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

The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 108 posts

Re: The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media

#81

Post by odabaxok »

joopxiv wrote: post #77
CamperBob2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, and it doesn't exactly help that respected people like Elon Musk are cranking up a lot of irrational FUD for reasons known only to themselves.

I think it's quite strange that when respected and rational people like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking warn against dangers of AI, some people still dismiss it as irrational FUD. Did you consider they might have a point?

Can you please write what concerns do they have? I have tried to google Elon Musk's quotes about AI, but all I found was that he said, we should fear AI, because it is like summoning a demon... Does he have some thought-out points you refer to? ..because from all of his quotes it seems that he doesn't know how ai works.

Re: The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media

#82

Post by bahjoite »

gabrielgoh wrote: post #32

A fascinating aspect of this entire kerfuffle is that the meta story, the one about sensationalism and "bad journalism" is too, a form of media sensationalism that plays to the ears of a more sober and skeptical audience who wants news about "media sensationalism" and "AI hype". A bit of digging reveals that no serious news outlet really got this wrong (correct me if I'm wrong!), and most of the sensationalist headli…

A minor point: theatlantic.com isn't a British tabloid.

Re: The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media

#83

Post by TeMPOraL »

schoen wrote: post #54
shiftpgdn wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a bachelor's degree and have no idea what curve fitting is.

You might have seen it called "regression" (also "interpolation" and "extrapolation"), but not everyone has necessarily been exposed to this.

Related, I used to jokingly explain mean-square-error approximation like this: there is this geometrical theorem, that you can drive a line through any three points on a plane, as long as the line is thick enough. So mean-square-error approximation is basically minimizing the thickness of that line :).

Re: The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media

#84

Post by Scea91 »

arjo1 wrote: post #52
adityab wrote: post #11

This stuff sounds funny now, and some of us grad students had a good laugh. But I am worried about the future of ML reporting. The "field" is growing fast and I think we don't have nearly as many science communicators for AI/ML in particular and CS in general, as in other fields. I saw comments by lots of genuinely afraid laypeople who were producing platitudes to the effect that scientists don't have common sense, t…

Perhaps a good layman type explanation would be that nueral networks are essentially curve fitting on steroids. (Hopefully at some point people have done curve fitting in school and remember drawing lines of best fit). Therefore the term AI is essentially a misnomer. I would even go as far as to emphasize that nueral networks are boring mathematical equations which do not actually mimic the inner workings of our brai…

How do you know that our brains are not 'just curve fitting on steroids' too?

Re: The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media

#85

Post by joopxiv »

odabaxok wrote: post #81
joopxiv wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's quite strange that when respected and rational people like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking warn against dangers of AI, some people still dismiss it as irrational FUD. Did you consider they might have a point?

Can you please write what concerns do they have? I have tried to google Elon Musk's quotes about AI, but all I found was that he said, we should fear AI, because it is like summoning a demon... Does he have some thought-out points you refer to? ..because from all of his quotes it seems that he doesn't know how ai works.

I think the AI concerns have been summarised below in this thread:

A) We're striving to make strong AI.

B) It seems plausible that as computing and AI research continues, we'll get to strong AI eventually given that brains are "just" extremely complex computers.

C) We do not know what strong AI will be able to do or how it will act, if it exceeds human intelligence.

The concern is not with the current state of the art, but what could happen in the future if we continue improving AI without seriously considering some safeguards against making a system that at some point becomes clever enough to start making itself even smarter.

I won't claim I'm an AI expert, but I think people like Musk and Hawkins deserve (based on their accomplishments) to be taken serious when they express concerns. I very much doubt that everyone in this thread dismissing their comments as irrational fear mongering have enough knowledge on the topic to do so.

Re: The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media

#86

Post by barry-cotter »

odabaxok wrote: post #81
joopxiv wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's quite strange that when respected and rational people like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking warn against dangers of AI, some people still dismiss it as irrational FUD. Did you consider they might have a point?

Can you please write what concerns do they have? I have tried to google Elon Musk's quotes about AI, but all I found was that he said, we should fear AI, because it is like summoning a demon... Does he have some thought-out points you refer to? ..because from all of his quotes it seems that he doesn't know how ai works.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_risk_from_artifi...

