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

Machine learning has become alchemy (2017) [video]

youtube.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 134 posts

Re: Machine learning has become alchemy (2017) [video]

#31

Post by turingspiritfly »

soared wrote: post #27
Barrin92 wrote: post #21

The problem with ML in my opinion is not that we're missing some sort of fundamental theory, but that there simply is none. ML is essentially fancy pattern matching roughly resembling the human visual system, which is why it happens to be good at tasks related to perception. It's not some master algorithm, it's not going to produce sci-fi AI, and it probably isn't even suited to solve most problems in the realm of in…

> It barely learns anything given the amount of computation effort an data that goes into it, but it just happens to be good enough to be practically preferable to old symbolic systems. I don’t follow this. Are you implying there haven’t been absolutely massive gains in computer vision, nlg, nlp, etc?

Those massive gains have yet to considered reliable enough to be considered trusthworthy. Would you consider them trusthworthy in court, where lives are at stake? Gains are nice but we are still so far from the essence of AI systems and considering how much resources we are pouring into learning, at this point all of them appear as nothing more than massive fat expensive toys

Re: Machine learning has become alchemy (2017) [video]

#32

Post by laretluval »

turingspiritfly wrote: post #31
soared wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It barely learns anything given the amount of computation effort an data that goes into it, but it just happens to be good enough to be practically preferable to old symbolic systems. I don’t follow this. Are you implying there haven’t been absolutely massive gains in computer vision, nlg, nlp, etc?

Those massive gains have yet to considered reliable enough to be considered trusthworthy. Would you consider them trusthworthy in court, where lives are at stake? Gains are nice but we are still so far from the essence of AI systems and considering how much resources we are pouring into learning, at this point all of them appear as nothing more than massive fat expensive toys

Humans are often not considered trustworthy and reliable in court.

Re: Machine learning has become alchemy (2017) [video]

#33

Post by EpicEng »

laretluval wrote: post #32
turingspiritfly wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those massive gains have yet to considered reliable enough to be considered trusthworthy. Would you consider them trusthworthy in court, where lives are at stake? Gains are nice but we are still so far from the essence of AI systems and considering how much resources we are pouring into learning, at this point all of them appear as nothing more than massive fat expensive toys

Humans are often not considered trustworthy and reliable in court.

What does that have to do with engineering?

Re: Machine learning has become alchemy (2017) [video]

#35

Post by ggm »

laretluval wrote: post #30
soared wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It barely learns anything given the amount of computation effort an data that goes into it, but it just happens to be good enough to be practically preferable to old symbolic systems. I don’t follow this. Are you implying there haven’t been absolutely massive gains in computer vision, nlg, nlp, etc?

There’s going to be people plugging their ears and shouting “but it’s just nonlinear function approximation!” all the way into the singularity.

Singularity be like fusion... Always far enough away to be hinted at from thin evidence

Re: Machine learning has become alchemy (2017) [video]

#36

Post by perl4ever »

laretluval wrote: post #30
soared wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It barely learns anything given the amount of computation effort an data that goes into it, but it just happens to be good enough to be practically preferable to old symbolic systems. I don’t follow this. Are you implying there haven’t been absolutely massive gains in computer vision, nlg, nlp, etc?

There’s going to be people plugging their ears and shouting “but it’s just nonlinear function approximation!” all the way into the singularity.

Human intelligence involves choosing which context to use at any given point. So far, so called AI appears to take an external source of context for granted, which is why it seems to me fundamentally different from "real" intelligence, just like your eyes are different from your entire nervous system.

Re: Machine learning has become alchemy (2017) [video]

#37

Post by solotronics »

turingspiritfly wrote: post #31
soared wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It barely learns anything given the amount of computation effort an data that goes into it, but it just happens to be good enough to be practically preferable to old symbolic systems. I don’t follow this. Are you implying there haven’t been absolutely massive gains in computer vision, nlg, nlp, etc?

Those massive gains have yet to considered reliable enough to be considered trusthworthy. Would you consider them trusthworthy in court, where lives are at stake? Gains are nice but we are still so far from the essence of AI systems and considering how much resources we are pouring into learning, at this point all of them appear as nothing more than massive fat expensive toys

I have the perspective of an informed layman as a programmer who hasn't messed with ML yet. Wouldn't the "safest" solution be a system with multiple algorithms and a consensus mechanism?

Re: Machine learning has become alchemy (2017) [video]

#38

Post by perl4ever »

m0zg wrote: post #22
oldgradstudent wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would AI be suitable if it performs statistically better than humans? In general yes, but it might depend on the pattern of failure - if your self-driving cars hunts me or my family personally, I might have problem with that. But how can you determine that without releasing it to the wild and waiting for bodies? Worse, say you have a safe system, but you need to modify the network (to fix some bug). How can you det…

But any technology can be deadly if you deploy it widely enough. _WhatsApp_ has resulted in "bodies" and it doesn't have any AI in it at all. First airplanes were basically flying coffins. Cars until early 90s had very little chance of survival in collision above 40mph. Many drugs have serious, sometimes deadly side effects. Quarter of a million people die in hospitals in US alone every year due to medical errors. 10…

"Quarter of a million people die in hospitals in US alone every year due to medical errors. 100% of those errors are currently made by humans."

Well, that's an odd thing to say. I guess you can say that, for instance, the Therac-25 episodes involved human error, but in that case, any problems with AI are also due to human error. If everything is due to human error, then there is no alternative to defend.

Medical errors certainly do involve the interface between humans and computers, and it isn't really plausible that either humans or computers can be eliminated from medicine.

Re: Machine learning has become alchemy (2017) [video]

#39

Post by gshrikant »

m0zg wrote: post #22
oldgradstudent wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would AI be suitable if it performs statistically better than humans? In general yes, but it might depend on the pattern of failure - if your self-driving cars hunts me or my family personally, I might have problem with that. But how can you determine that without releasing it to the wild and waiting for bodies? Worse, say you have a safe system, but you need to modify the network (to fix some bug). How can you det…

But any technology can be deadly if you deploy it widely enough. _WhatsApp_ has resulted in "bodies" and it doesn't have any AI in it at all. First airplanes were basically flying coffins. Cars until early 90s had very little chance of survival in collision above 40mph. Many drugs have serious, sometimes deadly side effects. Quarter of a million people die in hospitals in US alone every year due to medical errors. 10…

Rightfully so. Part of the problem is the way that we speak about the technology - calling it 'artificial intelligence' when the underlying technology does not resemble true intelligence at all. This raises expectations and lets people use AI as a dumping ground for infeasible ideas.

Re: Machine learning has become alchemy (2017) [video]

#40

Post by perl4ever »

oldgradstudent wrote: post #18
m0zg wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you feel like you understand human limitations in these critical systems? Are humans suitable? Would AI be suitable if it performs statistically better than humans?

> Would AI be suitable if it performs statistically better than humans? In general yes, but it might depend on the pattern of failure - if your self-driving cars hunts me or my family personally, I might have problem with that. But how can you determine that without releasing it to the wild and waiting for bodies? Worse, say you have a safe system, but you need to modify the network (to fix some bug). How can you det…

I think people obfuscate (in general, in these discussions) the difference between "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns". People get scared of the unquantifiable potential errors and other people pooh-pooh the idea we can't deal with risk. But is it reasonable to consider two different kinds of risk?
Post reply on HN