On the other hand, we are today daily using tools that 20 years ago certainly was studied as AI, such as speech recognition and image classification. Maybe they are not using general artificial intelligence to do it, but I think that is beside the point. They are accomplishing something that used to be thought to require some kind of intelligence to accomplish. But as soon we succeed with one of these tasks, the magic disappears among the practitioners, and the goalpost for what is allowed to be called AI is moved. Our understanding what intelligence really is, is very vague to begin with, so what’s wrong with calling progress in machine learning AI even after we actually succeeded with something?
Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things
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Re: Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things
#32The two that are conflated according to this author: Machine intelligence in general, and A specific bundle of technologies.
But the goal is specifically to conflate these two, isn't it? If I create a machine that beats a chess grandmaster, does it matter whether or not the machine "knows" how to play chess? If I create an app that takes you to a great restaurant for the mood you're in, does it matter whether or not it understands "mood" or "restaurant"? At some point, the stringing together of specific bundles of technologies becomes indistinguishable to the average person from real intelligence. (This probably happens far, far sooner for the average person than it does tech folks and researchers)
At that point, we've created something that for a specific domain _is_ intelligent: it reasons about things in an internal way that is opaque to us and provides what we perceive to be interactive value. Then, that thing just becomes another bundled to be assembled in an even larger chain. True AGI would be able to create and assemble the bundles.
But even then, the same end-state occurs: at some point whatever we're calling AGI will be able to do things with bundles of technologies that we perceive to provide interactive value. Will it matter at that point whether or not the machine is "truly" intelligent? (Apologies for the scare quotes, but many of these terms are quite suspect in this conversation and are used in all sorts of ways by authors)
To put it bluntly, the goal of AI work is to do cool stuff for reasons we're not exactly sure about. Otherwise it'd just be programming. We are using a lot of programming tools, like NN, to do this. At some point, various groups will fake themselves out and stop working in that area. Whether or not that's intelligence or not, whether or not anything new will ever happen in that field, is beside the point and not in the (commercial) scope of work. Aside from all the formal work and really cool stuff happening, in the end, when it gets used somewhere, this is a "looks good enough to me" situation. We're not looking to create intelligence, we're looking to create an uber-duber supreme version of Eliza for some given problem. The we find other, more complex and interesting problems. Then if we need to we'll join them together (There is a lot of detail that I have ignored, including how GANs play into my argument)
Re: Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things
#33The talk about "AI" is not just misinterpreted in the press, but the ML/AI practitioner themselves too. I can understand academia & researcher hyping it up, they need to chase the funding. But code boot-camp "ML" engineers being all over-hyping is really, really annoying and contribute to the problem far worse. These people are easy to spot: go to an ML/AI meetup or community that also shares latest tech. Since those…
You might underestimate the speed and velocity of advancement in the field. A few years ago creating artificial data or images that are indistinguishable from real data was impossible. Now machines generate information, like entire videos that are real but fake. This can, and has already (look at facebook and fake profiles), led to big problems and in a few years the world will change quite drastically because of fur…
I don't think I underestimate the speed nor velocity of the advancement, just being realistic about the scope of the advancements. I follow conferences and read ML papers (DL & DL/ML application in Robotics) regularly so I think I have a some grasp on the advancement in the field. GAN sure have been a big step, and have found a great usage. (deepfake etc) but I'd say it is still highly overblown. Like GPT3 it will see wide adaptation enough to make visible improvement (and problems) in certain industries, just as better classifiers changed a lot.
I also don't like the blanket term of "automation" because it is like AI: too vague and often used by someone who don't fully grasp HOW hard automation tasks are (and how the complexity scale and differs from the task ). Just as optimism in Self-driving car is now more on low-fire.
The over-promise of ML is something akin to people expecting "it to just get better" similar to Moore's law. If you take a look at what direction the algorithms are improving, what incremental advancements are being made the scope of the speed and velocity become much more clear; and just because cars get faster, doesn't mean it will one day fly to space like a rocket. If we one day in short term future see great improvement, it will probably not be the ML improvements, but due external factors (hardware, network speed, etc)
Re: Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things
#34There’s a great Wikipedia article which is apt here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect?wprov=sfti1
It’s perhaps best encapsulated by Douglas Hofstadter’s quip: “AI is whatever hasn't been done yet”.
The point being, AI is a moving target, and the threshold for reaching it migrates further which each new accomplishment in the field. If you showed the ML of today to someone in the sixties, you’d have a hard time convincing them it wasn’t AI.
But I don’t believe this is an issue reserved only for the press. At least anecdotally, practitioners don’t think of it this way either.
Re: Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things
#35There’s a great Wikipedia article which is apt here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect?wprov=sfti1 It’s perhaps best encapsulated by Douglas Hofstadter’s quip: “AI is whatever hasn't been done yet”. The point being, AI is a moving target, and the threshold for reaching it migrates further which each new accomplishment in the field. If you showed the ML of today to someone in the sixties, you’d have a hard time…
Another apt article: https://link.medium.com/hLkrmNzD9bb
Re: Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? The machine learns via essentially trial-and-error to produce a model that best fits the data provided to it. The hope is that the training data is representative of "unseen" data the model later encounters in order to be useful. Seems pretty accurate given the broadness of the topic and variety of use cases.
Because it’s regression and statistical analysis. Nothing special about ML except applying it to large(r) datasets, particularly in areas where it works well (various recommendation based models for example).
Your neurons also learn by processes similar to regression and statistical analysis.
Why would it be OK to call it learning in a human or an animal, but not in software?
Re: Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? The machine learns via essentially trial-and-error to produce a model that best fits the data provided to it. The hope is that the training data is representative of "unseen" data the model later encounters in order to be useful. Seems pretty accurate given the broadness of the topic and variety of use cases.
Because it’s regression and statistical analysis. Nothing special about ML except applying it to large(r) datasets, particularly in areas where it works well (various recommendation based models for example).
I don't see a problem with machine learning as a term. Especially since it incorporates more than regression methods - it's useful to have a general term without having to specify the type of algorithm each time.
Re: Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things
#38#2 is like how Tesla sells "Auto-pilot".
Re: Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things
#39I find a lot of the media (here in Japan anyways) call literally every automation by computers or machines AI. Example, there’s an automated gate that only opens if a scanner finds your body temperature is not too high. AI Gate. The other day was something related to automatic checkout at shops or something where it all boiled down to some computer reading QR codes
That reminds me how in South Africa the traffic lights are called robots.
A quite good story riffing off that: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/okorafor-kahiu_10_16/.
Re: Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things
#40The talk about "AI" is not just misinterpreted in the press, but the ML/AI practitioner themselves too. I can understand academia & researcher hyping it up, they need to chase the funding. But code boot-camp "ML" engineers being all over-hyping is really, really annoying and contribute to the problem far worse. These people are easy to spot: go to an ML/AI meetup or community that also shares latest tech. Since those…
The so called “AI” as they are practicing it now, is not intelligent at all.
Sure, they found a new trick to recognize cat pictures. But this technique was discovered decades ago. It just took this long for computers to speed up, for it to be usable.
Instead, they should change the moniker from Artificial Intelligence, to Artificial Insight.
Because all it is doing is to comb through all that random data, to look for interesting signals. But, the algorithm doesn’t even know if what it found, is interesting. That’s up to the human to decide.
Hence, the algorithm can provide Insight. But, it is the human in the loop, that will provide the intelligence.