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Artificial Intelligence as the year 2000 approaches (1992)

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Re: Artificial Intelligence as the year 2000 approaches (1992)

#41
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Came here to say this. We got 10 instead because we have 10 fingers to count on.

And when was the last time you counted something on your fingers that was more than 3? Also, quoting parent's link: > It is possible to count to 12 with the thumb acting as a pointer, touching each finger bone in turn. A traditional finger counting system still in use in many regions of Asia works in this way, and could help to explain the occurrence of numeral systems based on 12 and 60 besides those based on 10, 20…

> And when was the last time you counted something on your fingers that was more than 3?

???

I'm not talking about me, I'm talking about the thousands of years of human history that got us here?

Re: Artificial Intelligence as the year 2000 approaches (1992)

#42
post #3

Vernor Vinge’s 1993 Technological Singularity is worth a read: https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/book98/com.ch1/vinge.singularity... “ Progress in hardware has followed an amazingly steady curve in the last few decades. Based on this trend, I believe that the creation of greater-than-human intelligence will occur during the next thirty years. (Charles Platt has pointed out that AI enthusiasts have been making claims like t…

The problem is that no matter how far back you go it's alway "in the next 30 years". I remember finding articles from 1930s, 40s, 50s all arguing robots and AI were on the verge of becoming common. 80+ years later and computers are still glorified abacus.

Re: Artificial Intelligence as the year 2000 approaches (1992)

#43
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably, Duodecimal would have been better. 12 is divisble by a large number of factors and it has some more interesting aspects outlined here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal

Came here to say this. We got 10 instead because we have 10 fingers to count on.

> We got 10 instead because we have 10 fingers to count on.

People have counted in 12s by reference to the knuckles on each finger.

Even more commonly, people have counted in 20s by reference to fingers and toes.

You can point to fingers as the reason for a base 10 system instead of a base 11 system, but you can't really point to them as the reason for a base 10 system uniquely.

Re: Artificial Intelligence as the year 2000 approaches (1992)

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always find it fascinating things like subroutines that are obvious to us now had to be invented by someone. You can easily imagine an alternate history where computing would look totally differently.

Lots a things are invented multiple times. It's more common that one might presume. I'm generally wary of claim that someone was first to invent fairly obvious things.

In physics people will eventually find stuff because they are law of nature. There is no law of nature that subroutines should exist so it’s very possible they would never be invented and people would do things in a different way.

Re: Artificial Intelligence as the year 2000 approaches (1992)

#45
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We still have 10 more years to go then. But honestly I'd argue that we have already achieved at least some level of "greater than human" intelligence. Not general intelligence, mind you, but none the less.

If you're suggesting that something like a chess engine is intelligent then we might as well call a forklift intelligent because it can lift boxes I can't lift. Pretty much the opposite is true. Virtually all progress in 'AI' has been in pattern matching and purely numeric or symbolic manipulation of simple objects or functions, we aren't even remotely close to 'breath life into a machine', which is what people like…

To be a little cynical, I remain unconvinced that humans are not just pattern matching too.

Go players thought there was something uniquely human about mastering Go... until an AI proved them wrong.

We are just beginning to see that machines are better at diagnosing some diseases earlier and with higher precision than human experts...

Can you even think of a behavior that isn't pattern matching, at its core? I'd argue it doesn't exist. Humans are awful at random number generation. If you really think about it, there is really no evidence that humans are doing anything other than crunching numbers.

Re: Artificial Intelligence as the year 2000 approaches (1992)

#46
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're suggesting that something like a chess engine is intelligent then we might as well call a forklift intelligent because it can lift boxes I can't lift. Pretty much the opposite is true. Virtually all progress in 'AI' has been in pattern matching and purely numeric or symbolic manipulation of simple objects or functions, we aren't even remotely close to 'breath life into a machine', which is what people like…

To be a little cynical, I remain unconvinced that humans are not just pattern matching too. Go players thought there was something uniquely human about mastering Go... until an AI proved them wrong. We are just beginning to see that machines are better at diagnosing some diseases earlier and with higher precision than human experts... Can you even think of a behavior that isn't pattern matching, at its core? I'd argu…

>Can you even think of a behavior that isn't pattern matching, at its core? I'd argue it doesn't exist.

Yes, quite trivial ones, for example winograd schema.

(1) John took the water bottle out of the backpack so that it would be lighter. (2) John took the water bottle out of the backpack so that it would be handy

What does it refer to in each sentence? ML systems absolutely suck at this because the structure of the sentence is identital. The answer is derived from understanding the meaning of the sentence.

ML systems in NLP right now esentially correlate strings without having any idea of the underlying world. To solve a problem like the one above you need to go from syntax -> model of the world -> back to syntax. That would constitute actual understanding.

Similar problems are of course questions of the kind "X was alive in 2000. X was alive in 2010", was X alive in 2005? Pattern matching doesn't help you here, you need a deep model about the world to actually answer the question. (unless you're guessing).

The reason why pattern matching can't solve every problem is because real world problem spaces are open-ended. There are infinite sentences or infinite problems, some entirely new without any solution in historical data.

Re: Artificial Intelligence as the year 2000 approaches (1992)

#47
post #36
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need a real intelligence test. Good luck doing better. Turns out Turing was pretty smart when he thought this up. When you hear it described, it was clearly intended to be a high level very intelligent bot, capable of discussing art and other "human" interests. In practice, these bots tend to just regurgitate random comments from their corpus, acting essentially as electronic parrots Whilst this is true, Google's…

Nobody converses like that, it reads like two grandparents trying to "chat on the internet" :)

Well "two grandparents" are people of course.

And people chat like that on dating apps all the time.

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