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Will A.I. Ever Be Smarter Than a Four-Year-Old?

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: Will A.I. Ever Be Smarter Than a Four-Year-Old?

#61

Post by Udik »

Foobar8568 wrote: post #54
Udik wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, I think the GP meant exactly what google translate translated, and that your interpretation is wrong. He says that it takes him a long time to translate French and he won't even start if the original text is Chinese or Japanese. :) Edit: check replies below

I am native French, I need concentration to understand the intent on any xyz to French Google translations. A good proof is to translate back and forth a text. I often use German to English or Japanese to English (amazon), I can guess the overall meaning but 60% is my own interpretation.

Completely my fault, I was skimming too fast and I mixed up pen2l's comment with your reply, then proceeded to explain to paganel what the mix meant :)

I'd like to say it proves we're not general intelligences most of the time, but let's not generalize: it only proves that I am not a general intelligence most of the times. :)

Re: Will A.I. Ever Be Smarter Than a Four-Year-Old?

#62

Post by Udik »

paganel wrote: post #51
Udik wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, I think the GP meant exactly what google translate translated, and that your interpretation is wrong. He says that it takes him a long time to translate French and he won't even start if the original text is Chinese or Japanese. :) Edit: check replies below

I'd guess we'll have to wait for him to explain :) Anyway, translations and what gets lost in translation can be fun pretty fun.

See my reply to your sibling comment :/

Re: Will A.I. Ever Be Smarter Than a Four-Year-Old?

#63

Post by ben_w »

Spooky23 wrote: post #40
ben_w wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transistors are faster than synapses to the same degree that wolves are faster than hills. And synergy is just as relevant for digital minds as organic ones.

Think about how much a gorilla has in common with a human. We’re close, but only one species is in a zoo. Every human gets smarter as our tools like AI get better.

That minor differences put gorillas in zoos and humans watching them is part of the problem.

AI can look a very long way from human right up until it beats everyone. And even after it’s exceeded humans for decades, judging by someone I’ve seen in the last year or so who insisted they could beat any computer at chess.

For example, imagine that there is just one thing about our minds that we don’t understand how to replicate, which leaves our AI at gorilla-level. No real grasp of language, poor physics model, fails mirror test, etc.

Now build into that the software behind WolframAlpha, Siri, Google Translate, Tesla, and AlphaZero, and you have a gorilla who beats every human at chess, go, and shogi; drive about as well as the average American; knows more languages than most people can name; can solve advanced calculus, chemistry, physics, and economics problems; and has some limited capacity for speech.

It would still be an idiot by most people’s evaluation.

Now add that one little thing that separates us from gorillas.

(That’s assuming they still count as “tools” rather than as “people”, which is a whole different kettle of fish).

Re: Will A.I. Ever Be Smarter Than a Four-Year-Old?

#64

Post by BucketSort »

jobigoud wrote: post #41
BucketSort wrote: post #15

Once we can rigorously define what "smarter than a four-year-old" means, then yes. But until we even know what we are talking about, no.

I'm not sure that is true. For example I can tell you are "smarter than a four-year-old", even though we can't rigorously define what that means. I would even go as far as saying that the fact that we can't rigorously define what "smarter than a four-year-old" means is a limitation of the current intelligence or knowledge of Humans. Part of the trajectory of machine intelligence is independent of our own knowledge, f…

We understand what "smart" means in relation to what one can do in the world, but that says nothing of what it actually is. It's like if I make an analogy: "That guy is like a dog chasing a bone." It only means something if you understand it, it has no substance on its own. I feel the same way about the way people use terms like "smart," "intelligent" they only mean something if we already know what they mean, but we only know what they mean in relation to the world, not their character independent of it.

I do see the trajectories being different, but I believe they must also converge at some point.

Edit: Also, the documentary "Baby Geniuses" has extensive evidence that babies are really smart, they just can't communicate how smart they are.

Re: Will A.I. Ever Be Smarter Than a Four-Year-Old?

#65

Post by crusso »

short_sells_poo wrote: post #56
crusso wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, the title of the article is inane. Brains just process information. Computers process information and we continue to make them better at it. Eventually, computers will process information at least as well as brains do for various definitions of "well". https://www.ted.com/talks/sam_harris_can_we_build_ai_without...

That seems like a very reductionist way to look at it. There is absolutely no guarantee that consciousness and general intelligence is an emergent property of any sufficiently capable information processing system. It feels intuitive that it would be, but so far we only have biological examples and no artificial ones. Even the most sophisticated artificial neural networks we can build today are nothing more than curv…

Watch the video that I linked. Your questions/issues are answered or obviated by it.

Re: Will A.I. Ever Be Smarter Than a Four-Year-Old?

