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The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.

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

#41
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be interested in knowing what coungerarguments the people downvoting this comment might know of, which I apparently don't.

>> The list of discrete tasks (games, decision making once the parameters are defined) a computer can't do is a very short list. > I'd be interested in knowing what coungerarguments the people downvoting this comment might know of, which I apparently don't. I didn't downvote, but I will cite artistic endeavours. How long until a film crew of computers can shoot, edit and score a documentary or film that would be inte…

> How long until we could assemble an orchestra of computers that can interpret sheet music with feeling well enough to impress a human audience?

I think AIs making music will come long before AAA games and movies, both of which encompass music as an art and then throw in like another 5 artistic pursuits on top.

I think AIs will be making music inside 10-20 years or less. Honestly I think it could happen in like 1-2 years if a company with lots of AI resources chose to focus on it.

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

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

So at what point in a life of a human does general intelligence, or common sense, develop? Watching a baby do things feels like watching a robot trying to perform a task for the very first time. It seems like pattern matching overall with a very complex and fine grained sensory input system. Also some things are definitely preprogrammed and passed on from one generation to the next. There are many examples regarding…

Fair question. I can't claim a definite answer as to when this general/commonsensical ability develops, but I think to some degree we are born with it/preprogrammed as you point out. Certainly by toddler phase most humans have figured out visual pattern recognition better than the world's most advanced machine learning algorithms.

My own thinking on this has been very much influenced by an early AI researcher-turned-philosopher and HCI practitioner, Terry Winograd. His book Understanding Computers and Cognition has some solid arguments for seeing cognition as a trait evolved as a form of "structural coupling" between a living organism and its environment. Highly recommended for anyone looking for an alternate perspective on AI from someone who was doing it way, way before it was cool.

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

#43

I've been collecting examples of where the ads that I see are based on extremely simple algorithms of the type that could have easily been supported 30 years ago, and yet I keep reading articles that suggest that the advertising industry is deploying sophisticated tools to target ads to me. I wrote about this recently: ------------------------- Despite much talk about Machine Learning and AI improving advertising res…

I willing to take a punt and guess that the models they’re using are using short term/isolated data, not 10 years worth of your entire browsing history.

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

#44
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compu…

I remember when I was a teenager: a moonless night in the woods and my bicycle light was broken. It was so dark that I literally couldn’t see my hand in front of me. I could drive (slowly) because I knew that part of the street by hard and I knew there is a gravel patch on each side of the road. So I every time I entered gravel from the left I just turned a little more to the right and vice versa. And I knew I entered gravel by ear.

There was also a faint red light from a memorial site candle that I could use as a orientation point.

The thing was that I have never done this before (or after), nor did I think I ever would ever find myself in such a situation. I drove through that very road often at night also often without light because I had shitty broken bicycles, but this night was truly exceptionally dark and the darkest night I ever had seen since.

The question is, what would an AI have done in a similar situation (sensors go dark for some reason)?

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

#45
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…

I suppose it's a subset of "well defined rules", but it's worth calling out explicitly, I think: Chess also has an objective (and trivially verifiable) win condition.

There are few interesting situations in real life where such a thing exists.

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

#46
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be interested in knowing what coungerarguments the people downvoting this comment might know of, which I apparently don't.

>> The list of discrete tasks (games, decision making once the parameters are defined) a computer can't do is a very short list. > I'd be interested in knowing what coungerarguments the people downvoting this comment might know of, which I apparently don't. I didn't downvote, but I will cite artistic endeavours. How long until a film crew of computers can shoot, edit and score a documentary or film that would be inte…

I think music will be the first of these milestones, and before long AI will be writing enjoyable compositions and pop chart hits.

Next AI will write passable stories, and then decent ones, and then marketable novels with a coherent plot.

AI assist tools will be able to help animators create scenes, backgrounds, and characters using just keywords descriptions. Then with the ability to write scripts will come the ability to create movies. It will take some editing to filter out the nonsense but we'll probably have AI film productions within 30 years.

That's my guess, purely based on what's been demonstrated so far.

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

#47
I despise the term Artificial Intelligence. This is all PROBABILISTIC MODELLING. Nothing to do with AI/AGI/whatever.

The computers aren’t thinking or learning. It’s just modelling fancy probability statistics.

E.g. classical neural networks are basically a load of linear regression equations with an activation function stuck on the end of each of them. No magic. Just lots of linear regression.

This stuff only works when:

1) you are trying to solve a specific problem that is suited to probabilistic models

2) you have a data set that is sufficiently large, varied and specific

3) the model is developed, trained, tested, implemented and updated in a rigorous and sensible manner

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

#48
Of all the hypes going around (blockchain mostly lol) I think ai is going to have the most substance to it though. I would say the breadth of problems being solved are much wider and there is still a lot of research which hasn't really found its way to actual implementation yet

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

#49
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be interested in knowing what coungerarguments the people downvoting this comment might know of, which I apparently don't.

>> The list of discrete tasks (games, decision making once the parameters are defined) a computer can't do is a very short list. > I'd be interested in knowing what coungerarguments the people downvoting this comment might know of, which I apparently don't. I didn't downvote, but I will cite artistic endeavours. How long until a film crew of computers can shoot, edit and score a documentary or film that would be inte…

I don't think that you need to limit creativity to the arts, which is unfair to machines because art really depends on human emotional quirks. That is even kind of the whole point of art.

What about technical inventions? Can AI invent, let's say, the process to produce aluminum? Or planar semiconductors? Or a rocket engine? These are also creative works.

(I do think that AGI soon claims are rubbish)

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

#50

I despise the term Artificial Intelligence. This is all PROBABILISTIC MODELLING . Nothing to do with AI/AGI/whatever. The computers aren’t thinking or learning. It’s just modelling fancy probability statistics. E.g. classical neural networks are basically a load of linear regression equations with an activation function stuck on the end of each of them. No magic. Just lots of linear regression. This stuff only works…

Actually most modern neural networks are not probabilistic, they are deterministic function approximators.

Also your point 3) isn’t quite correct either, often a “standard” architecture and training procedure (e.g. ResNet50 with Adam) will work on a new task with sufficient training data and minimal modification of the model.

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