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

The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.

gen.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 384 posts

Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.

#21

Post by rhacker »

roenxi wrote: post #17
mindgam3 wrote: post #8

> The technologists know it’s bullshit. Fed up with the fog that marketers have created, they’ve simply ditched A.I. and moved on to a new term called “artificial general intelligence.” Not to detract from an otherwise excellent BS takedown, but unfortunately the author fails to mention that there’s a non-zero possibility that AGI itself is merely taking the bullshit to the next level. It continues to astound me how…

The real issue we are facing is that everything that we thought was not going to be pattern matching and tree search has turned out to be pattern matching and tree search. I remember my father telling me computers were never going to be able to play Chess, because it required creativity for example. Nowadays a neural network with tree search plays chess that looks remarkably human. A lot of problem domains have falle…

I kinda see it this way:

AGI is Data in Star Trek TNG - trying to be human, making decisions to want to be alive, eventually dreaming and finally using an emotion chip. Another alternative here would be Moriarty or the various doctors in Voyager.

AI is the Ship in TNG - lots of heuristics to figure out what the user is trying to do. Past usage of commands and relating major events outside the ship with algorithms for battle, life support, etc.. Events categorized by importance and automatic handling to save lives when necessary. Basically an extremely advanced Siri that doesn't really misunderstand you - while at the same time not really caring about you or knowing anything about being alive other than the priorities built into its software.

I think for the next 100 years we're going to have AI progressing like the ship in TNG. I don't think we'll have AGI until maybe 100-200 years.

Then again when I was born no one had a fucking clue eventually we would have something like the iPhone and talk to someone in China with <1 sec lag. So my estimates could easily drop to half.

Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.

#22

Post by mattigames »

Everything is bullshit until is not, humans were talking about transportation without using animal forces for decades before it became a reality, and a lot of people were highly skeptical of such thing being even possible until it actually happened in 1804 (first steam train), same thing happens with Artificial Intelligence, and we are in such uncharted territory that someone could say AGI is just 10 years away and someone else say 100 years away and both get the same amount of credibility, meaning near none cause we don't even know what is that we don't know to achieve AGI.

Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.

#23

Post by runciblespoon »

mindgam3 wrote: post #8

> The technologists know it’s bullshit. Fed up with the fog that marketers have created, they’ve simply ditched A.I. and moved on to a new term called “artificial general intelligence.” Not to detract from an otherwise excellent BS takedown, but unfortunately the author fails to mention that there’s a non-zero possibility that AGI itself is merely taking the bullshit to the next level. It continues to astound me how…

@mindgam3 .. “Minor quibbles about truth and meaning of words aside, I have to support any article that skewers the soft underbelly of the phony AI ecosystem as effectively as this one does.”

I fully concur ..

Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.

#24

Post by moneytide1 »

tachyonbeam wrote: post #15
moneytide1 wrote: post #6

These types of AI promotion seem to be a sort of cop-out that suggest we all look forward to a hands-off future where computers will be able to do everything for us. Then human minds will be allocated away from thoughtful interaction with their environment and into an all-hands-on-deck scenario where neural net operations are given top priority so they can churn out some answers.

My main short-term fear is that increased automation will lead to an increasingly isolated society. I can already get almost everything delivered through amazon, order takeout through an app without speaking to anyone. Watch movies on Netflix without needing to go to a video store. What's the world going to be like when drone deliveries become a thing, and I don't even have to speak to a delivery driver? How will it…

Your short-term fear is seeming to be validated over time as your listed "person-less" capabilities are constantly being implemented. I myself have lived brief bouts of the hikikomori lifestyle, although I still provide for myself as opposed to being taken care of by family as many are in the video you linked. But over the past few months, I've been prioritizing face-to-face conversations, especially with new people. This is the timeless, natural "neural net":

When we interact in this way, we isolate certain topics that are more relevant to our modern condition because both parties involved understand there is a time constraint. There is a sort of natural algorithmic process going on in both our minds because we are calculating the ideal things to say with this "new person". If we are speaking in proximity to other people, our conversation can take on a whole new shape because there is a "public" element and perhaps we are trying to dialogue for an audience that could eventually participate if they choose to. All of these mechanisms that keep people in check with each other are completely lost when out-sourced to programmed automation and looped control.

