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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?

#81

Post by simplestats »

chermi wrote: post #53
kkoncevicius wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I don't think this line of dismissal necessarily fits. If we ended up having to expand physics to include some new (today seen as mystical) property of the universe, then you are essentially wrong here. With QM (which I doubt is related to consciousness) we had to add unmeasurable quantum phase to everything and accept certain previously-"nonphysical" new properties of systems. Similarly with other revolutionaly theories.

Magic can be disproven by explaining the phemonen with a conventional physical theory.

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#82

Post by Kranar »

servytor wrote: post #72
Kranar wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your position couples intelligence with consciousness a bit too tightly. I can imagine a goldfish is conscious but not intelligent and I can imagine a very powerful supercomputer to be intelligent but not conscious. The prerequisite to change your position can be satisfied by having a computer randomly generate a question, which I don't think would be an example of consciousness or intelligence. Furthermore e…

'Consciousness' is just a synonym for self-aware. Goldfish are not self-aware.

Stating that I can imagine X to be Y is not a statement that X is Y, only that if X is Y then nothing changes about my model of either X or Y.

That said, I'm not able to verify from a brief search for consciousness and self-awareness that the two are synonyms. The two seem to be related but are treated differently from one another. Furthermore it's not even clear whether goldfish are conscious or self-aware. Seems like it's an open question.

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#83

Post by sabhiram »

What does it mean for a child to understand? For a baby? A dog? A command line application?

Understanding implies comprehension of some input, to influence a future state. Surely my stateful database understands requests that come to it. It, however will never surprise me with behavior that I would (should) not expect. I suppose if you "understood" the human machine and mind well enough, it would be possible to predict the actions it will carry out.

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#84

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#85

Post by nescioquid »

Kranar wrote: post #66
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…

I think your position couples intelligence with consciousness a bit too tightly. I can imagine a goldfish is conscious but not intelligent and I can imagine a very powerful supercomputer to be intelligent but not conscious. The prerequisite to change your position can be satisfied by having a computer randomly generate a question, which I don't think would be an example of consciousness or intelligence. Furthermore e…

As a lay-person, I was persuaded by Roger Penrose's argument that intelligence presupposes understanding, and that understanding is not computational. I had also finished reading a bunch of phenomenology before I read Penrose, so I was probably primed for that sort of an argument to be persuasive.

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#86

Post by hackinthebochs »

nescioquid wrote: post #85
Kranar wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your position couples intelligence with consciousness a bit too tightly. I can imagine a goldfish is conscious but not intelligent and I can imagine a very powerful supercomputer to be intelligent but not conscious. The prerequisite to change your position can be satisfied by having a computer randomly generate a question, which I don't think would be an example of consciousness or intelligence. Furthermore e…

As a lay-person, I was persuaded by Roger Penrose's argument that intelligence presupposes understanding, and that understanding is not computational. I had also finished reading a bunch of phenomenology before I read Penrose, so I was probably primed for that sort of an argument to be persuasive.

But why think understanding is not computational? It certainly enables a lot of computational behaviors, its effects can be modeled by computation. What power does understanding endow a system that a priori is beyond computation to capture?

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#87

Post by jonplackett »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #32
jonplackett wrote: post #12

Highly recommend A a thousand Brains by Jeff Hawkins if you’re interested in this https://numenta.com/blog/2019/01/16/the-thousand-brains-theo... He basically argues we all have 1000s of little, but interacting models of all sorts of things going on in our brain all at the same time. He calls them reference frames and it’s those that create intelligence. ‘Understanding’ would come naturally out of having those. Fasci…

I've not read the book, but from your description it maybe has some similarity to Marvin Minsky’s "Society of Mind". Mind and intelligence as the emergent behaviour of many cooperating/competing systems.

yes i think he talks about that. The difference is he's also looking for (and finding) the 'how' in physical brain structure terms, rather than just theory alone.

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#88

Post by optimalsolver »

servytor wrote: post #72
Kranar wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your position couples intelligence with consciousness a bit too tightly. I can imagine a goldfish is conscious but not intelligent and I can imagine a very powerful supercomputer to be intelligent but not conscious. The prerequisite to change your position can be satisfied by having a computer randomly generate a question, which I don't think would be an example of consciousness or intelligence. Furthermore e…

'Consciousness' is just a synonym for self-aware. Goldfish are not self-aware.

How do you know?

Another fish, the cleaner wrasse, can apparently recognise itself in the mirror, hinting at some for of self-awareness.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/fish-clea...

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#89

Post by KhoomeiK »

People outside the NLP research community need to understand that a language model does nothing more than calculate probabilties for the next word given some context. The way it learns that probabilistic function can be quite complex, involving billions of parameters, but it's still fundamentally the same. Most of the increase in performance in recent years has come from the ability to train LMs that better generalize this probability function from huge text corpora--functions that better interleave between the datapoints it's trained on.

Humans use language with purpose, to complete tasks and communicate with others, but GPT-3 has no more goals or desires than an n-gram model from the 90s. LMs are essentially a faculty for syntactically well-formed or intuitive/system 1 language generation, but they don't seem to be much more.

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#90

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

interstice wrote: post #76
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Is it the case that playing the games are effectively a way of asking and answering questions, specifically ‘do I win if I do this’?

That wouldn't qualify as 'unexpected' in any way. The system's ability to express any questions it might have is severely curtailed by the limitations of its inputs and outputs.
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