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The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
311–320 of 384 posts
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
AGI as discussed by people working on it is closer to the Ship than to Data. The defining thing about AGI is that can figure its way around arbitrary challenges just like humans do, but not necessarily the same way humans do. There's a concept called "orthogonality thesis" that tells you that intelligence and values are orthogonal. That is, there's no reason why a powerful enough AI would have to develop values simil…
> not really caring about you or knowing anything about being alive other than the priorities built into its software". Is that really "general" intelligence, then? I would argue we don't know today whether consciousness and agency are separable from general intelligence. You could say that "general intelligence" implies some degree of intelligence on any topic, which would include self-reflection and metacognition.…
I believe it is. I'm also not describing a p-zombie, since I find the whole concept of p-zombies utter nonsense.
The general AI I described would have self-reflection, agency and arguably consciousness, yet - per orthogonality thesis - it may not have anything resembling human values.
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#313In 1949, some years after the invention of neural networks, Norbert Weiner, one of the leading minds of the time, was convinced that AI (AGI as you may call it) or a full understanding of the brain is no more than five years away. Alan Turing thought Weiner was delusional, and that it may take as much as fifty years. Seventy years later, we are nowhere near insect-level intelligence. I don't see any fundamental barri…
> Seventy years later, we are nowhere near insect-level intelligence. That's arguable: For instance, we have the entire connectome of c. elegans mapped out; we can easily simulate it, and it seems to act the same as the actual nematode. So, in one sense, we are at that level. However, we still have no clue how such a simple system actually works to produce the level of "intelligence" it has. So in that sense, we're n…
> We can easily simulate it.
To my knowledge, this is nowhere near truth. They got it to wiggle by basically scripting muscle contractions, no neural networks are involved in the process. When you turn on the network, it does nothing. (And I love project, the idea and community behind it.)
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#314At 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…
AI may have a definition that is a bit vague but I find it unfair to say that you can call any black box "AI". (Though I'll gladly grant artistic license to your specific example) I was recently asked to make a very simple introduction to AI. It made me think a bit as I have been annoyed at the confusion between ML and AI that is so frequent nowadays. I proposed that AI started with Turing's hypothesis that brains ar…
Your definition is interesting. Unfortunately, we were discussing the definition used by the rest of humanity. Which is complete gibberish.
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
> not really caring about you or knowing anything about being alive other than the priorities built into its software". Is that really "general" intelligence, then? I would argue we don't know today whether consciousness and agency are separable from general intelligence. You could say that "general intelligence" implies some degree of intelligence on any topic, which would include self-reflection and metacognition.…
I believe it is. I'm also not describing a p-zombie, since I find the whole concept of p-zombies utter nonsense. The general AI I described would have self-reflection, agency and arguably consciousness, yet - per orthogonality thesis - it may not have anything resembling human values.
So like, a sociopath, then? I guess we do know that those can exist.
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#316>> Deep learning algorithms have proven to be better than humans at spotting lung cancer, a development that if applied at scale could save more than 30,000 patients per year. It's not easy to scale deep learning because deep neural nets have a very strong tendency to overfit to their training dataset and are very bad at generalising outside their training dataset. In a medical context this means that, while a partic…
>>the same classifier will be much worse in the same task on images from a different hospital (or even from a different department in the same hospital).
Has anybody figured out why this is the case? Could it be socioeconomic factors? Or the presence of different toxic pollutants across different communities?
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
The downside of statistical models has always been understanding and explaining why they do whatever they do. Any statistical model will generate a result, either right or wrong, but it's impracticable to figure out how it came up with that result: the only knob you have is training data.
"Symbolic" techniques are the usual first choice because in order to get them to work reasonably well (i.e. beyond the 60%-80% threshold), you have to understand what they're doing.
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#318> 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…
> 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.
Absolutely false. It just seems that way because you read biased research and articles.
There's a boatload of problems that cannot be solved with pattern matching and tree search. Even really simple ones.
One example is estimating/predicting binomial proportions adequately.
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#319Earlier 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…
You also have night vision and radar to detect metal objects. Plus sound which is still barely utilized besides Doppler. Ultimately humans cannot match the senses of an automated car, the problem is in processing and integrating. Which we are pretty far away from solving in a general case.
I'm not so sure about that. For one thing, unless they've changed a lot more than I think they have since the last time I got to fool with one myself, the sensors have very limited range. Take a look at the screens displaying "what the car sees" in this self-promotion video from Waymo:
https://youtu.be/B8R148hFxPw?t=148
What the car is in essence doing is driving by GPS and maps while staring at its feet. It is not as bad as driving with your eyes closed, but it's not that much better.
Further, some of the infrastructure it is relying on, like lane markings, are very poorly maintained.
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Gonna suck for those people who don't own cars and are relying on the fleets of privately-owned pseudo-taxis.