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What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

quantamagazine.org

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Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#51

Post by filippp »

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…

I think neuroscience could in principle show that phenomenal consciousness is an illusion, by giving a full account in terms of the brain of why it seems to us that we're conscious. Whether it will is another question.

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#52

Post by teddyh »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #10
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because snark is a pre-installed module in the Western Human Online Communication Library Codebase. The code for "understanding" is part of Generic Human Firmware codebase and is tightly integrated with the OS. Unfortunately it hasn't been open sourced.

It's totally open source, just written in a language we don't (yet) understand.

I.e. a binary blob.

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#53

Post by chermi »

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…

*Edited because I can't type*

I do not understand this argument.

I'm going use the word magic for whatever you're calling this non-"materialistic" spiritual explanation. I'm not trying to be a jackass, that's truly the best word I can find for it. I don't think magic is a bad thing, I just don't think you should summon magic until you need to.

Magic is not an explanation, it's a non-explanation. It's non-falsifiable (blah-bity Popper, yeah yeah).

Our adeptness at manipulating matter is not the origin of wanting (at least mine) to find a 'materialistic' explanation for something. It's the desire to have a predictive (read, useful) model of that thing, even if the model is not complete. Once you poke deep enough at any model you will find that there is some hand-wavy "magic" at the bottom. That is, there is some part that we don't know yet, either because we can't do the math, because we can't measure due to difficulty of experiment, or because of fundamental bounds where maybe you might be justified in starting to invoke some magic.

Despite best selling books about some quantum mysticism bullshit, I have yet to see an inkling of evidence for invoking magic for consciousness. From a physics perspective, biological systems are freaking hard, we have no reason to expect them to crack easily. And that's without us (physicists) understanding nearly enough about biology!

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#55

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#56

Post by PeterisP »

trabant00 wrote: post #24

It's incredible how stupidly powerful the rational part of the human brain is. It has this unlimited capacity to get lost in details. "What does it mean for AI to Understand?" - we keep arguing over definitions and moving the goal posts to make it seem we are an step closer to reaching AI. When my first AI coworker will read the on-boarding docs and start solving Jira issues I will have no doubt we have done it. That…

Regarding Turing test, it turned out that fooling people is easier than it might seem, so it's not considered anymore a reasonable qualification for general artificial intelligence as everybody now presumes that it's possible for a system to exist that can beat the Turing test but doesn't even attempt to be intelligent in any reasonable/general way.

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#57

Post by bryan0 »

PeterisP wrote: post #56
trabant00 wrote: post #24

It's incredible how stupidly powerful the rational part of the human brain is. It has this unlimited capacity to get lost in details. "What does it mean for AI to Understand?" - we keep arguing over definitions and moving the goal posts to make it seem we are an step closer to reaching AI. When my first AI coworker will read the on-boarding docs and start solving Jira issues I will have no doubt we have done it. That…

Regarding Turing test, it turned out that fooling people is easier than it might seem, so it's not considered anymore a reasonable qualification for general artificial intelligence as everybody now presumes that it's possible for a system to exist that can beat the Turing test but doesn't even attempt to be intelligent in any reasonable/general way.

I don't know why this is a common viewpoint. A proper Turing test with trained judges and human subjects who are actually trying to convince the judge they are human still seems like the best test of intelligence IMO.

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#58

Post by jonplackett »

bpizzi wrote: post #34
jonplackett wrote: post #14

Anyone who has kids and teaches them things will know AI learns and ‘understands’ very differently. I can say something like ‘a tiger is just a lion with stripes’ to a 3 year old and they now ‘understand’ what a tiger is almost as well as if they saw a picture of one. They could definitely identify one from a picture now. This kind of understanding won’t work with an AI because we don’t understand what characteristic…

> I can say something like ‘a tiger is just a lion with stripes’ to a 3 year old and they now ‘understand’ what a tiger is almost as well as if they saw a picture of one. They could definitely identify one from a picture now. Assuming the 3 year old already knew what a lion looks like, and point at 'things with stripes' and 'things without stripes'. I think that a model that can already recognize separately lions and…

Maybe… but this is just one very easy example and also using something very obvious and visual.

I could also say “a Cheetah is like a lion but it’s smaller and has spots and runs a lot faster. And a leopard is like a lion but smaller and can climb trees and has spots.”

I could probably start with a house cat and describe an elephant if I wanted to and I’ll bet the kid would work it out.

The ability to take apart and reassemble knowledge is what I’m talking about here, not just add two simple bits of information together.

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#59

Post by bryan0 »

> Unfortunately, Turing underestimated the propensity of humans to be fooled by machines. Even simple chatbots, such as Joseph Weizenbaum’s 1960s ersatz psychotherapist Eliza, have fooled people into believing they were conversing with an understanding being, even when they knew that their conversation partner was a machine.

This is not a Turing test. Or at least not a reasonable one. A reasonable Turing consists of a judge and 2 interfaces, one which chats with a computer and the other which chats with a human. Both the human and computer are trying to convince the judge that they are the human. If the judge cannot determine which is which after an open-ended conversation then the computer passes.

There is no reasonable judge which after chatting with a human (who is actually trying to convince the judge they are human) would be unable to differentiate between a human and Eliza or any other chatbot out there.

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#60

Post by jonplackett »

ShamelessC wrote: post #17
jonplackett wrote: post #14

Anyone who has kids and teaches them things will know AI learns and ‘understands’ very differently. I can say something like ‘a tiger is just a lion with stripes’ to a 3 year old and they now ‘understand’ what a tiger is almost as well as if they saw a picture of one. They could definitely identify one from a picture now. This kind of understanding won’t work with an AI because we don’t understand what characteristic…

I've done a fair bit of work with multimodal deep learning and I am fairly confident that a DALL-E, CLIP, or NUWA architecture would output/classify those phrases accurately without being trained explicitly on images of Tigers. I see your point however.

I’d be interested in where to look for more info on that.

Do you think it could work on anything more complex?

As I said in comment below I reckon I could make a much more elaborate explanation and still have the kid get it.

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