Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

quantamagazine.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 134 posts

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#41

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

jll29 wrote: post #30

As an AI professor, I've always held that machines are NOT intelligent (I am prepared to change my position on the day my computer asks me anything surprising that I didn't program it to). But this does not mean we cannot produce operational models of understanding, for example we have models of propositional/logical semantics and discourse such as Lambda Discourse Representation Theory and others, which can compute…

> As an AI professor, I've always held that machines are NOT intelligent (I am prepared to change my position on the day my computer asks me anything surprising that I didn't program it to).

While granting you your seemingly arbitrary metric for 'intelligence', one is forced to wonder to what extent AI systems of today are even given a means by which to ask such questions if they did, in fact, have them. Take AlphaGo, for instance, which can consistently beat the greatest living grand masters of the game. Does it have any means of interaction by which it could pose an unexpected question?

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#43

Post by md2020 »

chrischapman wrote: post #36

Machines don't learn. Living things learn. Machines don't understand. Living things understand. Machines 'do' algorithms. Living things 'do' use-cases. Algorithm Definition: A sequence of actions that yields a result. Use-case Definition: A sequence of actions that yields a result of value to a user. The difference between the two is 'of value to a user'. To me, the line between algorithm and use-case is the line bet…

This just sounds like you defined “value” to mean “something only living things do and that machines don’t do”, and then said the reason machines can’t learn is because they can’t value. Seems like circular reasoning. I think if you’re putting humans, chimps, ducks, and caterpillars in the category “can value”, machines still belong on that axis. They’re far below caterpillar for now, but they’re there.

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#44

Post by chrischapman »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #38
chrischapman wrote: post #36

Machines don't learn. Living things learn. Machines don't understand. Living things understand. Machines 'do' algorithms. Living things 'do' use-cases. Algorithm Definition: A sequence of actions that yields a result. Use-case Definition: A sequence of actions that yields a result of value to a user. The difference between the two is 'of value to a user'. To me, the line between algorithm and use-case is the line bet…

Sounds like a bunch of unsubstantiated claims? So if something does learn, then its a living thing? My AI can learn (see a pattern and repeat it); now its a living thing? Not sure what to do with that.

Yep. Totally unsubstantiated. Back of the envelope theory at best.

> learn (see a pattern and repeat it)

How did your AI 'see' and is 'see a pattern and repeat it' a good enough definition of 'learn'? Surely to 'learn' also means to 'understand'. What did your AI 'understand'? I doubt your AI actually learned anything. It attained zero knowledge in the way a living thing obtains knowledge. It may have stored a result in a database but did it actually understand anything?

These are genuine questions as I have no professional knowledge of AI.

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#45

Post by mannykannot »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #41
jll29 wrote: post #30

As an AI professor, I've always held that machines are NOT intelligent (I am prepared to change my position on the day my computer asks me anything surprising that I didn't program it to). But this does not mean we cannot produce operational models of understanding, for example we have models of propositional/logical semantics and discourse such as Lambda Discourse Representation Theory and others, which can compute…

> As an AI professor, I've always held that machines are NOT intelligent (I am prepared to change my position on the day my computer asks me anything surprising that I didn't program it to). While granting you your seemingly arbitrary metric for 'intelligence', one is forced to wonder to what extent AI systems of today are even given a means by which to ask such questions if they did, in fact, have them. Take AlphaGo…

One can reasonably ask whether the techniques that produced AlphaGo could produce a program that asks unexpected (yet pertinent) questions. I'm not sure, but I think we can say it has not been demonstrated yet.

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#46

Post by prometheus76 »

Verdex wrote: post #18
tested23 wrote: post #16

What does it mean for humans to understand? There are many times in the past where i thought i understood something and then i grow older and i see the holes.

Yeah, I feel this question is important to understand before we worry about what it means for the AI to understand. My thought is that we've got three types of "understanding": 1) social understanding 2) intuitive understanding 3) structural understanding Social understanding is something the society we live in knows, but the individual only knows in so far as the individual is doing something to fit in or via peer p…

I would use "experiential understanding" instead of "intuitive understanding", but I think we mean the same thing. I am not sure I agree with your hierarchy, however. I would rather have an experiential understanding of marital arts if I was faced with a would-be attacker than I would have a "structural understanding" as you put it. In other words, for many domains of interaction with the world, an experiential knowledge is far superior to a "structural" or as I understood what you were saying a "propositional" understanding of a topic or subject.

