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Machine intelligence, part 1

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#141

Post by Micaiah_Chang »

khawkins wrote: post #80
fchollet wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shane Legg is known for being a co-founder of DeepMind, in a business role (as I understand). He's a complete nobody as a researcher (is he even an AI researcher? I would be surprised). The big names of deep learning have all taken a vocal stance against the recent end-of-the-world punditry (most notably Yann LeCun and Andrew Ng). Also notable: roboticist Rodney Brooks http://www.rethinkrobotics.com/artificial-intell…

Here's machine learning expert Michael Jordan on the issue: http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/ma...

I'm afraid of making a middlebrow dismissal but I'm going to post it anyway, in hopes that someone just skimming would not be mislead.

The question is what Michael Jordan thinks of the "concept of the singularity", and then he dismisses it out of hand.

Crucially, he does this after confessing that no one in his social circle has talked about this issue with him, and without saying anything about what form of Singularity he is dismissing.

I mention this, because oftentimes I see people appealing to authority, quoting them on the issue and the authority in question is not even talking about the same issue!

I worry that my credence in all this superintelligence stuff only stems from familiarity with the arguments and the complete inability of people to engage with the actual argument. Some of the 'rebuttals' in this comments section have answers in Sam's article for crying out loud!

Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#142

Post by Micaiah_Chang »

sudioStudio64 wrote: post #58
spot wrote: post #54

opinions of 187 scientists and other writers and thinkers (Dennett, Smolin, Rees, Dyson, Rushkoff, O'Reilly, Coupland, Kelly, etc etc) on thinking machines on edge.org (and many of them address the threat issue): http://edge.org/annual-question/q2015 including mine: http://edge.org/response-detail/26219

It kind of reminds me of predictions about traveling faster than sound igniting the atmosphere.

This seems as if it is conflating the worry that nuclear bombs would ignite the atmosphere with supersonic travel.

Who predicted this?

Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#143

Post by mej10 »

fchollet wrote: post #129
mej10 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How can we possibly prove that AI is not some kind of magical emergent property, "one simple algorithm away"? We can't. I hope you aren't a researcher, because this is a ludicrous statement. We haven't studied it enough to know whether we can or not.

> I hope you aren't a researcher Andrej is a brilliant researcher, currently doing his PhD. He has a bright career ahead. Maybe you should actually read his comment instead of dismissing it crudely, and likewise for the thoughts of the likes of LeCun, Ng, Bengio, etc. These are the people I would listen to, not the Nostradamus pundits.

I admit, my first sentence was in poor taste. Apologies to Andrej.

At the same time, saying that something isn't possible to prove when we literally have no idea about its provability isn't a good stance for a researcher to take.

This is similar to my problem with the list of AI researchers you've provided. Saying that there is nothing to fear and waving your hands isn't exactly scientific.

Also, it isn't like these people (Sam, Musk, etc) literally think it could happen any day. The point is that we should be aware of the risk and prepare accordingly -- why is that unreasonable?

Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#144

Post by irickt »

pyb wrote: post #44

Did sama not simply consider that, by the time AI becomes so powerful as to be dangerous, we might also be able to program an AI with the opposite function, ie 'save humanity', and watch it fight the 'bad AI'?

This is an important counter to this strange fear-mongering trend. Whatever advances a supposed intelligent machine can use, people will first put it to their own best use - including defense, not from autonomous machines, but from other people using these advances. We'll have a lot of experience and good tools to protect ourselves.

Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#145

Post by irickt »

karpathy wrote: post #100

I could make a lot of comments here but I'd just be reiterating what people much more qualified than I have already said. People who are at the forefront of AI and have actually developed state of the art AI technologies for many years, in some cases decades: Andrew Ng: http://www.wired.com/2015/02/ai-wont-end-world-might-take-jo... "I think it’s a distraction from the conversation about…serious issues," Yoshua Bengi…

Another in the same vein: http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/02/25/be-calm-robots-are...

Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#146

Post by fchollet »

mej10 wrote: post #143
fchollet wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hope you aren't a researcher Andrej is a brilliant researcher, currently doing his PhD. He has a bright career ahead. Maybe you should actually read his comment instead of dismissing it crudely, and likewise for the thoughts of the likes of LeCun, Ng, Bengio, etc. These are the people I would listen to, not the Nostradamus pundits.

