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There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence

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Re: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence

#141

Post by blennon »

randomsearch wrote: post #132

Can someone please explain what has happened in ML or AI that makes AGI closer? Whilst some practical results (image processing) have been impressive, the underlying conceptual frameworks have not really changed for 20 or 30 years. We're mostly seeing quantitive improvements (size of data, GPGPU), not qualitative insights. ML in general is just applied statistics. That's not going to get you to AGI. Deep Learning is…

The biggest advance that I've seen towards AGI is the work using reinforcement learning, e.g. neural nets that learn to play video games through trial and error. There is an impressive repertoire of _behavior_ that emerges from these systems. This, in my opinion, has the greatest potential to take us another big step towards -- but not necessarily to -- AGI.

Re: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence

#142

Post by edanm »

randomsearch wrote: post #132

Can someone please explain what has happened in ML or AI that makes AGI closer? Whilst some practical results (image processing) have been impressive, the underlying conceptual frameworks have not really changed for 20 or 30 years. We're mostly seeing quantitive improvements (size of data, GPGPU), not qualitative insights. ML in general is just applied statistics. That's not going to get you to AGI. Deep Learning is…

I think the most accurate answer is that we just don't know. Since we really don't know how an AGI could work, we have no idea which of the advances we've made are getting us closer, if at all. Is it just an issue of faster GPUs? Is the work done on deep learning advancing us? I don't think we'll know until we actually reach AGI, and can see in hindsight what was important, and what was a dead end.

I do take exception to some of the specific statements you make though, which make it sound like the only real progress has been on the hardware side. There's been plenty of research done, and lots of small and even large advances (from figuring out which error functions work well ala Relu, all the way to GANs which were invented a few years ago and show amazing results). Also, the idea that "just applied statistics" won't get us to AGI is IMO strongly mistaken, especially if you consider all the work done in ML so far to be "just" applied statistics. I'm not sure why conceptually that wouldn't be enough.

Re: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence

#143

Post by frooxie »

nurettin wrote: post #87
frooxie wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We understand what intelligence is better than we understand what consciousness is. "Artificial Consciousness" would be the vague term.

Not sure what you mean. I've seen some hacker news people argue the exact opposite and downvote me for exploring the exact opposite concept, now the opposite happens. I guess this is not the right place to ask or think.

> Not sure what you mean.

I mean that e.g. if we create a machine that can solve every thinking-related problem that humans can solve, then we can be certain that we have created artificial intelligence. But how are we supposed to ascertain that we have created something conscious, as in a machine with subjective experience? Strictly speaking I can't be certain that _you_ are conscious. (Also, why would we replace "AGI" with "AC", when people are looking to build something intelligent, irrespective of whether it has internal subjective experience?)

> I guess this is not the right place to ask or think.

That has not been my experience.

Re: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence

#144

Post by edanm »

deong wrote: post #106
sago wrote: post #33

I've been around AI since the end of the last big hype in the late 80s. The recent leap in machine learning has felt rather hyped to me. I don't think AGI is near. But I find myself agreeing with this article. Strongly. And I have long suspected that, we miss a lot of the significance and opportunities in AI, because we have only one exemplar of 'higher' intelligence: a human being. AI folk are so concerned with gett…

The article makes a lot of good points, but for me, the critical error is in assuming that if short term prediction is hard, long term prediction must be massively harder. He asked a panel for the least impressive thing they did not believe would be possible within a few years. In other words, pick the point closest to the boundary of that classifier. Obviously my future knowledge is imperfect, and anything close to…

That's an interesting point, but what makes you think it's true? Do you have any studies that have studied this? I think it's a fascinating question about prediction.

Your "will it rain" example is a good one, but it's easy to counter - I can't say what the world map will look like exactly tomorrow, but it will be a hell of a lot better than even my coarse prediction of the world map in 2040. I think.

Re: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence

#145

Post by johansch »

gooseus wrote: post #140
johansch wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the point several times over. The entire point is very simple: if there is no magic involved it's down to physics. If it's possible to create brains without magic, it is possible to do so artificially.

I don't think I am... if a task is possible, but takes 100x the lifetime of the universe to accomplish, is it actually "possible"? Or is accomplishing that task the same as "magic"? It I send a message using a one-time pad, the other person knows what I sent, you can ask questions and see that communication is actually happening... so if we're not using magic to communicate, it must be possible to communicate in the…

That doesn't really make much sense to me, I'm afraid. Please bear with me, but my first guess is that you have invented a coping mechanism that allows you to deal with conflicting information in your mind. Are you by any chance religious?

(I figure I should be allowed to ask such a normally speaking quite loaded question because of my previous statements, up the thread.)

