The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I. • Hacker News Board

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

#261

Post by patrick5415 » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 1:52 PM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #225

patrick5415 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>- lidar at night works just fine at night Yes, let’s rely on a single sensor. > - plenty of cities with no or very little snow But plenty of city have plenty of snow. So perhaps not a deal breaker in a limited set of circumstances. > - construction zones: blacklisting, remote monitoring & manual mapping, detection of cones, barriers, re-painted lanes Why should we add to already high construction costs just because…

Why shouldn't surrounding infrastructure adapt a bit for self-driving cars? Look at everything that had to change for railroads, cars, and airplanes. If railroads were invented today they would never be allowed. They can't stop for miles? You have to teach everyone everywhere to stay off the tracks? How's that supposed to work? It's good that our safety standards are a lot higher today for new tech, but perhaps there…

Honestly? Because I see self driving cars as expensive toys for rich people[1], and I don’t feel like spending tax dollars or making other concessions to subsidize that.

I think the analogy to railroads is a bit tenuous. There are immediate benefits to connecting two sufficiently separated points with a rail line. A single stretch of properly marked and instrumented roadway is relatively worthless[1].

[1] Trucking being a potential exception.

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

#262

Post by tim333 » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 1:53 PM UTC

waynecochran wrote: post #9

Getting ready for the next AI winter.... this is a cyclic phenomena.

Or the singularity. Then it isn't.

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

#263

Post by cirgue » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 1:57 PM UTC

There is a massive positive, though, for the 'geeks building the future": AI is where everyone else is looking. If you know where you should be looking, you have a decisive advantage over the rest of the market.

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

#264

Post by cr0sh » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 2:01 PM UTC

Wiretrip wrote: post #141

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).

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.

I don't know if this is against HN "rules" - but I'm going to give you an explanation anyhow.

I downvoted one of your comments that was essentially a cut-and-paste of this comment here; I have noticed that you have done this more than once here within the comments.

Please refrain from doing this; it seems to add nothing but noise to the conversation. If you believe your commentary has merit within the context of the thread at hand, do your best to restate that opinion in an original manner, not by simply copying and repeating the exact same statement.

I hope this explanation clarifies why I downvoted you; I believe your comment does have merit to the discussion as a whole, but posting it once should be enough to reach the audience with it's intended message.

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

#265

Post by bombingwinger » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 2:05 PM UTC

cirgue wrote: post #263

There is a massive positive, though, for the 'geeks building the future": AI is where everyone else is looking. If you know where you should be looking, you have a decisive advantage over the rest of the market.

Doesn’t your last sentence go for literally everything?

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

#266

Post by goatlover » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 2:11 PM UTC

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…

> Extrapolating the trend of the last 30 years, there is evidence that computers will be able to solve every task a human can using pattern matching. If that isn't AGI, it might turn out to be better than intelligence.

Only if the trend lasts and is applicable to every human task. Those are pretty big assumptions.

> If someone finds an objective function for deciding what decision parameters are important AGI could be upon us very quickly.

And if that function doesn't exist, because the real world (not a board game) is messy, dynamic and complex?

> As a postcript, I think people radically overestimate human intelligence.

Individually maybe, but as a group we're pretty damn impressive. I think you're radically underestimating the species. But this has been the case for strong AI proponents since the 1950s. AGI is always 20 years and one good algorithm away.

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

#267

Post by tempodox » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 2:12 PM UTC

Wiretrip wrote: post #139

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…

So true. The real danger with 'AI' at the moment is the 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.

> ...premature deployment of half-baked parlour tricks...

And the “fake it till you make it” attitude in SV only makes this worse.

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

#268

Post by cr0sh » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 2:13 PM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #223

sjy wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Did you mean post-Chomsky? It's my understanding that machine translation started to become semi-useful after abandoning traditional grammars (or anything Chomsky would recognize) and switched to statistics.

> It's my understanding that machine translation started to become semi-useful after abandoning traditional grammars...and switched to statistics.

What's curious about this statement (and forgive me if I am in error here; I am not extremely familiar with the machine translation field) is that the community chose to go down the route of "traditional grammars" and their rules, for the purposes of translation, rather than down the route of statistics to begin with.

Because as it was noted, this happened after WW2 and the advances in cryptography, which were by and large also driven by statistical analysis and other similar mathematically based advances; one would think that such insights would have carried over into the machine translation realm.

But they didn't - which is simply a curious historical footnote. It's also something we see often in history - particularly as it relates to technological advances; that there are certain paths that are taken that lead to virtual dead-ends decades later, but which the path that should have been taken was presaged by earlier work, yet for one reason or another wasn't pursued.

If we only had a way to avoid such "wrong turns", we could be much further along technologically - but of course, that would also be tantamount to "telling the future"...almost.

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

#269

Post by goatlover » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 2:15 PM UTC

ecmascript wrote: post #202

dspillett wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So you think experience is itself an illusion? When you kick a rock and feel pain, you're not really experiencing pain? Is the rock also an illusion?

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

#270

Post by eli_gottlieb » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 2:18 PM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #110

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?

Like the intellectual equivalent of a beast of burden - good at solving open problems by (apparently) intuiting connections and making inferences, probably with the appearance of creative operation and experimental learning, but lacking any genuine desire or personal agency. IMO this is much more plausible as AGI than some kind of mythical general meta-intelligence that has a virtual soul. I don't see why consciousne…

Besides which, consciousness and agency are two different things, damnit! I've got a github repo in which I train agents by policy optimization. I have no illusions that my Pytorch models are conscious.