121–130 of 192 posts
I actually started reading the Book of Why and I recommend it to the HN crowd. Pearl does a really good job of going through the history of causality, including the quite interesting story behind the now known to be wrong (or at least incomplete) claim that "correlation is not causality". He then places causality on a 3-rung scale. The bottom rung is association in data, which is where he says AI is stuck. Then there…
What if human intelligence is not computable? Why does no researcher address the fundamental assumption of the field?
In practice you can work on AI-the-engineering-discipline without taking a position on this. Perhaps this is why you feel that researchers don't talk about it. Disciplined scientists tend not to take public positions on things they don't know for sure.
"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…
Stuart Russell recently published a non technical book on AI. I really hope tech journalists take note
This article conflates two separate, very different issues into one: * Issue #1: There is a tremendous amount of hype, noise, and snake oil surrounding the moniker "AI." Pretty much everyone agrees with this statement. (And anyone who doesn't agree with it... is probably selling snake oil.) * Issue #2: Is intelligence just a form of "curve fitting," i.e., is it just finding solutions to very complicated, high-dimensi…
"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…
c.f. 'eliza' for some of the issues.
"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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If someone wants to go as far as to claim that any computation is just curve-fitting then your statement is equivalent to Church–Turing thesis. There are no formal arguments against Church–Turing thesis. From that perspective intelligence is indeed just a curve fitting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis I really enjoyed the "The Measure of Intelligence" by François Chollet. https://arxiv.org/…
>There are no formal arguments against Church–Turing thesis. do you mean "all computation that can be done, can be done using a Turing machine"? Or do you mean "no one has proven Church Turing wrong?" If it's the second - yes, that's so. But so what? If it's the first then many people in Quantum Computing community will be quite upset, P=BQP? You have proof?
"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…
You can get involved in this, but it takes real work (i.e. time taken away from your research area) and an honest understanding that the policy issues their own deep specialty, and you are likely to be quite naive about it going in.
Depending on how complex a curve, and how many dimensions it is in, couldn't you argues that is essentially what our brains do as well? Not that I am defending the massive hype field that is ML today, but curve fitting is a form of intelligence.
I was say fundamentally no -- and Douglas Hofstadter is probably the foremost spokesperson against intelligence being curve fitting. General intelligence is primarily about developing useful conceptual categories (not mapping to existing ones) and drawing cause-and-effect inferences that assist us in achieving goals . Curve fitting is just another name for pattern recognition, mapping to previously defined categories…