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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.

#161

Post by visarga »

AstralStorm wrote: post #127
TomVDB wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment reminds me of this xkcd cartoon: https://xkcd.com/1425/ It's 5 years old now (coincidentally the time span quoted to develop a solution), but recognizing a bird was already considered a solved problem 3 years ago, less than 2 years after the publication of the cartoon. Predicting the future is hard.

Surprisingly, recognizing a bird is much harder when you count rare species and running birds. Thus, sparse data. Does it recognize penguins too? AIs today still fail at it. Some folks were trying to train one to match endangered species and they had to pull mighty tricks to have some 70% accuracy. I think it was here on HN some time ago, but can't recall a link.

And yet, average humans can classify even fewer species.

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

#162

Post by swebs »

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…

>all that counts is that you call it AI even if it is a simple algorithm

Is that incorrect though? I think a lot of people here are making a lot of assumptions about a very vague and ill-defined term. To me it seems like AI is just a way of saying that a program is capable of making decisions. There is no implicit tie-in to machine learning or neural networks or anything like that. These decisions can come from 5 lines of "if" statements (as is the case with most video game AI).

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

#163

Post by visarga »

atoav wrote: post #44
roenxi wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> perfect information game, finite problem space, well defined rules Chess isn't reality, but the things you list are all mostly things that humans can't deal with either. Take imperfect information - humans can't make decisions using information they don't have any more than machines can. Humans certainly can't deal with the infinite (and their approximations to do so are probably measurably worse than those a compu…

I remember when I was a teenager: a moonless night in the woods and my bicycle light was broken. It was so dark that I literally couldn’t see my hand in front of me. I could drive (slowly) because I knew that part of the street by hard and I knew there is a gravel patch on each side of the road. So I every time I entered gravel from the left I just turned a little more to the right and vice versa. And I knew I entere…

Probably have the common sense to stop. It's a trivial test case.

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

#164

Post by dboreham »

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…

Agreed (with the analysis, not necessarily that we're anywhere close to achieving GAI). Nice to finally see proof that John Searle was 100% wrong with his assertion that intelligence couldn't possibly be algorithmic though.

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

#165

Post by dspillett »

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…

Dubiously claiming "I" have worked for many humans in many walks of life, I don't see dubiously claiming "AI" as much different!

A key problem is that AI is a very wide and vague concept.

What she might have is a simple "expert system", which a lot of systems called AI in the 80s were and many today probably are too, monitoring the inputs, and she may have programmed that initially in its knowledge acquisition phase with the aid of a machine learning arrangement. That would qualify as "using AI" depending on which interpretation of "AI" you are working by. An expert system can be called a rudimentary AI, and could be implemented as simple combinatorial logic if new learning during operation is not needed.

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

#166

Post by mbeex »

benreesman wrote: post #159

If everyone sophisticated enough to be on this site would just use the term “applied computational statistics” (even just in their own thoughts) instead of “deep learning” or AI, the world would be a better place. Gradient descent finds some fun minimia (my current venture is heavily based on that idea) but to assign more agency to Adam or RMSProp than they merit is just an exercise in feeding the trolls.

Couldn’t agree more. All these delusional discussions: Is it intelligence? Is it true intelligence? How far is it to become true...? Skynet rising?

To be fair: The last question is certainly adequate regarding the application of unverified/-able algorithms in a life-changing incarnation as a virtually unsupervised decision making quality. This is horrible. But it is another question (and better answered skipping the pseudo-philosphical part)

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

#167

Post by dboreham »

mattigames wrote: post #22

Everything is bullshit until is not, humans were talking about transportation without using animal forces for decades before it became a reality, and a lot of people were highly skeptical of such thing being even possible until it actually happened in 1804 (first steam train), same thing happens with Artificial Intelligence, and we are in such uncharted territory that someone could say AGI is just 10 years away and s…

Your example isn't quite as it seems : "trains" (cars running on rails) were used in mining for hundreds of years prior. The steam engine was first documented in 1698. What happened in 1804 was someone figured out the manufacturing processes to make a steam engine light enough and powerful enough to usefully pull a train of cars over some reasonable distance.

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

#168

Post by kaolti »

Barrin92 wrote: post #154

In my opinion the term intelligence itself is misplaced for machine learning tasks. Every problem that is solved with ML and "big data" appears to me to be a perception problem (which wouldn't be surprising because the mechanism is inspired by human vision, not cognition, which it lends itself to naturally). As a specific example, a few months ago or so openai released their text generation tool and branded it as "to…

I agree. Extracting meaning is NOT a math problem, meaning comes from the human context and context is infinite. Hence different humans extract different meanings.

I think AI and ML are great for processing large amounts of data and looking for patterns. Patterns on their own don't mean anything though, it's always up to us to interpret them.

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

#169

Post by Majestic121 »

cm2187 wrote: post #158
Majestic121 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My understanding is that AI has different failure modes. If it doesn't see the road, it might not realise it doesn't see the road and just go off road. It's not necessarily going to react like a reasonable human.

I see your point, and it's indeed valid : I do remember a tesla crash where the autopilot simply followed an old line on the road instead of the regular one, thinking all was fine until it hit a column, killing the passenger.

But in this specific case of snow, I think this could be handled in a decent way by AI, as I would not expect snow conditions to be too hard to detect. Even something like "grip is not good enough for autopilot/snow detected on/around the road, stop on the side or slow down to the point of being impossible to have a fatal car crash until driver takes over" would be good enough.

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

#170

Post by nl »

AstralStorm wrote: post #136
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.

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.

I'm a bit unclear if this is supposed to be a definition of intelligence.

Stephen Hawking would fail this test, but no one would argue he isn't intelligent.

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