Earlier quoted context omitted.
...that should really be quantum computing right now.
Quantum will be the next 'AI', like blockchain was the last one. :-)
What about the quantum blockchain?
The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
251–260 of 384 posts
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#252At 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…
> Backpropagation, which most researchers will agree is an AI algorithm, is a "simple algorithm".
As time rolls on and we see more articles like this one calling out the "AI BS" - which I agree should be called out...
I worry that a new "winter" will set in, and funding will be cut, and research towards how biological neural networks actually work vis-a-vis artificial neural networks will suffer.
Because from what I understand, we currently don't know how such biological networks actually "learn" - because there isn't a "mechanism" for backpropagation to occur.
IIRC, there's still questions on how information is propagated through biological networks; our artificial representations of them are constrained to approximately a single dimension of the real thing (and even that doesn't capture the biology, thus the idea of "spiking neural networks") - but there may be other avenues of information diffusion that are important as well, still to be revealed in the biological makeup.
We know for certain we are missing something fundamental, when even if you could scale up some of today's best deep learning systems to data center scale won't approximate anything close to what goes on in the human brain, given the size and power constraints.
Figuring this out could be set back, when funding becomes scarce once more.
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#253This reminds me of the article the other day about the internet being an SEO wasteland
Basically our business networks run the same way (not a shock at all): sycophants spam aristocratic investors with half assed bullshit solutions to juice the odds of hooking one
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
>Maybe its time to change definitions or terms.
Nah, I prefer having something to keep me cynical and disappointed every time another "cutting-edge AI" application comes out. As a research community, we should be held accountable for our failures to achieve the real shit, the full-on Charles Stross vision.
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#255This is no different than anything else. You hype what you're working on so people get interested and throw money at you.
AR/VR glasses, AI, self driving cars, it's all the same. You generate interest, make lots of money and who cares if it ever gets to market.
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#256I totally agree with the gist of this article. This hype is being propagated by a lot of folks who are willingly clueless, as for example, in the data science crowd. This band-wagon is crowded and isn’t stopping any time soon.
It irks me to no end to comme across tutorial-style articles proclaiming to teach an AI algorithm, also known as ‘linear regression’.
What bugs me the most though, are the countless ‘influencers’ on LinkedIn which spew rubbish about machine learning, AI and all the wonderful things that are just around the corner.
Lastly, it doesn’t help when countless articles/books are written on the subject of AI dangers, AI ethics and are ‘robots coming for us?’. These add fuel to the fire of hype.
In the end, this behavior will only guarantee the eventual blowing-up of the bubble, when promises are not delivered.
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
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-throu…
While I don't doubt what you saw or your explanation/interpretation of the project (that is, what was likely a BS application of the terminology), it should be understood that such a system could in theory be constructed.
It is possible, for instance, to implement a small neural network on a regular Arduino; a simple google search for "arduino neural network" should yield some information. It would be a small step from there to interfacing such an implementation to something else as part of an art project.
Again, I am not doubting your story; I just wanted to point out that what appears to be a simple system could very well have an actual artificial intelligence aspect to it, even given the seemingly unreasonable processing constraints of an Arduino.
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#258This 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…
These are made up numbers, but I use this to explain the scale to people. If it costs $1Bn to reach 80%, it'll take another $100Bn to reach 90%. There isn't enough money to reach 100% for two reasons. 1) You can't get to 100% and 2) It will take so long people lose interest. You can't sustain the hype that long.
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#259In 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…
In the text generation tool outlined above (and indeed many of the convnet-based visual networks), the hidden layers are there precisely to extract 'meaning'. The lower layers (closer to the source input) deal with syntax and feed upwards to hidden layers that extract semantic features, which in turn feed upwards to more layers, each with a bigger overview of the semantic features and thus ultimately the context. Tha…
>the hidden layers are there precisely to extract 'meaning
That is just wishful thinking, no? I mean, there is no particular reason to think that the hidden layers will actually do this with any high degree of success.
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#260Everything 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…
Unless you believe the Kurzweil argument that we will figure what is needed from reverse engineering the human brain in which case you guestimate a timeline.