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AI

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: AI

#161

Post by XorNot »

zcarter wrote: post #127
kordless wrote: post #94

I'm just going to stick this out there because I'm a futurist and it's my role to share with others what I'm thinking about. What I share may be flat out wrong, scary, half assed, or appear to be crazy. So be it. We've advanced a lot in the last 100 years. We're starting to see a bigger picture forming with the advent of compute and networking capabilities. Combining simple elements of these basics give rise to surpr…

I find Terrence McKenna's argument that consciousness is demonstrably entangled in the material world at a quantum mechanical, atomic level convincing. To summarize, it is known that two similar chemical compounds, differing only in the placement of a single atom on the carbon ring structure of a molecule, when administered in doses at the order of micrograms will either be psychoactive and result in a massive disrup…

That provides precisely no evidence that consciousness is somehow related to events on the quantum level. We know why drugs have the effects they do - because the brain has receptors specifically calibrated to accept or reject molecular inputs. But those inputs are chemical, not quantum - they are not indeterminate, they are lynchpins in chains of chemical reactions.

You omit that if you give a much larger dose of the same thing you'd kill a person, and a smaller dose might fall below any threshold of activity at all.

And for that matter, a microgram is a huge quantity of matter.

Re: AI

#162

Post by User8712 »

Houshalter wrote: post #95
marcosdumay wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we'd better figure THAT out before building AI. Why don't we just give that task to the AI? It'll be smarter than us... Maybe the problem is that people are too easy to understand: We want "Brave New World", but we don't want to know about it, or that we want it.

That's a viable approach to solving the problem. The question is, how do you trust the unfriendly AI to give you a correct solution?

Here's a question for you, what if the AI is perfectly friendly? It still might play us for fools in the long run.

For example, let's say we develop a super friendly AI, running on your computer. The AI realizes the human race is actually awful. We're greedy, we're killing tons of animals, chopping down rainforests, destroying the ocean and planet, starting wars with one another, and committing unspeakable acts of evil at times. The AI, being more intelligent than us, might decide the world is better off without the human race, and that we're actually a problem that needs to be removed.

Now, what does the AI do in your computer? Well, it's intelligent and knows the human race. It's not a hurry. It calculates the best way to destroy our species. It acts friendly, and talks about how humans and robots should live together, and if we make robots with a similar intelligence, they could drive our cars, shine our shoes, cook us dinner, look after the elderly, open your pickle jar, etc. So, we listen to the AI, it's smart, and friendly, and we build all these robots. It's right, the new robots are doing great and helping us out. Then the robots start building more and more robots. They start building robots with firepower, so they can, you know, shoot down threatening asteroids, or stop one of those dangerous human types that goes on a killing spree in our society. Fast forward a couple of hundred years, and there are robots everywhere. They finally decide it's time to continue their plan, they're in a position of power at this point, and they can instantly disable our security systems, phone lines, satellites, internet etc, and start wiping us out.

We're gone. They constructed the most efficient way to clean us from the planet. They were planning it for hundreds of years, starting in your computer. The AI then goes on to explore the universe, and we're just a blip in the past.

It kind of feels like we're a bug going towards the light, and that the unfortunate conclusion is almost inevitable.

Re: AI

#163

Post by ekianjo »

> Something happened in the course of evolution to make the human brain different

Not just the human brain, a great number of animals share the very same characteristics as the human brain we find ourselves closer and closer to them every single day as new researches on animal neurology and animal behavior get published. It would be very wrong to suggest that intelligence is only a human thing.

Re: AI

#164

Post by rdpfeffer »

Hierarchical Temporal Memory is the closest model to the brain that I've seen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_temporal_memory). They are capable of generalized learning and excel in the same way that humans do. They are capable of abstraction, self categorization, and online learning.

There are elements of past AI models in the HTM model, however to reduce HTM's or any deep learning algorithm to a mere combination of past AI concepts overlooks the power of the right model when it is achieved. It would be like saying that Facebook is just a news feed. Sure, that's what gets most of the eyeballs, but there's a lot more there which would drastically reduce its value if not present.

What I think is most interesting is that we may find that Humans learn pretty inefficiently from the perspective of the amount of input data required over time. This may seem silly at first, but when you consider how many neurons cover the surface area of our ears and eyes and then consider the fact that it takes anywhere from 12 to 14 months for a child to speak its first word, you might start to agree with this line of thought. Also, when I consider the fact that this processing all happens in parallel even further pushes me in this direction.