Re: The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media

#87

Post by redcalx »

arjo1 wrote: post #52
adityab wrote: post #11

This stuff sounds funny now, and some of us grad students had a good laugh. But I am worried about the future of ML reporting. The "field" is growing fast and I think we don't have nearly as many science communicators for AI/ML in particular and CS in general, as in other fields. I saw comments by lots of genuinely afraid laypeople who were producing platitudes to the effect that scientists don't have common sense, t…

Perhaps a good layman type explanation would be that nueral networks are essentially curve fitting on steroids. (Hopefully at some point people have done curve fitting in school and remember drawing lines of best fit). Therefore the term AI is essentially a misnomer. I would even go as far as to emphasize that nueral networks are boring mathematical equations which do not actually mimic the inner workings of our brai…

> essentially curve fitting on steroids

Biology is essentially simple chemical reactions on steroids. I.e. you have assumed there is a qualitative distinction between biological brains and artificial neural nets that cannot be overcome by scaling up. However (A) AI models are many, varied and new variants are being explored all the time, and (B) there are systems where new new dynamics appear at larger scales, thus producing a qualitatively different system based on the same underlying rules, e.g. physics -> chemistry -> biology -> human brains -> social networks.

Re: The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media

#88

Post by lemondrops »

joopxiv wrote: post #77
CamperBob2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, and it doesn't exactly help that respected people like Elon Musk are cranking up a lot of irrational FUD for reasons known only to themselves.

I think it's quite strange that when respected and rational people like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking warn against dangers of AI, some people still dismiss it as irrational FUD. Did you consider they might have a point?

On the other hand I think it's quite strange that a talented entrepreneur and a physicist, among others, are considered as a source of expertise in a field they have nothing to do with, per se. I don't see any of the top AI/ML researchers voicing these kind of concerns. And while I highly respect Musk and Hawking, and agree that they are rational people, their concerns seem to be driven by "fear of the unknown" more than anything else, like another comment pointed out.

Whenever I see discussions about the dangers of AI, they are always about those Terminator-like AI-overlords that will destroy us all. Or that humans will be made redundant because robots will take all our jobs. But there are never concrete arguments or scenarios, just vague expressions of fear. Honestly, if I think about all the things HUMANS have done to each other and the planet, I can hardly imagine anything worse than us.

Re: The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media

#89

Post by Spooky23 »

bduerst wrote: post #23
adityab wrote: post #11

This stuff sounds funny now, and some of us grad students had a good laugh. But I am worried about the future of ML reporting. The "field" is growing fast and I think we don't have nearly as many science communicators for AI/ML in particular and CS in general, as in other fields. I saw comments by lots of genuinely afraid laypeople who were producing platitudes to the effect that scientists don't have common sense, t…

We saw the same layman rhetoric with GMO crops in the late 90's to early 00's. Slippery-slope nightmare scenarios, accusations of playing god, corporate greed run unchecked, etc. It seems to be a recurrent theme for new technology. Typically, reasonable people don't buy into most of these scare tactics, even if the tactics are being used as clickbait.

Many of these things have played out. We have declining biodiversity of staple crops, dependence on a small number of herbicides, etC.

Re: The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media

#90

Post by Spooky23 »

tonmoy wrote: post #30
shadykiller wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've always played with nature without understanding the repercussions. Some turned out good and some bad. So the best strategy is to have a kill switch. Unfortunately GMO has turned out to be a bad experiment(widespread usage of glyphosates) which has badly affected our environment and health and we are nowhere close to killing it. https://gmo-awareness.com/resources/glyphosate/

Do you have any better resources to claim that "GMO has turned out to be a bad experiment"? Not only does "gmo-awareness.com" not create any confidence for me, but the points in the link are about a chemical substance and not really an impact of the GMO seeds directly. Moreover, all the points listed seem to be common for most chemical pesticides or herbicides if not used in moderation

Remember that you have GMO + herbicide + patents.

GMO by itself is a step beyond plant breeding that's been done for millennia. It's ok in my eyes until its combined with the other two things.

Post reply on HN