AI • Hacker News Board

Re: AI

#221

Post by eli_gottlieb » Thu, Feb 20, 2014, 10:48 AM UTC

mtrimpe wrote: post #206

debt wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The problem is that we haven't adopted the definition of consciousness that's useful long term yet: that consciousness is best interpreted as a property of reality. If everything is conscious then some parts of it are just more dynamic (intelligent?) than others. Physical reality least, plants more [1], animals even more and humans most . Defined like that human consciousness just becomes that part of all consciousne…

If we're to adopt that theory, we need a basically physical or metaphysical theory of what consciousness actually is rather than a theory which explains consciousness as a process atop biology.

Re: AI

#222

Post by membrain » Thu, Feb 20, 2014, 10:50 AM UTC

rdl wrote: post #36

elwell wrote: post #10

Critically speaking, this article doesn't add anything. I don't know why I read it. Can anyone explain why they upvoted?

For me, "There are certainly some reasons to be optimistic. Andrew Ng, who worked or works on Google’s AI, has said that he believes learning comes from a single algorithm - the part of your brain that processes input from your ears is also capable of learning to process input from your eyes. If we can just figure out this one general-purpose algorithm, programs may be able to learn general-purpose things." is what w…

this hypothesis is around since at least the 70s (Vernon Mountcastle' paper on cortical similarities), recently (2004) hawkins also published a book in which he promoted the same idea, on which he is currently working with his AGI company numenta.

to be honest, it sounds really great and it could even be the case that there is a very general underlying principle to cortical information processing and pattern recognition. But one should be careful not to mix solid scientific hypotheses with mainstream media hysteria and people who try to grab attention with their simplifications, claiming today that entropy maximization is the underlying principle and changing to sparse coding tomorrow. We are not that far and what we need is solid research instead of over-the-head assumptions and claims "to have solved the riddle" (in that respect, it might not be that far off alchemy :P)

Re: AI

#223

Post by PeterisP » Thu, Feb 20, 2014, 10:52 AM UTC

ygmelnikova wrote: post #37

elwell wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should it?

Because it thinks. It takes in information and performs an analysis on that data. Surely over the time it would take to evolve, my brain thinks that it should understand that more than anything? It understands how every other organ works in explicit detail at the the molecular level. The only thing my brain can imagine, is that my consciousness is disconnected somewhat from my brain. It's as though my consciousness i…

1) Individual brains don't evolve, evolution happens to the gene blueprint by which embryos make brains, and it is fixed before the new brain has had a single thought;

2) Your brain definitely doesn't understand how every other organ works in explicit detail; controlling organs only requires being part of a good enough feedback loop to have the organ mostly function; your brain understands your heart "at the molecular level" about as much fruitflies do.

Re: AI

#224

Post by eli_gottlieb » Thu, Feb 20, 2014, 10:52 AM UTC

electrograv wrote: post #99

nl wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already have a candidate algorithm[1], which is successful in a broad range of applications[2][3][4]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning#Convolutional_neu... [2] http://deeplearning.net/reading-list/ [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning#Results [4] http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/06/google-x-neural-ne...

"Deep Learning" is not itself a candidate for anything, because it's not any single algorithm, but a category of approaches. Deep Learning generally refers to machine learning algorithms that deal with stacking multiple layers of simpler functions to enable more complicated functions, and optimizing all the parameters to best fit your training set and generalize to new samples (the hard part). Though it usually refer…

One of the most interestingly general things about Deep Learning is that unsupervised learning approaches can be used at the bottom of the "stack" to learn more useful high-level features from the input data. This ends up making your higher-level learners more helpful for "Real Stuff".

Re: AI

#225

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Feb 20, 2014, 10:55 AM UTC

theatgrex wrote: post #180

001sky wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold exists, So How would it be impossible alchemy to exist ?

if by alchemy you mean making gold from another element then it does exist. we just cant do it yet

We can. It involves particle accelerators and is mindbogglingly expensive.

Re: AI

#226

Post by PeterisP » Thu, Feb 20, 2014, 10:56 AM UTC

onnoonno wrote: post #187

Houshalter wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you are made of atoms that can more efficiently be used for something else. Morality (and all human values) is a purely human concept that evolved in the specific conditions of human evolution (and even just our specific culture.) AIs are not anthropomorphic, they don't have to have anything like human minds or values.

Why do you think AI would be more concerned about efficiency than understanding?

