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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.

#201

Post by ecmascript »

toxik wrote: post #148
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…

No this is not what I am saying. I am saying it isn't some kind of magical thing going on that we can't replicate given enough technical progress and skills.

Yeah sure, but so is the claim for that consciousness does exist.

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

#202

Post by ecmascript »

dspillett wrote: post #177
toxik wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not sure the claim is that consciousness doesn't exist. More that it is an emergent property of complex systems rather than something that is (or can be) deliberately programmed.

Precisely. It's the complex system that gives us an illusion of consciousness. At least, that is what I naively believe in since there is a lack of evidence for anything else.

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

#203

Post by bumby »

lmm wrote: post #172
ak39 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No. But, as the parent post said, we don't always know why a human driver chose to act a certain way either. So that shouldn't be a blocker.

But we evolved to have empathy to help understand how humans act in the cases we don't have complete or good information.

This is why "crazy" people make us so uneasy. They don't fit our mental models for how a human should act. Would you be comfortable driving with a road full of unpredictable "crazies"?

I wonder if we'll ever have the same level of trust with AI as humans if it is still being used at a black box level.

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

#204

Post by EliRivers »

z3phyr wrote: post #183
EliRivers wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Human intelligence works well [0] from inside human shaped objects with human shaped biology, in human shaped societies, and to no small degree for doing human-style tasks.

I am not convinced that putting that human intelligence, whatever it is, into a silicon box will give us the results we hope for (or is even a sensible ambition, given the degree to which our intelligence is part of our biology).

[0] Actually, maybe it doesn't work really well - maybe it's a slow-motion car crash over millions of years. But it works well enough that we clearly want more of it.

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

#205

Post by robertAngst »

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…

Okay, but as much as we believe profitable companies are run by idiots, they arent. They need to stay profitable or create profit, so they hire technical managers that know that AI is really just finding uses for data.

All of tech is magic to the non-tech people.

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

#206

Post by atoav »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #198
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…

>> Accidentally (?) she managed to create the best representation of AI I have seen in art: all that counts is that you call it AI even if it is a simple algorithm. Backpropagation, which most researchers will agree is an AI algorithm, is a "simple algorithm". So are many other AI algorithms, some of which are simple enough to be understood so well that most people don't recognise them as AI anymore: search algorithm…

The point was that her PCB wasn’t connected to anything at all. She claimed there were pumps and sensors, but there was literally nothing. There were cables etc and it certainly would fool someone who has no idea of circuit design and electronics, but I happen to know a bit about it and the circuit almost certainly didn’t do what it claimed it did.

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

#207

Post by robertAngst »

DEADBEEFC0FFEE wrote: post #193
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…

Anyone who read science fiction as a youth, must surely cringe at the way AI is used. Its a barely disguised synonym of magic.

AI in 2019 is useful math + programming.

AI in books is impossible in 2019.

I don't cringe, but then again, my boss is really happy with the AI program I built. Maybe its time to change definitions or terms.

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

#208

Post by TeMPOraL »

nineteen999 wrote: post #182
TeMPOraL wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Which is kind of my point, so I feel we're at least partially in agreement.

The point I'm making is this: creativity in software is either easy to achieve, or near impossible, depending on what you really mean by the term "creativity".

If you have a piece of performance in front of you, and your judgement of whether or not it's "creative" changes when you learn whether the author was a human or a machine, then that "creativity" is impossible for machines by definition - and, frankly, it's also not worth talking about, because it does not depend on the author, but whether or not you consider the author human.

If, however, your opinion wouldn't change upon learning whether the author was human, that kind of creativity is trivial to achieve for machines - it involves relaxing the constraints of whatever algorithm is used to create the performance, and injecting some randomness into it.

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

#209

Post by Chris2048 »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #198
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…

>> Accidentally (?) she managed to create the best representation of AI I have seen in art: all that counts is that you call it AI even if it is a simple algorithm. Backpropagation, which most researchers will agree is an AI algorithm, is a "simple algorithm". So are many other AI algorithms, some of which are simple enough to be understood so well that most people don't recognise them as AI anymore: search algorithm…

Can back-propagation can't be used in total isolation (data, nnet), so by itself it isn't "AI", even if it is an "AI algorithm".

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

#210

Post by atoav »

dspillett wrote: post #165
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…

The thing is, her PCB wasn’t at all connected to the frame electrically. There were decoy cables but they were all connected back to the PCB as far as I could tell.

The remaining circuitry was way to simple for the claimed functionality. Basically a DIY arduino on a bigger PCB with a few leds.

Around the inner frame there was transparent silicone how her “sensors” should be able to get through that layer of see-through isolation without beeing seen themselves is beyond me.

This is why I think it is a work of fiction. I don’t know whether on purpose or because they thought nobody will notice. I certainly found it to be an interesting commentary on AI :)

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