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Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says

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111–120 of 134 posts

Re: Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says

#111
post #35

The rebuttal to this view is "provide a principled definition of intelligence". Doesn't seem like the article does this. A hint appears partway through: "computers will not be able to match humans in their ability to reason abstractly about real-world situations". Does human intelligence distinguish itself by its "abstractness" and by its application to "the real world"? There's also "the systems do not form the kind…

> For my money, we will never consider any machine intelligent as long as we mass produce it. We won't consider machines intelligent until they have and demonstrate the capacity to consider us not-intelligent. It's an open question of how long we will consider anything after that point.

We won't consider machines intelligent until they have and demonstrate the capacity to consider us not-intelligent.

I can't see how this claim is even slightly illuminating aside from it's pure "quip-ness". A robot playing, say, the game of go, might spit-out "you are not intelligent" whenever it wins. Is that "the capacity to consider us not-intelligent"?

You could even set-up a micro-world where virtual entities interact, evolve and rate their opponent. It wouldn't be hard for these entities to compete with humans in this arena, to do better than humans and so to give human poor poor evaluations but the entities to be pretty simplistic and far from what humans consider intelligent and far from fit outside the micro-world (you could do it with adaptive game-theory solvers, say).

Re: Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says

#112
post #58

Related: Artificial Intelligence – The Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25530178 - Dec 2020 (120 comments) The AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16873778 - April 2018 (161 comments) Others?

The hero HN doesn't deserve.

Re: Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/641

This still happens a lot with some more mundane things. I picked up a bag of sugar the other day that said "gluten-free sugar!"

It doesn't help when formal classifications such as "organic" muddy the waters:

"Of course it's organic, it comes from a plant!"

"That's not what organic means..."

"Guh, wat?"

Re: Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says

#114
post #14

Reminds me when X-rays first were discovered, everyone claimed their product contained them, including X-ray headache tablets, golf balls, stove polish, razor blades. https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/full/10.1148/rg.242035157 for some fun pictures. I won't be surprised when AI toothbrushes come out.

If computing ability were to become as cheap and low-power as human/animal brains, you could have the full capacities of a present day dentist contained in the area of a present day powered tooth. Just make the bristles freely moving, add some hard pieces for plaque and you have a thing that could use that intelligence.

Which is to say, sure, today "AI" is just a marketing term but that's 'cause they don't have it, not because real intelligence isn't something that would be very useful in many, seemingly trivial places.

Re: Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says

#116
post #68
post #15

"Computers have not become intelligent per se, but they have provided capabilities that augment human intelligence, he writes. Moreover, they have excelled at low-level pattern-recognition capabilities that could be performed in principle by humans but at great cost. " It's odd how under-appreciated this is. There is no "intelligence" here as we know it, not even a hint. There are algorithms operating on data for ver…

> There is no "intelligence" here as we know it, not even a hint. There are algorithms operating on data for very prescribed use cases. I agree with your general point, but if you break it down, our brains a nothing "intelligent" either. It's just a network of neurons searching for patterns in the sensor input. Sure, it can reconfigure itself, but from a really abstract perspective it's nothing more than a ultra-scal…

Maybe, maybe not. I'm not sure if it's just a matter of scale or of the fundamental nature of the thing. It might be that the computer / neural network metaphor, whilst isomorphic to certain brain procesees, may ultimately not tell us very much about the larger system and what it actually is.

I tend to think that because computers are the current peak of civilisation / engineering, and in some ways, "alive", we think we might be like a computer. In the Victorian machine age they talked of humans as machines. Maybe some, hitherto unthinkable invention is around the corner, and we will say humans / brains are like that too.

Re: Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says

#118
The last time I was at a start up (~2 years ago), it was a running joke that the easiest way to raise money was to say your product had something to do with AI. We saw so many companies that were branding everything as AI simply to raise a round.

One of the funniest cases was a start up that claimed to be using AI to process their customers' requests but was actually just farming out the work to contractors who were doing everything by hand.

Re: Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Ad for the "x-ray stove polish" lists "cannot explode" as a feature which makes me wonder about their competitions polish

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/641

Relevant Achewood: http://achewood.com/index.php?date=02112003

Re: Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says

#120
post #51

But I heard the florist across the street telling me they are just now getting into the 'deep learning AI' (what they said) just to pick the right flowers for my mother for mothers day several weeks ago. Since they are 'going to use' deep learning soon, they must be turning into an AI company. /s Every time I see a new company preaching endlessly about 'AI' to address a non issue at this point is straight-up begging…

That sounds kind of real. Image recognition is one of the most useful ML areas and it's good at identifying plants.

Doesn't have to be deep learning though: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-past...

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