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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.

#181

Post by visarga »

Thorentis wrote: post #14
povertyworld wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it's true the AI hype is getting a bit overboard, couldn't one make the argument that humans, and to a lesser extent other animals, are just a collection responses to pattern recognition like when I see a thing that looks like this I should eat it, but when I see a thing that sounds like that I should run away? After all, what is common sense but "believe it when I see it" type thinking which is most certainly…

Sure, one could make that argument. But suggesting that we are close to creating a general intelligence on-par with humans is entirely unfounded. Even if we assume that the only thing differentiating humans from other forms of intelligence (including artificial neural networks) is more pattern to learn, then that still requires data sets millions if not billions the size of what we currently have. Plus, we know very…

> a general intelligence on-par with humans

Humans aren't general intelligences. We're good at things that make us survive, and that's about it. We're not good at 'general' problems, it takes us decades or hundreds of years of small steps and theories, and we may never find the answer. Most of us can't even grasp the fine nuances of math and physics, even after 12-16 years of education. Look at how hard it is for us to even imagine quantum and relativistic effects, or 5-dimensional geometry.

Consider how long it took us to create germ theory of disease and how many of us died without raising to the challenge of understanding the cause. Look at what we believed about nature just 500 years ago. Humans without the larger system of culture, society, industry, lots of time and resources, can't do much. AI will inherit our tech, culture and scientific advances right from the start.

There is a limit to how intelligent a system can become, and this limit is given by the complexity of the survival problem and the environment. You don't become smarter than the problems you have to deal with require. And environments don't evolve exponentially, so AI won't evolve exponentially fast either. Evolution is a series of sigmoids, not an exponential, and there can never be really exponential processes in nature, there's always an upper limit.

I'd say it would be enough to have AI that can survive by itself and sustain us along with it, instead of AGI.

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

#182

Post by nineteen999 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #97
atoav wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that the parent comment wrote interpret music not make it. I am a musician and there were already impressive algorithmic compositions in the 70s using Markov chains, and today we use machine learning to create something that resembles the works of J.S. Bach. But how is that creativity? Creativity means coming up with new and interesting things (and fair enough many musicians make quite uncreative decisions all t…

Creativity and purposeful manipulation of human emotions are orthogonal concerns, even if often bundled together under the term "creativity" in context of arts. To disentangle them I propose a simple test: take these 'impressive algorithmic compositions that resemble the works of J.S. Bach' and play them to people, telling them they were composed by a gifted human. Then ask what they think of their creativity, and of…

> Creativity and purposeful manipulation of human emotions are orthogonal concerns, even if often bundled together under the term "creativity" in context of arts.

No, absolutely not, I disagree. If we know that a piece of music is generated by software algorithms, it instantly loses any real meaning.

> To disentangle them I propose a simple test: take these 'impressive algorithmic compositions that resemble the works of J.S. Bach' and play them to people, telling them they were composed by a gifted human. Then ask what they think of their creativity, and of emotions the author intended to communicate.

The problem here is you are lying to people in order to achieve an effect. Deception has been known to cause a significant backlash amongst music fans [1]

There are enough music fans out there that will honestly want to know whether the music was created by a human or a computer program. If it ever becomes common place that procedurally generated music is misrepresented as the works of a human or group of humans, then there is a large segment of the population that will turn their noses up, and only listen to live music, where it is apparent that the music is performed by humans.

The rest of the audience, meh, if they want to hear meaning in music composed by machines, that's their prerogative I suppose. Most people I know who actually play instruments or sing are appalled by the idea, or at best, slightly bemused.

I will assert, those who have never stepped away from their computer keyboard long enough to have taken a deep breath, stood in front of a microphone, plucked an electric guitar at high volume or smashed drum skins with sticks in front of a live audience of 100 to 1000 cheering people may just be incapable of understanding this. The feeling in the air can be electric.

Humans connecting with other humans through the creation and reception of music will never be correctly emulated or simulated through silicon, no matter how good the facsimile.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milli_Vanilli

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

#183

Post by z3phyr »

EliRivers wrote: post #142
misterman0 wrote: post #60

Earlier 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…

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.

So get whatever intelligence human have in computers. That was the goal. Call it general intelligence or call it x.

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

#184

Post by blablabla123 »

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…

But also the whole concept of AI is so deeply fascinating and even frightening to people that maybe there is no other way than to buy into this. Once it happens, everybody wants to be a part of it ;)

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

#185

Post by z3phyr »

w0utert wrote: post #89
Quekid5 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose it's a subset of "well defined rules", but it's worth calling out explicitly, I think: Chess also has an objective (and trivially verifiable) win condition. There are few interesting situations in real life where such a thing exists.

