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What you wanted to know about AI

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Re: What you wanted to know about AI

#21

Post by xyzzyz »

pyrrhotech wrote: post #11

Tldr: current AI capabilities are exaggerated by cherry-picked sample data and fear fueled by famous smart people is unwarranted. Do Any of those cited give specific timelines? Even if we are very far away, do you really doubt that one day machines will have superhuman intelligence? I take that as pretty much a given, whether it's 50 or 500 years from now. What I'm not so sure of is whether fear is an appropriate res…

However, we go out of our way to protect animals that can feel pain and experience emotions because it's what we've decided through our intelligence and higher reasoning is the moral thing to do.

We care about and protect some animals, yeah. However, we also industrially butcher hundreds of thousands of other animals every day to satisfy our goals.

Stats show that the more intelligent and educated the human, the more likely he is to behave morally as our greatest moral philosophers define it. Why would super intelligent machines buck this trend?

There's pretty large jump from "more intelligent => more moral" to "behave according to human morality and satisfy human goals".

Re: What you wanted to know about AI

#22

Post by moyix »

Argh. From the article:

> The fears of machine superintelligence are based on the belief that true AI is just around a corner. After all, we’re so advanced and the progress is only accelerating, it’s probably a few years away, at most.

Versus MIRI [1], quoting Nick Bostrom, whose book is arguably what most recently sparked all of the current discussion of AI risk:

> If what readers take away from language like “impending” and “soon” is that Bostrom is unusually confident that AGI will come early, or that Bostrom is confident we’ll build a general AI this century, then they’ll be getting the situation exactly backwards.

> [...]

> > My own view is that the median numbers reported in the expert survey do not have enough probability mass on later arrival dates. A 10% probability of HLMI [human-level machine intelligence] not having been developed by 2075 or even 2100 (after conditionalizing on “human scientific activity continuing without major negative disruption”) seems too low.

> > Historically, AI researchers have not had a strong record of being able to predict the rate of advances in their own field or the shape that such advances would take. On the one hand, some tasks, like chess playing, turned out to be achievable by means of surprisingly simple programs; and naysayers who claimed that machines would “never” be able to do this or that have repeatedly been proven wrong. On the other hand, the more typical errors among practitioners have been to underestimate the difficulties of getting a system to perform robustly on real-world tasks, and to overestimate the advantages of their own particular pet project or technique.

I agree with the meat of the article, though – recent AI progress has surely been oversold by the media. It's really frustrating to see people continually arguing against strawmen when there are some perfectly lovely arguments to grapple with instead!

Aside: is there some kind of law we could coin that if a rebuttal to AI risk starts off by referencing Skynet and Terminator, we can safely assume it's not going to be worth reading?

[1] https://intelligence.org/2015/01/08/brooks-searle-agi-voliti...

Re: What you wanted to know about AI

#23

Post by pqomdv »

aamar wrote: post #15

There's some good comments about some new AI tools; it's a shame that the article's premise is a straw man. The fears of machine superintelligence are based on the belief that true AI is just around a corner. After all, we’re so advanced and the progress is only accelerating, it’s probably a few years away, at most. Analogously, public figures started warning us about climate change, so it must be just a few years be…

The global warming comparison isn't very good. We had the capabilities for carbon output 50 years ago and it has slowly been increasing. But we don't yet have an AI. So there is no need to warn anyone, except out of irrational fear. Once we actually get it, it would make sense to start warning about its applications, so it doesn't get out of control.

If I apply your analogy correctly, then warning about AI now, is the same as it would be warning about global warming in the 19th century. Not very logical and certainly very paranoid.

Re: What you wanted to know about AI

#24

Post by protonfish »

pauletienney wrote: post #2

Indeed we are far far away from true AI (to me it implies self-consciousness). The point is even if it happens in 100 or 200 years, it will be a huge change in human history. I guess Gates, Hawking and Stark are talking about a further AI creation, they are kind of long-term thinking guys.

I think you mean, simply, conscious or self-aware. A self-conscious AI would spend too much time worrying about what the other robots think of it.

Re: What you wanted to know about AI

#25

Post by ghaff »

simonh wrote: post #20
codyh1 wrote: post #9

Human level AI seems to be a far reach but AI in specific domains seems to be the approaching intersection. What I mean by this is the self-driving car...very discrete skills but not any where near human level. Let's not forget google's "Find Mitten's the Cat" AI on videos.

