of blind-spot you run into if you try to get people to explain how free will could be possible and…

That's a tough one free will.

I usually default to "what if you killed yourself" but then you follow it up with "Well but by killing yourself..." ahhh

It does drive you insane to think you're just in this infinite sized thing and you're this thing that creates a perception of your external container and soon you'll cease to exist, does the world cease to exist as well, hard to imagine just not being. Guess time to find out haha.

I also laugh at my own problems and then you just imagine zooming out of the Earth and being in space. Nothing there, no laws, money, just you and your mortality.

I have a cat and I was just holding him one day and I was like "holy cow here is this living thing that evolve along side us" I just stared at my cat for a bit. Odd. this living thing independent of me. Why does a seed grow? hahaha why does the Gerbil run in circles.

Re: AI learns to write its own code by stealing from other programs

#22
post #8
post #7

Just like real people!

People pay me... to use StackOverflow haha On a serious note this could potentially suck for developers. Just like the labor jobs and automation. You have a skill set? Well this computer can do your job. I guess be the guy building the code writing the code. I do wonder what will we do when computers do everything for us. I have this motor that moves my neck to a look at a girl who also has a motor that moved her nec…

"I do wonder what will we do when computers do everything for us."

Depends how our social structures will morph to support a society where having a job is no longer the norm and most people are in fact jobless.

In our current societies the way things stand all these masses of people will be living in slums fighting for scraps while those elite who control the system live in their walled off mini-societies and palaces.

Re: AI learns to write its own code by stealing from other programs

#24

A nuance that is underappreciated by a lot of people / the media is the degree to which any of the AI generates X models (faces, drawings, fills in photos, increases sharpness, etc.) simply copy and paste and interpolate from the training set. Unlike general supervised learning problems, for many of the deep learning "generative" models that get posted to HN regularly, there is no objective "test set" to measure gene…

Interesting how you consider interpolating from training data not learning. Isn't that like exactly what learning is? If you get unintended repeating patterns then there isn't enough diverse training data

Re: AI learns to write its own code by stealing from other programs

#26
post #19

I thought this would take longer. "Developer" will stick around as a job for people who need new and unique things, or for apps that need speed, but if your job is making forms to take in data, putting it in a database, performing some sort of analysis on it, and then printing a report to the screen then you should really starting learning something else, because those jobs will not exist in 10 years.

i don't think so.

the problem is human computer interaction. to specify what is needed is harder than the actual coding.

i would guess this will be implemented in an IDE and will reduce coding times tremendously

Re: AI learns to write its own code by stealing from other programs

#27

A nuance that is underappreciated by a lot of people / the media is the degree to which any of the AI generates X models (faces, drawings, fills in photos, increases sharpness, etc.) simply copy and paste and interpolate from the training set. Unlike general supervised learning problems, for many of the deep learning "generative" models that get posted to HN regularly, there is no objective "test set" to measure gene…

Eh, I'm sure many people copy and paste from Stack Overflow. (Not me ofc, I would never:) )

So I guess we are all out of jobs in a couple years...

Re: AI learns to write its own code by stealing from other programs

#28

A nuance that is underappreciated by a lot of people / the media is the degree to which any of the AI generates X models (faces, drawings, fills in photos, increases sharpness, etc.) simply copy and paste and interpolate from the training set. Unlike general supervised learning problems, for many of the deep learning "generative" models that get posted to HN regularly, there is no objective "test set" to measure gene…

Interesting how you consider interpolating from training data not learning. Isn't that like exactly what learning is? If you get unintended repeating patterns then there isn't enough diverse training data

If there is not enough diverse training data then perhaps you should not call it learning in first place. The whole notion of learning is about algorithm + correct train data meant to make sense of certain kind of test data. All three components matter a lot and it is something that even the experts sometimes seem to miss.

Running a crude algorithm some small set of training data specifically meant to amaze you on specific algorithm have very little information content.

Re: AI learns to write its own code by stealing from other programs

#29
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People pay me... to use StackOverflow haha On a serious note this could potentially suck for developers. Just like the labor jobs and automation. You have a skill set? Well this computer can do your job. I guess be the guy building the code writing the code. I do wonder what will we do when computers do everything for us. I have this motor that moves my neck to a look at a girl who also has a motor that moved her nec…

>I do wonder what will we do when computers do everything for us. Yeah, this is a pretty existential question that has been posed a lot around here. What do you do if you do not have to do anything? It is like vacation, forever. You are free to be lazy, or creative, or adventurous, or somewhere in between, but will you be happier? I have been between significant work for a few months and I am itching to do something…

> It is like vacation, forever.

I guess that's one way to look at death from malnutrition, exposure or untreated illness.

We can wax optimistic about what post-automation life could be like, but let's be honest: right now, unless you are an investor in companies that have automated or provide automation solutions, you are in absolutely no position to see 'vacation, forever' on the horizon for yourself or your children in a post-automation world.

We should be frantically trying to do everything possible to fix that, however, because automation will be competing against the wage-labor relationship that the majority of people are dependent on.

Re: AI learns to write its own code by stealing from other programs

#30

A nuance that is underappreciated by a lot of people / the media is the degree to which any of the AI generates X models (faces, drawings, fills in photos, increases sharpness, etc.) simply copy and paste and interpolate from the training set. Unlike general supervised learning problems, for many of the deep learning "generative" models that get posted to HN regularly, there is no objective "test set" to measure gene…

Interesting how you consider interpolating from training data not learning. Isn't that like exactly what learning is? If you get unintended repeating patterns then there isn't enough diverse training data

I'm not an expert in deep learning (yet) so someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

Technically I see no reason you couldn't say that meets the definition of learning.

But perhaps that's asking the wrong question. Dictionaries aside, one might decide that a useful standard of "learning" in certain contexts is to have a level of understanding of the subject. And then we ask, does the system have understanding? What is understanding?

A system that only interpolates training data can't logically become consistently better at the task than the data it learns from. Whereas a a sufficiently deep learning system (including, but not limited to, a human) can defeat its master.

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