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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

#141

Post by xyzzy123 »

calibraxis wrote: post #62
iandanforth wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised he brought that up, it's a weird point. Because a different part of the brain processes the constructed language it's no longer language? It's also untrue. We construct language patterns, poetry for example, where the positional number of a word or a syllable changes its meaning. That said his point about the brain being wired to take the less computationally intensive route is a very important insight…

Actually, his point is that our language organ takes the more computationally expensive route. Not the easier one. That's the puzzle. I don't have his books on me, so I may misconvey this point, but IIRC, he also mentioned regular languages (you know, like with regexes) as another example of a computationally "easier" language family we don't pick up with our language organ. We don't speak arbitrary languages. The sp…

I suppose it depends on your definition of 'expensive'. By that I mean, if your computational model is inherently serialised, sure, regexes are cheap. If fuzzy matching and rough temporal correlation between processing units turns out to be cheap, perhaps regexes are ridiculous extravagance on your hardware family.

I suppose you could turn it around - assuming our language processing is optimal (bit of a leap) you can infer things about our hardware architecture by the languages which we parse efficiently.

Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

#142

Post by xyzzy123 »

confluence wrote: post #103
ilaksh wrote: post #83

The field is now called AGI. It isn't mentioned in this article. Everyone seems to be ignoring the whole field of AGI (artificial general intelligence). Or maybe they truly are ignorant of it. Anyway, suffice to say, AI and AGI didn't stop progressing, and Chomsky is no longer any sort of expert in those fields. Even Norvig isn't up to speed on the most advanced approaches to AGI, but at least he enters the same room…

I've heard of OpenCog before and it, along with the Singularity crowd gives me a weird amateur, bullshitty, vague, generalist feeling that Noam Chomsky does. Basically - where's the beef? What has been done by either crowd apart from taking credit from those who do things in the actual industry/real world? My fundamental aversion to both OpenCog and the entire Singularity crowd is a) their statements are so general a…

I think AGI is an important field of study - but only from an ethical viewpoint!

In terms of engineering yeah, the trend in AI at the moment is applied statistics for sure, and it wins hard.

Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

#143

Post by xyzzy123 »

sown wrote: post #124
ilaksh wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What they are talking about is the idea of human-like general intelligence, and AI mostly doesn't try to do that anymore, although there are some people who are seriously trying and calling it AI and even a few who are sort of aware of what the AGI people are doing or have projects that are as sophisticated. But most of the researchers who are farthest along and most serious about it have been calling it AGI. Anyway,…

> and AI mostly doesn't try to do that anymore, I think part of the problem is that we don't even know what AGI really is. How do you define conscience in a rigourous way. Doesn't mean it can't be done without such work but it just seems soooo undefined right now that people are suspicious if someone comes along and claims to have a partial solution. Do we even know what we're looking for? When we do know or have an…

Right; as far as I know there is no serious research in AGI. AI is applied statistics, and anyone who doesn't have that point of view isn't producing results right now.

Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

#144

Post by koningrobot »

Cacti wrote: post #44
gavanwoolery wrote: post #39

While I respect (some of Chomsky's work) it is amazing to me that he thinks language is something more than mathematics/statistics. Language is math, it is basically an advanced form of discreet mathematics. We can reproduce virtually anything on a computer, and it is no more "shallow" than artificial light from a lightbulb is "artificial." There is no magic going on, we are biological computers, walking number crunc…

I completely agree. The fact that math = language, and that it's built into our DNA, is astounding. And from there that the Halting Problem is basically tied into our DNA, that is, how we think, how our brains work, our ability to conceive ideas, is just mind-blowing. What Chomsky has done in his academic career in on par with the greatest scientists in our history.

Math is a model of reality. Math does not exist in your DNA; DNA exists subject to the rules of that which math models.

Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

#145

Post by twoodfin »

rdtsc wrote: post #82
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you're kidding about his contributions to political debate. Chomsky has the maximalist attitude that represents everything that is wrong with political debate today. His hatred of U.S. foreign policy is so extreme that he will defend absolutely everyone the U.S. opposes which means occasionally defending tyrants and denying genocide.

> His hatred of U.S. foreign policy Sadly enough for (U.S. foreign policy and its supporters) he actually supports his claims very well with sources and footnotes, and if you read through this works, you might find that perhaps there is a reason others (who don't just watch Fox News) don't agree with said policy, and also that somehow Americans in certain parts of the world are not "hated because of our freedoms". Th…

Cranks can load their screeds with sources and footnotes, too.

There's a reason no one outside the campus left takes Chomsky's political opinions seriously, and it's not a massive conspiracy.

Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

#146

Post by justin66 »

confluence wrote: post #119
corporalagumbo wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chomsky's expertise is in linguistics and political analysis. Stephen Pinker's The Language Instinct is a good, readable introduction to some of Chomsky's work (and the wider field to which he is pivotal.) Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent is probably his classic work of political analysis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky_bibliography He's no quack.