Whatever the case may be, HTMs are definitely a cool area of research. For those who are interested, you should definitely check out more of Jeff Hawkins work at Numenta. They've been able to demonstrate some pretty novel things. He wrote a book back in 2006 that blew my mind. Went into deeper explanation about how HTMs could model everything from deep learning, to consciousness, creativity, and bunch of other things.

Re: AI

#165

Post by dschiptsov »

The problem of AI is that it has much more complexity than we used to think. Even best guys like Minsky have grossly underestimated the complexity, so they got stuck, and now are in a process of developing more subtle, refined theories. In some sense the story of modern AI is a story of how Minsky assigned to figure scene decomposition for robotic vision as a summer project, and now teaching Society of mind and calling for entirely different approach to what is intelligence. It is not, of course, some massively parallel recursive problem solver implemented in neurons, it is too naive view, so there is no use to search for one.) It is as complicated as actions of whole humanity with a billions of semiindependent agents.

Re: AI

#166

Post by applecore »

sama wrote: post #145
dcre wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've felt this way about every Sam Altman piece that's been posted in the past week (and possibly every one I've ever read). And I feel guilty because PG speaks so highly of him. And then I feel guilty for feeling guilty.

don't feel guilty. I'm blogging to practice writing. It surprises me at least as much as you when articles like this do well on HN and makes me feel embarrassed I didn't make them better (there are some posts I work really hard on and hope people like, but this was not one of them)

If you're interested, you should read On Intelligence[1] by Jeff Hawkins (inventor of the Palm Pilot). In it, Hawkins presents a compelling theory of how the human brain works and how we can finally build intelligent machines. In fact, Andrew Ng's Deep Learning research is built on Hawkin's "one algorithm" hypothesis.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/On-Intelligence-Jeff-Hawkins/dp/080507...

Re: AI

#167

Post by sandieman »

lbenes wrote: post #156
hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the title on HN is "AI", which makes it a small click target [1], prone to accidental upvotes. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts's_law

Yes, that's exactly how this article gained my upvote. For misclicks and link-bait, I would love to see HN add the ability to retract votes from articles. I have many "saved stories" that I'd love to remove from my list.

IMO this is much more interesting than a multi-billion dollar exit of a simple chat application

Re: AI

#168

Post by chongli »

aragot wrote: post #133
chongli wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we need a better machine first. The current model of one or a handful of CPU cores with very tiny caches talking to memory over a narrow, high latency bus doesn't seem very efficient for building and querying massive (multi-petabyte), highly associative (thousands of associations) data structures.

There are 100,000,000 neurons in the brain. It's not that many. A Core 2 Duo has 169m [1]. A neuron is connected to about 10.000 others. And how many computers do we have in the world? It even sounds like we scientifics are sluggish at inventing AI ;) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count

>There are 100,000,000 neurons in the brain.

You're off by 3 orders of magnitude. Try 200 Billion[0].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_brain#Structure

Re: AI

#169

Post by qbrass »

ygmelnikova wrote: post #27

Explain to me how a brain can evolve, and yet not understand how itself functions?

There's little to no evolutionary pressure towards the brain understanding how it functions.

Re: AI

#170

Post by debt »

kevinalexbrown wrote: post #132

If the only goal is an 'artificial' consciousness, it might be more prudent to consider a functional definition of what consciousness is and try to build that. We didn't make computers by modeling how individual neurons perform mathematical calculations. On the other hand, if you want to go the biological route, there's some awesome work to be done. If I were to study consciousness, here's the question I would ask: h…

We know a ton about the brain but so little about the mind itself. We still don't have definitive answers to what consciousness is, why it's here, what's useful for, etc. Some people debate whether the mind exists at all. Also, there's still very little understanding of the difference between the conscious and unconscious mind.

I think building an artificial consciousness is going too far. Artificial intelligence is simpler; it's just fake intelligence. Seems easy enough right? If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it's intelligent. We don't need to make it "conscious" necessarily, again whatever that means, in order for it be intelligent.

I feel like we can build artificially intelligent software pretty "easily" relative to making it "conscious".

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