Computers have always been very good at performing very specific tasks in highly proscribed circumstances. What were learning to do is expand the circumstances within which the computer can operate, but as you say the tasks are still very highly specific. We could probably have programmed a computer to drive a car back in the 70s, within an extremely specific configuration of roads and with no traffic or pedestrians.…

>But it's still only useful for driving a car

And it's still only useful for driving a car in a rather specific configuration of roads and a somewhat limited set of conditions. I'd argue that a car's ability to operate autonomously and rather reliably under those circumstances is leading a lot of folks to be very optimistic about how long it will be before I can summon robo-taxi with my smartphone.

Re: What you wanted to know about AI

#26

Post by [deleted] »

pqomdv wrote: post #23
aamar wrote: post #15

There's some good comments about some new AI tools; it's a shame that the article's premise is a straw man. The fears of machine superintelligence are based on the belief that true AI is just around a corner. After all, we’re so advanced and the progress is only accelerating, it’s probably a few years away, at most. Analogously, public figures started warning us about climate change, so it must be just a few years be…

The global warming comparison isn't very good. We had the capabilities for carbon output 50 years ago and it has slowly been increasing. But we don't yet have an AI. So there is no need to warn anyone, except out of irrational fear. Once we actually get it, it would make sense to start warning about its applications, so it doesn't get out of control. If I apply your analogy correctly, then warning about AI now, is th…

[deleted]

Re: What you wanted to know about AI

#27

Post by one-more-minute »

pqomdv wrote: post #23
aamar wrote: post #15

There's some good comments about some new AI tools; it's a shame that the article's premise is a straw man. The fears of machine superintelligence are based on the belief that true AI is just around a corner. After all, we’re so advanced and the progress is only accelerating, it’s probably a few years away, at most. Analogously, public figures started warning us about climate change, so it must be just a few years be…

The global warming comparison isn't very good. We had the capabilities for carbon output 50 years ago and it has slowly been increasing. But we don't yet have an AI. So there is no need to warn anyone, except out of irrational fear. Once we actually get it, it would make sense to start warning about its applications, so it doesn't get out of control. If I apply your analogy correctly, then warning about AI now, is th…

If people had started to worry about the long-term effects of carbon output before it was already widespread, a lot of the damage it has caused could have been limited.

I don't see what's irrational about trying to solve problems before they become problems, rather than trying to do damage control after the fact.

Re: What you wanted to know about AI

#28

Post by [deleted] »

pqomdv wrote: post #23
aamar wrote: post #15

There's some good comments about some new AI tools; it's a shame that the article's premise is a straw man. The fears of machine superintelligence are based on the belief that true AI is just around a corner. After all, we’re so advanced and the progress is only accelerating, it’s probably a few years away, at most. Analogously, public figures started warning us about climate change, so it must be just a few years be…

The global warming comparison isn't very good. We had the capabilities for carbon output 50 years ago and it has slowly been increasing. But we don't yet have an AI. So there is no need to warn anyone, except out of irrational fear. Once we actually get it, it would make sense to start warning about its applications, so it doesn't get out of control. If I apply your analogy correctly, then warning about AI now, is th…

[deleted]

Re: What you wanted to know about AI

#29

Post by AndrewKemendo »

aamar wrote: post #15

There's some good comments about some new AI tools; it's a shame that the article's premise is a straw man. The fears of machine superintelligence are based on the belief that true AI is just around a corner. After all, we’re so advanced and the progress is only accelerating, it’s probably a few years away, at most. Analogously, public figures started warning us about climate change, so it must be just a few years be…

How about this instead:

Current AI technologies give us no insight about the probability of an AGI

Because that is exactly the point. We can't look at what we have built today and extrapolate that AGI will come from it.

All anyone can do is speculate wildly on AGI just as they were able to in 1956 [1]. The difference is that we see automation/computing as ubiquitous (smartphones/computers in 2015), rather than around the edges (Radio/TV 1956). Which brings it closer to home in some ways.

[1] I chose 1956 because of the dartmouth conference on AI

Re: What you wanted to know about AI

#30

Post by AndrewKemendo »

one-more-minute wrote: post #27
pqomdv wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The global warming comparison isn't very good. We had the capabilities for carbon output 50 years ago and it has slowly been increasing. But we don't yet have an AI. So there is no need to warn anyone, except out of irrational fear. Once we actually get it, it would make sense to start warning about its applications, so it doesn't get out of control. If I apply your analogy correctly, then warning about AI now, is th…

If people had started to worry about the long-term effects of carbon output before it was already widespread, a lot of the damage it has caused could have been limited. I don't see what's irrational about trying to solve problems before they become problems, rather than trying to do damage control after the fact.

You aren't getting the comparison.

It's akin to someone back then worrying about the long-term effects of steam/water vapor.

You don't know if vapor is actually a problem, or will become one, and you don't have any data in any field to back up your concerns.

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