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Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck

nytimes.com

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Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck

#121

Post by mannykannot »

ballenf wrote: post #101
mannykannot wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Even Google Translate, which pulls off the neat trick of approximating translations by statistically associating sentences across languages, doesn’t understand a word of what it is translating. >This is just another incarnation of "AI is the thing we haven't done." I don't think so - it appears to be an objectively correct assessment of the current state of the art. > Otherwise we're just moving goalposts. The fir…

>>> Even Google Translate, which pulls off the neat trick of approximating translations by statistically associating sentences across languages, doesn’t understand a word of what it is translating. >> This is just another incarnation of "AI is the thing we haven't done." > I don't think so - it appears to be an objectively correct assessment of the current state of the art. How deep an understanding is required to me…

This is a discussion of the current state of affairs, not, for example, a Searle-like claim that understanding can not and will never be achieved. To substantiate a claim of 'no true Scotsman', I think you have to present an actual case where you think a machine has achieved understanding, but which is being unreasonably dismissed.

Ironically, your last sentence has 'no true Scotsman'-like reasoning, along the lines of 'no true AI sceptic would fairly evaluate a claim of machine understanding.'

BTW, I am not a skeptic of the potential of AI, though I am skeptical of some claims being made.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck

#122

Post by unityByFreedom »

pdimitar wrote: post #91
unityByFreedom wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are forthcoming breakthroughs in humanity being an interstellar civilization. We just need to build faster-than-light engines and terraforming equipment. Nothing major, right? Building a dataset is easy and not something you would compare to faster-than-light engines. Believe it or not, some major breakthroughs are held back by simple lack of funding, and lack of awareness. To make a dataset you need to pay r…

Your reply, while overall correct, still underestimates the problem of "how do we invent AI?". Data-sets shouldn't be "tuned" or "refined" (tems I see in practically every "AI" article); if they need to be remade then the consumer is not only not AI -- it's not even a clever NN implementation. Forgive my cynicism if you can, but in my eyes you guys just support what might make you money one day (or already does) and…

> Your reply, while overall correct, still underestimates the problem of "how do we invent AI?"

I'm not talking about building a real AI.

I actually agree with you that we're nowhere near developing that. Not sure where you got any other idea from me.

I'm saying there are some machine learning problems that could be served by some simple data entry. This could save lives, including yours and mine, via advanced cancer detection [1]

You're right that since I studied data science, I'm incentivized to advertise its usefulness. But, I studied data science because I believe it is a growing part of our future.

You can try it yourself too. There are many tutorials online. Making use of machine learning gets easier every year.

[1] http://money.cnn.com/2015/03/12/technology/enlitic-technolog...

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck

#123

Post by landon32 »

observation wrote: post #34
backpropaganda wrote: post #12

An agent can be intelligent without it learning how to read human language. Look around, most organisms in our world communicate using extremely simple binary language or don't communicate verbally at all. Yet, they are intelligent enough to do very complicated tasks which current robots fail to do. Intelligence is an easier problem than language, and thus should be solved before language. What a sigh of relief to re…

> Look around, most organisms in our world communicate using extremely simple binary language or don't communicate verbally at all. Yes. > Yet, they are intelligent enough to do very complicated tasks which current robots fail to do. True. > Intelligence is an easier problem than language, and thus should be solved before language. Wrong. This is the classic mistake everybody makes, including people in Computer Scien…

> For Nature to learn how to develop a nervous system capable of flexibly interacting with the environment, culminating in our brains, took hundreds of millions of years.

Nature never learned anything. Nature is not a force that chooses what features it wants to implement in living things. We evolve in periods of punctuated equilibrium, when the average individual within a population cannot reproduce successfully. Then species change very quickly(sometimes sub-1000 years) to fit their environment. We're not sure why humans evolved to be so intelligent, but one possible reason is that our environment was changing very quickly, so quickly that we had to change our core behaviors within the course of a life time.

It can be very confusing to anthropomorphize Nature. Since Nature never tried to make intelligence, the speed at which intelligence evolved in Nature is pretty irrelevant to the difficulty of the problem of intelligence.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck

#124

Post by Animats »

I've been down this road. I used to be interested in "embodiment" as a path to AI, but in the sense of things that could move around in the physical world, not fall down, and not bump into stuff. Low-end mammal level AI was the goal - mouse level. I made some progress in that area [1], hit the limits of available simulators, spent several years on improving physics engine technology, and eventually sold that off to a game middleware company.

