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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

#51
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate your enthusiasm but we're still not there. The videos look almost perfect, with "almost" still oscillating around the uncanny valley. Self-driving cars are almost totally self-driving and are almost not killing people. GPT3 uses fluent English and can be used to generate almost meaningful content in most contexts. Speech recognition progressed enormously and can be used to transcribe most well-pronouncin…

This is what I've started thinking of as the ‘pretty dumb for a human’ take on AI. If your requirement for believing something is on the path to AGI is for it to practically already be AGI, it's no longer predictively meaningful. This sort of argument suffices to dismiss, for example, the possibility that today's humans evolved from apes, or even that today's humans could have come from pre-language, pre-civilization…

Not OP, but to be honest there isn't much at all that suggests significant steps have been made towards AGI. GPT-3 isn't AGI, it's the opposite of AGI.

To be really frank, I doubt AGI is more than a teleological narrative.

Re: Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things

#52
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I've started thinking of as the ‘pretty dumb for a human’ take on AI. If your requirement for believing something is on the path to AGI is for it to practically already be AGI, it's no longer predictively meaningful. This sort of argument suffices to dismiss, for example, the possibility that today's humans evolved from apes, or even that today's humans could have come from pre-language, pre-civilization…

Problem is that the AI we have is nothing like biological intelligence. Our super computers can't even compete with the intelligence of an ant, how am I to believe that replicating human intelligence is around the corner or that we are even moving the right direction to get there?

> Our super computers can't even compete with the intelligence of an ant

I don't see what might spur anyone to claim this. It's obviously ridiculous.

Re: Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things

#53
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem is that the AI we have is nothing like biological intelligence. Our super computers can't even compete with the intelligence of an ant, how am I to believe that replicating human intelligence is around the corner or that we are even moving the right direction to get there?

> Our super computers can't even compete with the intelligence of an ant I don't see what might spur anyone to claim this. It's obviously ridiculous.

Can we put machines with grip claws in a random forest, no human oversight and make them build a house? Including foraging the lumber, foraging fuel etc? You need a huge amount of intelligence to navigate complex 3d environments, identify different kinds of objects in nature, identify different beings as threats of friends, identify suitable spots for building, handle errors when stuff you did failed etc. We are nowhere close to that level.

Re: Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things

#54
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Our super computers can't even compete with the intelligence of an ant I don't see what might spur anyone to claim this. It's obviously ridiculous.

Can we put machines with grip claws in a random forest, no human oversight and make them build a house? Including foraging the lumber, foraging fuel etc? You need a huge amount of intelligence to navigate complex 3d environments, identify different kinds of objects in nature, identify different beings as threats of friends, identify suitable spots for building, handle errors when stuff you did failed etc. We are nowh…

So therefore protein complexes are intelligent?

This is literally the watchmaker argument with the nouns swapped out.

Re: Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things

#55
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we put machines with grip claws in a random forest, no human oversight and make them build a house? Including foraging the lumber, foraging fuel etc? You need a huge amount of intelligence to navigate complex 3d environments, identify different kinds of objects in nature, identify different beings as threats of friends, identify suitable spots for building, handle errors when stuff you did failed etc. We are nowh…

So therefore protein complexes are intelligent? This is literally the watchmaker argument with the nouns swapped out.

What? Our computers can't even do the tasks that even the simplest of general purpose intelligences in the wild can, how can we say that we are making progress towards general purpose AI? If we were making progress, like first fruit fly, then ant, then a mouse etc, then I'd see it. But now? Its just toys. Maybe I'm wrong, but it is pretty easy to not be impressed when they still can't do simple things that insects can do.

Re: Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things

#56
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So therefore protein complexes are intelligent? This is literally the watchmaker argument with the nouns swapped out.

What? Our computers can't even do the tasks that even the simplest of general purpose intelligences in the wild can, how can we say that we are making progress towards general purpose AI? If we were making progress, like first fruit fly, then ant, then a mouse etc, then I'd see it. But now? Its just toys. Maybe I'm wrong, but it is pretty easy to not be impressed when they still can't do simple things that insects ca…

Our computers also don't know how to do all sorts of complex biological manufacturing that small groups of proteins can do inside cells. Thus your measure of intelligence also says that protein complexes are intelligent, but they aren't, so your argument is invalid.

As I said, this is literally the watchmaker argument with the nouns swapped out. Ant minds are not general intelligences, they are programs created by natural evolution. Their pathfinding and identification and anthill-making and communication are all fixed programs in their genetics, not learnt during life. They cannot execute other programs.

