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Is AI Riding a One-Trick Pony?

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Re: Is AI Riding a One-Trick Pony?

#53

I'm encouraged that so much fruitful work has come out of this one trick. If you can use the same basic framework for image labeling, playing Go, and translating natural languages, I'd say it's a powerful tool with broad applications. I think that there's a kernel of insight to "A real intelligence doesn’t break when you slightly change the problem." But human perception and intelligence are pretty brittle. The metho…

I feel like people have a harder time accepting these kinds of flaws if they differ wildly from mistakes a human would make.

I agree: humans generally don't tolerate mistakes from machines if the mistakes are not similar to those that humans would make. And people generally don't recognize their own intellectual shortcomings in comparison to others (other human cultures, other non-human animals, machines) as long as those shortcomings are common within one's peer group. It's unremarkable to be unable to memorize long passages in a literate culture, but it's an intellectual impairment to have a hard time distinguishing similar symbols like U and V. In an oral culture the relative importance of memory and visual symbol disambiguation are reversed.

Re: Is AI Riding a One-Trick Pony?

#54
Nature succeeded in creating human-level intelligence with one trick and no understanding, so clearly it can be done. It did take a while though. More tricks and more understanding would probably help speed things up.

Re: Is AI Riding a One-Trick Pony?

#55
post #28

I'm encouraged that so much fruitful work has come out of this one trick. If you can use the same basic framework for image labeling, playing Go, and translating natural languages, I'd say it's a powerful tool with broad applications. I think that there's a kernel of insight to "A real intelligence doesn’t break when you slightly change the problem." But human perception and intelligence are pretty brittle. The metho…

Of course, we're the product of an evolutionary history which results in such human "failure modes" being rare. If staring at a zebra made you hallucinate, you'd be unlikely to be the most successful member of your species, nor would your offspring thrive. So while we only tend to run into our obvious failing whens we do the unusual, computers fail at what we consider mundane.

The other day I was walking out of my closet, turned, and nearly jumped out of my skin because some clothes hanging from the door briefly looked like a large man standing right next to me. I'm not sure that our failings only happen under unusual circumstances, but rather maybe we're just used to them and don't think about it much.

Re: Is AI Riding a One-Trick Pony?

#56
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All AI is just objective minimization. AI cannot solve the halting problem or perform Solomonoff induction.

Neither can human AI solve the Halting Problem. It's proven unsolvable.

It's proven unsolvable for computers (i.e., Turing machines). Whether that makes it impossible for humans to solve (as a matter of course, or as a matter of Turing's proof) depends on whether you believe that we are isomorphic to computers. Which, to be fair, is exactly the belief that underwrites artificial intelligence. But then Turing's proof involves a program that inspects the halting oracle you're using, which isn't well-posed for humans evaluating halting.

Re: Is AI Riding a One-Trick Pony?

#57
post #50

The most relevant part of the article: David Duvenaud, an assistant professor in the same department as Hinton at the University of Toronto, says deep learning has been somewhat like engineering before physics. “Someone writes a paper and says, ‘I made this bridge and it stood up!’ Another guy has a paper: ‘I made this bridge and it fell down—but then I added pillars, and then it stayed up.’ Then pillars are a hot ne…

it's really simple

1) learn how the brain works 2) build a simulator

most current AI research skips step 1

Re: Is AI Riding a One-Trick Pony?

#58
post #46

Real intelligence is whatever computers can't do yet. Some think this is because we have such an impoverished grasp of intelligence, that it's only when we see a computer actually do it that we realize it doesn't really represent intelligence (logical deduction and inference, rudimentary natural language understanding, expert systems, chess, speech recognition, image recognition). Machines and tools that perform bett…

The unrestricted Turing test has been around since the 1950s as a test that hasn't changed. No one is moving the goalposts, I think it's rather the opposite. Every ten years computers learn a new trick or two and people rush to claim that this time, it's intelligent.

The Turing test is all a smoke and mirrors game. Q&A interactions say nothing about underlying self-directed initiative. Acting intelligent doesn't make it so just as a thespian doesn't become a real Hamlet by playing the role.

Re: Is AI Riding a One-Trick Pony?

#59
post #54

Nature succeeded in creating human-level intelligence with one trick and no understanding, so clearly it can be done. It did take a while though. More tricks and more understanding would probably help speed things up.

It didn't just take a while. It also took a lot of resources.

And perhaps strong AI can only evolve if the agents can interact in a world that is as complicated as ours.

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