Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

calpaterson.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 427 posts

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#121

Post by 0xffff2 »

tester34 wrote: post #25
aNoob7000 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if it would be cheaper for all these companies to go and pay for a sticker/stamp of some kind put on all the signs in a city. Figure out a standard and put them everywhere. This would give them time to get the AI vision detection algorithms figured out.

what's the point of putting it on the signs when you can create virtual sign map that every city/road maintenance HAS to update?

>when you can create virtual sign map that every city/road maintenance HAS to update?

Who can do that?

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#122

Post by wildermuthn »

Borrible wrote: post #12

Since Dartmouth AI looks like a story of naive visions, exaggerated promises, massive disappointment, recurrent divisionary tactics, rebranding and snak oil sale. Until finally a light on the horizon became visible and academically camouflaged wishful thinking could be materialized into usable products. A groping in the dark, nothing more. There are probably good reasons why the blind watchmaker needed billions of ye…

As convoluted as this comment is, props for pointing out that evolution (and the formation of the solar system) took billions of years to produce intelligence. Can humanity do it in less time?

Because biological evolution’s is oriented toward propagation of DNA rather than intelligence, we can ask what kind of evolutionary pressures lead to intelligence. Under what scenarios does higher intelligence lead to higher survival, and lower intelligence to lower survival? If the answer was “all the time”, then everything on earth would show signs of intelligence. An intelligent spider would have no significantly greater chance of survival. It merely needs to spin webs, eat, and reproduce in a tight loop, with deterministic responses to various scenarios — it needs instinct more than intelligence.

By understanding what kind of evolutionary pressures lead to the necessity of intelligence, we can evolve (train) ML directly for intelligence, skipping straight to the answer rather than showing our work.

The answer is found in the peculiar evolution of mammals, the only organisms that display consistent intelligence across all its species. Mammals are highly social, beginning from live birth to mammalian glands that feed its comparatively feeble spawn. Sociality is built into the bodies of mammals. And the most social animal on earth is Homo Sapiens.

From here I’ll just recommend “Consciousness and the Social Brain.” I’ve been beating this dead horse on HN for some time.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#123

Post by gowld »

cblconfederate wrote: post #93
jacobolus wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> google created a negative feedback loop with the web Friendly note: this may be a "negative" (i.e. bad) effect, but it is not a negative feedback loop. A negative feedback loop is a part of a system that self-corrects back toward a stable position. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_feedback

the negative feedback is that any attempt to create quality, non-seo content is punished by being ranked low and so we revert to average/low quality of over-SEOed but low signal content. Like other users have noticed, publishing a good recipe is not enough, you have to fill it up with useless fluff. and you have to make pretty URLs . And add meta the tags This happens for tech advice too, like linux solutions etc

SEO content is a positive feedback loop.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#124

Post by erikpukinskis »

nautilus12 wrote: post #119
lifthearth wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a patch thanks to contributor Marx but everyone keeps pressing "remind me later".

Probbably due to the memory of the deaths of millions of people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communist_... You get bit by a viper in the bathroom and your going to avoid that bathroom for a while.

That doesn’t really explain anything, given there are millions of deaths under capitalism too.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#125

Post by sudosysgen »

daenz wrote: post #112
lifthearth wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a patch thanks to contributor Marx but everyone keeps pressing "remind me later".

Does bribing not exist in that system?

Sure there is. I don't know which motivation you'd have to bribe someone to promite your product, though. Would also be hard to sustain if intellectual property was decommodified.

Other, more pressing concerns have to be addressed, though.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#126

Post by cletus »

soarfourmore wrote: post #49

The following quotes are fairly interesting and ironic: > Larry Page and Sergey Brin were originally pretty negative about search engines that sold ads. Appendix A in their original paper says: >> "we expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers" > and that >> "we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives…

At this point, the snide dismissal of all things advertising is nothing short of boring.

To be sure there are many forms of advertising annoyance: auto-playing sound/video, remarketing (or what I like to call advertising a product I've already bought), interstitials, popups (to be fair, there are many non-advertising forms of these eg "sign up to our newsletter" dialogs) and so on.