Re: Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things

#57
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Our computers can't even do the tasks that even the simplest of general purpose intelligences in the wild can, how can we say that we are making progress towards general purpose AI? If we were making progress, like first fruit fly, then ant, then a mouse etc, then I'd see it. But now? Its just toys. Maybe I'm wrong, but it is pretty easy to not be impressed when they still can't do simple things that insects ca…

Our computers also don't know how to do all sorts of complex biological manufacturing that small groups of proteins can do inside cells. Thus your measure of intelligence also says that protein complexes are intelligent, but they aren't, so your argument is invalid. As I said, this is literally the watchmaker argument with the nouns swapped out. Ant minds are not general intelligences, they are programs created by na…

> Ant minds are not general intelligences

The fact that you don't consider ants as general intelligences means you agree that we aren't making progress towards general intelligences, since ants intelligence is way closer to general intelligence than any computer program we have.

> Their pathfinding and identification and anthill-making and communication are all fixed programs in their genetics, not learnt during life.

They only born with some bases, they intelligently comes up with fine tuned parameters to make them work in practice. Hence they learn. If you don't call this "intelligence" they you can't consider the "AI" we do today "intelligent". I mean, every model a computer executes was invented by a human, the computer only optimized the parameters.

I mean, insects can learn to recognize arbitrary objects without anyone giving them training data or a reward function, they just do it on their own. That is a part of general intelligence. The way we do AI can never achieve that, since it always relies on human intelligence to decide all of those things meaning we just get out some optimized function that can fuzzy match input data.

Re: Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things

#58
post #31

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 magi…

There's nothing wrong with it, it can simply lead to confusion. When computers started, people called them 'thinking machines' and, say, multiplication was something that required some intelligent behavior on the part of the person doing it. There's nothing wrong with calling a calculator a thinking machine that implements intelligent behavior, but it helps if everyone is aware that at other times when people talk about 'thinking' and 'intelligent' they mean something quite different. This is not uncommon; when people use the word 'bank' they refer to very different things: river ones, park ones, central ones, rotations of flying objects etc. But everyone should be aware that getting better at building comfortable banks to sit on in the park is not the same as getting better at figuring out the optimal rate of interest or turning planes. It certainly might, but that is a separate argument and terminology can obscure that.

Re: Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things

#59
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our computers also don't know how to do all sorts of complex biological manufacturing that small groups of proteins can do inside cells. Thus your measure of intelligence also says that protein complexes are intelligent, but they aren't, so your argument is invalid. As I said, this is literally the watchmaker argument with the nouns swapped out. Ant minds are not general intelligences, they are programs created by na…

> Ant minds are not general intelligences The fact that you don't consider ants as general intelligences means you agree that we aren't making progress towards general intelligences, since ants intelligence is way closer to general intelligence than any computer program we have. > Their pathfinding and identification and anthill-making and communication are all fixed programs in their genetics, not learnt during life…

> The fact that you don't consider ants as general intelligences means you agree that we aren't making progress towards general intelligences, since ants intelligence is way closer to general intelligence than any computer program we have.

Please don't argue like this. It's your job to explain what you think is true, and my job to explain what I think is true. Up to this point in this conversation I explicitly haven't taken a stance about how generally intelligent our best AI are, because it's pointless to argue that until the epistemics are valid. In fact I didn't intend to argue past that point at all; I'm objecting to bad arguments, not the position per se.

> The way we do AI can never achieve that

This is not meaningfully true. We have unsupervised image recognition, for example, and there's plenty of work on all sort other unsupervised learning of all sorts of things.

The idea that insects ‘don't have a reward function’ is not really valid; a reward function is just the function you're optimizing on.

Re: Talk about “AI” in the press these days tends to conflate two things

#60
I'm sorry, this is a pointless discussion.

First off AI and MI are used almost synonymously[0] and MI very rarely:

  - "Artificial Intelligence" 192M hits
  - "Machine Intelligence" 4.8M hits
  - "Machine Learning" 153M hits
> The word “AI” in these ads has a recognizable meaning, and it is not the same meaning used in the sentence “Elon Musk founded OpenAI because he was worried AI might cause human extinction.”

These is not that different, they are the same thing on different time scales. The first usage names the current (moving definition) state, which moves toward the second which is a singular (theoretical) point in development.

Finally, is this just a PSA? We already know this. If it doesn't say ML, deep learning, CNN, or other specific term it's a fluff piece, or just trying to get eyeballs on research (which is rational).

[0] https://www.dataversity.net/ai-vs-machine-learning-vs-deep-l...

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