There are a bajillion possible future worlds that a particular mind might choose to make, and only a extremely tiny faction of these worlds include hapiness of mankind as a priority above everything else. And being not first priority, in essence, means being a worthless disturbance in the way of the first priority, and thus extinction.

Re: AI

#227

Post by lmm » Thu, Feb 20, 2014, 11:00 AM UTC

timClicks wrote: post #90

edanm wrote: post #86

If anyone is interested in AI, I highly recommend joining Less Wrong, a community started by AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky. He started the community to convince people to focus on the "friendly AI problem". [1] I actually recommend that everyone read LW, but especially if you're interested in AI. [1] In a nutshell, the friendly AI problem is: assume we create an AI. It may rapidly become more intelligent than us, i…

Any suggestions for getting started in the LW community? Its barrier to entry means I can't seem to vote on anything, etc. It's quite intimidating really.

Say hello in an introductions thread, and/or post decent comments. The karma barrier to entry is pretty low (something like 5 to vote on most things and 20 to vote on everything), you'll get there in no time.

Re: AI

#228

Post by eli_gottlieb » Thu, Feb 20, 2014, 11:02 AM UTC

hooande wrote: post #173

Many people see Artificial General Intelligence as a panacea. The idea is, "We'll create artificially intelligent scientists who will solve all of our other problems for us!". I think that future generations will look back on this as a modern version of alchemy. If blogs had existed centuries ago I'm sure that people would have called the transmutation of metal the most important trend of their time. This isn't to de…

>But we don't have a single example of an application that can handle a task that it hasn't been specifically trained and tested for.

"Playing Atari Through Deep Reinforcement Learning" was published just this last year.

>The idea of artificial consciousness currently requires a leap of faith.

Detach the notion of AGI from "artificial consciousness" or "artificial people". Contrary to the normal Humans Are Special shtick we all recite, intelligence is only one design feature of us homo sapiens sapiens out of very many.

"Intelligence" in software terms is just machine learning in active decision environments. Or in other words, Machine Learning + Decision Theory = Artificial Intelligence.

This is not to say we should be cheerleading for the fabled "Strong AI" within the near term. Quite the opposite: I'm trying to express just how far the distance is between software that can learn and perform some general task without being specifically purpose-built, and a conscious, sapient Asimovian robot deserving of personhood rights, and of course Skynet.

For an even further elaboration of just how far off we are from the latter two forms of "AI": we currently have literally no way of specifying tasks or goals to general AI agents other than reinforcement learning. We are stuck training our software like we train our dogs: give it a cookie when it does the right thing, bring out the rolled-up newspaper when it goes wrong.

So yeah. AI is almost definitely possible, and a formal field of research regarding it does exist, but we are indeed decades away from anything really and truly useful for large-scale applications such as killing all humans.

Re: AI

#229

Post by eli_gottlieb » Thu, Feb 20, 2014, 11:07 AM UTC

wantrepeneur wrote: post #186

theatgrex wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we do have proof that general intelligence exists. So How would it be impossible for artificial general intelligence to exist ? Do you believe in mind body dualism? AGI will be difficult but comparing it to Bigfoot or Leperchauns is rediculous. There is a huge difference between very very very hard and impossible.

Humans are not a general intelligence.

This is a surprisingly good point. The learning power of human and animal minds is very limited, varies along a normal curve, and doesn't seem to scale with increased computational power (ie: brain size). The decision-making power of human and animal minds is... well, absolute crap, actually, but evolution was working with the constraint that decision-theoretically good decision-making requires lots and lots of compute-power, implying a need for lots and lots of calories, constraining the level of decision-making intelligence that could evolve to consume very limited food supplies.

Re: AI

#230

Post by membrain » Thu, Feb 20, 2014, 11:16 AM UTC

aliakbarkhan wrote: post #197

aragot wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personnaly don't think the brain could be as intelligent if it were only a part of it, like if had 3 senses instead of 5 for example: The emulation of a sense by the others might be necessary to bootstrap the system. So we might just be on the wrong path when we try to teach a small machine to learn. And maybe, once you have a fully functional brain, that it constantly derives out of bounds. Like sudden overheating…

The amount of rampant bulshitting here by obviously unqualified people is amazing. If you don't even know that humans do not, in fact, have five senses, I'm not sure I can take your post seriously even as unqualified speculation.

can we please put this right on top of the whole page and close this thread? too many ai-fanboys in here, who got their knowledge about ai from hollywood movies and video games..