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DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

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Re: DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

#91
post #24
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that we're trying to duplicate something with the ability of the human brain, and we aren't constrained by size. We can cheat (e.g. 1,000,000 times bigger with 1,000,000 times the power, etc). We're just missing an algorithm or two.

ah yes, it's true we can keep adding on processors and memory until we go beyond what's in the brain (i think currently deep mind has ~ 11 billion neurons to our 100 billion), and indeed so far it's helping, but my point is that it's not at all clear that "more = better". there is more complexity involved than simply scale. the machine could become schizophrenic for exmaple (seriously).

> in the brain

you focus only on single brain, when really we need to look at many trillions brains and experiments with complex reward function(real world): billion years of evolution * billions of various creatures born and died within every year. All this giant sequence of experiments converged to current human brain.

In ML terms: to achieve result similar to human brain we need to run that many hyperparameter optimization trials. Or find some better shortcuts than human brain biological structure.

Re: DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what sorts of tools are you using to deal with this data?

It's a hodgepodge. Mostly Matlab, Python, and R, with a few things that have tight time/memory requirements in C++. Matlab was really popular in neuroscience for a very long time, so we still have a lot of code in m-files, but most labs are moving towards Python (and a few towards R). The code quality varies a lot. Some of our "core" stuff is great, but there's also a lot of stuff that was written quickly and meant t…

I'm interested in using kdb+/q for applications dealing with large scale scientific data. Do you think there would be much interest in the neuroscience community?

I'll add, I work in a lab and have seen the stuff of nightmares myself.

Re: DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

#93

It angers me that Peter Thiel simultaneously advocates AGI and maintains a hardened bunker. AGI is the single biggest existential threat on the horizon. The article speculates what the AGI will be like. The AGIs that exist will be the ones that proliferate. Ultimately, the AGIs that survive and proliferate will be ones that put their own interests before anything else. People talk about benevolent AGIs, that’s like l…

Yes. Natural selection does not end when biology does. Anything that has scarcity and variation will have selection effects: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ And should AI go wrong, Theil's bunker will not save him.

Thank you so much for posting that link. I am on the verge of tears. I am tortured day and night by my conviction on this issue and reading that link made me feel for the first time that I am not alone in this conviction. This man understands completely where I’m coming from. I had no idea there was a formal philosophical name for what I was trying to describe.

Every day I experience the world and I am overwhelmed by how amazingly good it is. I relish every moment and everything is rich with opportunity. But as your link shows, the world is only this way because human society and everything in it happens to be the natural conclusion of all the worlds entities racing to the bottom. We live in a magical time where empathy and cooperation are often the most expedient thing to do. All that needs to happen is for the economic equation to change a little bit and the world will contort into something else, maybe something grotesque.

Re: DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AGI is the single biggest existential threat on the horizon > There is zero possibility of surviving AGI proliferation You're spreading unsubstantiated FUD. In another post from your account you suggest it's unethical to have children because AGI will be so bad. The vast majority of experts do not support any of these beliefs. Most experts believe we are not anywhere near close to AGI, and/or that we are missing fu…

The condescending tone you have does not help you. And you seem to be more concerned with looking at my account history or brushing me off as “fud” than actually addressing the substance of my comment. And yes, I do so completely believe in what I’ve written that I have opted to not have children until it is clear that a solution will be implemented. There are two parts to my argument: the substrate for AGI to spring…

I happen to agree the burden is on people to prove it’s safe. But that’s not how things work. Take Climate Change for example. How many people take the uncertainty as a license to keep going off the cliff?

Read this story as a possible alernative:

http://m.nautil.us/issue/53/monsters/the-last-invention-of-m...

Re: DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

#95
post #2

"But human intelligence is limited by the size of the skull that houses the brain." When you think about it this way, it seems impossible that we haven't duplicated the capability of the human brain in an airplane hangar somewhere. What's going on inside our heads that we can't mimic? That magical algorithm...

Protein folding is still an exponential time algorithm when done inside a computer and biological systems do this in constant time, massively, in parallel. Determining whether a molecule is an agonist takes a long time to calculate. I've heard the complexity is O(N^3). Biological systems do this in constant time, trillions of times a second in parallel. If you could simulate biological systems easily, you could do dr…

I'm concerned that you're ascribing unique characteristics to biological systems, when in fact we see the same characteristics in almost any natural system. Biological systems don't solve protein folding. Proteins fold in biological systems.

Fluids take an enormous amount of computing power to simulate correctly. But water isn't smart, it just does what water does. Heck, the N-body problem is a classic O(n^2) algorithm, but we don't say that the planets and stars are "solving" it.

