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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.

#101
post #88

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.

> a Dota bot that's pretty good as long as you give the bot a huge advantage Excuse my ignorance but what is the huge advantage? And what happens if you don't give the bot that?

The details require a little knowledge of Dota, but essentially the bot only knows how to play a much simplified version of the game.

They play with a reduced number of playable heroes (5 of the 100+). Each hero changes the dynamic of the game and many heroes have unique interactions with each other, so this is a very substantial simplification.

Additionally, Dota is a game where mechanics (the ability to quickly and precisely click the thing you intend to click) play a huge role and bots have a natural advantage there.

Another important skill in Dota is watching everything that's going on, positioning your screen in the right place and paying attention to the minimap. As bots don't interact with the game via a screen (I believe the game exposes variables that describe the full state of the game that the bots can see), this is another advantage they have.

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

#102
The hype is BS but narrow AI in the context of automation is here. Job are so specialised nowadays (driving, cashiers, fulfilment, paralegal, diagnostician ...) that a narrow AI (i.e. a glorified automation algorithm) that can do just 10% better at a cheaper cost will take down the job. The confusion is real (AI, AGI, terminator...) but pattern recognition softwares powered with big data has already proven business value and are here to stay.

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

#103
post #73

At 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…

"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."

100% this!

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

#104
post #72

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…

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 bicyclis…

Self-driving cars may be safer than manually driven cars in certain contexts.

What's missing from AI is reliability. It's brittle, it works well in some situations and not at all in others.

Which is a problem, because you can never be sure how well it's working for you.

There's no anti-Dunning-Kruger-function to say "I'm sorry Dave, I can't handle this, you should take over" - partly because that's not something you want to experience driving into a hail storm at 70mph on a freeway if you're asleep, but also because it would require a level of domain-specific AI self-awareness that is barely on the radar in most domains.

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

#105

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…

These days it’s more 95% easy, last 5% hard.

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

#106
post #72

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…

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 bicyclis…

>- lidar at night works just fine at night

Yes, let’s rely on a single sensor.

> - plenty of cities with no or very little snow

But plenty of city have plenty of snow. So perhaps not a deal breaker in a limited set of circumstances.

> - construction zones: blacklisting, remote monitoring & manual mapping, detection of cones, barriers, re-painted lanes

Why should we add to already high construction costs just because the self driving tech isn’t up to snuff?

>- self-driving cars with 360 degree view and plenty of patience and no distraction are safer for bicyclists than manually driven cars

Citation?

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

#108

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…

I agree that defining a goal along with metrics would be very helpful to make meaningful progress towards AGI. However, defining this test is extremely hard, to a point where I'm not sure if we could define a test like this. So far it seems, that just by defining a test we can come up with a narrow AI that optimizes for this test.

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

#109
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is consciousness a necessary component for AGI, though?

>Is consciousness a necessary component for AGI, though? I always thought so. Like, without volition, it's just a really good natural language tool, and not a general intelligence. What would an artificial general intelligence without consciousness look like to you?

A really efficient slave. Essentially it does not get creative and is ultimately predictable, even in failure modes. It would also have no subconscious drives to do unexpected things.

Capitalistic dream.

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

#110
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is consciousness a necessary component for AGI, though?

>Is consciousness a necessary component for AGI, though? I always thought so. Like, without volition, it's just a really good natural language tool, and not a general intelligence. What would an artificial general intelligence without consciousness look like to you?

Like the intellectual equivalent of a beast of burden - good at solving open problems by (apparently) intuiting connections and making inferences, probably with the appearance of creative operation and experimental learning, but lacking any genuine desire or personal agency.

IMO this is much more plausible as AGI than some kind of mythical general meta-intelligence that has a virtual soul.

I don't see why consciousness or agency are at all necessary for AGI - except as a science fiction trope.

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