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Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

theatlantic.com

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Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

#4

Post by jholman »

I haven't finished reading TFA yet, but so far it's really good, because it sounds like Chomsky is actually getting to the point.... which he sometimes does, and sometimes absolutely doesn't (or so it often seems to me).

If you're interested in this area, which you might call the philosophy of artificial mind, or philosophy of cognitive science, I strongly suggest reading the link to Norvig's article (linked in TFA, but here it is again: http://norvig.com/chomsky.html ). In particular, I'd suggest reading it before reading the actual interview with Chomsky (maybe ideally reading it after the prefatory part of TFA).

My own inclination is that on the face of it, I find Norvig's approach less satisfying, as Chomsky appears to, but upon much consideration my current belief is that Chomsky's approach is too mystical and too just-so, and Norvig's approach at least has the merit of bearing fruit... fruit that one day might be concentrated into a concise and elegant theory.

Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

#6

Post by lsb »

The "right" way is to take endless numbers of videotapes of what's happening outside the video, and feed them into the biggest and fastest computer, gigabytes of data, and do complex statistical analysis -- you know, Bayesian this and that -- and you'll get some kind of prediction about what's gonna happen outside the window next. In fact, you get a much better prediction than the physics department will ever give. Well, if success is defined as getting a fair approximation to a mass of chaotic unanalyzed data, then it's way better to do it this way than to do it the way the physicists do, you know, no thought experiments about frictionless planes and so on and so forth. But you won't get the kind of understanding that the sciences have always been aimed at -- what you'll get at is an approximation to what's happening.

Chomsky seems to keep using naïve models as a strawman, and Norvig rightly calls him on it. If you use simple models, you can only get simple insights, but statistical machine translation (for example) builds probabilistic context-free grammars, which maps human notions of language far better than "make sure every three words in sequence is plausible".

Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

#8

Post by hvs »

jholman wrote: post #4

I haven't finished reading TFA yet, but so far it's really good, because it sounds like Chomsky is actually getting to the point.... which he sometimes does, and sometimes absolutely doesn't (or so it often seems to me). If you're interested in this area, which you might call the philosophy of artificial mind, or philosophy of cognitive science, I strongly suggest reading the link to Norvig's article (linked in TFA,…

I think I agree with you. Chomsky is astoundingly intelligent and (I think) I understand what he is getting at (i.e. develop a theory of how something happens and use it to find evidence that supports or refutes that theory, rather than using statistical methods to develop a predictive model that doesn't teach you anything about the underlying system), but you can't but feel a sense of "yeah, but how?"

You can hardly blame the AI researchers for sticking with methods that have been very successful (at least practically speaking) after they had their funding cut out from under them in the 90's for the perceived "failures of AI".

I do like the idea of developing a theory (e.g. vision is processed via algorithm in the brain represented by X) and then attempting to find evidence of that. It can help to avoid the reductionist idea that you need to model everything down to the cellular level in order to understand the brain. It's like trying to disassemble code in memory and then read the algorithm rather than examining every 1 and 0 in memory and trying to make heads or tails of them.

That's enough rambling from me..

Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

#10

Post by iandanforth »

Chomsky is right up there with Minsky in being part of the problem. His ideas about language being part of the genome are fanciful nonsense. Skinner produce reams of reproducible empirical observations of behavior which are, today, critical to the evaluation of the performance of AIs. Chomsky has produced interesting theories, but mostly derailed linguistics on the basis of the argument 'language is complicated, something magical must be going on.' His contributions to political debate are monumental. His contributions to science are negligible if not entirely detrimental.
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