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Why AI is harder than we think

arxiv.org

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Re: Why AI is harder than we think

#41

Post by sgt101 »

tediousdemise wrote: post #40

I wonder if general artificial intelligence will one day be considered the digital equivalent of the philosopher’s stone. For centuries, alchemists made it their life goal to produce the stone, each attempt resulting in utter failure.

There's a huge difference: no natural process that was observed by alchemists acted as a philosophers stone. They sought to find one, but never did. On the other hand I can observe intelligence in the sentence you have written, and maybe you can observe intelligence in this one that I have written. Natural intelligence does exist, the questions are how does it work, and what are the barriers to it existing in other substrates. AI doesn't have to try to create intelligence to answer well posed scientific questions - the alchemists didn't get to that point until people started building nuclear reactors.

Re: Why AI is harder than we think

#42

Post by sgt101 »

JackMorgan wrote: post #33

As a student of philosophy and a former middle school teacher, my experience leads me to think that if we could make AI, it would only manifest in a "society" of AI that are all growing and adapting together. They would communicate with each other at speeds so fast that communication with them would be almost impossible. Also, they'd have language that would be changing so fast we couldn't learn it. I think the real…

GPT2?

Re: Why AI is harder than we think

#43

Post by audunw »

I think another common fallacy is to assume that humans have more general intelligence than we actually do. This is manifest in three ways:

1. Assuming that we can build an AI than can do what a human does, without being embedded in the physical world and in constant communication with other humans in the same way we are. I think this is covered by "Intelligence is all in the brain" in the article

2. Not considering that intelligent breakthroughs by humans isn't partly a product of chance.. of millions, and now billions of humans trying semi-random things. Obviously there's SOME intelligence behind it, otherwise we wouldn't have achieved more than other animals. But maybe we're overestimating how much of our results are product of intelligence alone.

3. Not considering that we use pretty dumb heuristics to come to decisions. I think the paperclip maximizer is a silly example, because the decision of whether an AI should kill or cooperate with humanity to maximize the production of paperclips is probably undecidable. Coming to a clear decision probably requires more computing power than you could have on a single planet. We humans don't need to be certain about the outcome to make a decision. We have emotions like fear, anger, pride and jealousy to nudge us towards decisions like going to war with other people to grab their resources. We need to remember that we're a product of evolving in an environment where we had to compete with other humans for resources, so that's why we're prone to those kinds of decisions. AIs will be product of an environment of competing to please humans to gain computational resources. So the heuristics they develop will probably be strongly tied to achieving that goal.

Not that AIs couldn't be dangerous, put probably more because humans make active decisions to instruct AIs to harm other humans.

Re: Why AI is harder than we think

#44

Post by carschno »

mrjin wrote: post #34

IMO, currently there is no such a thing as intelligence in all AI approaches. By saying that I don't mean they are not useful, but rather saying that to me seems all so called AI model are based on statistics and for sure those programs are way better and/or faster than human in finding subtle common factors in some given datasets. But being able to resolve some hard problems does not mean they are intelligence as th…

One essential point about this philosophical branch of AI research is to investigate where "intelligence" and "understanding" really begin.

Saying "the computer does not understand and thus is not intelligent" is a valid, but mundane belief, ignoring that entire research branch with its many unknowns and open questions.

Re: Why AI is harder than we think

#45

Post by ryandvm »

mrjin wrote: post #34

IMO, currently there is no such a thing as intelligence in all AI approaches. By saying that I don't mean they are not useful, but rather saying that to me seems all so called AI model are based on statistics and for sure those programs are way better and/or faster than human in finding subtle common factors in some given datasets. But being able to resolve some hard problems does not mean they are intelligence as th…

That's why it's called "artificial intelligence". Once we've cracked general intelligence, which is seemingly just an emergent property of sufficiently complex information processing, it won't be "artificial" anymore. It'll just be intelligence.

Re: Why AI is harder than we think

#46

Post by JackMorgan »

sgt101 wrote: post #42
JackMorgan wrote: post #33

As a student of philosophy and a former middle school teacher, my experience leads me to think that if we could make AI, it would only manifest in a "society" of AI that are all growing and adapting together. They would communicate with each other at speeds so fast that communication with them would be almost impossible. Also, they'd have language that would be changing so fast we couldn't learn it. I think the real…

GPT2?

