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AI Is No Match for the Quirks of Human Intelligence

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

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and ship bug fixes for each person their prior code killed My question is always, who is responsible for those deaths? Or will we just have so little care for life that we consider them "for the cause"?

A valid question, and one that deserves an answer. However, also valid to note that 38k+ people die on US roads each yeah, and as I understand it, most of those are chalked up to being freak, unpreventable "accidents". So maybe there's a step here even ahead of autonomous vehicles where we commit to abandoning this way of thinking and insist that every road death is fully root-caused. Not just back to human error, bu…

> Not just back to human error, but in the FAA sense, back to why equipment, processes, and infrastructure were in place that allowed a single moment of human inattention to be so deadly.

I'm for it - but I'll bet the average person will be against all the weeks of training we will soon require every years before you are allowed to touch a car. It will be even worse once people realize how high the drop out rate is (people who fail and suddenly can't get around)

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

#62
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The word "smarter" masks some of the complexity here. If you define it as "higher performance on a task widely considered to require intelligence", then we've had computers that are smarter than humans for at least decades. If you define it as "higher performance on every task widely considered to require intelligence", then I'll take that bet, please.

We have beat humans on every single atari game by at least one order of magnitude, and we do that consistently, and it really only took 5 or so years since the first solution that provided tangible results. It has only been 8 or 9 years since GPGPUs were used for ML research. We are also seeing models that are able to generate code given prompts. Given enough representational power, I don't see why a model that learn…

I'll offer an even better deal:

If AI surpasses humans at either comedy or film(by total hours of content viewed, or some other metric you propose) by January 2050, I'll buy you a fake meat dinner.

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

#63
>> Psychologists have found that people make different choices when presented with the same alternatives, depending on how the alternatives are described.

Encapsulated into an old joke:

Two monks, both avid smokers, go to the pope for spiritual advice.

The first monk goes in, then after a while comes out looking dejected. The other monk asks him:

"What happened? What did he say?".

"He said no: we are not allowed to smoke during prayer".

The other monk smiles and nods knowingly. "Let me try" he says.

He goes in. After a while he comes out smiling triumphant.

"Wow, he said yes?" asks the other monk, amazed. "What did you say to him?"

"I said: Holy Father, are we allowed to pray while we smoke?".

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

#64
post #53

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 re…

It won't because actual DL products solve problems that are not sexy but still works objectively better than traditional ML for most tasks. The best example of this is OCR/Document Intelligence. The old ML approaches of the 1990-2000 are really no match for what we have now. It's gotten to a point where extracting handwritten text is done reliably for very cheap. Same goes for tables and key-values extractions which…

> It's gotten to a point where extracting handwritten text is done reliably for very cheap.

Is that freeform handwritten documents, or handwritten text filled into boxes on a form?

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

#65

>> Psychologists have found that people make different choices when presented with the same alternatives, depending on how the alternatives are described. Encapsulated into an old joke: Two monks, both avid smokers, go to the pope for spiritual advice. The first monk goes in, then after a while comes out looking dejected. The other monk asks him: "What happened? What did he say?". "He said no: we are not allowed to s…

> different choices when presented with the same alternatives

I've never been comfortable with the assumption from the social sciences that people don't change their preferences when confronted with seemingly unrelated extra options, the principle known as Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives[0].

Now it seems that there is an even weaker assumption, which perhaps should be called Independence of Relevant Alternatives, which is also not a reasonable axiom to hold. The assumption could be expressed as "A person's preference for X over Y guarantees their preference for X' over Y', whenever X' is an equivalent option to X and Y' is an equivalent option to Y."

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

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

#66
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…

I think you made an insanely good bet considering the average age of all vehicle types in the US except SUVs is greater than 10 years. Even if every new car in the US were fully self driving then it would be a tight bet assuming current trends hold. https://www.bts.gov/content/average-age-automobiles-and-truc...

I'd probably be willing to concede to a weaker form of the bet, say if more than 20% of taxi service miles driven were by self-driving cars. But we don't need to tell my friend that.

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

#67
Anything that has state involved in a known boundary of conditions, AI will always best human's.

Human's are really good at generating rules that create dynamics of play. Whenever that set of rules is inscribed in a form of notation, AI will best it.

Human's create notation, AI consume it. This can be mutually beneficial. AI depend on human's illogical-logic for breaking novelty thresholds, and human's depend on AI for doing better at logic. AI solve a very important problem of the human condition that has a huge attack vector on reason and logic. If we can somehow find harmony with AI where it doesn't become a risk of manipulating the source of debugging logic & reason then it'll be a very nice match!

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

#68
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 pe…

To help improve the framing a little more, with rough orders of magnitude:

* 10^10 Watts: electrical power generation of the Itaipu Dam[0]

* 10^26 Watts: luminosity of the Sun[0]

* 10^10 neurons simulated on the Japanese supercomputer K last year[1]

* 10^10 neurons in the human brain[2]

I'm not claiming that a simulation of the human brain with equivalent capability is just around the corner, just that it is misleading to point to the scale difference between artificial and natural energy sources with the implication that brain simulation is beyond our reach in the same way.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_%28power%2...

[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fninf.2020.0001...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...

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

#69
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't because actual DL products solve problems that are not sexy but still works objectively better than traditional ML for most tasks. The best example of this is OCR/Document Intelligence. The old ML approaches of the 1990-2000 are really no match for what we have now. It's gotten to a point where extracting handwritten text is done reliably for very cheap. Same goes for tables and key-values extractions which…

> It's gotten to a point where extracting handwritten text is done reliably for very cheap. Is that freeform handwritten documents, or handwritten text filled into boxes on a form?

Even free form handwritten text recognition is pretty good at this point and that's true for most languages. You can try with Google Lens if you have an Android phone.

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

#70
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A valid question, and one that deserves an answer. However, also valid to note that 38k+ people die on US roads each yeah, and as I understand it, most of those are chalked up to being freak, unpreventable "accidents". So maybe there's a step here even ahead of autonomous vehicles where we commit to abandoning this way of thinking and insist that every road death is fully root-caused. Not just back to human error, bu…

> Not just back to human error, but in the FAA sense, back to why equipment, processes, and infrastructure were in place that allowed a single moment of human inattention to be so deadly. I'm for it - but I'll bet the average person will be against all the weeks of training we will soon require every years before you are allowed to touch a car. It will be even worse once people realize how high the drop out rate is (…

Yeah. I think most advocates have long ago realized that the only way you could ever hope to have the requirements for vehicle piloting tightened up to where they should be is if you've built a society where 99% of people can drop out of the pool of drivers and survive, and that means some combination of a) robust mass transit, and b) machine pilots.

The current system is obviously the result of a century of symbiosis between car-centric development and driving being seen by most as a requirement to participate in society, and therefore a de facto right.

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