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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.

#141

Post by Wiretrip »

solidasparagus wrote: post #85
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…

We might be headed for the trough of disillusionment, but in terms of technology and industry applications, we are still in the early phase of modern AI (big data + ML).

Exactly, we are in a very early phase. However, the hype wave is driving a dangerous level of 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.

#142

Post by EliRivers »

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…

General intelligence? Does it even exist? I find the evidence that humans have it unconvincing, and I've seen nothing that makes me think we're "one invention" away. The direction of machine learning seems to be specialised tasks on specialised data sets; surely the very opposite of any kind of general intelligence.

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

#143

Post by mruts »

AstralStorm wrote: post #109
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?

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.

That sounds more like a Communist dream. Capitalism doesn’t reward really efficient slaves.

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

#144

Post by ak39 »

AstralStorm wrote: post #114
yonkshi wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately any AI systems will encounter the verification dilemma, the more powerful an AI system becomes, the less verifiable it would be.

Verification is easy, just like with humans. It's called a driver's license. And since the AI does not tire and can probably be sped up, you can put it through hundreds of thousands of hours of driving quickly in a good simulator with adversarial and normal situations, then rate it at various tasks. Just like we should do with human drivers, but fail to. Explanation is harder. But we probably shouldn't care, even in…

In the world of investments, that would be called buzzwordily as “back testing”.

But is it sufficient to answer _why_ the machine chose to act a certain way given a certain set of instantaneous input criteria?

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

#145

Post by Majestic121 »

cm2187 wrote: post #120
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…

> plenty of cities with no or very little snow But what happens that rare day it snows? Hundreds of deads? Cars get recalled for much less than that.

I don't know if you live in such a city, but I can tell you that in mine the rare days it snows circulation is extremely chaotic, with people having slow paced crashes all over the place, and I'd wager AI is good enough to do that as well.

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

#146

Post by fouc »

lsc wrote: post #95
pure-awesome wrote: post #91

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?

I mean, we could call it an "artificial general intelligence" or we could call it a "generalized optimizer & problem solver"

So basically if we can have a system that can solve any problem thrown at it, that's essentially the AGI.

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

#147

Post by misterman0 »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #122
solidasparagus wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We might be headed for the trough of disillusionment, but in terms of technology and industry applications, we are still in the early phase of modern AI (big data + ML).

I'm doing a bit of hiring at the moment. It's hard to find a single CV which doesn't have some kind of machine learning slant. As much as I think there are plenty of advances in ML left to take, I doubt every graduate will step out into a good application for existing machine learning tools.

Just like not all astrophysicists reach Nobel prize level achievements not all machine-learning graduates will innovate in their field. But to help you out, in order to find people who are likely to innovate, find out if that is their goal. If it is not then you know not to hire them. But if that's their goal, maybe start some kind of "program" where you give these people a chance. 6 months. A year maybe. If the are close to something or if you're pleased with them even though they aren't really innovating, then give them a "tenure" so to speak.

An evaluation process, it's very common here in Sweden. I mean how much money can you really loose in six months? You can kick that shithole straight out day one if that's your perogative. It's a good deal for both parties.

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

#148

Post by toxik »

ecmascript wrote: post #129

I think honestly think westworld (yes the tv-series) has the best explanation of why general intelligence is a hard problem to solve. They mention consciousness but I think the same apply to intelligence in general. Humans in my mind aren't different from say a program you write except that we have a lot more input and possible outputs depending on a much larger variant of external variables. If we could build machin…

I find this analysis reductionist. You're basically saying "brains aren't hard to reproduce once you have biological sensors and actuators." Why not? They're _extremely_ delicate, intricate organs.

Claim 2 is also a difficult one: of course you can easily claim consciousness doesn't exist, but it is impossible to argue by logic. You need a metaphysical philosophical framework, and then it's already left the realm of empirically observable truths.

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

#149

Post by lsc »

misterman0 wrote: post #133
pure-awesome wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

>Tens of thousands of people comprehend Einstein's work. It used to be hundreds. We're smart as shit these days.

In some ways, I feel like this is the real singularity. This trend towards feeding and offering education to everyone. Like, it used to be that to be an intellectual, you'd need to be born rich to get the free time and education. I mean, being born rich still helps, sure, but a lot more people are getting a shot.

On the other hand, it's a process that levels off at some point, like everything else. The population is leveling off; as we bring education and leisure time to more and more of the world, eventually most of the people who have the capability to do this sort of thing will have done it.

I mean, I see that with computers, too... like with the leveling out of Moore's law; exponential processes, in nature, tend to not remain exponential.

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

#150

Post by Iv »

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 may have a definition that is a bit vague but I find it unfair to say that you can call any black box "AI". (Though I'll gladly grant artistic license to your specific example)

I was recently asked to make a very simple introduction to AI. It made me think a bit as I have been annoyed at the confusion between ML and AI that is so frequent nowadays.

I proposed that AI started with Turing's hypothesis that brains are Turing machines and that AI was the field that tries to bring human capacities to computers.

My next slide says "AI is not really a field. It is more of a goal and a theme. And now a set of techniques used in many different fields."

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