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AI is mostly about curve fitting (2018)

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Re: AI is mostly about curve fitting (2018)

#91

Post by projektfu »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #68
ipsa wrote: post #33

"Machine learning" used to be a safe haven. You could flee there to escape the Terminators and brain-on-a-chip graphics. Business PR deliberately killed that. They wanted their ML algorithms to be refered to as AI, so they could fully ride the hype train. AI used to be a tight quirky community. Having the brain as inspiration led to all sorts of anthropomorphizing. This was ok. Researchers understood what was meant w…

What’s wrong with anthropomorphizing? I’ve noticed at least as many people under-anthropomorphize as over. People who seem obsessed with human exceptionalism and are personally offended at the idea that plants and animals (and computers!) might have subjective experiences like our own. But to me it seems obvious we are far more alike “lower” species than we are unlike them. I would say the cases of human exceptionali…

Anthropomorphizing is dangerous because it leads to metaphor that can both ascribe too much to the subject and create blind spots in the minds of researchers. Saying, for example, "Dogs want love," is fine for the owner but problematic for a researcher because love, as we understand it, is a human state. We'll never really understand what it means for a dog to feel loved. To the ethologist that is not to say that there are not similar emotional processes for dogs, it's to say that they cannot be understood by analogy to the human ones.

It's sort of like the color perception problem [1]. Dogs and machines do see colors, but what do they see?

1. https://newrepublic.com/article/121843/philosophy-color-perc...

Re: AI is mostly about curve fitting (2018)

#92

Post by shotashotashota »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #68
ipsa wrote: post #33

"Machine learning" used to be a safe haven. You could flee there to escape the Terminators and brain-on-a-chip graphics. Business PR deliberately killed that. They wanted their ML algorithms to be refered to as AI, so they could fully ride the hype train. AI used to be a tight quirky community. Having the brain as inspiration led to all sorts of anthropomorphizing. This was ok. Researchers understood what was meant w…

What’s wrong with anthropomorphizing? I’ve noticed at least as many people under-anthropomorphize as over. People who seem obsessed with human exceptionalism and are personally offended at the idea that plants and animals (and computers!) might have subjective experiences like our own. But to me it seems obvious we are far more alike “lower” species than we are unlike them. I would say the cases of human exceptionali…

They are both a problem, people do think human are somehow exceptional. We all agree that we are apes but none of us want to admit when we get horny in public.

But ML, AFAIK, is so simple; its literally a glorified polynomial functions. The only thing it get going for it is the large data set that we can train it on. It cannot "learn" anything from a small data set and extract any information out of it without a human imposing his/her knowledge on it.

For instance, take the concept of an even number. This simple knowledge is so powerful in solving algorithmic problems. But, its very hard to make a machine learn of this concept in general.

I think the problem is really overestimating how "intelligent" human are. We are only as intelligent with respect to our imagination. Its possible that there is an entire class of intelligent outside of our imagination that we cannot fully grasp its intelligent. Similarly, I am only conscious with respect to my own consciousness, but there may be another class of consciousness that is unimaginable to this monkey's brain.

Re: AI is mostly about curve fitting (2018)

#93

Post by ryeguy_24 »

lostmsu wrote: post #72
ryeguy_24 wrote: post #66

It was so refreshing to read the title of this article. This couldn’t be more true and timely. Everyone and their brother is talking about artificial intelligence and it’s frankly annoying at this point. These models are, simply put, just fancy interpolation/ extrapolation approaches.

And we are not?

Point taken. I don’t have a good response to that.

Re: AI is mostly about curve fitting (2018)

#94

Post by ethbro »

ben_jones wrote: post #62
ipsa wrote: post #33

"Machine learning" used to be a safe haven. You could flee there to escape the Terminators and brain-on-a-chip graphics. Business PR deliberately killed that. They wanted their ML algorithms to be refered to as AI, so they could fully ride the hype train. AI used to be a tight quirky community. Having the brain as inspiration led to all sorts of anthropomorphizing. This was ok. Researchers understood what was meant w…

Honest question, aren’t the consequences for “real” researchers keeping their heads down quite severe? Won’t we have important policy decisions both public and private and billions in funding misdirected for years when they could best be put elsewhere? Sure the “real” researchers will have easier access to funding, which perhaps is a key motivating factor to not push back on the hype, but isn’t there a large opportun…

Hasn't this almost always been true?