Perhaps it is not all bad though, because ordering through services like eBay/Amazon quickly and efficiently could ultimately save resources/emissions as we are having items routed to us that would historically take up space in a brick/mortar location. But the concern we are sharing here is that community is compromised when everyone has the option to anonymously do everything.

Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.

#25

Post by mindgam3 »

roenxi wrote: post #17
mindgam3 wrote: post #8

> The technologists know it’s bullshit. Fed up with the fog that marketers have created, they’ve simply ditched A.I. and moved on to a new term called “artificial general intelligence.” Not to detract from an otherwise excellent BS takedown, but unfortunately the author fails to mention that there’s a non-zero possibility that AGI itself is merely taking the bullshit to the next level. It continues to astound me how…

The real issue we are facing is that everything that we thought was not going to be pattern matching and tree search has turned out to be pattern matching and tree search. I remember my father telling me computers were never going to be able to play Chess, because it required creativity for example. Nowadays a neural network with tree search plays chess that looks remarkably human. A lot of problem domains have falle…

Although I will admit to have used/benefited from the myth that chess skill is related in some way to general human intelligence, it’s a myth.

Key differences between chess and real world: perfect information game, finite problem space, well defined rules. It blows my mind that serious people believe that ability to outperform human chess players using massive compute is some kind of major step towards AGI. If only it were that simple.

It’s not that people overestimate human intelligence, it’s that they underestimate the meta-cognitive reasoning that we call common sense.

Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.

#26

Post by m0zg »

ethbro wrote: post #20
m0zg wrote: post #18

There is a lot of froth, as in any hot field. However, unlike before, there are many cases where AI actually works now. Some perceptual tasks work better than a human, in fact. We can quibble about the naming and whatnot, but that's not something you can say about the last AI winter. It's sort of like dotcom bust of 00, sure things imploded back then, but there's no sign whatsoever e-commerce will implode at any time…

> Some perceptual tasks work better than a human, in fact. [...] that's not something you can say about the last AI winter Eh. I'd say that's somewhat apples to oranges. A) There were some useful and successful expert systems. B) Things seemed to be going swimmingly, until they hit a fundamental wall. C) We're working with a few orders of magnitude greater compute than they had access to.

Sure, but we did figure out how to make things more robust and generalizable, at least for perceptual tasks so far. Knowledge representation and probabilistic reasoning are still non-existent, though. Moreover, nobody is even working on any of that, for fear of being compared to Doug Lenat.

Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.

#27

Post by jcranmer »

tachyonbeam wrote: post #15
moneytide1 wrote: post #6

These types of AI promotion seem to be a sort of cop-out that suggest we all look forward to a hands-off future where computers will be able to do everything for us. Then human minds will be allocated away from thoughtful interaction with their environment and into an all-hands-on-deck scenario where neural net operations are given top priority so they can churn out some answers.

My main short-term fear is that increased automation will lead to an increasingly isolated society. I can already get almost everything delivered through amazon, order takeout through an app without speaking to anyone. Watch movies on Netflix without needing to go to a video store. What's the world going to be like when drone deliveries become a thing, and I don't even have to speak to a delivery driver? How will it…

I think your fear is misguided. People have been complaining about how technology is causing humanity to become more socially isolated for literally thousands of years, and the actual evidence has been that those complaints are unfounded. If anything, we've probably become more socially interconnected, but that's more due to the increased population density of our environs than technology changes.