In that regard, AlphaGo is a lot more impressive, not just because it is a vastly more complex problem to find a loss function for playing Go (compared to chess), but also because AlphaGo basically learned to play the game by itself without even having a model of the game rules initially (or so I've heard). That said, I would still not consider it anything like generalized AI, if only because the set of possible (val…

Now I want AlphaGo to teach me. Verbally. Like humans do.

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

#186

Post by laichzeit0 »

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.

Drive it in manual mode like we do right now? I mean even an autonomous car that could handle 80% of normal driving just fine would be great. And by 80% I'm talking about driving on a freeway without crashing into a barrier in broad daylight.

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

#187

Post by sjy »

bjourne wrote: post #153
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…

The first "AI winter" happened in the 60's. In 1949 Warren Weaver published a memorandum outlining his plan for universal machine translation. He likened the problem to cryptography, a field that had exploded due to WWII, and thought it would be solved in a few years. In hindsight, we know that his ideas were very naive but Weaver was an influential and charismatic person so they inspired lots researchers. They also…

It feels harsh to call him naïve because I'm sure I wouldn't have had any more insight, but it is surprising how little we knew about the science of language pre-Chomsky, considering that we have been learning languages for millions of years. Now that we have had several generations of computer technology fall short of the abilities of human translators, it seems obvious that you're probably not going to be able to write a machine translation program on a computer with a few megabytes of memory.

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

#188

Post by 0815test »

atoav wrote: post #51
pfisch wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How long until we could assemble an orchestra of computers that can interpret sheet music with feeling well enough to impress a human audience? I think AIs making music will come long before AAA games and movies, both of which encompass music as an art and then throw in like another 5 artistic pursuits on top. I think AIs will be making music inside 10-20 years or less. Honestly I think it could happen in like 1-2…

Note that the parent comment wrote interpret music not make it. I am a musician and there were already impressive algorithmic compositions in the 70s using Markov chains, and today we use machine learning to create something that resembles the works of J.S. Bach. But how is that creativity? Creativity means coming up with new and interesting things (and fair enough many musicians make quite uncreative decisions all t…

> To think we managed to solve composition by scrambling together some melodies from an input of thousand melodies and thinking we are done with the hardest part is hubris at it’s best.

To me, that's missing the point. The output of systems like BachBot and DeepBach is musically interesting precisely because of how weird and serendipitous the results of that "scrambling together" are. IOW, it's not just scrambling, but scrambling that manages to learn and preserve at least the short-term structures that we associate with "music". (That's a big improvement over simple Markov models.) It's nowhere near what humans would make, same as a picture of an actual dog is not similar to what the DeepDream network outputs as "dog-like" - but it's already interesting in its own right.

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

#189

Post by throwaway287391 »

> In this way, Dynamic Yield is part of a generation of companies whose core technology, while extremely useful, is powered by artificial intelligence that is roughly as good as a 24-year-old analyst at Goldman Sachs with a big dataset and a few lines of Adderall. For the last few years, startups have shamelessly re-branded rudimentary machine-learning algorithms as the dawn of the singularity, aided by investors and analysts who have a vested interest in building up the hype. Welcome to the artificial intelligence bullshit-industrial complex.

As an AI researcher, I think a lot of people are a little too sensitive to the term "AI" and make a lot of big assumptions upon hearing it. It's a very general term that doesn't really imply any particular degree of complexity or sophistication. Labeling simple machine learning algorithms and heuristics as "AI" isn't at all unique to this era of hype that began in the last ~5 years -- rather that's how the term has been used in academia for many decades. If you took a college class called "AI" or looked up some of the most popular textbooks on AI [1], you'd find that a lot of it is dedicated to search algorithms (breadth-first, depth-first, A*), linear classifiers, and feature engineering. If you think "artificial intelligence" is a bad name for these things, fine -- but don't blame the recent wave of hype, this is what the term AI means and has pretty much always meant. So go ahead and call your startup's linear regression "AI", and if the VCs leap to fund you under the impression that it means you'll be behind the singularity, that's on them. AI != deep learning. AI != AGI.

[1] e.g., "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" by Russell and Norvig

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

#190

Post by minikites »

michalu wrote: post #156
mikk14 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

With 90% of modern art, the "point they're trying to make" is whatever is the most convenient at the occasion. For the artists themselves rarely know as modern art is as much a BS-industrial complex as the AI.

Art is more complicated than that and your dismissive attitude misses the point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67EKAIY43kg
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