On the plus side, it makes it fairly easy to ask cocktail-party-caliber questions and quickly suss out whether you conversation partner knows what the hell they're talking about.

Re: AI is mostly about curve fitting (2018)

#95

Post by throwaway713 »

missosoup wrote: post #76
yk wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is basically what Chalmers argues in "Facing up the problem of consciousness." Basically, by the general approximation theorem, it is possible to find a neural network that acts externally precisely as you would, up to an arbitrarily small epsilon. However, one wonders if such a thing would be consciousness and if so, where does the consciousness sit, in the matrix multiplication or the graphics card. So, you ca…

There's no need for a supernatural explanation of consciousness. We are all p-zombies. Problem solved. The longer we refuse to acknowledge that consciousness is nothing special, the longer it will take to tackle this topic. The only reason we cling to the idea that our minds are somehow special compared to other animals of various complexity is because we refuse to acknowledge that consciousness might exist in someth…

You make a strong claim without anything to back it up. I don’t understand why it’s become trendy to deny that consciousness exists; to me it’s isomorphic to saying “We don’t actually exist at all. Prove me wrong.” It’s a vacuous statement, meant to sound evocative, but difficult to respond to in any meaningful way.

If I made a list of everything in order of how certain I am that the item on the list exists, consciousness would be at the top by far. Everything else could just be a nice illusion.

Re: AI is mostly about curve fitting (2018)

#98

Post by mattmcknight »

throwaway713 wrote: post #95
missosoup wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no need for a supernatural explanation of consciousness. We are all p-zombies. Problem solved. The longer we refuse to acknowledge that consciousness is nothing special, the longer it will take to tackle this topic. The only reason we cling to the idea that our minds are somehow special compared to other animals of various complexity is because we refuse to acknowledge that consciousness might exist in someth…

You make a strong claim without anything to back it up. I don’t understand why it’s become trendy to deny that consciousness exists; to me it’s isomorphic to saying “We don’t actually exist at all. Prove me wrong.” It’s a vacuous statement, meant to sound evocative, but difficult to respond to in any meaningful way. If I made a list of everything in order of how certain I am that the item on the list exists, consciou…

You falsely imply that the parent comment attempts "to deny that consciousness exists". What the parent comment actually says is "consciousness is nothing special" and "consciousness is a sliding scale rather than a binary property". These are different from non-existence.

Re: AI is mostly about curve fitting (2018)

#99

Post by mola »

ipsa wrote: post #33

"Machine learning" used to be a safe haven. You could flee there to escape the Terminators and brain-on-a-chip graphics. Business PR deliberately killed that. They wanted their ML algorithms to be refered to as AI, so they could fully ride the hype train. AI used to be a tight quirky community. Having the brain as inspiration led to all sorts of anthropomorphizing. This was ok. Researchers understood what was meant w…

This is currently true for almost all human endeavors. We're beset with PR people deliberately promoting misconceptions and out right lies. A recent article about "beewashing" is another good example of subverting human attention from real issues by over simplifying for the purpose of corporate PR. We are constantly bombarded by noise and lies so we won't be able to make sound and rational decision about anything. In recent years this transformed from a side effect of bottom line mentality to out right weaponization by powerful entities political and corporate.

Re: AI is mostly about curve fitting (2018)

#100

Post by EsssM7QVMehFPAs »

nextos wrote: post #71
account73466 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very well said. Also, curve fitting is not a corner case. Most relevant and intelligent things we care about can be solved with "just" curve fitting + extrapolation.

I think curve fitting is an important component of future AGI. But it definitely needs causal reasoning baked in, which leads to better models with less data [1,2]. My intuition is that there's a lot of important work to be done using logical representations of models and transforming them back and forth using well understood semantics operators. Deep functions will be part of said models, but the whole model does no…

Casual reasoning is one thing that is lacking. But what about creativity? What about drive and desire? What about belief and the will to fail on the road to success? What about collective intelligence and the need to peer up in efforts? What about emotional intelligence?

I personally do not believe in AGI since I also do not believe in psychology, sociology or neurobiology being anywhere near understanding the holistic nature of our own intelligence. We are getting better at emulating human traits for specific tasks with ML. We lack the specific knowledge of what the algorithm should mimic to become equal to us in terms of our intellect though.

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