I really don't understand why all this pedantic squabbling over terminology. Nobody has suggested that AlphaGo is AGI or human-level intelligence. But it is intelligent. Just like in humans or any other organism, intelligence is a spectrum. Artificial intelligence is no different. I think even the laymen understands that AlphaGo is not a sentient being inside a computer, just like people understood the same about DeepBlue.
AlphaGo Is Not AI
21–30 of 172 posts
Re: AlphaGo Is Not AI
#22This whole post can be (unintentionally) TL;DRed by a single Wikipedia article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect The phenomenon of people discounting significant advances as "not AI" is not new. I'm surprised it hasn't gotten old yet.
If there's an "AI effect" surely its inverse also exists; it seems to me that every time there is a [relatively] major advancement, a similar chorus of supporters pop up to tell us how we're so close to solving every AI problem imaginable. In recent memory there's Google's NMT, which had people effectively saying it's "solved" translation, but when I got to actually feed something into it, as a competent speaker of Japanese and former translator, I can only say that I was wholly unimpressed, relative to the hype at least.
Discounting AI advances is nothing new, but upselling them is at least as old, as well.
Re: AlphaGo Is Not AI
#23One problem with defining what is and isn't AI in the current age is that as something approaching "real" AI - rather than Hollywood AI - enters the public consciousness, it is seized upon by marketers wanting to attach the new buzzword to their products, effectively diluting the term in the process.
Things that a decade ago would have been described as performing regression analysis, and just last year doing machine learning, may be described this year as being powered by AI.
Re: AlphaGo Is Not AI
#24Title: "Why AlphaGo Is Not AI"
Actual argument: "Is [AlphaGo] going to get us to full AI, in the sense of an artificial general intelligence, or AGI, machine? Not quite"
Conclusion: "the rapid advances of deep learning and the recent success of this kind of AI at games like Go"
So not only the article discusses something different from the headline, it directly contradicts the headline by calling AlphaGo a type of AI.
Bad journalism.
Re: AlphaGo Is Not AI
#25The piece really makes the only point worth making in the beginning: > What is AI and what is not AI is, to some extent, a matter of definition. It is by the general and widely used definition that AlphaGo is actually an AI. It just happens to solve one very specific problem very well, making it a weak AI. > Again, the rapid advances of deep learning and the recent success of this kind of AI at games like Go are very…
What's a "weak AI"? Does any algorithm that is able to adapt its behavior by learning qualify as "weak AI"? If so, why call it AI at all?
Yeah, exactly. We call it AI because we need a name for this kind of adaptive algorithm, even if it isn't anything close to strong AI
Re: AlphaGo Is Not AI
#26If a chimp could play the game of go at the same level as humans, would we say the chimp had intelligence? When you base your definition of intelligence on sample size of 1 (humans), but can't even define within that context, you get these kinds of problems. Is platypus a mammal or not? Does the classification change the function?
Are all humans intelligent or posses natural intelligence? Is there a degree of intelligence? i.e. are some humans in possession of more intelligence than others?
I look at artificial intelligence as an umbrella term which has varying meaning depending on context. If you classify a task as needing intelligence to solve and someone finds a piece of code to do it, you have an artificial intelligence there. You can keep moving the goal post but it's only nuances and definition.
Re: AlphaGo Is Not AI
#27One of the co-founders of DeepMind (Shane Legg) has provided the following definition of intelligence: "Intelligence measures an agent’s ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments" in [1]. This definition has been pretty influential, and in the sense of this definition, AlphaGo is not AI. But it is a great step towards AI. [1] S. Legg, M. Hutter, Universal Intelligence: A Definition of Machine Intellige…
> Intelligence measures an agent’s ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments A tardigrade achieves its goals in a wide range of environments; I don't think anyone would call it intelligent. I've known quite a few 15-year-old juvenile delinquents that I'm certain were able to achieve their goals in a much wider range of environments than Albert Einstein; were they all much more intelligent than Einstein…
I would absolutely classify a tardigrade as an intelligent system. Systems of parts interacting in an intelligent way applies to more than just networks of nerve cells.
Re: AlphaGo Is Not AI
#28The piece really makes the only point worth making in the beginning: > What is AI and what is not AI is, to some extent, a matter of definition. It is by the general and widely used definition that AlphaGo is actually an AI. It just happens to solve one very specific problem very well, making it a weak AI. > Again, the rapid advances of deep learning and the recent success of this kind of AI at games like Go are very…
Speaking as an AI researcher, almost nothing is "AI" research. In practice i feel most current AI research falls into two categories:
* Fuzzy problems -- image, sound and free text recognition. Where there is no real "true answer".
* Problems too hard to solve in a reasonable time without heuristics -- SAT, scheduling, etc. In practice NP-hard problems and further up the complexity heirachy -- AlphaGo goes here.
Once we know how to do something reliably, it stops being AI and just becomes "an algorithm" :)
Re: AlphaGo Is Not AI
#29The piece really makes the only point worth making in the beginning: > What is AI and what is not AI is, to some extent, a matter of definition. It is by the general and widely used definition that AlphaGo is actually an AI. It just happens to solve one very specific problem very well, making it a weak AI. > Again, the rapid advances of deep learning and the recent success of this kind of AI at games like Go are very…
> It is by the general and widely used definition that AlphaGo is actually an AI.
Only for a little while. AI is how we describe new technology that does something we think of as requiring human intelligence. AI, like the word "technology" itself, is a term we use during the lag between creating something and learning to take it for granted.
I don't foresee an end to technological development, but I do think eventually there will be no AI, because our ability to intuitively appreciate intelligence doesn't much surpass our own. Beyond some point we will stop perceiving new technological capabilities as higher levels of intelligence. There will be people, computers, appliances, services not tied to individual machines, and genetically engineered rabbit tutors for our children, and nobody will be surprised to encounter intelligence anywhere, least of all in a computer.
Re: AlphaGo Is Not AI
#30Good to know that quadriplegics are not intelligent, much less sentient.
Please don't make a point this way on HN.