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The AI Battle

aifuture.substack.com

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Re: The AI Battle

#111

Post by carapace »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #73
carapace wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's me almost exactly six years ago, predicting "most coding and design tasks will be automated within three to five years." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11718300 If we count GitHub Copilot as the tip of the spear then I was too optimistic. > GitHub Copilot ... was first announced by GitHub on 29 June 2021 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub_Copilot

You were too pessimistic! Automatic programming, a.k.a. program synthesis, has been a thing since the early days of AI and computer science, for example the idea of deductive program synthesis, where a program is generated wholesale from a complete specification in a formal language that is not a computer language goes at least as back as Alonzo Church himself, in 1957: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_synthesis…

That's right, this is your field isn't it? Cheers!

Gosh, the robot car work was incredible, I can't believe I've never heard of it before!

- - - -

Copilot isn't cutting edge but it's significance is just that it's a mass market tool. It will be interesting to see how well it does, and whether users find it worthwhile overall after a couple of years. Will it be improved to the point where it starts to compete with its users?

I've asked other programmers before, if you could write a program that replaced you would you do it?

(One of the reasons I like Schmidhuber is that his goal, since early on, is to "Create an automatic scientist, and then retire.")

To me the ultimate effect of programming is to obviate the programmer.

Re: The AI Battle

#112

Post by carapace »

ajafari1 wrote: post #60
carapace wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's me almost exactly six years ago, predicting "most coding and design tasks will be automated within three to five years." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11718300 If we count GitHub Copilot as the tip of the spear then I was too optimistic. > GitHub Copilot ... was first announced by GitHub on 29 June 2021 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub_Copilot

Nice! You were very close. With any exponential curve, it takes forever to get to point A, but once there, it's an immediate job to point Z.

Cheers!

I'm going to try to work up a decent reply to your article, but it might take me a day or two.

Have you read Wendell Berry's "What are People For?" (that essay not the whole eponymous book)?

- - - -

The (open) secret at the heart of AI is that no AI can answer: "What is good?" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31720621 )

AKA "Lucky for whom?" Teela Brown, fictional character in Larry Niven novels

Spoiler alert!

This link gives details of the character that are spoilers: https://larryniven.fandom.com/wiki/Teela_Brown

Unfortunately those details are the point I'm trying to make, and I'm a huge Niven fan so I'm not going to spoil Ringworld, but it ties in with the (ultimately metaphysical) question, "What is good?"

Re: The AI Battle

#113

Post by rytill »

bsenftner wrote: post #100
rytill wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you falsify this hypothesis? What specific task do you think AI will be unable to do in our lifetimes because of this lacking of comprehension?

One can not explain anything to an AI, it has no comprehension. You're talking to nothing, a brick. Lacking comprehension, using "intelligence" in the name of AI is a marketing joke. I write the stuff, at a very high level. All the "software engineer careers are doomed" crap is nonsense. Lacking comprehension, AI is an idiot savant and a damn good actor, and nothing more because there is literally nothing inside.

So what specific task will AI definitely not be able to do in 5 years?

Re: The AI Battle

#114

Post by deepsquirrelnet »

Barrin92 wrote: post #84

It's not going to happen for a very simple reason, the personal identity of the artist in the age of mass produced crap (not just by machines, but also by other people) is gaining importance. (Today) consuming music or art isn't just about the work itself, it's even more about the person and culture surrounding it, and there is no culture or interesting narrative in machine produced art. AI art is not authentic, it h…

> The only people who watch bot chess-competitions are AI enthusiasts, not chess fans

Actually that’s not entirely true. Grandmasters frequently study AI openings and use them to search for new ideas to bring against their opponents.

While I generally agree with your sentiments, I see more of a synergistic future, where humans take inspiration from computers (and consequently it gets fed back into the machine).

Re: The AI Battle

#116

Post by donkarma »

hoppla wrote: post #22

Are AIs capable of creating something really unique, or is it just a washing machine spinning on old ideas?

try asking it for a red sphere on top of a green cube next to a yellow cone, it falls apart instantly. extrapolation only goes so far, it's like a photoshop artist who gets the background and then copies elements from the internet to paste into the background

Re: The AI Battle

#118

Post by krageon »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #67
tialaramex wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> those systems are not a path to AGI If that's the actual meat of your claim, it's weird to just put it unsupported at the end. If you think it's an aside you've got a big problem, because without it the rest is pretty weak. We saw this with chess. Anybody who was clinging on to the idea that well, the machines can't really play chess, because technically there do seem to be a few humans who are better, was screwed…

On "not the path to AGI": Gary Marcus on the Mindscape podcast is worth a listen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANRnuT9nLEE&list=PLrxfgDEc2N... Transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2022/02/14/184-... "...And then there’s natural language understanding and reasoning, and I would say we have not really made progress at all. GPT-3, which we may wanna talk about, gives the illusion of having natural…

This argumentation is based on the "feeling" that something doesn't understand things the way they do and that this is sufficient to say that it is inferior. It's a very old argument against AGI, and it's as boring as it ever was: It relies on human exceptionalism and on the concept of the soul (i.e. something humans have and other things can never have, which cannot be quantified or understood). It is compelling only to those who are religious or who still hold religious tendencies.

Re: The AI Battle

#119

Post by krageon »

ajafari1 wrote: post #31
tialaramex wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> those systems are not a path to AGI If that's the actual meat of your claim, it's weird to just put it unsupported at the end. If you think it's an aside you've got a big problem, because without it the rest is pretty weak. We saw this with chess. Anybody who was clinging on to the idea that well, the machines can't really play chess, because technically there do seem to be a few humans who are better, was screwed…

Right on. When do you expect a productized AI that can replace your average skilled programmer?

The average is so bad it barely even has to produce code that works, so that's not really a bar I'm interested in seeing cleared.

Re: The AI Battle

#120

Post by ETH_start »

>>But, how big of a role will human designers have in the future as AI designers take on the lion’s share of the work? Will it take 5 hours for a designer to interface with a client for just one image? I think not. Let’s be extremely generous and say it takes 1 hour of client-tech interface time for a given image. AI just eliminated 4 out of every 5 hours of a designer’s workday. There is no way the entire gap can be filled with a worker simply taking on more assignments. If you multiply out the disruption across hundreds of thousands of designers and artists, then well, you get the picture.

If one could get graphic design work that is 20 times better for one fifth the cost, one would commission far more graphic design work. Easily five times as much, given the number of scenarios where the cost to benefit ratio of doing so would suddenly make it worthwhile.

Something similar has been happening in software development for decades. New frameworks, higher level programming languages, etc are all ways of automating more programming, by enabling the cloning of progressively more complex pre-made functions.

The result of this automation, and commensurate increase in programming productivity, has not been programmers becoming unemployed. It has been vastly more complex programs, allowing software, and software developers, to be utilized in more domains.

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