11–20 of 209 posts
Why AGI and not "Artificial Consciousness" ? Is it because people think that consciousness is a by-product emerging from many kinds of pattern detection algorithms that suit all cases? (if so, what is the evidence for that?)
Why AGI and not "Artificial Consciousness" ? Is it because people think that consciousness is a by-product emerging from many kinds of pattern detection algorithms that suit all cases? (if so, what is the evidence for that?)
Why AGI and not "Artificial Consciousness" ? Is it because people think that consciousness is a by-product emerging from many kinds of pattern detection algorithms that suit all cases? (if so, what is the evidence for that?)
Also pattern detection is often raised in the way you just did, but it’s realy a distraction. Pattern detection just helps recognise things, it’s not inherently related to the ability to reason about things. So you need both, but they are not the same thing either.
Why AGI and not "Artificial Consciousness" ? Is it because people think that consciousness is a by-product emerging from many kinds of pattern detection algorithms that suit all cases? (if so, what is the evidence for that?)
That seems to be a very interesting article. However, it’s quite long. Anybody ok with writing a short synthesis or abstract? Thanks
Basically, humans historically are rather bad at predicting future technological advancement - even those people directly involved. The article gives the examples of Wilbur Wright saying heavier-than-air flight was 50 years away in 1901 and Enrico Fermi saying that a self-sustaining nuclear reaction via Uranium was 90% likely to be impossible 3 years before building the first nuclear pile in Chicago. So AI researcher…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Basically, humans historically are rather bad at predicting future technological advancement - even those people directly involved. The article gives the examples of Wilbur Wright saying heavier-than-air flight was 50 years away in 1901 and Enrico Fermi saying that a self-sustaining nuclear reaction via Uranium was 90% likely to be impossible 3 years before building the first nuclear pile in Chicago. So AI researcher…
We’re just as bad at predicting in the other direction. General strong AI has been about 20 years away since the 1960s. Nanotechnological antibody robots were supposed to be coursing through our bloodstreams making us near immortal long before now.
The only non-speculative and relevant claim here is that the experts were wrong about Winograd Schemas. The paper Eliezer cites to prove that we've made unexpected progress in Winograd Schemas only deals with a very specific type of Winograd Schemas, and not an arbitrary one. This is awfully dishonest for someone purporting to be a skepticist. Also, the wording seems to imply that WS performance is already pretty hig…
If the article's main claim was "AGI is imminent", that would be a valid criticism. But it isn't (as the article says explicitly). The main claim is that technological progress is hard to forecast in general, especially for those not personally at the cutting edge of the field, and that almost no one right now is even really trying. Therefore, we should be very uncertain about AGI timelines. There's plenty of histori…
And we're supposed to judge by the author's description of "silence" and "nervousness" that befell an expert panel. I can assure you that most AI researchers are trying, and are just not in the business of writing long-form articles to the public asking for donation.
> See eg. the recent paper by Grace et al.
A self-selected group of NIPS/ICML authors don't constitute experts. NIPS/ICML authors are the core of the community. The experts would be the top 1% of the community, i.e. either the authors with the most citations or most papers or just generally regarded highly by peers.
edit 1: Go players are not the experts I'm talking about. I'm talking about AI experts, and no not amateur AI hobbyists who know how to do Pseudo Monte Carlo. I mean, such as, people doing RL research. Watch, for instance, this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMm0XaCFTJQ
Why AGI and not "Artificial Consciousness" ? Is it because people think that consciousness is a by-product emerging from many kinds of pattern detection algorithms that suit all cases? (if so, what is the evidence for that?)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Basically, humans historically are rather bad at predicting future technological advancement - even those people directly involved. The article gives the examples of Wilbur Wright saying heavier-than-air flight was 50 years away in 1901 and Enrico Fermi saying that a self-sustaining nuclear reaction via Uranium was 90% likely to be impossible 3 years before building the first nuclear pile in Chicago. So AI researcher…
We’re just as bad at predicting in the other direction. General strong AI has been about 20 years away since the 1960s. Nanotechnological antibody robots were supposed to be coursing through our bloodstreams making us near immortal long before now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the article's main claim was "AGI is imminent", that would be a valid criticism. But it isn't (as the article says explicitly). The main claim is that technological progress is hard to forecast in general, especially for those not personally at the cutting edge of the field, and that almost no one right now is even really trying. Therefore, we should be very uncertain about AGI timelines. There's plenty of histori…
> no one right now is even really trying And we're supposed to judge by the author's description of "silence" and "nervousness" that befell an expert panel. I can assure you that most AI researchers are trying, and are just not in the business of writing long-form articles to the public asking for donation. > See eg. the recent paper by Grace et al. A self-selected group of NIPS/ICML authors don't constitute experts.…
I make this judgment based on, among many other things, the tiny budgets given to people like Tetlock to study predicting events even a few years out; the fact that Kurzweil's very simple methods, basically "just draw a line through the curve", are still considered big news among many financial and political elites; that nobody had bothered to spend $100K on a good survey methodology for AI prediction, before the paper I linked came out earlier this year; that a friend of mine, who is supposed to run a (small budget) government program on forecasting, has to ask me where to get datasets on past tech progress because nobody has ever bothered to compile them into a standardized form, and so on.
"I can assure you that most AI researchers are trying"
What serious forecasting attempts, with specific dates attached to specific events, have been done in this vein?
"The experts would be the top 1% of the community"
IIRC, NIPS has around 5,000 people, so the top 1% would be like 50 people, and most of them won't respond to a survey. That's not a reasonable sample size.
(edit: this article doesn't ask for donations to anything; the links at the bottom are all to various papers and research materials, so getting money is obviously not the main goal)
(edit 2: the video linked is from after AlphaGo came out. I'm sure many people, after AlphaGo happened, claim that it was easily predicted. Again, hindsight is 20/20.)