The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I. • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by atoav » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 6:01 AM UTC

pfisch wrote: post #41

nineteen999 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

Note that the parent comment wrote interpret music not make it.

I am a musician and there were already impressive algorithmic compositions in the 70s using Markov chains, and today we use machine learning to create something that resembles the works of J.S. Bach.

But how is that creativity? Creativity means coming up with new and interesting things (and fair enough many musicians make quite uncreative decisions all the time).

These statistcal improvisators can come up with some interesting combinations but they are completely unaware of them and don’t repeat it ever again.

IMO we didn’t even solve composition, because it also requires a good feel for how humans react to a piece and how a given piece or instrument fits culturally and what emotions it envokes for what reasons.

Interpretation is yet another thing, it means interacting with an audience in one way or another.

To think we managed to solve composition by scrambling together some melodies from an input of thousand melodies and thinking we are done with the hardest part is hubris at it’s best.

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

#52

Post by jbay808 » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 6:03 AM UTC

galaxyLogic wrote: post #40

What's the most difficult thing AI should be be able to solve but can not as of yet? I would say it is writing a program which writes an AI program. Why? Because it is so difficult for us to define what exactly an AI program should be able to do. This shows that we have an issue with not being able to ask the right question. If we could answer exactly what the AI should be able to do then it would be much easier to c…

By this argument, humans also aren't general intelligences, because we haven't been able to write one yet either.

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

#53

Post by Causality1 » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 6:04 AM UTC

solidasparagus wrote: post #12

The author seems confused about what artificial general intelligence is. People have not meaningfully moved towards AGI - it's still a distant pipe dream. The closest we've gotten is probably a Dota bot that's pretty good as long as you give the bot a huge advantage. Which is an incredible piece of technology, but about as close to AGI as an ant is to a human.

Not even an ant. If AGI is a human then what we have is the equivalent of synthetic RNA molecules.

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

#54

Post by mindgam3 » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 6:04 AM UTC

Quekid5 wrote: post #45

mindgam3 wrote: post #25

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…

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.

Agreed and thanks for calling it out. It is so much harder to “learn” without obvious win states.

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

#55

Post by H8crilA » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 6:04 AM UTC

solidasparagus wrote: post #12

The author seems confused about what artificial general intelligence is. People have not meaningfully moved towards AGI - it's still a distant pipe dream. The closest we've gotten is probably a Dota bot that's pretty good as long as you give the bot a huge advantage. Which is an incredible piece of technology, but about as close to AGI as an ant is to a human.

But that's precisely the point. A microtargetting solution for McDonalds isn't A[G]I, and as the article states - everyone knows it. But the brand power of calling something AI is too strong to resist it.

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

#56

Post by foldingmoney » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 6:05 AM UTC

galaxyLogic wrote: post #40

What's the most difficult thing AI should be be able to solve but can not as of yet? I would say it is writing a program which writes an AI program. Why? Because it is so difficult for us to define what exactly an AI program should be able to do. This shows that we have an issue with not being able to ask the right question. If we could answer exactly what the AI should be able to do then it would be much easier to c…

>We could say that an AI program should pass the Turing Test and many have written programs that more or less pass it. But so now, write a program that writes several different programs that all pass the Turing Test one better than the previous one.

That's essentially what machine learning is, though.

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

#57

Post by foldingmoney » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 6:10 AM UTC

lkrubner wrote: post #34

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…

Apparently you didn't get the targeted ad telling you that advertisers' dark patterns have become so sophisticated that free will is literally fiction now.

/s, obviously

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

#58

Post by thom » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 6:15 AM UTC

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…

My fundamental problem with this viewpoint is that people appear to radically underestimate the amount of training data (all of it incredibly rich in context) that humans have had access to over the course of their lifetimes.

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

#59

Post by computerex » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 6:15 AM UTC

dreamcompiler wrote: post #32

This happened right before the first AI Winter in the late 80s: AI (in the form of expert systems) solved a number of hard problems and was hyped as being able to solve every problem. Reality set in when we figured out: 1. It didn't scale and 2. Getting 80% of the problem solved was easy, but getting that last 20% was very, very hard. Maybe several orders of magnitude harder than the first 80%. Nowadays we don't seem…

Right. There has been a lot of progress within the last decade in narrow AI, but AGI remains as elusive as ever.

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

#60

Post by misterman0 » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 6:16 AM UTC

dreamcompiler wrote: post #32

This happened right before the first AI Winter in the late 80s: AI (in the form of expert systems) solved a number of hard problems and was hyped as being able to solve every problem. Reality set in when we figured out: 1. It didn't scale and 2. Getting 80% of the problem solved was easy, but getting that last 20% was very, very hard. Maybe several orders of magnitude harder than the first 80%. Nowadays we don't seem…

>> We're not going to have AGI any time soon.

In your mind, how many inventions are we from GAI? 1? 1000?

Also, given we have our very brightest working in the problem space (MS, Google, FB, OpenAI ...) how long would each remaining invention take?

It seems plausible to me that we are only one invention from GAI, one novel combination of two or more existing solutions and that this may come from anyone and at any time.