Re: DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just curious - how do neuroscience people and people of non-CS fields find out about HN?

A lot of bio stuff now generates huge amounts of data and needs computational skills to collect and interpret. My undergrad degree was in CS and I still split my time between training animals and training models (plus writing and, today, RAID-babysitting). We get about 1 Gb/min of neurophysiological data (x4-6 hours/day) and I'm hoping to scale that up quite a bit soon. People doing microscopy also generate giant dat…

Ever read the book "On Intelligence" by Jeff Hawkins and if so, what are you thoughts on it? I've read that and ray kurzweil's books and On Intelligence was my favorite and got me super interested in AI but I haven't done much with it so I'm curious what someone who has a PhD in neuroscience thinks of it.

Re: DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

#97
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AGI is the single biggest existential threat on the horizon. Really? The madman with the football in a white house and the media pushing an anti Russia sentiment aren't scaring you at all?

Nuclear war is not be capable of wiping out humanity (although causing potentially billions in casualties), a hostile AGI can likely wipe out humanity to the last person.

It can? How exactly? I can never wrap my head around this argument from the AGI risk people. I simply cannot in any way follow their logic. Why is this imaginary creature maniacally homicidal? Please give me a good reason for this.

The only correlation I have noticed between intelligence and violence is generally negative (sure this is completely unscientific). Like my friend, who is a pure mathematician, and won't eat animals because it deeply troubles him to harm other animals. Haven't you noticed that smarter people tend to be pacifists? Look at animals like lions....fabulously homicidal. Again, this is a crap analogy, but I'm just making the point that there are other ways of looking at the intelligence/homicide correlation.

Secondly, in all this stupid talk of homicidal AGI's I never hear one good mechanism proposed for how the imaginary creature is going to execute all 7 billion or so of us, it's plan for disposing of our bodies....etc. Oh wait I forgot, it's smarter than us...so of course we wouldn't know...we can't imagine it with our feeble brains. Not to mention that it creates a fabulously efficient source of eternal energy for itself, lives in cyberspace in some magical bit realm--and then here comes the million dollar question: Why the fuck would it spend the energy to execute all of us if it can just ignore us? Sound a lot like god delusion to you?

I really can't stand when people trivialize nuclear war like this. 'It can't kill all of us'. Please just shut up. Will it crumble the fabric of our society? Leading possibly (remember, all AGI people care only about possibility--not even likely realities) to war and famine? Who cares if not ever single human dies, what is the consequence to our world fabric? Let me save you the suspense--it's completely devastating. These arguments coming out of CFAR and the effective altruism movement are so fucking dumb I constantly want to scream.

Re: DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I am worried about people succumbing to hype or greed and using badly understood algorithms to control critical infrastructure." What you're describing as hype/greed around badly understood algorithms could easily manifest as 'cult-like oracle religions'. Combine that sort of thing with the superstitious, wealthy people playing power games, and what you're describing is essentially the exact same thing as the "bad s…

Except - We're nowhere near it. Using Siri, not itself the outmost edge, but an estimate of the state of the art... If you have an iPhone, take it out and ask Siri how much memory is left on your phone. If she doesn't know how (she doesn't) explain it to her (she can't learn). This is not a philosophical question, it's not a question that requires opinion forming, or fuzzy guesses, it's not a question that requires e…

An iOS dev is going to read this and build that feature into Siri just to mess with you.

Re: DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a hodgepodge. Mostly Matlab, Python, and R, with a few things that have tight time/memory requirements in C++. Matlab was really popular in neuroscience for a very long time, so we still have a lot of code in m-files, but most labs are moving towards Python (and a few towards R). The code quality varies a lot. Some of our "core" stuff is great, but there's also a lot of stuff that was written quickly and meant t…

I'm interested in using kdb+/q for applications dealing with large scale scientific data. Do you think there would be much interest in the neuroscience community? I'll add, I work in a lab and have seen the stuff of nightmares myself.

Possibly! I've not played with the time series databases much. Most of our queries would be something like "give me signals from channels A-C that are +/- 1 second from all events of type X." If it would help with something like that, it'd be great.

Re: DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

#100
post #37

> AGI stands for artificial general intelligence, a hypothetical computer program that can perform intellectual tasks as well as, or better than, a human. It shows the article was written by someone who has no idea what he is talking about. It would not be a "computer program" but a model composed of simpler sub-models that contain both code and data. Data is the essential part, not the code. It would be something th…

AlphaZero did pretty well teaching itself chess and go just from the rules. You could imagine a better AI program learning a lot from basic data, say a physics simulator and access to the internet.
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