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Machine intelligence, part 1

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#161

Post by samiur1204 »

Urgh, every couple weeks, it seems like someone prominent in the Tech industry, but actually knowledgeable about Machine Learning or "Artificial Intelligence", makes some outlandish claim. We are nowhere close to "AI" in the terms that Elon Musk and Sam Altman are talking about. We might just as well start preparing for aliens that have superintelligence and have found earth.

All these kinds of comments are so distracting from the really awesome work real ML researchers are doing. One of them, Yann LeCunn, said: “Hype is dangerous to AI. Hype killed AI four times in the last five decades. AI Hype must be stopped.”

I wrote about this topic just a months ago: http://blog.samiurr.com/artificial-intelligence-no-were-not-...

Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#162

Post by [deleted] »

mej10 wrote: post #91
fchollet wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His thoughts seem quite sensible, although extremely abstract and theoretical. This is lightyears away from the Elon Musk / Bill Gates / etc. fear-mongering.

So do you take his thoughts seriously or not? Do you now think AI researchers are engaging in unethical behavior since they don't care about AI safety?

[deleted]

Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#163

Post by jfoster »

andrewla wrote: post #150
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.

I was going to make this argument, though it also occurs to me that it's unlikely for biological life to make that decision. Even smallish groups of humans seem unable to agree unanimously on almost anything.

Potentially what sama was trying to convey was that machine life will reason about things more logically (or at least more consistently) than biological life, and come to that conclusion. Biological life may not be capable of that conclusion due to an inability to agree with other biological life.

Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#164

Post by jfoster »

"Today we have virtual reality so advanced that it’s difficult to be sure if it’s virtual or real"

That's over-stating things a bit. The advancement from pong to VR is massive, but VR where it's difficult to tell whether it's real? Probably still decades (or more) away.

Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#165

Post by pararth »

sama wrote: post #105
neuralk wrote: post #103

Why are all these people (Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, now Sam Altman) who have no background in Artificial Intelligence coming out with these alarmist messages (particularly when there are more plausible imminent threats such as nuclear warfare, superbugs, etc)? As a grad student doing work in AI, I find it really frustrating. Why not instead talk to some current practitioners such as Mark Riedl, who is one of the pr…

though i dropped out, i studied AI in college. i also worked in andrew ng's lab. as a current grad student, why do you believe whatever makes us smart cannot be replicated by a computer program?

> why do you believe whatever makes us smart cannot be replicated by a computer program?

Turing's Universality of Computation actually guarantees that whatever is feasible in the physical world can be replicated as a computation in bits. However, I don't share the belief that AI research is anywhere close to achieving this in the most general sense of intelligence. Most AI researchers seem to agree: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9109140

Did you have a chance to look at David Deutsch's work on this topic?

http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/david-deutsch-artificial-...

http://www.ted.com/talks/david_deutsch_a_new_way_to_explain_...

http://www.amazon.com/The-Beginning-Infinity-Explanations-Tr...

Although Deutsch is not as charismatic a speaker as Kurzweil or as lucid a writer as Bostrom, his arguments make the most sense to me, given my limited experience doing AI research at Stanford. It would be interesting to know your thoughts on Deutsch's theory that the ability to create 'good' explanations is what separates human intelligence from the rest. (maybe through another blog post?)

P.S. Since I have your attention here, I took CS183B last quarter and it was really fun. Thanks!

Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#166

Post by [deleted] »

sama wrote: post #105
neuralk wrote: post #103

Why are all these people (Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, now Sam Altman) who have no background in Artificial Intelligence coming out with these alarmist messages (particularly when there are more plausible imminent threats such as nuclear warfare, superbugs, etc)? As a grad student doing work in AI, I find it really frustrating. Why not instead talk to some current practitioners such as Mark Riedl, who is one of the pr…

though i dropped out, i studied AI in college. i also worked in andrew ng's lab. as a current grad student, why do you believe whatever makes us smart cannot be replicated by a computer program?

[deleted]

Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#167

Post by olalonde »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #107

>SMI Sam, please don't make up a new acronym. Especially if you aren't an AI researcher. Plenty of thought has gone into this and your statement about it not seeming "real" misses the history of AI. There has been a lot of work in the AI community to try and steer our language towards a concrete nomenclature and Artificial General Intelligence has taken the helm at this point to represent machine instances that are e…

What do you think of http://lesswrong.com as a community?

Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#168

Post by mrottenkolber »

Wow is that article bad.

> and then for some reason decides to makes itself undetectable.

Uhm, what?

> In fact, many respected neocortex researchers believe there is effectively one algorithm for all intelligence.

And that belief is absolutely ridiculous since most algorithms effectively aren't a single algorithm. What they call an algorithm is a huge monolithic program generated by a dumb evolutionary algorithm, e.g. mostly noise.

> because artificial seems to imply it's not real or not very good.

WHAT? Look up "artificial" please.

Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#169

Post by AndrewKemendo »

olalonde wrote: post #167
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #107

>SMI Sam, please don't make up a new acronym. Especially if you aren't an AI researcher. Plenty of thought has gone into this and your statement about it not seeming "real" misses the history of AI. There has been a lot of work in the AI community to try and steer our language towards a concrete nomenclature and Artificial General Intelligence has taken the helm at this point to represent machine instances that are e…

What do you think of http://lesswrong.com as a community?

Frankly, not much - but it's not like I think they are doing bad things it just seems like it's yet another philosophical forum.

I was active from 2007~2010 when it was just transitioning from the Hanson/Yudkowski combined blog with a robust comments section to the beginnings of what you see now. I'm sure some of my comments are still floating around there somewhere.

I think in the early days it was a pretty good place to bounce ideas off of each other about philosophical ideas/concepts WRT AGI, and probably still has that to some degree. It just became too cultish around Yudkowski for my tastes and ended up being very navel gazing around Bayesian probability and "rationalism" as religion. That's not to denigrate Bayesians or rationalism at all because those are great things.

In the end the community is more interested in talking than they are doing and SIAI is somewhat of an offshoot of that ethos with roots in the original Future of Humanity core group, and continues that legacy.

Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of really smart great people contributing interesting things there about rationality and optimization. I just moved away from their religion of rationality that boils down to these super hardcore utilitarian calculations which end up kind of defeating the populist goals of spreading rationalism.

Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#170

Post by olalonde »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #72
SquidMagnet wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has been my experience that the more a particular person attempts to understand and control machine intelligence, the more she grows to fear it and its potential.

The only people who claim that machine intelligence is dangerous are the ones on the outside looking in. Everyone who actually works in on AI and understands it (hint, it's just search and mathematical optimization) thinks the fear surrounding it is absurd.

How many of those AI researchers are actually working on AGI though? As you mentioned, most of them are in fact just developing search and optimisation algorithms. Personally, I believe the fields of neuroscience/biology are more likely to produce the first AGI. People who claim machine intelligence is dangerous are not scared of k-means clustering or neural networks, they are scared of an hypothetical general intelligence algorithm which hasn't been discovered yet. One could argue that the fear is absurd because AGI is not likely to happen within our lifetime but it's hard to argue that it will not happen eventually and be a potential threat.
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