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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.

#131

Post by lsc »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #110
lsc wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 consciousne…

>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.

so, like a philosophical zombie? like something that appears to be conscious but isn't?

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

#132

Post by slavik81 »

ramraj07 wrote: post #75
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.

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..

Ants are from the other branch of creatures with bilateral symmetry. That fork would have occurred before the Cambrian explosion, so that's at least a half a billion years ago. That's a long time!

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

#133

Post by misterman0 »

pure-awesome wrote: post #91
lsc wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

exactly... we don't even have a definition of consciousness that is better than Jacobellis v. Ohio - For that matter, I'm not sure we even have it that good. I'm not sure I'd recognize a non-human consciousness when I saw it. I'm not sure anyone would. I mean, sure, I can totally see the idea that consciousness is maybe some emergent property of complex systems... in which case, sure, we could stumble upon it by acci…

Is consciousness a necessary component for AGI, though?

I don't think it's necessary for us to get a machine to reach "consciousness", whatever that is, before we realise it's overtaken our mental ability to combine two existing concepts in order to create a new one.

I imagine this is what's going to happen: we humans have drawn two circles (thank you dear fella for that analogy) and we are about to draw a third, combing two existing concepts.

At some point we will have drawn so many circles that the next one will not be drawn by us. It will be drawn by AI.

Who knows when we'll reach that level of machine intelligence and if it even requires them, the machines, to be conscious? But we will, without any doubt, reach a point where there have been so many circles drawn that they are now smarter than us at drawing them. Absolutely without any sort of doubt in my mind this will happen.

Tens of thousands of people comprehend Einstein's work. It used to be hundreds. We're smart as shit these days. Fuck me if it's not before I die.

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

#134

Post by usgroup »

walrus1066 wrote: post #103
atoav wrote: 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!

...that should really be quantum computing right now.

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

#135

Post by AstralStorm »

isolli wrote: post #69
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.

Agreed. This paragraph (in an otherwise insightful essay) was particularly jarring: "Remarkable things are happening in the field of artificial (general) intelligence. Deep learning algorithms have proven to be better than humans at spotting lung cancer." This is very emphatically narrow AI.

Pattern matching is not intelligence. Calling it AI rather than ML is disingenuous.

Tell me when a generic algorithm can solve many different games on different environments at the very least.

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

#136

Post by AstralStorm »

nl wrote: post #82

AGI will arrive as soon as someone can arrive at a reasonable definition of intelligence. Try it. Everything I've seen is already achievable by computers.

Solving novel problems. Show me.

By novel I mean multiple categories. A system that can serve as archive, mathematician, calculator, can move a robot, drive a car and additionally make coffee from scratch. Oh and talks (speaks and understands and acts upon orders) in 3 human languages at decent levels plus can roughly explain what it's doing. Oh and can learn more unrelated skills.

Hey, people do it all the time.

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

#137

Post by skgoa »

0xfaded wrote: post #125
tintor wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A standardized QR code printed on cones to say "construction ahead do this" seems relatively simple compared to correctly interpreting the construction site. Would also produce automatically labeled training data

And then someone runs over the cone and 100 following cars crash into construciton workers at full speed. The core issue of automated driving isn't solving any of the 1000 simple driving tasks. It's creating an entire distributed system that is inherently robust against errors, failures or manipulation.

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

#138

Post by mikk14 »

atoav wrote: 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…

Maybe that's exactly the point she was trying to make :-)

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

#139

Post by Wiretrip »

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…

So true. The real danger with 'AI' at the moment is the premature deployment of half-baked parlour tricks or the over reliance on simple algorithms where there are real consequences. i.e. prison sentences and insurance eligibility and yes, autonomous vehicles.

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

#140

Post by [deleted] »

misterman0 wrote: post #60
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 tim…

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