Here's another way of putting what I'm saying: when we want to learn about a tree, in the West, our first inclination is to cut it down, categorize/classify the parts, and count the rings. We think we know what a "tree" is at that point. In the East (and I'm learning this perspective from Eastern Orthodox Christianity), if you want to learn about a tree, you plant one. Maybe more than one. Nurture it. Prune it. Fertilize it. Watch it grow. Watch it change with the seasons. Build a treehouse in it for your kids. Watch your daughter get married in the shade of the tree. In other words, instead of dissecting something (which kills the thing itself) in order to categorically "understand" something propositionally, in the East, they focus on having a relationship with something in order to understand it.

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#47

Post by tiborsaas »

jrm4 wrote: post #37
jll29 wrote: post #30

As an AI professor, I've always held that machines are NOT intelligent (I am prepared to change my position on the day my computer asks me anything surprising that I didn't program it to). But this does not mean we cannot produce operational models of understanding, for example we have models of propositional/logical semantics and discourse such as Lambda Discourse Representation Theory and others, which can compute…

Thank you. This all seems very simple to me: So-called AI is mostly not different from books, movies, videogames etc. No, they don't "think" and they are not "intelligent." But that in no way precludes that it an instance of it being mind-blowing and world-changing. Books, etc. do that, too.

Can a book drive a car by attaching some sensors to it?

AI models definitely have intelligent aspects to them since they perform tasks we can't write algorithms for manually in a straightforward way.

But a movie or a book is nothing like an AI model, they don't process information, they are static. AI models can react to numerous inputs in various ways.

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#48

Post by tomthe »

My understanding of "Understanding":

Imagine a photo of a written poem:

An image-processing program can "understand" the digital image: It can read the jpg, change the picture completely (e.g.: change the colors slightly), without changing the meaning one level up. But it doesn't understand the characters or words.

An OCR program can read the image and "understand" the characters (or the textual representation. It can change the representation completely (save it as UTF-8 or whatever) without changing the meaning one level up. But it doesn't understand the language.

GPT-3.... well, let't go directly to humans

A human can read the text and understand the words and understand their meanings and what the sentences say. Another human really understands the poem and the subtext another level up.

I think understanding always works on different levels and is a part of communication.

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#49

Post by chrischapman »

md2020 wrote: post #43
chrischapman wrote: post #36

Machines don't learn. Living things learn. Machines don't understand. Living things understand. Machines 'do' algorithms. Living things 'do' use-cases. Algorithm Definition: A sequence of actions that yields a result. Use-case Definition: A sequence of actions that yields a result of value to a user. The difference between the two is 'of value to a user'. To me, the line between algorithm and use-case is the line bet…

This just sounds like you defined “value” to mean “something only living things do and that machines don’t do”, and then said the reason machines can’t learn is because they can’t value. Seems like circular reasoning. I think if you’re putting humans, chimps, ducks, and caterpillars in the category “can value”, machines still belong on that axis. They’re far below caterpillar for now, but they’re there.

The ability to 'value a result' seems to me to be linked to consciousness. How do machines belong to that axis? Do you really think machines can value something in the same way you and I do? I would assume they can't (and may never). You could probably code an algorithm that simulates 'valuing a result', but I'm sceptical that the machine would actually value the result in the way you and I would. If it did, that would be astonishing as it would indicate (to me) that it's alive!

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#50

Post by marginalia_nu »

kkoncevicius wrote: post #35
jll29 wrote: post #30

As an AI professor, I've always held that machines are NOT intelligent (I am prepared to change my position on the day my computer asks me anything surprising that I didn't program it to). But this does not mean we cannot produce operational models of understanding, for example we have models of propositional/logical semantics and discourse such as Lambda Discourse Representation Theory and others, which can compute…

> How do consciousness and intention emerge from materials that are not alive and that have neither consciousness nor intention? I think the question shoud first be not about "how", but rather - "does consciousness emerge from the materials". Most cultures in the past have maintained ideas about the duality between spirit and matter. Nowadays we are so adept at manipulating matter we always explicitly assume that eve…

It seems to me that consciousness emerges when things arranged in some particular way are acted upon some principle, which is true even for simple behavior, like a rock falling to the ground.

If you put a sail on a boat, it will catch the wind and move across the water. It's not the sail alone that moves the boat, nor the wind, but their interplay. A sail without wind doesn't get moved, and a wind without anything to catch it doesn't move anything.

May be a bit of an unintuitive conclusion, but I think may be that we are catching the consciousness like a sail catches the wind, and this is the same "wind" that we call the forces of nature, that we only can perceive as patterns in how things around us appear to change.

Post reply on HN