What a lot of people miss, I think, is that human beings are fundamentally social animals, and we crave social interaction. And I say this as a strong introvert--as someone who has to be alone to recharge myself emotionally. Things like distance learning or working from home are not well-received by most people, especially not on a long-term basis. Sure, some people will find it comfortable, but those people are a tiny majority, and I should point out that it's not a new phenomenon: Emily Dickinson for the last 10 years or so of her life or so refused to meet visitors face-to-face and rarely left her house, which is more severe than most hikikomori.

Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.

#28

Post by mindgam3 »

povertyworld wrote: post #11
mindgam3 wrote: post #8

> The technologists know it’s bullshit. Fed up with the fog that marketers have created, they’ve simply ditched A.I. and moved on to a new term called “artificial general intelligence.” Not to detract from an otherwise excellent BS takedown, but unfortunately the author fails to mention that there’s a non-zero possibility that AGI itself is merely taking the bullshit to the next level. It continues to astound me how…

While it's true the AI hype is getting a bit overboard, couldn't one make the argument that humans, and to a lesser extent other animals, are just a collection responses to pattern recognition like when I see a thing that looks like this I should eat it, but when I see a thing that sounds like that I should run away? After all, what is common sense but "believe it when I see it" type thinking which is most certainly…

> After all, what is common sense but "believe it when I see it" type thinking which is most certainly pattern intuition?

I guess I would argue that common sense encompasses something outside of pure pattern intuition, which is the ability to synthesize not just solutions to a known problem/question but to figure out what question to ask in the first place, across a variety of situations include some that have never been seen previously.

The overhype part isn’t just the Mechanical Turk later, although that’s part of it. It’s also the assumption that pattern recognition within any given domain can generalize to this meta-ability to essentially level jump outside previously established boundaries or “training data.”

Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.

#29

Post by roenxi »

mindgam3 wrote: post #25
roenxi wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real issue we are facing is that everything that we thought was not going to be pattern matching and tree search has turned out to be pattern matching and tree search. I remember my father telling me computers were never going to be able to play Chess, because it required creativity for example. Nowadays a neural network with tree search plays chess that looks remarkably human. A lot of problem domains have falle…

Although I will admit to have used/benefited from the myth that chess skill is related in some way to general human intelligence, it’s a myth. Key differences between chess and real world: perfect information game, finite problem space, well defined rules. It blows my mind that serious people believe that ability to outperform human chess players using massive compute is some kind of major step towards AGI. If only i…

> perfect information game, finite problem space, well defined rules

Chess isn't reality, but the things you list are all mostly things that humans can't deal with either. Take imperfect information - humans can't make decisions using information they don't have any more than machines can. Humans certainly can't deal with the infinite (and their approximations to do so are probably measurably worse than those a computer uses, because a computer can use honest-to-goodness probability formulas).

Operating without rules is not clear cut, but most people do invent a whole heap of funny rules because they can't operate without clear rules either. Humans often literally hate and fear things that look different or don't follow all the funny rules they come up with.

These are the same arguments as are deployed against self driving cars - if a computer doesn't have the information needed to make a decision then neither will a human in the same situation.

The threat, opportunity and potential of AGI is very real. Once technology settles down and stops changing then we'll know that the situation has stabilised. But even as it stands what we have now would easily pass muster as AGI for the 1910s and it is still improving extremely rapidly.

Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.

#30

Post by [deleted] »

roenxi wrote: post #17
mindgam3 wrote: post #8

> The technologists know it’s bullshit. Fed up with the fog that marketers have created, they’ve simply ditched A.I. and moved on to a new term called “artificial general intelligence.” Not to detract from an otherwise excellent BS takedown, but unfortunately the author fails to mention that there’s a non-zero possibility that AGI itself is merely taking the bullshit to the next level. It continues to astound me how…

The real issue we are facing is that everything that we thought was not going to be pattern matching and tree search has turned out to be pattern matching and tree search. I remember my father telling me computers were never going to be able to play Chess, because it required creativity for example. Nowadays a neural network with tree search plays chess that looks remarkably human. A lot of problem domains have falle…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN