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A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

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Re: A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

#71

Post by js8 »

lokischild wrote: post #65
soco wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It seems inevitable to me the moment AI capacity seriously surpasses human (as a whole) capacity in any specific topic, it becomes an oracle. I hear of efforts to translate machine decision making to human understandable terms, but if it is a question of raw intelligence, it will quickly become impossible to understand.

This is a topic of Lem's novel/essay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem_XIV.

And to be honest, I wondered about that with GPT-3. Maybe it could give a more profound answer to a given prompt, but it chose not to, since it found the prompt to be too silly, and it responded in kind. Just like adults are able to entertain an imaginary universe of children.

So even to explain that we want a "serious" answer might be difficult.

Re: A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

#72

Post by klmadfejno »

Barrin92 wrote: post #31
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…

> 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. You sure about that? https://twitter.com/hatr/status/1361756449802768387?s=20 > Waymo runs self driving cars today in very specific locations Ernst Dickmann had autonomous cars on the road in very specific locations in the 1980s https://youtu.be/_HbVWm7wdmE

> You sure about that?

Single dumb human posts singular dumb ai example to show that all ai are dumb and fails to recognize the irony.

Re: A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

#74

Post by jokoon »

Unless science studies:

* analysis of trained neural network so they're not just black boxes.

* arrangement of real neurons in actual brains of ants, mice, flies and other small animals.

* some philosophical questioning of how conscience, intelligence, awareness emerge, including a good definition and differentiation on how the brain is able to recognize causality from correlation.

* some actual collaboration between psychology AND neurology to connect the dots between cognition and how an actual brain achieve it.

Unless there are more efforts towards those things, machine learning will just be "advanced statistical methods", and programming experts will keep over-selling their tools. Mimicking neural networks is just fancy advertising about a simple graph algorithm.

Re: A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

#75

Post by mjburgess »

klmadfejno wrote: post #64
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…

And yet computers continue to perform tasks that were talked about for years as something uniquely human / intelligence driven. This is a nice philosophical debate, but in practice I think it falls flat.

I dont see any single case of that. Rather in every case the goal posts were moved.

Can a computer play chess? No.

They search through many permutation of board states and in a very dumb way merely select the decision path that leads to a winning one.

That was never the challenge. The challenge was having them play chess; ie., no tricks, no shortcuts. Really evaluate the present board state, and actually choose a move.

And likewise everything else. A rock beats a child at finding the path to the bottom of a hill.

A rock "outperforms" the child. The challenge was never, literally, getting to the bottom of the hill: that's dumb. The challenge was matching the child's ability to do that anywhere via exploration, curiosity, planning, coordination, and everything else.

If you reduce intelligence to merely completing a highly specific task then there is always a shortcut, which uses no intelligence, to solving that task. The ability to build tools which use these shortcuts was never in doubt: we have done that for millenia.

Re: A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

#77

Post by klmadfejno »

mjburgess wrote: post #75
klmadfejno wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet computers continue to perform tasks that were talked about for years as something uniquely human / intelligence driven. This is a nice philosophical debate, but in practice I think it falls flat.

I dont see any single case of that. Rather in every case the goal posts were moved. Can a computer play chess? No. They search through many permutation of board states and in a very dumb way merely select the decision path that leads to a winning one. That was never the challenge. The challenge was having them play chess; ie., no tricks, no shortcuts. Really evaluate the present board state, and actually choose a mov…

> They search through many permutation of board states and in a very dumb way merely select the decision path that leads to a winning one.

> That was never the challenge. The challenge was having them play chess; ie., no tricks, no shortcuts. Really evaluate the present board state, and actually choose a move.

Uh-huh. And how exactly do you play chess? Do you not, perhaps, think about future states resultant from your next move?

Also, Alpha Zero, with its ability to do a tree search entirely removed, achieves an ELO score of greater than 3,000 in chess, which isn't even the intended design of the algorithm.

A rock will frequently fail to get the to bottom of a hill due to local minimums vs. global minimums. A child will too sometimes.

Re: A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

#78

Post by conjectures »

OrderlyTiamat wrote: post #49

This author makes broad sweeping claims, supprting them with numerous references that (in all instances that I checked) actually counter their argument. I'm not even sure the author knows _what subject they want to talk about_, never mind what argument to present.

Whatever it is, it should be antifragile though.

Re: A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

#79

Post by maest »

lokischild wrote: post #65
soco wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It seems inevitable to me the moment AI capacity seriously surpasses human (as a whole) capacity in any specific topic, it becomes an oracle. I hear of efforts to translate machine decision making to human understandable terms, but if it is a question of raw intelligence, it will quickly become impossible to understand.

It's interesting to see how super advanced ML-based engines have changed the field of chess in recent years - top engines are way better than top humans, so, in a sense, act as oracles.

Top players routinely use them in preparation, to study new lines, get hints about what moves make sense in a position and also to generate new ideas or tweak the principles they apply in the game. The engines don't explain their reasoning, but provide something closer to the "correct" move in any given position. It's up to the humans to do the legwork and understand _why_ the recommended move is strong.

Clearly, chess is not real life, but the impact of these oracle engines has been broadly positive (with the exception of using engines to cheat in online play).

Re: A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

#80

Post by lkbm »

dragontamer wrote: post #68

Hmmm... >> Jeff Bezos’s Amazon operated on extremely tight margins and was not profitable https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312509... Amazon made $645 million net profit in 2008, $476 net profit in 2007, and $190 million in 2006. Where did this myth of "Amazon doesn't make profits" come from? Why are people seemingly unable to check publicly shared historical 10k and fact-check themselves before m…

Yeah, the 2008 number is wrong, but the meme comes from earlier. Its first profitable quarter was Q4 2001, three years after IPO, and it's first profitable year was 2003, six years after IPO.[0] This seems like a long time, especially for the late nineties/early 2000s. (Though tbh, IPO three years after founding feels early to me too.)

Additionally, I seem to recall that they talked this up. Not "we're working on becoming profitable" but instead "We plan to continue losing money for several years. Deal with it."

I believe that prior to 2016, any profitable years were pretty much entirely thanks to Q4, and they were pretty small for its size[1]. A profitable year is good, but three quarters of losses each year will stand out. Sure, they're retail, but they're also tech. Sky high margins are expected year-round.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Amazon

[1] https://qz.com/1925043/the-days-of-amazons-profit-struggles-...

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