But what made Google a money-printing machine is that search advertising is actually largely aligned with the interests of the user. That is, just by searching for something the user has shown an intent that other advertising doesn't have (where generally it's just attention thievery). Imagine I search for "how do I sleep on an airplane". Isn't a neck travel pillow an appropriate result here?

I get that it's popular to just hate on all advertising but that's just shallow.

As long as search results are marked as ads when they are ads and paying for ads doesn't improve your organic search ranking (aka the Yelp business model) then I'm completely fine with it.

There is a lot of crap in search results and this is a constant battle of whack-a-mole. At one point it was content farms. As someone who has search for a lot of home furnishing stuff recently I can tell you a big problem is affiliate link blogspam. There'll be some real-sounding domain like mattressreviews.com but it becomes pretty clear it's just mass-produced "content" to justify affiliate links.

Honestly, this will probably get to the point (I hope) where Google does the same thing it did to content farms and starts downranking sites with affiliate links (cough Pinterest cough).

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#127

Post by leoc »

patatino wrote: post #28
gverrilla wrote: post #6

amazing quotes: > Larry Page and Sergey Brin were originally pretty negative about search engines that sold ads. Appendix A in their original paper says: we expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of theconsumers and that we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have acompetitive search engi…

I sometimes ask myself if they are looking back and questioning all the little decisions they took and think, "where did we go wrong"?

It has to be emphasised that (IIUC) Page and Brin's misbehaviour is not just a thing of the past, but active and ongoing, since they still have majority voting power over Alphabet https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/011516/top-5-g... . Even one of them is a hugely clouty shareholder, especially if he enlisted the support of a few of their chums who hold the remainder of Class B. Yes, by now they probably can't just undo Google's fundamental size and orientation as an AdWords behemoth at will: too many business risks and legitimate concerns about fiduciary duty, too much risk of shareholder lawsuits and so on. But within that they surely have enormous power to restrain Google's actions at their discretion.

Of course when bad things happen the usual tendency is to attribute too much power and assign too much blame to a few individuals. But if anything the reverse seems to be true here. Page and Brin largely don't have the twin "if I don't do it I'll be fired" and "if I don't do it someone else will" excuses that others tend to have. Yet there seems to be an ambient belief that they shouldn't be expected to restrain Google, that their (at best) abdication of responsibility is somehow inevitable or proper. What makes this really disgraceful is that Google probably got where it today is in large part because in the past people bought, and Google actively sold, the idea that Larry and Sergey were nice guys who could be could be trusted to use their controlling stake to do the right thing. However stupid it was to ever trust in that idea, Page and Brin are not justified in abusing that trust now.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#128

Post by omgwtfbyobbq »

jacobolus wrote: post #86
cblconfederate wrote: post #37

The problem is that google created a negative feedback loop with the web. People have a tangible interest to game google, which worsens the quality of their AI datasets, which makes their AI suggestions terrible. There was the expectation that google's AI suggestions and info boxes would improve over time, but i 've noticed them getting worse and consider them a permanently broken gimmick now. They probably have the…

> google created a negative feedback loop with the web Friendly note: this may be a "negative" (i.e. bad) effect, but it is not a negative feedback loop. A negative feedback loop is a part of a system that self-corrects back toward a stable position. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_feedback

So a negative positive feedback loop?

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#129

Post by Zelphyr »

carrozo wrote: post #73
soarfourmore wrote: post #49

The following quotes are fairly interesting and ironic: > Larry Page and Sergey Brin were originally pretty negative about search engines that sold ads. Appendix A in their original paper says: >> "we expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers" > and that >> "we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives…

Everybody’s got a plan until they’re punched in the face (with hundreds of billions of dollars).

Or, maybe, "Everybody is altruistic until they have shareholders."

The idea that companies should only be beholden to shareholders that has taken firm hold over the past 50(+/-) years doesn't look to be a good one, in hindsight.

Post reply on HN