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A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

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Re: A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

#81

Post by api »

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…

"After decades of investment, oversight, and standards development, the space program is not closer to light speed travel than it was in the 1970s."

Re: A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

#82

Post by mjburgess »

klmadfejno wrote: post #77
mjburgess wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 you…

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

Not quite. You'd need to look into how people play chess. It has vastly more to do with present positioning and making high-quality evaluations of present board configuration.

> rock will frequently fail to get the to bottom of a hill due to local minimums

Indeed. And what is a system which merely falls into a dataset?

A NN is just a system for remembering a dataset and interpolating a line between its points.

If you replace a tree search with a database of billions of examples, are you actually solving the problem you were asked to solve?

Only if you thought the goal was literally to win the game; or to find the route to the bottom of the hill. That was never the challenge -- we all know there are shotcuts to merely winning.

Intelligence is in how you win, not that you have.

Re: A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

#83

Post by dnautics »

plutonorm wrote: post #55
digitcatphd wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep... didn't read past the headline of the article.

I waded through half of it hoping a coherent point would emerge before heading over to hn comments to confirm my suspicions.It’s a mash up of a couple of different pop opinions on the state of ML without any real insight.

at least one of them is true. The effort spending "cleaning data" which I think by her description she means "connecting pipes" is underestimated. I work for a company that deploys an ML model that works on a "lowest common denominator" between multiple different downstream SAASes, and this week I have been struggling with a field that should be an integer, but is a string in one SAAS provider, (and there are entries that are not parsable as integer). I can't simply convert it to a string because the ML model is not expecting it.

Re: A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

#84

Post by Falling3 »

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…

> 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.

This is a perfect example of moving the goal posts. The objective was never to simulate a human playing chess.

Re: A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

#85

Post by gowld »

lkbm wrote: post #80
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 bec…

Amazon was unprofitable because they poured all their opearating profits into growth projects, not because they were subsidizing operations with investment.

Like many retailers, the business is seasonal and Q4 has more shopping. This is modeled as part of the business. We don't say lawn care businesses are unstable because they do most work in the summer.

Re: A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

#86

Post by mjburgess »

Falling3 wrote: post #84
mjburgess wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. This is a perfect example of moving the goal posts. The objective was never to simulate a human playing chess.

The objective was to build an intelligent machine. Games were chosen as they, in humans, require intelligence.

They thought that AI would come out of building systems that can replace humans: sure, but only insofar as you preserve the use of intelligence.

If you replace with a shortcut, you havent built an intelligent machine.

Re: A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

#87

Post by andrewprock »

Falling3 wrote: post #84
mjburgess wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. This is a perfect example of moving the goal posts. The objective was never to simulate a human playing chess.

The moving of the goal posts is being done by those who claim that chess algorithm are in any sense intelligent.

The same holds for artificial intelligence broadly. It is as far from intelligence as a can opener.

Re: A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

#88

Post by jjcon »

jokoon wrote: post #74

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…

1,2,4 are already occurring so I’m not sure what you’re on about. The third is completely irrelevant and seems fairly pseudoscientific, leave that to philosophers, we’re not trying to create souls.

> advanced statistical methods

Furthermore plenty of methods in machine learning, including some methods of training neural nets, are completely astatistical in nature. Unless you want to grow the definition of statistics to be so large as to consider all of maths and every science as ‘statistics’ these will rightly remain distinct fields of study (though they do overlap just like stats is used and overlaps with most sciences).

Re: A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

#89

Post by klmadfejno »

mjburgess wrote: post #82
klmadfejno wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 you…

> Uh-huh. And how exactly do you play chess? Do you not, perhaps, think about future states resultant from your next move? Not quite. You'd need to look into how people play chess. It has vastly more to do with present positioning and making high-quality evaluations of present board configuration. > rock will frequently fail to get the to bottom of a hill due to local minimums Indeed. And what is a system which merel…

> Not quite. You'd need to look into how people play chess. It has vastly more to do with present positioning and making high-quality evaluations of present board configuration.

That is what Alpha Zero does when you remove tree search

> A NN is just a system for remembering a dataset and interpolating a line between its points.

Interpolating a line between points == making inferences on new situations based on past experience.

> If you replace a tree search with a database of billions of examples, are you actually solving the problem you were asked to solve?

The NN still performs well on positions it hasn't see before. It's not a database. The fact that the NN learned from billions of examples is irrelevant. Age limits aside, a human could have billions of examples of experience as well.

> A NN is just a system for remembering a dataset and interpolating a line between its points.

So are human brains. That is the very nature of how decisions are made.

> Only if you thought the goal was literally to win the game; or to find the route to the bottom of the hill. That was never the challenge

So then why did you bring it up as an example other than to move goal posts yet again? I can build a bot to explore new areas too. Probably better than humans can. Any novel perspective that a human brings, is, by definition, learned elsewhere, just like a bot.

> Intelligence is in how you win, not that you have.

Sure, and being a dumbass is in how you convince yourself you're superior when you lose every game. There are many open challenges in AI. Making systems better at learning quickly and generalizing context is a very hard problem. But at the same time, intellectual tasks are being not only automated, but vastly improved by AI in many areas. Moving goalposts on what was clearly thought labor in the past is just handwaving philosophy to blind yourself from something real and actively happening. The DOTA bots don't adapt to unfamiliar strategies by their opponents, and yet, they're still good at DOTA.

Re: A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

#90

Post by TchoBeer »

Barrin92 wrote: post #35
dtech wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how this is relevant. Computers in the 1970 had no situational awareness about people interviewing for jobs. So yes, that software might be crap, it still has infinitely more awareness.

what even is "infinitely more awareness?" is that an actual metric? Computers today have exactly as much awareness as they had in the 1970s, situational or otherwise, which is none. The algorithm in question does not know what a bookshelf is, does not know what a job interview is and it does not know how the two relate. It correlates a bunch of pixels and creates the illusion of having awareness, but this is an anthr…

How would we know if it had "actual awareness" and not "the illusion of awareness"
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