> The BS-Industrial Complex of
Brilliant! This is really a thing, and the computer industry is (and has always been?) rife with it.
The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
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Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#72This 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…
AGI is not needed for self-driving.
None of what is mentioned above is a deal-breaker for self-driving car service:
- lidar at night works just fine
- plenty of cities with no or very little snow
- construction zones: blacklisting, remote monitoring & manual mapping, detection of cones, barriers, re-painted lanes
- self-driving cars with 360 degree view and plenty of patience and no distraction are safer for bicyclists than manually driven cars
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#73At the Biennale in Venice (one of the most important art shows there is) I saw a work which looked like this:
There was a metal frame holding two glas plates with ventian sediment inbetween (sand, soil, mud). In the center there was another metal frame which formed a hole. There also were to PCB boards with ATMEGA micro controllers.
In the text the artist claimed she controlled the biome of the soil with an AI using various sensors and pumps.
This was clearly a fake, as you could see nothing like that on the PCB.
Accidentally (?) she managed to create the best representation of AI I have seen in art: all that counts is that you call it AI even if it is a simple algorithm. AI is the phrase behind which magic hides and people love magic. Everything that has the aura of “humans don’t fully understand how it works in detail” will be used by charlartans, snake oil salesmen and conmen.
If even artists slap “AI” onto their works to sell it, you know we are past the peak now.
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#74> 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…
> all I see is machines that can do some form of pattern recognition
what proof do we have that the brain isn't just doing that ?
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#75The 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.
The ant to human analogy is surprisingly apt in a way you might not consider though - evolutionarily speaking the ant and humans diverged relatively recently, if you count things from the beginning of life. In that way, we might also be closer to AGI than some might think..
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#76> The BS-Industrial Complex of Brilliant! This is really a thing, and the computer industry is (and has always been?) rife with it.
IBM Global Services. Oracle. Accenture. Any company with 100+ employees who does consulting involving the design, implementation and maintenance of computer systems for any government bureaucracy.
Is there anyone around here who thinks this industry sector is something else than industrial grade BS and if every single one of those companies disappeared overnight that we would not be in a better place as a civilization very, very quickly as we were forced to pick up the pieces.
Industrial quantities of BS are the norm, right? Most of us do startups to do something more than to schmooze, threaten and ultimately bilk customers paying with other peoples money. We kind of want to do tech.
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#77Earlier 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…
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…
AGI as discussed by people working on it is closer to the Ship than to Data. The defining thing about AGI is that can figure its way around arbitrary challenges just like humans do, but not necessarily the same way humans do. There's a concept called "orthogonality thesis" that tells you that intelligence and values are orthogonal. That is, there's no reason why a powerful enough AI would have to develop values similar to those of humans (like Data, trying to be humans) - you could have an AGI that's smarter than humans in everything, but is "not really caring about you or knowing anything about being alive other than the priorities built into its software".
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> 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 tim…
We've drawn a couple of circles and we want to draw the rest of the owl, and you're telling us there's only one step.
Yes. Because we don't know it is an owl we should draw. It's equally likely AI is just three circles combined.
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#79Earlier 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…
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 abil…
I actually think AI will never really make great "pop chart hits", for the mundane economic reason that once we figure out how to make good music with AI, it will be possible to absolutely flood the market with that genre of music, making it impossible for any potentially great hits to stand out.
That said, I absolutely believe that AI-generated music can soon and will easily easily replace any sort of background or generic license-free music uses, where they simply need to be "good enough" rather than great.
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#80I 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.
The only nnets I mentioned were “classical” as a purposefully over simplified example. Yeah, they can model any function, but historically they were used for probabilistic density functions (if I remember correctly).
Most of what the article talked about can be done with much simpler models, which is what I get peeved about.
Also, yes, you can transfer learn with resnet. But if I throw my bank statements at it, it’ll do bugger all.
Similarly, if I throw new images at resnet in a silly way, it won’t transfer properly.