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A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

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Re: A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

#21

Post by js8 »

richk449 wrote: post #4

> After decades of investment, oversight, and standards development, we are not closer to total situational awareness through a computerized brain than we were in the 1970s. Hard to see how that could be true. In just about any field, computers today provide much better situational awareness than was possible in 1970. The article makes the usual complaints about self driving cars: > Despite $16 billion in investment…

> Wondering if this article is written by GTP-3.

FYI, it was written by a woman. I looked up her book, Kill It with Fire, and as a mainframer I have to say it seems pretty interesting.

I think what she alludes to in this essay, though, is more like that AI cannot solve socioeconomic problems of humans. And even humans seem to struggle with it.

Whenever I read stories where the metrics became the targets, and the like, I am reminded of Varoufakis' book Economic Indeterminacy. He doesn't give any answers there, but there is this "strange loop" in rationalism that nobody really understands.

I also think that AI might be a wrong target, because you need to understand the problem before you can solve it, and once humans understand the problem, they don't need AI anymore, they just code the solution as an algorithm. On the other hand, if humans don't fully understand the problem, it's extremely difficult (except artificial circumstances like games) to explain to AI what the problem is, so it would arrive at a "reasonable" solution (and avoided, at the very least, killing all humans).

Re: A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

#22

Post by gverrilla »

abpavel wrote: post #16

> On a warm day in 2008, Silicon Valley’s titans-in-the-making found themselves packed around a bulky, blond-wood conference room table. The author has read The New Yorker a lot. Some captivating details, made irrelevant at the end of the paragraph.

This style is very funny indeed. Sometimes it's used in my language (pt-br) aswell on some articles (probably because they bought the piece from reuters or something and translated). It's very strong in writers like Gay Talese, who take it so serious they even DRESS the style LMAO

Re: A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

#23

Post by mjburgess »

richk449 wrote: post #4

> After decades of investment, oversight, and standards development, we are not closer to total situational awareness through a computerized brain than we were in the 1970s. Hard to see how that could be true. In just about any field, computers today provide much better situational awareness than was possible in 1970. The article makes the usual complaints about self driving cars: > Despite $16 billion in investment…

> Yet cars are much more intelligent today than they were in the 1970s

Therein lies the problem. Your definition of intelligence presumes that it is a simple quantitative scale, measuring I guess, something like "system complexity".

The relevant sense here, in which no progress has been made, is qualitative -- ie., it is a distinct property. And this property has not been acquired.

What is the property? It is dynamical, not formal. It is more like gravity (, pregnancy) than it is like addition.

It is the ability many animals have of adaption in the shifting and challenging environments in which they are embedded.

That type of adaption is not formal: it is not adaption in the sense of "updating a weight parameter". Rather, of the cells of their bodies coordinating themselves differently, and thus of their tissues, and thus of their organs, and thus of their whole brain-body system. Both from a top-down command ("I want to run now, and so my cells...") and from a bottom-up ("my cells... so I ...").

What enables animals to be fully embedded in their physical environment, to cope and adapt to its radical shifts, is this capacity. The type of "crossword puzzle" "intelligence" we obsess with is entirely derivative of this more basic --and vastly more powerful -- intelligence.

Cognition is just a semi-formal process, parasitical on the body's intelligence; whose role is simply to notice when it fails and problem-solve it.

We have, at best, merely the architecture of this formal reasoning. But there is still nothing for it to reason about. And in this sense, computer science has made no progress -- and indeed, cannot. It is not a formal problem.

Re: A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

#25

Post by vagrantJin »

Scarblac wrote: post #18
fungiblecog wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-driving cars are much much better, but they are not "intelligent" in any sense of that word

"Intelligence" is anything that humans can do but we don't know how to make computers do. Once computers can do it, it's "mere computation".

I doubt we'd call locomotion and reaction to sensory feedback intelligent. Even single cell organisms are well and truly capable of that.

Re: A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

#26

Post by Animats »

MattGaiser wrote: post #13

>People don’t make better decisions when given more data, so why do we assume A.I. will? How much of this is just because it says something they do not want to hear or because there are incentives to not consider it?

People don’t make better decisions when given more data, so why do we assume A.I. will?

It's recognized that many machine learning systems today need very large amounts of training data, far more than humans facing the same task. That's a property of the current brute-force approaches, where you often go from no prior knowledge to some specific classification in one step. This often works better than previous approaches involving feature extraction as an intermediate step, so it gets used.

This is probably an intermediate phase until someone has the next big idea in AI.

Re: A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

#27

Post by soco »

js8 wrote: post #21
richk449 wrote: post #4

> After decades of investment, oversight, and standards development, we are not closer to total situational awareness through a computerized brain than we were in the 1970s. Hard to see how that could be true. In just about any field, computers today provide much better situational awareness than was possible in 1970. The article makes the usual complaints about self driving cars: > Despite $16 billion in investment…

> Wondering if this article is written by GTP-3. FYI, it was written by a woman. I looked up her book, Kill It with Fire, and as a mainframer I have to say it seems pretty interesting. I think what she alludes to in this essay, though, is more like that AI cannot solve socioeconomic problems of humans. And even humans seem to struggle with it. Whenever I read stories where the metrics became the targets, and the like…

If we can't understand the problem, will we be able to understand the solution presented by that AI? Or we'd just apply it, trusting blindly the unfathomable reasons the AI used? Do we have an AI where the decision tree can be grasped by humans?

Re: A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

#28

Post by soco »

mjburgess wrote: post #23
richk449 wrote: post #4

> After decades of investment, oversight, and standards development, we are not closer to total situational awareness through a computerized brain than we were in the 1970s. Hard to see how that could be true. In just about any field, computers today provide much better situational awareness than was possible in 1970. The article makes the usual complaints about self driving cars: > Despite $16 billion in investment…

> Yet cars are much more intelligent today than they were in the 1970s Therein lies the problem. Your definition of intelligence presumes that it is a simple quantitative scale, measuring I guess, something like "system complexity". The relevant sense here, in which no progress has been made, is qualitative -- ie., it is a distinct property. And this property has not been acquired. What is the property? It is dynamic…

You have a valid point here. But it might be that for practical reasons the progress in that direction won't be needed. Like, brute forcing it might be enough to reach a level higher than we can grasp. And if we can't grasp it, it's all Greek to us anyway...

Re: A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

#29

Post by [deleted] »

vagrantJin wrote: post #25
Scarblac wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Intelligence" is anything that humans can do but we don't know how to make computers do. Once computers can do it, it's "mere computation".

I doubt we'd call locomotion and reaction to sensory feedback intelligent. Even single cell organisms are well and truly capable of that.

[deleted]

Re: A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

#30

Post by mjburgess »

soco wrote: post #28
mjburgess wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yet cars are much more intelligent today than they were in the 1970s Therein lies the problem. Your definition of intelligence presumes that it is a simple quantitative scale, measuring I guess, something like "system complexity". The relevant sense here, in which no progress has been made, is qualitative -- ie., it is a distinct property. And this property has not been acquired. What is the property? It is dynamic…

You have a valid point here. But it might be that for practical reasons the progress in that direction won't be needed. Like, brute forcing it might be enough to reach a level higher than we can grasp. And if we can't grasp it, it's all Greek to us anyway...

The problem with brute forcing is it requires data from the future.

Physics can be solved with statistics, but only from God's POV.

The future, absent information about it, is too open to solve by merely constraining models by past example cases.

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