I'm not sure what you mean by this comment. GPT2 is a precomputed web of associations between words that can produce a simulacrum of human speech. It's not used for actual propagation of anything. It's a Looney Tunes painting of a train tunnel, not an actual train tunnel. GPT2 "AI" isn't trying to "tell us anything" any more than a magic 8 ball is trying to tell us anything.

Re: Why AI is harder than we think

#47

Post by pitspotter »

Borrible wrote: post #37

So... You're saying it isn't easy to build a system, that, after about five years of learning a myriad of other things, can lace its shoes after about a dozend tries and showing him just twice? That at the same time can explain why it is a good idea to lace them, if wearing them at all? That insists stubbornly, that it is much more fun to wear no shoes when walking in the wet sand at the beach? That about one or two…

Worth emphasising that the knowledge of how to do these things like tying shoelaces and writing topology papers is contained in the surrounding culture. So if a machine can learn this culture, much of the complexity is outsourced. The ability to learn just one piece of existing culture conveys the ability to learn any other part of it, if one is inclined to do so.

>And that with just 20 Watt?

It is amazing; however there's a school of thought that just as we evolved brains in order to reduce physical effort generally this included minimising power consumption by the brain itself. Intelligence was then a by-product of a more glucose-efficient brain!

Re: Why AI is harder than we think

#48

Post by forgotpwd16 »

kthejoker2 wrote: post #38
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> The paper seems to focus a bit on the types who thought it's a bit of symbol manipulation you can do in lisp which has always seemed a bit dumb. About half of the paper is about modern deep neural networks, but can you please give a few examples of the kind of AI you say is "a bit of symbol manipulation you can do in lisp"? Because I would say this is an extreme oversimplification borne by terminal unfamiliarity w…

Symbolic AI is a well known topic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_artificial_intelligen... As the article notes > Symbolic AI was the dominant paradigm of AI research from the mid-1950s until the late 1980s. And, yes, Deep Blue was just "a bit of symbolic manipulation you can do in Lisp" at a very large hardware scale. It simply brute force calculated the value of as many position trees as it could up to ply…

Is symbolic AI dead nowadays? All AI papers I'm seeing is on machine learning.

Re: Why AI is harder than we think

#49

Post by simonh »

ryandvm wrote: post #45
mrjin wrote: post #34

IMO, currently there is no such a thing as intelligence in all AI approaches. By saying that I don't mean they are not useful, but rather saying that to me seems all so called AI model are based on statistics and for sure those programs are way better and/or faster than human in finding subtle common factors in some given datasets. But being able to resolve some hard problems does not mean they are intelligence as th…

That's why it's called "artificial intelligence". Once we've cracked general intelligence, which is seemingly just an emergent property of sufficiently complex information processing, it won't be "artificial" anymore. It'll just be intelligence.

I've heard this "just an emergent property" theory before, but I don't get it. What evidence of this do we have of this?

It seems like we make complex information processing system all the time, and the more complex they are the more fragile they are. Even the tiniest thing going wrong sends the whole system into chaos or a dead stall. Thermodynamics teaches us that order, and intelligence is largely about imposing order, takes a huge amount of work and is inherently unstable.

Re: Why AI is harder than we think

#50

Post by pitspotter »

JackMorgan wrote: post #33

As a student of philosophy and a former middle school teacher, my experience leads me to think that if we could make AI, it would only manifest in a "society" of AI that are all growing and adapting together. They would communicate with each other at speeds so fast that communication with them would be almost impossible. Also, they'd have language that would be changing so fast we couldn't learn it. I think the real…

Yes! I like the garbage collection analogy and we already know that children brought up without parents do badly. Why would an AGI be any different, let alone an AGI brought up in virtual chains for safety's sake. What a misguided notion of safety that would be.

>The idea though that we'd make a solo intelligence is bizarre.

Yes, even our outlier general intelligences (i.e. creative geniuses) got that way because they somehow reproduced more of the surrounding culture inside their heads than everyone else did. It's misleading to think of that as solo brilliance.

>They would communicate with each other at speeds so fast that communication with them would be almost impossible.

In addition to pausing, we could also slow the simulation down for periods of communication. But given how long it took humans to evolve from single-celled organisms, and later to develop hand axes, etc, we may find that our potential AGI culture also starts off very very slowly.

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