#66

Post by ben_w »

rayiner wrote: post #33
ben_w wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a four year old is probably better at translating language she does speak. > "Pull the briefs." Garbage. After several tries, I tried "download the briefs.” I have no idea what you mean by the first sentence, and would never guess that it was the same meaning as the second sentence if you hadn’t told me. English is my native language, and my first assumption was the first sentence meant “remove the underwear from s…

> I have no idea what you mean by the first sentence, and would never guess that it was the same meaning as the second sentence if you hadn’t told me. But I’m sure you could’ve written down the literal phrase, which is all I asked Siri to do (Siri doesn’t do anything with a reminder other than parse it for dates and times). (Incidentally, my six year old would understand what I mean by brief—my wife and I are both la…

In English sure, but I don’t have a six-year-old’s grasp of English.

Given my childlike comprehsion of German, a better comparison would be if I heard the German translation (“Zieh die Slips”, says Google, making exactly the same incorrect assumption I would’ve made). If someone asked me to transcribe “Zieh die Slips”, I would probably write “Sie die Slips” or “Sehe dies Lips”.

Re: Will A.I. Ever Be Smarter Than a Four-Year-Old?

#67

Post by TaupeRanger »

wj wrote: post #34
TaupeRanger wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the best AI is much smarter at chess than any 4 year old An AI is not "smarter at chess" than a 4 year old any more than a calculator is "smarter at arithmetic" than a 4 year old or a car is "smarter at moving fast" than a 4 year old. A modern AI program is simply a computational statistics program crunching some numbers. It has no "smarts" or "understanding" of the game in any meaningful sense. The fact that it can…

I feel like that with that line of reasoning you could also say that a 34-year-old isn't smarter than a 4-year-old. The 34-year-old just has a bigger dataset.

The distinction is apples and oranges. A 4 year old is capable of creating explanatory knowledge about the world. A 34 year old is better at doing that. All current computational statistics programs are utterly incapable of anything even remotely approaching this capability.

Re: Will A.I. Ever Be Smarter Than a Four-Year-Old?

#68

Post by mcv »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #59
mcv wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See? That line of reasoning is exactly what I mean when I say we're moving the goalposts on what it means to be intelligent. Ultimately our brains also fuzzy statistics and arithmetic on the signals going to our brains, but we create intelligent results from that. Is it suddenly not intelligent anymore once you know how the sausage is made?

Not at all. The goalposts are the same as they always were. If we want intelligent machines (the kind capable of creativity, that is, the ability to create new explanatory knowledge about reality), then we will need to see evidence of this creativity. So far no AI has even remotely approached this, because, among other things, no AI is capable of explaining anything at all .

No, the goalposts have definitely moved. Playing chess used to be a sign of intelligence, and for that reason, game playing has always been a big focus for AI research. Search algorithms in general have always been part of AI research.

They may not be self-learning, but not all AI is. And modern chess and go AI is self-learning and scarily good at it.

Re: Will A.I. Ever Be Smarter Than a Four-Year-Old?

#69

Post by short_sells_poo »

crusso wrote: post #65
short_sells_poo wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like a very reductionist way to look at it. There is absolutely no guarantee that consciousness and general intelligence is an emergent property of any sufficiently capable information processing system. It feels intuitive that it would be, but so far we only have biological examples and no artificial ones. Even the most sophisticated artificial neural networks we can build today are nothing more than curv…

Watch the video that I linked. Your questions/issues are answered or obviated by it.

Can you please point out where? Because I did watch this video in the past and I know about Sam Harris and his views. He addresses _none_ of my points and provides _zero_ proof for any of your claims. He makes interesting claims and proposes interesting outcomes given assumptions that are far from certain.

Can you provide any study that lays out a path with well researched and supported claims and assumptions from where we are now, to artificial general intelligence?

A runaway positive-feedback loop of continuously (self-)improving machines is a _possibility_ but by no means an inevitability. We don't even know what consciousness really is, what gives rise to it. To make a claim that it is inevitable that we'll be able to create general intelligence seems like an absurdly bold claim to make.

Again, I'm not saying it is impossible, but it seems hubris to me to declare that it is certain, when we only have vague and nebulous predictions to work on.

Re: Will A.I. Ever Be Smarter Than a Four-Year-Old?

#70

Post by crusso »

short_sells_poo wrote: post #69
crusso wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watch the video that I linked. Your questions/issues are answered or obviated by it.

Can you please point out where? Because I did watch this video in the past and I know about Sam Harris and his views. He addresses _none_ of my points and provides _zero_ proof for any of your claims. He makes interesting claims and proposes interesting outcomes given assumptions that are far from certain. Can you provide any study that lays out a path with well researched and supported claims and assumptions from wh…

"Can you please point out where?"

Your issues/questions indicate that you either aren't familiar with the talk or you disagree with the basic assumptions that he outlines. Questions like "Can you provide any study that lays out a path with well researched" are nonsensical given that we obviously aren't there yet.

If you disagree with his stated assumptions (which I'm not just going to repeat here since the video is short), then we can just agree to disagree because I find them compelling.

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