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The A.I. Revolution Is On

wired.com

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Re: The A.I. Revolution Is On

#11

Post by jacquesm »

Way to go wired, an article with a bunch of references to things that are definitely not AI, would not have been considered AI (even in the dark gray past) and that are not considered AI today even by those that would like to believe that an 'AI revolution' is on.

According to this article AI is just another way of saying 'the leading edge in real world interaction', from inventory control to (apparently) crappy search results that still need further interpretation. (google 'what is the color of grass' for a nice example of AI in action, any three year old would tell you 'green' is the answer, not a bunch of links).

The 'AI winter' was not brought on by a lack of progress or interesting results, it was mostly brought on by it being used as buzz word hyping the notion of AI long before even baby steps had been made in the field, and this article fits right in with the over-selling of AI. An ABS system is AI? Please.

As of now we do not know if there will ever be something that we would call an AI but just like with pornography, I'll know it when I see it, and an inventory control system, no matter how clever it appears is not it, especially not if it took a bunch of programmers to write.

I think the one thing that will set a true AI off against the background of wanna-be AI systems is that a true AI can be taught by non programmers to reason about the world around it and draw meaningful conclusions without external input. We are still - in my opinion at least - very far away from anything that comes close to that.

Learning is the key to AI, not programming.

Re: The A.I. Revolution Is On

#12

Post by mishmash »

jacquesm wrote: post #11

Way to go wired, an article with a bunch of references to things that are definitely not AI, would not have been considered AI (even in the dark gray past) and that are not considered AI today even by those that would like to believe that an 'AI revolution' is on. According to this article AI is just another way of saying 'the leading edge in real world interaction', from inventory control to (apparently) crappy sear…

> Learning is the key to AI, not programming.

And learning how to program will be the ultimate in AI.

Re: The A.I. Revolution Is On

#13

Post by themrbluesky »

jacquesm wrote: post #11

Way to go wired, an article with a bunch of references to things that are definitely not AI, would not have been considered AI (even in the dark gray past) and that are not considered AI today even by those that would like to believe that an 'AI revolution' is on. According to this article AI is just another way of saying 'the leading edge in real world interaction', from inventory control to (apparently) crappy sear…

but the Kiva system does learn.

Re: The A.I. Revolution Is On

#14

Post by Dn_Ab »

jacquesm wrote: post #11

Way to go wired, an article with a bunch of references to things that are definitely not AI, would not have been considered AI (even in the dark gray past) and that are not considered AI today even by those that would like to believe that an 'AI revolution' is on. According to this article AI is just another way of saying 'the leading edge in real world interaction', from inventory control to (apparently) crappy sear…

There is a joke that goes more or less that any sufficiently advanced AI is indistinguishable from 'just' statistics. But statistics (the unreasonable effectiveness of data) and the philosophy of probability are very profound topics that delve into the very fabric and nature of the universe. The same things keep appearing everywhere too. Bayesian networks and quantum mechanics. Entropy. Monte Carlo. So many.

I have a personal theory that we learn physical actions from statistical models more than modelling physical variables. Otherwise training how to do something as easy as a back flip (from a physics perspective) or flare would not be so hard.

Another problem is that nobody knows what the I part of AI is. So from the get go saying what AI is and isn't, is a failed experiment. I don't know what I is but i bet there are times you will know it when you see it and i won't. and vice versa. I also contend that modern systems do learn in a very basic sense. But I suspect we will also disagree on what learning is.

Re: The A.I. Revolution Is On

#15

Post by FooBarWidget »

carsongross wrote: post #8

Has A.I. figured out how to simulate humility yet? It certainly has a lot to be humble about... -A Systems Guy

I've seen a chat bot that's indistinguishable from a real human being. It reaches that goal by acting like a stupid and rude 12 year old kid who think he's cool and l33t.

  hey man
  wtf u talking about
  lololol wtf man ur dumb
  thats shit
  whatever
You can't tell whether he's really an annoying 12 years old or whether he's a bot.

Re: The A.I. Revolution Is On

#16

Post by _delirium »

flatline wrote: post #3

"The computers are in control, and we just live in their world" No, we are ostensibly in control, or at least the humans who know how to program and control this type of system are. Like any machine or complex system, it may fly out of our control, but it is not in some other entity's control at that point, it's just out of control. We're not to the point of facing a true artificial intelligence, yet...

It not under the control of a conscious entity which can flexibly formulate new goals, adapt to new tasks, etc. But under a loose definition you could say that quite a few large systems are under "an entity's control" in the sense that they have an internal set of procedures they're carrying out, criteria they use to make decisions, etc. It's a rather hardwired and unchanging entity, but in large (and especially old and incrementally grown) systems, what exactly it's doing and why might actually be somewhat opaque to the human operators.

It's basically a philosophical question what you want to call that, but I'm okay with at least metaphorically calling that a situation where "the machine is in control", because in a sense it "knows" what it's doing and carries it out, whereas the human operators have only a vague sense of what it's doing, and sometimes have to engage in software archaeology to figure it out and change anything.

(But yes, I wouldn't say that an "AI" is in charge of anything.)

Re: The A.I. Revolution Is On

#17

Post by _delirium »

jacquesm wrote: post #11

Way to go wired, an article with a bunch of references to things that are definitely not AI, would not have been considered AI (even in the dark gray past) and that are not considered AI today even by those that would like to believe that an 'AI revolution' is on. According to this article AI is just another way of saying 'the leading edge in real world interaction', from inventory control to (apparently) crappy sear…

Yeah, I think this has to do more with systems and who controls them, than with AI per se. As far as classic writing on human/machine interaction goes, it's less about the stuff that AI pioneers like John McCarthy and Alan Newell were writing, and more about the stuff that Ted Nelson was writing in Computer Lib, about the dangers of people's lives being significantly structured by computers they didn't understand and didn't know how to control.

Re: The A.I. Revolution Is On

#18

Post by paganel »

lukev wrote: post #6
flatline wrote: post #3

"The computers are in control, and we just live in their world" No, we are ostensibly in control, or at least the humans who know how to program and control this type of system are. Like any machine or complex system, it may fly out of our control, but it is not in some other entity's control at that point, it's just out of control. We're not to the point of facing a true artificial intelligence, yet...

Agreed. The mystification of what computers do is a worrying trend. For now, at least, computers can't do anything at all interesting or remarkable. They can, however, do boring things really really fast . And lots of boring things, done really really fast, can yield some pretty impressive results. But it doesn't change the fact that what computers actually do is utterly trivial. Anything interesting they achieve is…

> When computers are creative, when they start doing things that haven't been done before, without the direct programming of any human, then a computer can truly be said to be "in control."

I'm still dreaming about the day when a computer would be ironic. Or about when a computer-scientist would write a book similar to Freud's "Jokes and Their Relation to The Unconscious" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jokes_and_their_Relation_to_the...)

Re: The A.I. Revolution Is On

#19

Post by clay »

"Today’s AI doesn’t try to re-create the brain. Instead, it uses machine learning, massive data sets, sophisticated sensors, and clever algorithms to master discrete tasks."

The second sentence is basically my model for how the human brain works.

Re: The A.I. Revolution Is On

#20

Post by tbrownaw »

flatline wrote: post #3

"The computers are in control, and we just live in their world" No, we are ostensibly in control, or at least the humans who know how to program and control this type of system are. Like any machine or complex system, it may fly out of our control, but it is not in some other entity's control at that point, it's just out of control. We're not to the point of facing a true artificial intelligence, yet...

> We're not to the point of facing a true artificial intelligence, yet...

I expect we'll find one about the same time we find a true scotsman.

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