Boston Dynamics took that much further. But it's the same approach I used - analysis of the dynamics, not AI. It's a complicated problem in dynamics, but it barely needs AI at all. Boston Dynamics, unfortunately, demonstrated that even if you spend $120 million, you're not at a minimum viable product that sells yet. Really cool legged robot prototypes, though.

This was all before machine learning took off. For a while I was looking at adaptive model-based control, which is a lot like machine learning. Machine learning seems to be getting good at what the front end sections of the visual and auditory cortexes do. This is real progress. But a whole organism is still out of reach.

There's a business case for focusing on language skills, but in a way, it's a distraction. The mammals all have close DNA compatibility, but only humans do language much. If we can get into the entry-level mammal range of AI, we should be getting close. I once said something like that to Rod Brooks when he was promoting Cog (a robot humanoid head with a lot of compute power), and he said "I don't want to go down in history as the man who developed the world's greatest robot mouse."

Reverse engineering biology is going very slowly. See "openworm.org", which is an effort to develop a good computerized model of the C. elegans nematode that runs in simulation. C. elegans has 302 neurons, the wiring diagram is known, and it still doesn't work. This shows how little we really know about nervous systems.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc5n0iTw-NU

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck

#125

Post by methehack »

tim333 wrote: post #74

I'd dispute that AI research is stuck or that his proposed answer along the lines of "An international A.I. mission focused on teaching machines to read" is a good one. Research seems to be cracking along with AlphaGo, self driving cars and the like. Recently DeepMind have been doing interesting stuff with dreams[1], imagination[2] and body movement[3], the last one being a little reminiscent of his daughter inventin…

Let's just say if the terminator had the brain of a self-driving car, I could kill it with my Prius. Lots of "progress" is being made but you could still fairly call it "stuck".

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck

#126

Post by pgodzin »

> Not long ago, for example, while sitting with me in a cafe, my 3-year-old daughter spontaneously realized that she could climb out of her chair in a new way: backward, by sliding through the gap between the back and the seat of the chair. My daughter had never seen anyone else disembark in quite this way; she invented it on her own — and without the benefit of trial and error, or the need for terabytes of labeled data.

I really hate the constant comparisons of AIs to babies. The author's 3 year old daughter has had 3 YEARS of sensory data obtained through moving and trying to fit through things. That is terabytes worth of data! I would expect an AI to be able to generalize once as well.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck

#127

Post by pdimitar »

unityByFreedom wrote: post #122
pdimitar wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your reply, while overall correct, still underestimates the problem of "how do we invent AI?". Data-sets shouldn't be "tuned" or "refined" (tems I see in practically every "AI" article); if they need to be remade then the consumer is not only not AI -- it's not even a clever NN implementation. Forgive my cynicism if you can, but in my eyes you guys just support what might make you money one day (or already does) and…

> Your reply, while overall correct, still underestimates the problem of "how do we invent AI?" I'm not talking about building a real AI. I actually agree with you that we're nowhere near developing that. Not sure where you got any other idea from me. I'm saying there are some machine learning problems that could be served by some simple data entry. This could save lives, including yours and mine, via advanced cancer…

I would gladly take the time, if only I had some. :(

Thank you for your kind answer.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck

#128

Post by 0xbear »

pgodzin wrote: post #126

> Not long ago, for example, while sitting with me in a cafe, my 3-year-old daughter spontaneously realized that she could climb out of her chair in a new way: backward, by sliding through the gap between the back and the seat of the chair. My daughter had never seen anyone else disembark in quite this way; she invented it on her own — and without the benefit of trial and error, or the need for terabytes of labeled d…

Not to mention that kinds don't even know how to _see_ when they are born, and for several months thereafter. That's petabytes of visual stimuli going through that brain so that it learns what's statistically more important and infers semantics around it all.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck

#129

Post by cscurmudgeon »

visarga wrote: post #87
rwnspace wrote: post #10

I sense the hand of an editor. Particularly regarding the title. Embodiment seems to be a branch with low-hanging fruit, when it comes to advancing AGI. I think the economic structural problems are important, but it's possible to over-egg the details and for some lab to stumble on an experimental paradigm with features we didn't realise were implicated a priori. When it comes to other AIs, the idea that we are stuck…

> Embodiment seems to be a branch with low hanging fruit, when it comes to advancing AGI. If it were "low hanging" it would have been picked already. Reinforcement learning with AI agents is hard, especially in a dynamic environment with many types of objects. I think the path towards AGI is to do simulation coupled with deep learning. Simulation would open the door to predicting non-trivial effects that cannot be le…

> We can generate artificial training examples to cover all the rare cases.

That means we have a model to start with. Chicken & egg.

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