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‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

theguardian.com

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Re: ‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

#21

Post by gaius »

baxtr wrote: post #10

It is fascinating how the whole thing is following the classical hype cycle. This and blockchain will tank, and, then come back at a later stage, hopefully, matured. I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing. I did my masters' thesis in 2004 using evolutionary algorithms. No ordinary person would talk to me about that, even worse, I was easily labeled an outsider and a nerd. Today, people having AI skills are the…

This and blockchain will tank, and, then come back at a later stage, hopefully, matured

I think it's a mistake to conflate the two, they are unrelated and orthogonal to each other. AI has a whole raft of problems waiting to be solved as soon as it develops enough but blockchain is very much a solution in search of a problem that only it can solve. Every proposed application of it eventually requires a "trusted third party" and then the whole house of cards comes tumbling down. In a former role I sat in on many fintech pitches where painfully earnest people from outside the industry proposed solutions to problems that they only imagined existed... I mean at the level of claiming that only blockchain can do something that actually the Medicis were doing in the 15th century...

Re: ‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

#22

Post by kilon »

panic wrote: post #15
kilon wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a lawyer and a coder and I have to disappoint you that that hype is very real indeed. The problem is two fold a) Lawyers completely underestimated the decision making abilities of software even without AI b) People who are not lawyers that completely overestimate the complexity of legal resolution. (a) Happens because the software we lawyers use is basically... well... crap and most lawyers are clueless when it…

> Also there is no much of an option really, AI is pretty much unavoidable because the ever evolving immense complexity of modern society has made legal resolution so complex that court cases take up to decades to be fully resolved which of course is not a viable solution. Instead of turning law into a computer game where the company with the most TPUs wins, why not simplify or reform the system so that human beings…

Simplification is an illusion. Simplification works great for understanding and learning , I completely agree but is terrible on problem resolution. Mainly because problems don't get simple just because you want them to. Secondly because the nature of knowledge and the world we live in is of immense complexity.

You are absolutely correct though that we are indeed driving off a cliff of incomprehensibility , I cannot count the times when I have caught , including myself, lawyers and coder not understanding even basic concepts like OOP or legal responsibility under the influence of drugs and alcohol. It's not that the concepts are hard to understand but they are so numerous it becomes so easy to get lose track of where you are , where you were and most importantly where you are going.

When I started coding back in the end of 80s coding in Assembly was not that hard. After 30 years of coding I decided to go back to Assembly I just got blown away how much more complex it became, though obviously not surprised, and of course I discovered that even Assembly coder mostly use C libraries cause well, otherwise it gets insane really fast.

My solution to this may sound insane but in life I have learned that when I have a crazy idea ,usually, I end up being correct. I do believe that AI wont replace us but rather augment us. I am not talking about cyborgs , singularity and these nonsense I am talking about software that helps you navigate through the chaos of information. And when I say AI I mean it in the most vague way possible obviously the technology will change in the future in so many ways.

The only viable solution for the human being is to either find news ways to take advantage of the potential of his own intelligence or augment himself in some way.

Afterall its not a secret that AI is already used to construct AI and this opens the door to a ton of potential.Afterall is it not coding all about automated decisions making ? It's not as if we have not being trusting automated machines for thousands of years. But nonetheless humans are terrified of technology. The marvel of the human condition.

Re: ‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

#23

Post by kilon »

gaius wrote: post #19
kilon wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a lawyer and a coder and I have to disappoint you that that hype is very real indeed. The problem is two fold a) Lawyers completely underestimated the decision making abilities of software even without AI b) People who are not lawyers that completely overestimate the complexity of legal resolution. (a) Happens because the software we lawyers use is basically... well... crap and most lawyers are clueless when it…

law and coding is much closer than people think because there is a lot more logic than there is tv drama in a real court room. I've a friend who abandoned her engineering career at 30 to become an IP lawyer (she is incredibly senior in her firm now) who says the law is just a program that you run on a judge.

I have 10 years experience in law and father is a lawyer and even though her remark has obviously a comedic basis , she is very much correct. Objectivity is a huge deal in the legal profession, the ability to separate emotion from critical thinking. Of course its easier said than done which is what creates the laughing part :)

Re: ‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

#24

Post by notahacker »

devoply wrote: post #2

Media does not get AI wrong... media wants to create sensationalism that drives clicks so it publishes stories to that effect. It happens for every topic people fear which these days includes terror and AI...

Also, for the most part, media is merely parroting the sensationalism from within the AI industry. It's not the media that is actually allocating millions of dollars to the possibility AI might become self aware and start attacking people.

