Live data from Hacker News

AI Is No Match for the Quirks of Human Intelligence

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

31–40 of 86 posts

Re: AI Is No Match for the Quirks of Human Intelligence

#31
post #3

It's odd to take an anecdote about what a person did thousands of years ago (assuming Archimedes actually existed, I suppose we have decent evidence) and use that as the gold standard for how the human mind functions.

That's being disingenuous to the point being made in the article. Archimedes's example is only given as an instance of the insight problem. I am sure you can construct such examples specific to any domain. That particular example was probably chosen because it would be familiar to a general audience, but the overall point is solid.

Humans have made some rather remarkable feats of intellectual achievements. Could AI have discovered relativity or evolution for instance?

Re: AI Is No Match for the Quirks of Human Intelligence

#32
post #7

If true then robot cars are scarier then I've thought ... AI is going to be able to process the right scenario to avoid a deadly crash within the first decade or more of market adoption or the programmers are going to learn and ship bug fixes for each person their prior code killed? *I'm always downvoted for this thought but is this not the true way forward with robot cars? Those who downvote me think the first batch…

It's a legitimate question but the mechanism of how it works is completely wrong. Many people will be killed by any given mass market implementation of self driving cars. Those people will be killed by crashes that a human could not have avoided, people will be killed by errors few humans would make (e.g. "plowing into an overturned truck at full speed") and people will NOT be killed by facets of the system that humans cannot replicate (never tired, never drunk, never angry).

Dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people will die between "bug fixes". The only metric needed here is to determine if the system as a whole performed better or worse than a fleet of typical people. We know what the accident rate is for a fleet of typical people (for now) and it is pretty bad. People also occasionally drive into obvious trucks for no known reason. People are inattentive. People are emotional. People rush. People ignore things they shouldn't or react too late to things they should. The bar to operate more safely than people is high, but not impossibly high.

In response to market changes, world changes, and continued investment, code will change but also input training samples will change, labeling technology will change. Those changes will result in a measured change in the fleet's performance.

There will be cases where a single death results in some code change. Early on there will be many such cases. But as time goes on, those cases will become less and less frequent, as the cases where specific code points are needed become not only unnecessary but even an impediment to the proper mapping of world features to behavior output.

Re: AI Is No Match for the Quirks of Human Intelligence

#33
post #4

There is nothing special about human intelligence. We will have smarter computers in our life time and I'm willing to place bets.

I don't think that's a useful framing. There is nothing special about stars, either, but the chance of human engineering resulting in some power generator that can equal the output of a star any time soon is pretty low. The fact that nature has solved a problem means it can be solved, but it doesn't mean we can trivially figure out how to do it in a manufactured device.

Aside from that, there is no "we" here. Some people reading this are 20 and some are 70. The scope of what it means for something to happen in one's lifetime is quite different for those two groups.

Re: AI Is No Match for the Quirks of Human Intelligence

#34
At what point does the current AI hype machine crash?

It feels like these startups all sell solutions to the top 20 or so companies, competing for a very limited market. It's table stakes for everybody else, an "all-or-nothing" achievement for AI.

By contrast, even a small amount of connectivity improved things dramatically for huge swaths of industry. That's how the internet started small and grew up.

AI seems to rely on being everything or being nothing. There's no small victories.

Re: AI Is No Match for the Quirks of Human Intelligence

#35
post #3

It's odd to take an anecdote about what a person did thousands of years ago (assuming Archimedes actually existed, I suppose we have decent evidence) and use that as the gold standard for how the human mind functions.

Chess and Go were beaten, and the AI goalpost had to move /somewhere/...

Some day we may reach the point where we realise humans don’t qualify as AI either.

Re: AI Is No Match for the Quirks of Human Intelligence

#36
I sometimes try to think about the "fast process" mentioned as intuition which I see as a fast likelihood estimation we do based on our previous knowledge. Which also make me think what role plays memory in our intelligence.

BTW, I don't have much idea about the subject.

Re: AI Is No Match for the Quirks of Human Intelligence

#37
The gold standard for thinking about the limits of AI is the work of Herbert Dreyfus, specifically the books What Computers Can't Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence published in 1972, and the revised What Computers Still Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason, published in 1992, and Mind over Machine, from 1986.

Re: AI Is No Match for the Quirks of Human Intelligence

#39
There's an entire genre of articles which argue that computers can never do X, because X is ill defined. Thing is, half of the time X is only ill defined because the writer neglects to define X well, and for the other half, that the writer can't define X well is no proof that it is impossible to define X well.

Here however, if the take the argument of representations in a technical sense, then since a neural network topology is just data we can fit along with the rest of the network, it's just wrong.

Or if we take a slightly more charitable interpretation, observing robots, from time to time they can get to really surprising solutions, so at least one would need to distinguish between a numerical algorithm finds a surprising solution and 'insight.'

Now, I actually don't want to be too hard on the article, I think it is genuinely interesting hodgepodge of facts about human cognition, I just think it should be rewritten without the computers will never do X thesis.

Re: AI Is No Match for the Quirks of Human Intelligence

#40
post #8
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a possibly related bet I have with a friend: "If, in ten year's time (from March 2021) self-driven cars outnumber manually-driven cars on the US roadways, I will buy you dinner. (and vice-versa, he buys if they don't.)" I think it's a reasonably harder task than playing chess for assessing whatever it is we mean by 'intelligence' and my bias is that the difficulties remain under-appreciated by the technical op…

That sounds like a commercial acceptance bet rather than a technology one but yeah I would take the same bet. But I'd bet by 2031 driving a car will not be the peak of AI.

Sure, there are technological and commercial (and regulatory, and, and, and...) aspects to the bet. The thing I'm after in my car bet is that I'm using 'replaces humans at something that requires intelligence' as the bar to clear for what you describe as 'smarter computers in our life time.'

Can you give a purer example of a bet that would demonstrate what you believe here?

Post reply on HN