Re: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence

#146

Post by sctb »

ythn wrote: post #136
ThomPete wrote: post #72

Humans evolved from immaterial matter to conscious carriers of information. The real question isn't whether AGI is possible but whether humans are the fittest carrier of information for our DNA and that seems to be technology in some shape or form helped by things like deep learning. My bet is always on evolution. And now that technology can learn it's IMO only a matter of time before we will experience another Cambr…

You read a lot of Sci-Fi, don't you?

Could you please stop posting unsubstantively like we've asked many times?

Re: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence

#147

Post by deong »

JabavuAdams wrote: post #118
deong wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article makes a lot of good points, but for me, the critical error is in assuming that if short term prediction is hard, long term prediction must be massively harder. He asked a panel for the least impressive thing they did not believe would be possible within a few years. In other words, pick the point closest to the boundary of that classifier. Obviously my future knowledge is imperfect, and anything close to…

> I don't think 30 years will see a machine that can make dinner by gathering ingredients from a supermarket, driving home, and preparing the meal. Really? Why not? Once or twice, if we cherry-pick its performance, or reliably? This is really surprising to me.

I mean reliably, the same way a human does. I can make a lasagne tonight, or lobster risotto, or whatever. I can decide on a thing, buy ingredients, chop things, get that lobster out of the shells, find the right recipe, substitute according to taste, and loads of other things that are somewhat related to making food. I can wash the pan I need, improvise a stove lighter if the igniter fails, etc.

We might be able to make machines to do each of those tasks, but that's not the answer. I might do 100,000 things in an average week. Clearly we aren't going to build 100,000 bespoke CNNs and LSTMs. To worry about superhuman AI, we probably have to figure out how to make one or a few machines that aren't gloried deep fryers.

Re: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence

#148

Post by Veedrac »

I worry talking about AGI is like going to the early industrial revolution and worrying about man building superhuman biology. A reasonable critic would point at the many aspects of biology we have little hope of replicating, like growth, self reparation, and general robustness.

But history has never been about competing on the same playing field. We don't build cars that perform like poor horses, we build cars that are 99% inferior to biology and 1% far, far superior. When we find something that looks like an existential threat, it isn't the mostly-general superhuman robot terminator, it's the tool that's that-much-superhuman on 0.01% of tasks: nuclear fusion.

I see no reason to bet against this same argument for AI. AlphaGo isn't 130% of a human Go master, it's 1,000x at a tiny sliver of the game. And the first AI that poses an existential threat won't need to have super- or even near-human levels of each piece of mental machinery, and I don't even have much reason to believe it will look like an entity at all. It could very well be something, some system, that achieves massive superintelligence on just enough to break the foundations of society.

Our world isn't designed to be robust against superhuman adversaries, even if those adversaries are mostly idiot. If we have hope of a fire alarm, it's that things will break faster and far worse than people expect.

Re: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence

#149

Post by afthonos »

randomsearch wrote: post #132

Can someone please explain what has happened in ML or AI that makes AGI closer? Whilst some practical results (image processing) have been impressive, the underlying conceptual frameworks have not really changed for 20 or 30 years. We're mostly seeing quantitive improvements (size of data, GPGPU), not qualitative insights. ML in general is just applied statistics. That's not going to get you to AGI. Deep Learning is…

You’re engaging in the time-honored tradition of dismissing progress with the term “just”. In the spirit of the article, I recommend you list and publish specific things that are too hard to achieve in the next five years. And then commit to not dismissing them post-hoc.

Re: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence

#150

Post by rl3 »

phs318u wrote: post #139
rl3 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The recent leap in machine learning has felt rather hyped to me. I don't think AGI is near. I've always thought it's never too early to start allocating significant resources to AGI research and safety given the potential impact. That said, I've up until very recently agreed with your take on the situation. What changed my mind was an article detailing the latest advances in silver nanowire mesh networks.[0] I knew…

Fascinating! > the question then becomes how to architect and train it into an AGI. If that’s the question then why even bother with silver nanowire “brains”? Why not just grow a human brain out of some suitable stem cells and work with that? Leaving aside the massive creepiness factor.

I'm guessing the answer is a combination of synaptic latency and ethics. The human brain's latency is relatively slow relative to traditional computing. The brain's synaptic latency is measured on the order of milliseconds, while a modern IC's latency might be measured on the order of nanoseconds or even picoseconds.

As messed up as it is, using biology as you describe might actually be safer once we get close to AGI, even if it is creepy as hell. There's something to be said for having a machine that's physically limited to thinking as fast as a human can (even if it is vastly smarter), versus one that can figure out a new branch of physics in the time it takes to blink.

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