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The end of AI winter?

machineslikeus.com

11–20 of 70 posts

Re: The end of AI winter?

#12
post #9

We do have search engines, which are pretty sweet and vaguely related to artificial intelligence. The future of AI will probably be similar - we'll get more cool stuff, but it will not be Data from Star Trek, it will be something we didn't expect.

I don't see search engines as being 'vaguely related to artificial intelligence' at all.

Re: The end of AI winter?

#13
post #7

The problem with AI is that people try to call simple heuristics and learning algorithms AI, while what we're actually seeing is an overglorified Eliza. The term Intelligence sets the expectation of "universal learning", not just solving problems we previously thought to be hard. And the research necessary to accomplish that, probably isn't even in the same direction as these fraud AI algorithms. The Biological Compu…

There has been some research in formal and universal models of AI. See below for an example.

Universal AI: http://www.hutter1.net/ai/uaibook.htm

Re: The end of AI winter?

#14
post #3

The problem with AI development seems to be the assumption that it's going to be a useful business tool. This is sort of like assuming that an artificial organism created in the lab will make a good secretary.

I think another problem is the expectation of what AI will look like at all. We think of intelligent human-like robots like something from science fiction, when in reality AI could just be a bit of code running on a standard machine with specific and likely specialized inputs and outputs. Think of an AI machine working with atmospheric data as one "sense" combined with seismic data and some others, with the directed…

I think the best defintion of "free will" basically boils down to "unpredictable in detail absent simulation". This sounds weird at first, but the results probably match your intuitive understanding of free will. Given that, I think that any general intelligence approaching human level will have free will.

That doesn't mean that it won't have certain goals, though it remains to be seen whether it will be possible to design a clean goal system with a top-level goal (see also "Friendliness"). Humans clearly do not have this kind of goal system.

Re: The end of AI winter?

#15
post #7

The problem with AI is that people try to call simple heuristics and learning algorithms AI, while what we're actually seeing is an overglorified Eliza. The term Intelligence sets the expectation of "universal learning", not just solving problems we previously thought to be hard. And the research necessary to accomplish that, probably isn't even in the same direction as these fraud AI algorithms. The Biological Compu…

It isn't actually clear whether intelligence is anything other than some emergent phenomenon of suitable connected 'simple heuristics' and 'learning algorithms'. If you as me, we also are overglorified Eliza's.

Re: The end of AI winter?

#16
post #7

The problem with AI is that people try to call simple heuristics and learning algorithms AI, while what we're actually seeing is an overglorified Eliza. The term Intelligence sets the expectation of "universal learning", not just solving problems we previously thought to be hard. And the research necessary to accomplish that, probably isn't even in the same direction as these fraud AI algorithms. The Biological Compu…

It isn't actually clear whether intelligence is anything other than some emergent phenomenon of suitable connected 'simple heuristics' and 'learning algorithms'. If you as me, we also are overglorified Eliza's.

There is one big difference: we can reason about reason (meta reason), Eliza can't.

It is not a difference in degree, it is a difference in kind and seems to be unique to higher primates (you can learn a dog to do tricks, but it won't spend its time coming up with new tricks), one of the most interesting science videos I have ever seen is one where a bonobo learns to write a symbol that had been on a computer it used to express its emotions.

Re: The end of AI winter?

#17
post #7

The problem with AI is that people try to call simple heuristics and learning algorithms AI, while what we're actually seeing is an overglorified Eliza. The term Intelligence sets the expectation of "universal learning", not just solving problems we previously thought to be hard. And the research necessary to accomplish that, probably isn't even in the same direction as these fraud AI algorithms. The Biological Compu…

It isn't actually clear whether intelligence is anything other than some emergent phenomenon of suitable connected 'simple heuristics' and 'learning algorithms'. If you as me, we also are overglorified Eliza's.

How do you feel about we also are overglorified Eliza's?

(Sorry, couldn't resist.)

Re: The end of AI winter?

#19
post #9

We do have search engines, which are pretty sweet and vaguely related to artificial intelligence. The future of AI will probably be similar - we'll get more cool stuff, but it will not be Data from Star Trek, it will be something we didn't expect.

I don't see search engines as being 'vaguely related to artificial intelligence' at all.

Apparently Google's Peter Norvig does, e.g. http://video.google.de/videoplay?docid=-6754621605046052935&... (he starts talking about the relationship between Google and AI at 06:40).

Re: The end of AI winter?

#20
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see search engines as being 'vaguely related to artificial intelligence' at all.

Apparently Google's Peter Norvig does, e.g. http://video.google.de/videoplay?docid=-6754621605046052935&... (he starts talking about the relationship between Google and AI at 06:40).

Well, he's obviously much more qualified than I am to make that observation. But that doesn't make him right automatically, or does it ?

AI has a certain level of expectation associated with it and I do not see google matching that level in any of their released products.

Computers to date do what we tell them to do. As soon as that changes we call it a bug, not a manifestation of intelligence. As long as that view persists I would argue that we have not yet achieved 'AI'.

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