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

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

#71
post #19
post #6

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…

Imagine if the immediate outcome of AI is not that we replace taxi drivers, dishwashers, and factory workers, but instead we displace most knowledge-worker white collar jobs, like quant and software engineer? There's an old (and sometimes forgotten) idea in AI that perhaps things we think are simple, like vision and control (robotics), are actually incredibly complicated and took millions of years to evolve. Whereas…

If software engineers end up automated away before truck drivers are, (not a completely harebrained concept given that one type of AI is doing better than expected and the other worse), it will put a hilarious spin on the "truckers should just learn to code" concept.

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

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"When you get attacked in the forest by a guy in a clown costume with an axe you don't need to add that as a training input first before you make a run for it." Sure, because it's already a training input. We'd run because we recognize the axe, the signs of aggression, the horror movie trope of an evil clown, and so forth. We have to teach "stranger danger" to children. "There's no agency, liveliness, autonomy or lea…

>Sure, because it's already a training input not in any meaningful sense, no. I can tell you, "if something's fishy about the situation, just leave". You can do this not because of some particular training inputs or examples I give you, but because you have common sense and a sort of personality and intuition for how to behave in the absence of data. If you told that sentence to a state of the art ML model you'd prob…

> not in any meaningful sense, no. I can tell you, "if something's fishy about the situation, just leave"

"Fishy" is doing a lot of work in this sentence. How much training went into refining an instinct for what's "fishy"? Do you not agree that everyone has a different view on what's fishy?

> I think if anyone knew how to build complex agents with rich internal states that have the intent and communication abilities of humans we'd do that.

I'm not so sure. There doesn't seem to be much commercial value in having an agent with intent and its own goals, and most AI advancements are for commercial entities these days.

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

#73
post #3

I think this essay includes a specific prediction, that human level ai is far away, that might be disproved this decade. If human level ai is close, focusing on some other kind of ai is more likely to be a waste of time.

There's no reason to think it's close this time, just like there's little reason to think this time automation is going to put everyone out of work.

Actually, there are many good reasons to think it's close:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K4urTDkBbtNuLivJx/why-i-thin...

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

#74
post #35
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if the immediate outcome of AI is not that we replace taxi drivers, dishwashers, and factory workers, but instead we displace most knowledge-worker white collar jobs, like quant and software engineer? There's an old (and sometimes forgotten) idea in AI that perhaps things we think are simple, like vision and control (robotics), are actually incredibly complicated and took millions of years to evolve. Whereas…

I'm not sure that people appreciate how even the highly technical white collar jobs have large social elements in them. You might be able to get the AI to write the code, but can you get it to attend the meetings? And it's understanding what the right thing is to build that's the critical challenge in programming.

What if you no longer need meetings? Take accounting software for instance. This function will probably go from an entire team of accountants to one of the C-levels just triggering the right software at the right time as part of their normal duties.

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

#75
post #74
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that people appreciate how even the highly technical white collar jobs have large social elements in them. You might be able to get the AI to write the code, but can you get it to attend the meetings? And it's understanding what the right thing is to build that's the critical challenge in programming.

What if you no longer need meetings? Take accounting software for instance. This function will probably go from an entire team of accountants to one of the C-levels just triggering the right software at the right time as part of their normal duties.

Think about why this isn't the case already? What specific capabilities does AI introduce to accounting?

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

#76
post #75
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you no longer need meetings? Take accounting software for instance. This function will probably go from an entire team of accountants to one of the C-levels just triggering the right software at the right time as part of their normal duties.

Think about why this isn't the case already? What specific capabilities does AI introduce to accounting?

The software just isn't there yet, but we have some inkling of what might be possible in just a few years. Perhaps a closer analogy would be human computers. You would have meetings with them back in the day to set out calculation tasks, but now they are so reduced away that their existence is in itself something that has been forgotten by most. Employees just perform the duties of the human computer throughout the course of their day without even thinking that they replaced what used to be an independent function.

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

#77

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.

maybe the A.I. affords every human to be an affluent retiree/philosopherking and have free-will

If so, it seems it would be undesirable for such AI to possess what we call sentience.

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

#78
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Current hardware is easily up to the task. I don't think so. If you want to model a single synapse in full to capture all effects that might lead to "learning", you have a system of ordinary differential equations. Solving that is very hard, and solving that for 10 million neurons is impossible. On current hardware can only implement but a poor caricature of a real neuron.

> On current hardware can only implement but a poor caricature of a real neuron. We don't need a complete physiological model for it to be useful. We don't need a perfectly accurate silicon-based mirror of a mammalian brain to outsmart ours on every task we do (and many we don't even realize we could). The challenge will be to coexist and cooperate with these completely alien intelligences that share almost nothing w…

I agree with your comment (but the OP point was not about which approximate model might still work)

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

#79
post #36
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s only 3 orders of magnitude off from today’s largest models like PaLM (5x10^11 parameters), a gap that’s narrowed by 3 orders of magnitude just since 2019. How far away do you think we are, exactly?

This is very impressive, but since a biological brain is so much more complicated, who could really make a solid guess? Probably no one right now. PaLM is not an attempt at AGI, a parameter is not equivalent to a neural connection, an activation function is not equivalent to a neuron (of which you have many different types), biological connection patterns are much richer, and biological stimuli are not like slideshow…

I made no claims contrary to anything in your post; your response — none of which I disagree with — makes me worry that you are coming in with a preexisting belief and just looking for reasons it must be true.

That said, there are plenty of multimodal networks (ie not slideshows), and we know very little about the relevance to intelligence of the “richness” of neural connections, activations, etc. — but it’s inarguable that we’ve made great strides in scale alone.

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

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post #25
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s only 3 orders of magnitude off from today’s largest models like PaLM (5x10^11 parameters), a gap that’s narrowed by 3 orders of magnitude just since 2019. How far away do you think we are, exactly?

Thank you for this information. I did not know this. But my view (I may be wrong), is that AGI is too resource-intensive to be within the reach of normal computing of the ordinary user for at least 2 decades.

You’re entitled to your own opinion, of course, but why do you hold this view?

And why is “the reach of normal commuting of the ordinary user” a relevant bar — Google search (as an example) requires computation beyond the reach of normal computing of the ordinary user yet has still had a tremendous impact.

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