Re: ‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

#25

Post by ThomPete »

jokoon wrote: post #20

Success in developing working AI is not so much of a big step in progress for AI in general. It would be more interesting if we could understand what happens in those black boxes, and synthesize it. All we see is showcase projects and services, but never something you can run on a client computer. It really looks like machine learning is just brute forcing problems until you have a partial solution key to a problem,…

AI doesent do latteral thinking that well yet. Its a meta problem, thinking about thinking requires selfawareness.

But saying its just bruteforce is missing the larger point, much of evolution is bruteforce.

Of course its money or power first thats how you pay for these things to begin with, with utillity we wil get more and more conscious ai but its obviously going to take time but a blip compared the time evolution have used.

Re: ‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

#26

Post by bartq »

Optimization and statistical algorithms known as "AI" are far far far away from surpassing humans. Philosophically, it will never happen, we can create intelligence at best equal to human being's, but creating that kind of "AI" would be equal to creation of life which is beyond scope of technology.

AI is as dangerous as we decide it can be, for example we can create gun with camera and shoot to people based on their looks. Law and common sense should not allow that, that's criminal activity.

I think AI should grow, and take over boring and repetitive tasks. This will free up many people form dull jobs and new jobs on top of that will be created, i.e. jobs to tune and organize AI units of computations and talk to other people about results.

Re: ‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

#27

Post by Joeri »

bartq wrote: post #26

Optimization and statistical algorithms known as "AI" are far far far away from surpassing humans. Philosophically, it will never happen, we can create intelligence at best equal to human being's, but creating that kind of "AI" would be equal to creation of life which is beyond scope of technology. AI is as dangerous as we decide it can be, for example we can create gun with camera and shoot to people based on their…

The mistake is viewing AI as somehow on the same curve as human intelligence. As if AI gets better and better and edges closer on the curve to human intelligence.

It’s more a different kind of intelligence which happens to be able to do some of the same tasks. It already far exceeds human ability, at the tasks that particular flavor of intelligence is good at. We don’t need to be looking at things people do and asking how deep neural nets can do those as well, we need to be looking at deep neural nets and asking which tasks they’re uniquely capable of doing.

Re: ‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

#28

Post by GauntletWizard »

shawndumas wrote: post #14

‘The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a theoretical psychological phenomenon, the term itself being coined by author, film producer and academic Michael Crichton after discussions with Nobel-Prize winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann. Originally described in Crichton's "Why Speculate?" speech, the Gell-Mann amnesia effect labels a commonly observed problem in modern media, where one will believe everything they read from a…

I think this generalizes as well. People believe what they're told, even if it's coming from people with a poor history of speaking the truth, whether it be misunderstanding or lies. Further, when they realize they've been lied to, they're often bad at going back and invalidating their cache and fixing assumptions based on that bad data.

It's really hard - you are told or assume, you internalize it, build on top of it, and then when you realize that you've built on falsehood it's easy to remove that piece without understanding what load it was bearing in your tower of thought. I've found myself doing this all the time when doing designs - I've had to train myself to go back frequently and retrace the logic I followed, being careful not to fall into the same pitfalls and re-introduce the same flaws -that the tower still holds up to inspection when those components were never introduced.

Re: ‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

#29

Post by TeMPOraL »

tim333 wrote: post #9

>The result is dangerous The complaints in the article seem to apply to crapy sensationalist journalism in general and there is much more danger from that applying to immigrants, politics war and the like. If the Sun prints some nonsense Facebook's bots does it really matter? Nonsense about the enemies WMDs on the other hand can costs thousands of lives and billions of dollars.

Printing nonsense is dangerous in general. By lying to people, you're screwing with their minds, and this has unpredictable consequences.

Re: ‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

#30

Post by ekianjo »

panic wrote: post #15
kilon wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a lawyer and a coder and I have to disappoint you that that hype is very real indeed. The problem is two fold a) Lawyers completely underestimated the decision making abilities of software even without AI b) People who are not lawyers that completely overestimate the complexity of legal resolution. (a) Happens because the software we lawyers use is basically... well... crap and most lawyers are clueless when it…

> Also there is no much of an option really, AI is pretty much unavoidable because the ever evolving immense complexity of modern society has made legal resolution so complex that court cases take up to decades to be fully resolved which of course is not a viable solution. Instead of turning law into a computer game where the company with the most TPUs wins, why not simplify or reform the system so that human beings…

Humans cant understand the Law because of the sheer volume of it. The legal corpus is so large than even lawyers need to specialize into smaller subsets of expertise. Software could at least make the Law more readily available for citizens.
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