You know in the soft sciences everyone is a quack because fundamentally they don't practice - wait for it - science. Science stops false connections by correctly attributing cause to its respective effect. Social sciences do not. For all intents and purposes, the vast majority of social science is either unreproducible, vague, mixing correlation with causation, uses dependent variables, poorly reasoned, statistical q…

> You know in the soft sciences everyone is a quack because fundamentally they don't practice - wait for it - science.

I wonder if you know you're being ironic here. Plenty of us have never even read Chomsky's political works and have been exposed to him solely through mentions in the CS literature, like the Dragon book, or more in-depth stuff on his theory of context-free grammars. There is a startling amount of proof that he not only writes about politics but, at one time or another, actually worked for a living and helped our field produce useful stuff.

Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

#147

Post by andreasvc »

Evbn wrote: post #99
andreasvc wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being cited doesn't mean he has something specific to say about those fields. He's an influential scientist so people may cite him when they found something vaguely related to his theories, to make their findings seem more important.

Ironically, here you are decrying a statistical model of impact factor and yearning for a higher level model of meaning in research.

I didn't imply a yearning for anything, I was just saying a citation can mean different things in different circumstances. I think you've fallen prey to the polarization that Chomsky is putting forth: either you are dealing with huge amounts of data and don't care about theory, or you're a rationalist whose theories don't need any empirical support. The reality of successful science is on neither of these extremes, of course.

And by the way I do think that judging human performance by simple metrics is problematic, but not because it's statistics or not 'high-level', simply because it doesn't take enough information into account; it's a shortcut to the actual concept of quality, which is dangerous when metrics are used in decision-making. Automated metrics give an air of objectivity which an expert opinion doesn't have, even though the latter may well be much more informed.

Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

#148

Post by andreasvc »

rdtsc wrote: post #76
andreasvc wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He dominated the field of linguistics for decades with anti-empiricist theories. You could argue that the popularity of his ideas held back alternative approaches; hence his contributions could be considered detrimental.

> He dominated the field of linguistics for decades with anti-empiricist theories. But he dominated. Where was Norvig or IBM's Watson back then? Unfortunately things like these don't happen in a vacuum. You can only say looking back that this is didn't or that was a bad idea. You should have said that at that time when the theory was advanced or came up with a better one. We didn't exactly live in in a totalitarian r…

> We didn't exactly live in in a totalitarian regime

Ironically that is something that people allude to with regards to Chomsky (ironic because of his anarchist political beliefs); cf. the book the Linguistics Wars. The bottom line is that his theories were very dominant, not because of overwhelming empirical support, but because of his authority.

Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

#149

Post by andreasvc »

Evbn wrote: post #88
andreasvc wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that meaning consists of associations is extremely primitive. It works for concrete nouns and verbs but it quickly fails as things get more complex. Language is used to refer to refer to abstract things, imaginary things, counterfactual situations, etc. And even if you do arrive at a series of concepts using associations, you have to understand how they are supposed to combine, even for completely novel sent…

Please argue that there is nothing to associate with. Why is a real observation from your senses more privileged inside your brain that a random well-formed value by a (hypothetical) random number generator neuron?

I argued that if you only have associations with previous experiences, you won't be able to deal with novel input. Ergo, you need more than just associations (synthesis, imagination, counterfactual reasoning, etc.).

As to your second question, I don't see how it relates to my argument, but I'll answer anyway. If you're comparing a observation to a random number, you're looking at the observation qua value, in which case it has the same status. If, however, you look at the level of interpretation (what it means in your brain), the observation has a complex set of relations with the rest of your brain and gives rise to a perception, wheres the random number value is just noise that has to be tolerated by the brain.

Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

#150

Post by Volpe »

confluence wrote: post #119
corporalagumbo wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chomsky's expertise is in linguistics and political analysis. Stephen Pinker's The Language Instinct is a good, readable introduction to some of Chomsky's work (and the wider field to which he is pivotal.) Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent is probably his classic work of political analysis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky_bibliography He's no quack.

You know in the soft sciences everyone is a quack because fundamentally they don't practice - wait for it - science. Science stops false connections by correctly attributing cause to its respective effect. Social sciences do not. For all intents and purposes, the vast majority of social science is either unreproducible, vague, mixing correlation with causation, uses dependent variables, poorly reasoned, statistical q…

> Science stops false connections by correctly attributing cause to its respective effect.

So was Aristotle a quack as well?

I ask because, he was pre-science, and pretty much laid the foundation for what became the scientific-method. (i.e empiricism).

Perhaps before you dismiss large bodies of knowledge you should look up the history of science, and see that it has flaws in and of itself...

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