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There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence (2017)

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Re: There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence (2017)

#41

Post by memexy »

jbay808 wrote: post #15

There are a lot of people in this thread who seem to be very confident and skeptical of the author's position. Maybe this would be a good opportunity to try the exercise he challenges in the article? Please post your nomination for what’s the least impressive accomplishment that you are very confident cannot be done in the next two years. We can check back in 2022 and see how we did!

Proving theorems. I will nominate Cauchy's Residue Theorem. It has already been formalized so a neural network or any generally intelligent agent should be able to do the same: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~wl302/publications/itp16.pdf.

Complex analysis in general is one of the more fun parts of math and I doubt it's getting automated any time soon. It also has a lot of application in signal processing (https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-application-of-complex-ana...) so any automation improvements in complex analysis can be carried over to those fields.

More generally, I don't think AI is the scary monster people make it out to be. It's another tool in the toolbox for automation and intelligence augmentation. I don't fear hammers so I don't see why people fear AI and the benefits of extra automation that AI enables.

Re: There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence (2017)

#42

Post by ilaksh »

andrewflnr wrote: post #37
jbay808 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, general intelligence exists and is not science fiction. I assume I'm responding to one. What should be the first sign that it's no longer science fiction, and it's acceptable to start making a plan?

That's actually a bit of an interesting question. General intelligence and human-like intelligence are not necessarily the same, and I'm not 100% convinced there's overlap. We can solve lots of the problems it occurs to us to try to solve, but that alone doesn't prove that we're "general intelligences". There are probably categories of problems we can't solve or even properly conceive, just like every other specializ…

Good point and interesting idea, but it's well established in common usage and the field of AGI that the term is meant to refer to human-like intelligence. So that's the default understanding, and you would need to qualify the term to mean something more general as you are describing.

Re: There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence (2017)

#43

Post by jinpan »

m0zg wrote: post #36
sacred_numbers wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We went from discovering fission in 1938 to building the bomb in 1945. I think it's entirely possible that AGI won't happen in the next century or maybe even ever, but history is filled with people who say "this can't happen" and are proven horribly wrong.

Yes, but then we did not invent much else in this area since then. Computing is fundamentally the same today as it was in the 60's. Sure, transistors are smaller, there's more memory, and clock is in gigaherts, but it's the same paradigm. And this paradigm is not going to take us to AGI even if Moore's law weren't dead for the last decade. Which it is.

Have you heard of this thing called quantum computing?

Re: There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence (2017)

#44

Post by mehrdadn »

jbay808 wrote: post #15

There are a lot of people in this thread who seem to be very confident and skeptical of the author's position. Maybe this would be a good opportunity to try the exercise he challenges in the article? Please post your nomination for what’s the least impressive accomplishment that you are very confident cannot be done in the next two years. We can check back in 2022 and see how we did!

Okay, sure. :-) Take the set of people [1] who:

- Have had an email account for at least 5 years,

- Have checked their spam folder at least once every month over the course of the past two years, and

- Have marked a set of emails as spam on at least 1 day every three months over the course of the past two years.

I'm very confident that, within the next 2 years, we will not have an accurate enough classifier that would cause > 80% of these people to simultaneously (a) check their spam folders less than one day each year, and (b) mark emails as spam on less than 1 day every year.

Oh, and to help prevent cheating:

- Let's say the classifier must not have been trained with any emails in the world that are sent more recently than 1 month prior to the beginning of its trial.

I'm also very tempted to say we don't need to worry about AGI before we can achieve the above for 30% of these people, but I'm less confident in this one.

[1] I suppose, as a practical matter, even if we had such a classifier, this would be untestable without access to everyones' email accounts. So, for the sake of argument, let's say our population under study itself is a simple random sample of 100M accounts from the set of providers who service > 50M accounts each and who are willing to run such a test at the time of the trial.

Re: There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence (2017)

#45

Post by WalterBright »

reducesuffering wrote: post #31
WalterBright wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a free market, a corporation has to please its customers in order to maximize profit. For example, Apple.

Tobacco companies. Humans can be enticed by short team pleasing at the expense of their long term destruction.

People do a lot of things for short term pleasure that risk heavy long term consequences. Societies don't have the right to decide for others what their choices should be.

Maybe outlaw ice cream next? Or how about marijuana smoking? (Oops, already tried that.) How about loud music (long term hearing damage)? How about motorcycles?

Re: There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence (2017)

#46

Post by WalterBright »

_y5hn wrote: post #27
WalterBright wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a free market, a corporation has to please its customers in order to maximize profit. For example, Apple.

Apple is a net negative in my perspective. They contribute negatively.

Nobody makes you buy an Apple product.

Re: There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence (2017)

#47

Post by Smoosh »

WalterBright wrote: post #22
jotm wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been saying AI won't be Skynet launching the nukes, it will be a corporation maximizing productivity with complete disregard for human needs heh

In a free market, a corporation has to please its customers in order to maximize profit. For example, Apple.

> in order to maximize profit

I'm wondering where this idea comes from (I'm not criticizing you specifically, but that maxim).

Do no investors value stability, longevity, ethical behavior etc?

Re: There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence (2017)

#48

Post by shahbaby »

jinpan wrote: post #43
m0zg wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but then we did not invent much else in this area since then. Computing is fundamentally the same today as it was in the 60's. Sure, transistors are smaller, there's more memory, and clock is in gigaherts, but it's the same paradigm. And this paradigm is not going to take us to AGI even if Moore's law weren't dead for the last decade. Which it is.

Have you heard of this thing called quantum computing?

Will never replace general computers.

It's more of a hardware to run specific types of algorithms.

Re: There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence (2017)

#49

Post by WalterBright »

Smoosh wrote: post #47
WalterBright wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a free market, a corporation has to please its customers in order to maximize profit. For example, Apple.

> in order to maximize profit I'm wondering where this idea comes from (I'm not criticizing you specifically, but that maxim). Do no investors value stability, longevity, ethical behavior etc?

I tend to invest in companies whose products and behavior I like. It's not terribly surprising that they've done well - pleasing customers is good business. I've dumped stock in companies that began a business model of suing their customers to make money - and those companies (again unsurprisingly) tilted down.

Buy companies that customers love, sell companies that customers do business with only because they have to.

Re: There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence (2017)

#50

Post by caf »

memexy wrote: post #41
jbay808 wrote: post #15

There are a lot of people in this thread who seem to be very confident and skeptical of the author's position. Maybe this would be a good opportunity to try the exercise he challenges in the article? Please post your nomination for what’s the least impressive accomplishment that you are very confident cannot be done in the next two years. We can check back in 2022 and see how we did!

Proving theorems. I will nominate Cauchy's Residue Theorem. It has already been formalized so a neural network or any generally intelligent agent should be able to do the same: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~wl302/publications/itp16.pdf . Complex analysis in general is one of the more fun parts of math and I doubt it's getting automated any time soon. It also has a lot of application in signal processing ( https://www.quo…

I like to think I'm a generally intelligent agent, but I put long odds that I'll be doing that in the next 2 years.
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