Artificial Intelligence: The Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet (2018)

This is one of my favorites. So much of industrial AI is about replacing labor (usually cheaper but lower quality). In a way, AGI is only slightly more ambitious. We should be setting higher goals for AI, including helping individuals be superhuman, and helping organizations coordinate betteele.

We already have artificial intelligence. It’s called children

This is a common sentiment, and pundits have been making similar remarks for decades. This author writes "Sixty years later, however, high-level reasoning and thought remain elusive."

That's the wrong problem with AI. The trouble with AI is that it still sucks at manipulation in unstructured situations and at "common sense". Common sense can usefully be defined as getting through the next 30 seconds of life without a major screwup. At, at least, the competence level of the average squirrel. This is why robots are so limited.

If we could build a decent squirrel brain, something "higher level" could give it tasks to do. That would be enough to handle many basic jobs in unstructured spaces, such as store stocking, janitorial, and such. It's not the "high level reasoning" that's the problem. It's the low-level stuff.

A squirrel has around 10 million neurons. Even if neurons are complicated [1], somebody ought to be able to build something with 10 million of them. Current hardware is easily up to the task.

The AI field is fundamentally missing something. I don't know what it is. I took a few shots at this problem back in the 1990s and got nowhere. Others have beaten their head against the wall on this. The Rethink Robotics failure is a notable example.

The real surprise to me is how much progress has been made on vision without manipulation improving much. I'd expected that real-world object recognition would lead to much better manipulation, but it didn't. Even Amazon warehouse bin-picking isn't fully automated yet. Nor is phone manufacturing. Google had a big collection of robots trying to machine-learn basic manual tasks, and they failed at that.

That's the real problem.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089662732...

GOFAI = "Good old fashioned AI" for those not familiar with the acronym

Biological brains have had a few billion years to optimize. Over the past decade or two, it's been increasingly apparent that the structure and algorithms that govern a particular neural net's behaviour are extremely important to its efficacy.

We likely have a very warped view of what intelligence is, because the most prominent examples of it have been aggressively honed over an extremely long period of time to be good at tasks crucial to their survival, such as effectively navigating a 3D environment. We consider art to be a difficult and complex task, and making a sandwich to be a simple one, but that's because our particular brand of intelligence is optimized toward the latter.