AI hasn't "gone wrong" yet. At least, we don't know that it has, and we can't truly know until we've solved it (for some concrete value of solved).
Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong
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Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong
#12Chomsky 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, some…
How do you approach Heidegger's or Derrida's arguments that 'language is complicated, something magical must be going on'? Will you allow for no qualitatively different meaning to language than probabilistic associations of sounds with objects?
Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong
#13Chomsky 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, some…
What do you think of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language ?
It certainly makes me doubt language (the technology of it) as purely cultural and learned.
Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong
#14Chomsky 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, some…
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Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong
#15Chomsky 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, some…
How do you approach Heidegger's or Derrida's arguments that 'language is complicated, something magical must be going on'? Will you allow for no qualitatively different meaning to language than probabilistic associations of sounds with objects?
I can't speak to the OP, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence; we are yet to observe anything in the natural world where "something magical [really turned out to be] going on", so this really is an extraordinary claim. It has been several years since I was current with the linguistics literature, but as far as I know no extraordinary evidence has been produced.
I don't think that requires that we view language solely as a probabilistic map between sounds and objects. All sorts of emergent behavior appear to be "magical" at first glance.
Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong
#16I 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…
I am not well acquainted with Noam Chomsky and his work, but the dichotomy you refer to I'd like to call "design vs evolution".
If the extreme "design" part the spectrum is what Chomsky talks about: "develop a theory of how something happens and use it to find evidence that supports or refutes that theory", then the extreme end of the "evolution" part of the spectrum must be this:
Choose a set of rules, use genetic programming techniques to rearrange those rules. Evidence you require will be acquired and utilised by the algorithm itself. The only crux is the set of rules to choose from and implementation of the technique. IMO, the more complicated the rules and the more they interact with each other, the better.
...only then can you get results like this: "...Five individual logic cells were functionally disconnected from the rest– with no pathways that would allow them to influence the output– yet when the researcher disabled any one of them the chip lost its ability to discriminate the tones."
http://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/
While we don't know whether the design approach will work, we have examples of evolution creating working intelligence[1].
[1] You.
Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong
#17Chomsky 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, some…
How do you approach Heidegger's or Derrida's arguments that 'language is complicated, something magical must be going on'? Will you allow for no qualitatively different meaning to language than probabilistic associations of sounds with objects?
What could 'meaning' possibly be other than probabilistic associations of sounds and concepts?
Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong
#18Chomsky 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, some…
> His contributions to science are negligible if not entirely detrimental.
I'm not a linguistics expert, but from my vantage point as a computer scientist, it would be hard to conclude that. Chomsky essentially founded the field of formal language theory, and was the first to propose many widely-used constructs, such as the context-free grammar. They may or may not explain how English works, but pretty much everything on the Chomsky hierarchy has been put to productive use in computers.
In a much more general sense, his arguments against blank-slate learning are pretty mainstream in machine learning as well. Chomsky's specific approaches aren't too widely used (though there is some work on grammar induction), but the idea that inductive bias is key to machine learning is widespread, though perhaps in a weaker sense than the very specific and strong inductive bias Chomsky proposes for language learning.
Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong
#19I've always considered Norvig's position pretty much self-evident for anybody who has dealt with real world problems. At the same time, Chomsky is still way more interesting to read, even if he's wrong. And he's wrong mostly for assuming that unsupervised learning has to be the end result when in fact it could be an intermediate step to more refined symbolic theories.
In any case, this kind of antagonism between the two approaches might be useful as it keeps the field more vital, preventing yet another stagnation.
Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong
#20The "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. W…
Chomsky is agreeing that it's making a map. He just doesn't think that map is very useful on a scientific level, but is useful on an engineering level.
You're responding that he's wrong, because it's useful on an engineering level.
Right? I'm reading many comments here and they seem to keep boiling down to this notion. Am I wrong?