I admit, my first sentence was in poor taste. Apologies to Andrej. At the same time, saying that something isn't possible to prove when we literally have no idea about its provability isn't a good stance for a researcher to take. This is similar to my problem with the list of AI researchers you've provided. Saying that there is nothing to fear and waving your hands isn't exactly scientific. Also, it isn't like these…

I don't think anybody would posit that it's unreasonable to entertain the idea as kind of far-fetched long-term possibility, much like encounters with alien life or faster-than-light travel.

It's the fear-mongering that's the issue. It's as if these same pundits were warning us about the dangers of space travel because it could hypothetically cause us (1000 years from now?) to draw the attention of a dangerous alien civilization (does that even exist?) that could destroy the Earth. It's the same level of ridiculous speculation. And that has no place in the scientific discourse.

Write sci-fi novels if you care about this issue, but don't pretend it's science, much less a pressing technological issue.

Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#147

Post by csallen »

mlinsey wrote: post #39

Funny to see the skepticism here. It's hard to understand the danger machine intelligence poses to humanity for the same reason it's hard to understand the danger tiny startups can pose to big industries. Current implementations look like toys, humans have bad intuitions about exponential growth, and most will disagree on how _probable_ the threat is (something that might not be known except retroactively) while syst…

Some of my personal skepticism boils down to: well, what are we going to do about it? There are only really two options:

(1) The methods to create strong AI will become known to us before we actually build something dangerous. At that point, since we will better understand the nature of the potential threat, it will actually be feasible to put safety restrictions in place.

(2) Someone will stumble upon strong AI in secret or on accident. I don't see how this is preventable, unless we issue a moratorium on AI-related research, which just isn't going to happen outside of scenario 1.

And so the answer becomes: let's wait and see.

That said, I don't believe there's anything unbearably harmful about the current level of speculation and "fear-mongering".

Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#148

Post by alent »

SquidMagnet wrote: post #117
alent wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main problem is that most of the time arguments about humanity obviating itself are couched in a framework where the only thing that has advanced, in this instance artificial intelligence, is the science needed to make it a reality. This has never been the case, which is why you see so much eye rolling when arguments like this (or some of the others here about robots replacing human workforces) are made. How can…

> How can we say that by the time we have such wondrous machines that we as a species will not have found ways to move ourselves forward to a place on equal footing with whatever we create? How can we find ways to move ourselves forward if we don't talk about and actively explore how to do so?

We are, just not so much in this thread specifically. Think about all the progress we are making in the bio-tech field - although this is clearly not the only answer to the problem. Don't get me wrong, conversations about moving ourselves forward are important, but I'm not sure starting such a conversation with what amounts to high-brow fear mongering is the correct way to do things.

Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#149

Post by superafroman »

fchollet wrote: post #52
mej10 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about Shane Legg (One of the cofounders of DeepMind)? http://lesswrong.com/lw/691/qa_with_shane_legg_on_risks_from... Quote: Q6: Do possible risks from AI outweigh other possible existential risks, e.g. risks associated with the possibility of advanced nanotechnology? Shane Legg: It's my number 1 risk for this century, with an engineered biological pathogen coming a close second (though I know little about the la…

Shane Legg is known for being a co-founder of DeepMind, in a business role (as I understand). He's a complete nobody as a researcher (is he even an AI researcher? I would be surprised). The big names of deep learning have all taken a vocal stance against the recent end-of-the-world punditry (most notably Yann LeCun and Andrew Ng). Also notable: roboticist Rodney Brooks http://www.rethinkrobotics.com/artificial-intell…

Shane Legg isn't just a business guy - his career has been pretty much focused on AI research since uni - http://www.vetta.org/about-me/

Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#150

Post by andrewla »

Lambdanaut wrote: post #79

> One of my top 4 favorite explanations for the Fermi paradox is that biological intelligence always eventually creates machine intelligence, which wipes out biological life and then for some reason decides to makes itself undetectable That's not an explanation of the fermi paradox, that's just moving the problem around. The SMI has no more reason to make itself undetectable than the guys that built it.

Exactly -- why not cut out the middleman and say that biological intelligence for some reason always decides to make itself undetectable.
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