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

intelligence.org

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

#51

Post by Smaug123 »

MattGaiser wrote: post #8

The best AI minds are still working on AI consistently recognizing stop signs.

The article does directly address this, at considerable length. I'll quote just the subsection headings from that section, each of which is followed in the text by many paragraphs of explanation.

One: As Stuart Russell observed, if you get radio signals from space and spot a spaceship there with your telescopes and you know the aliens are landing in thirty years, you still start thinking about that today.

Two: History shows that for the general public, and even for scientists not in a key inner circle, and even for scientists in that key circle, it is very often the case that key technological developments still seem decades away, five years before they show up.

Three: Progress is driven by peak knowledge, not average knowledge.

Four: The future uses different tools, and can therefore easily do things that are very hard now, or do with difficulty things that are impossible now.

Five: Okay, let’s be blunt here. I don’t think most of the discourse about AGI being far away (or that it’s near) is being generated by models of future progress in machine learning. I don’t think we’re looking at wrong models; I think we’re looking at no models.

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

#52

Post by pgt »

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…

Depending on who's holding the hammer, I do fear the hammer.

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

#53

Post by m0zg »

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?

The thing that nobody can tell if it works or not? What about it?

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

#54

Post by closeparen »

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?

Risk profile and time horizon are central considerations for investors, absolutely.

Sometimes a fast, go-big-or-go-home trajectory is what they're looking to invest in.

The way to put ethics in a language investors understand is to price in externalities.

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

#55

Post by esotericn »

WalterBright wrote: post #45
reducesuffering wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Societies don't have the right to decide for others what their choices should be.

If an AGI starts inventing new and wonderful ways in which we can destroy ourselves, and we are taken in by it, we will have to restrict that, it's non optional.

You can make the argument that, say, current hard drugs should be legal - but I don't think there's a way to defend the position that any possible future 'thing' should always be legal/permitted regardless of negative effect.

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

#56

Post by cosmodisk »

"Subsequent manipulations showed that a lone student will respond 75% of the time; while a student accompanied by two actors told to feign apathy will respond only 10% of the time"

My own anecdotal data confirms this: a colleague crashed with his bike just meters from our office. Pretty much the entire company stood there watching him bleeding and screaming on the pavement. I called the ambulance,as it didn't seem anyone was considering doing it at all. I'm sure every single of them would have called the ambulance if they were there on their own. On a different occasion,a friend pulled a few almost drowning drunk guests out of water during a wedding,while the rest stood on the shore watching the whole situation.

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

#57

Post by ajuc »

If you told people in 90s that at one point in future AIs will be able to:

- drive a car in traffic in almost all circumstances safer than majority of human drivers basing only on video input

- take a video and replace faces from another video well enough that more than 90% of people are fooled

- have 95%+ accurate OCR and speech recognition

- predict people's preferences regarding music/movies/books better than any human could

- generate short press articles on arbitrary subject appearing to most readers to be written by a human being

- win a game of chess/go/starcraft/whatever against the best human players

and asked them how far from that point till we have a general AI - they would most likely say less than a decade.

But now that we are there we devalue these acomplishements because we know how to do them, and still don't know how to do general AI.

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

#58

Post by WalterBright »

esotericn wrote: post #55
WalterBright wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Societies don't have the right to decide for others what their choices should be. If an AGI starts inventing new and wonderful ways in which we can destroy ourselves, and we are taken in by it, we will have to restrict that, it's non optional. You can make the argument that, say, current hard drugs should be legal - but I don't think there's a way to defend the position that any possible future 'thing' should alway…

An awful lot of harm has been done to people via one group who are sure they know what is best for others, and thereby are justified in forcing it upon them.

In fact, likely much more harm than those with evil intent.

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

#59

Post by ajuc »

mehrdadn wrote: post #44
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 woul…

That's cheating because improving AI is working on both sides - it's making better classifiers but also better spam generators :)

In the future with general AI classifying spam will be a hard problem even for people.

Imagine you get a message looking like it's from your facebook friend with his catchphrases telling you about his last trip and saying how great that travel agency was :) Spam or not?

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

#60

Post by narag »

jkhdigital wrote: post #29
jbay808 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is difficult to imagine anything resembling a "general" intelligence that isn't attached to a life-form[...] How is that argument any stronger than these ones that (non-animal) heavier than air flight is impossible? https://www.xaprb.com/blog/flight-is-impossible/ I think these are actually stronger arguments, because I can think of at least three very least significant material-science advantages that birds hav…

Yes, I realize that the phrase "difficult to imagine" is fun to pounce on. There's a big difference between "flight" and "general intelligence"; namely that the former is like Justice Potter Stewart's definition of pornography and the latter is... not. Anyways, maybe what I'm suggesting is that if you can point to something and say "that is a (artificial?) general intelligence", then I suspect you will also feel comp…

I think it's difficult to develop complex artificial intelligence without a body. But that doesn't mean that, once some basic blocks are developed, the knowledge can't be applied to a "less alive" system.
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