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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.

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Art is not complicated at all. Art marketers and pseudo-artists like to make it complicated to keep the "contemporary art" scam alive and profitable. That's because real art, like anything (engineering, piano, sports) takes years and years of hard work to perfect the skill which gives the ability to translate your ideas into something beautiful and self-explanatory (when you don't need to be expert to "understand the…

There's a lot of bullshit around art in general; it's not limited to modern art. If we only cared about the quality of the work, then a perfect forgery of da Vinci's style would be valued exactly as much as an original da Vinci.

I can't agree with the idea that art has to be technically difficult to be "real." If a simple, abstract sculpture gives me more joy than a portrait from a great master, that doesn't mean my understanding is defective. (Nor is yours if you disagree.) Meaning isn't limited to what the creator says it is, either.

People are obsessed with nailing down a precision definition of "art," and it always turns out to be "the stuff I like, but not that crap you like."

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

#342
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.

Not necessarily. The main example (that stuck with me) of AI in books I read as a kid 35 yrs ago was the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. Now I think that was eerily prescient.

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

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Art is not complicated at all. Art marketers and pseudo-artists like to make it complicated to keep the "contemporary art" scam alive and profitable. That's because real art, like anything (engineering, piano, sports) takes years and years of hard work to perfect the skill which gives the ability to translate your ideas into something beautiful and self-explanatory (when you don't need to be expert to "understand the…

There's a lot of bullshit around art in general; it's not limited to modern art. If we only cared about the quality of the work, then a perfect forgery of da Vinci's style would be valued exactly as much as an original da Vinci. I can't agree with the idea that art has to be technically difficult to be "real." If a simple, abstract sculpture gives me more joy than a portrait from a great master, that doesn't mean my…

I take your point on joy, and art perhaps has a broader spectre, like music. I can enjoy nice simple pop song but I don't confuse with Chopin.

On technical level. I disagree. There's a difference.

A piano player that plays a flawless Beethoven, is not Beethoven because there's a difference between the ability to compose and ability to play a composed piece.

And so it is with your analogy of Da Vinci vs. forgery.

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

#344
post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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". Back-propogation is not an "AI" algorithm. You are ironically doing exactly what this article is about.

This is not serious : back-propogation is the origin point of modern AI. This is the algorithm that powers the deep network revoultion. It's not the end point, it's not a magic box, but it is fundamentally an AI algorithm.

Just saying "no it isn't" is just not helpful or useful.

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

#345
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…

If navigating the world were that easy we wouldn't be (non-A)GI. The bulb on the end of our spine doesn't use 1/5th of our oxygen (or whatever huge amount it is) intake because it makes our foreheads look sexy. An auto-auto (I'm using that term unabashedly for "self-driving cars", you can too) has to be able to perceive and understand that the car in the next lane with the mattress poorly tied down might, at any mome…

That bulb is there because of politics, and because speak sounds sexy. There are many animals capable of navigating the world even better than us (most fly, for obvious reasons) that don't have anything near the size of our brains.

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

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, may…

Whatever human intelligence is, there's clearly some part of it that can do things like design computers and build houses. That part, at least, people would like to be able to match in performance using machines. It's 'intelligence' in the sense of being able to do things like think up clever strategies in novel environments that people want to put in a silicon box.

If that is the goal, it's certainly not what the current batch of machine-learning and hype-train riders are chasing. They (or at least, the ones doing it via huge training sets) seem to be working on the very opposite of novel environment situations. I wonder if anyone is seriously pursuing that.

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

#347
post #344
post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Backpropagation, which most researchers will agree is an AI algorithm, is a "simple algorithm". Back-propogation is not an "AI" algorithm. You are ironically doing exactly what this article is about.

This is not serious : back-propogation is the origin point of modern AI. This is the algorithm that powers the deep network revoultion. It's not the end point, it's not a magic box, but it is fundamentally an AI algorithm. Just saying "no it isn't" is just not helpful or useful.

You are missing the entire point of the article if you continue to call these algorithms "AI". Inflating simple things like this to mean "AI" has led to the term being meaningless.

You are the example it is making.

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

#348
post #17
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…

I don't know when your dad used to say that, but any researcher from the 50's would quickly tell you that Chess is just a giant tree search problem.

We have a huge number of unsolved pattern matching problems around, so AI still has a lot of value to bring. But we don't have that much evidence that it suffices for everything.

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

#349

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…

>> 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…

That's exactly what they thought in the 1950s and 1960s 1970s and 1980s. And oh by the way, our brightest minds were working on it then too.
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