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What you wanted to know about AI

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Re: What you wanted to know about AI

#121

Post by ChikkaChiChi »

jallmann wrote: post #39

When I started school, my dream was to figure out a theory to underpin a grand unified model of artificial intelligence. Imagine my disappointment once I started studying the subject in detail. Most functional AI nowadays consists of algorithms that are carefully tuned to solve a very specific problem in a narrowly defined environment. All the research nowadays is pushing the boundaries of a local optimum. Right now,…

Jeremy Clarkson made a fascinating point about the self-driving car and it's "intelligence." shortly before the whole fracas thing:

If you assume these cars will some day be able to identify humans, what decision is made in a situation where the car can either swerve and (potentially) injure a bystander, or continue on a trajectory which calculates to be certain death for its occupants?

What shocks me is how few people understand that this would not be a "decision" in the sense that the software would have a choice. It would either be coded in directly or would be a resultant output of the criteria it uses to already do its pathfinding.

Re: What you wanted to know about AI

#122

Post by blixt »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #102
blixt wrote: post #69

I would agree with this article that every independent solution today does not have the slightest chance to be iteratively improved to some kind of real intelligence. Even the "generic" game playing AI is very limited outside the scope of a pixel buffer and some digital output signals. However, I don't understand how the arguments correlate to "there is no need to worry about AI". The real worry should come from the…

>I would agree with this article that every independent solution today does not have the slightest chance to be iteratively improved to some kind of real intelligence. Even the "generic" game playing AI is very limited outside the scope of a pixel buffer and some digital output signals. Why do people who are laypersons to machine learning continue to insist, despite what those in the field say, that we are learning n…

Steps are certainly being made, but I don't think anyone in the field said any of the technology that exists today can be iterated upon to get even close to the kind of AI that would eventually become superintelligent. But yes, I do believe that with the amount of people working on these problems, we may very well "hit gold" and come up with something that does have the potential to become superintelligent, before we get there through brute-forcing means.

Re: What you wanted to know about AI

#123

Post by AndrewKemendo »

maaku wrote: post #117
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you argue against the position directly? No I can't because there isn't a way to argue it. I can't argue that it would be safe because I have nothing to point to that says it will be or even could be. We simply do not know enough about how it would be built to reason on it. It's not within the scope of the quoted works to elaborate a technical roadmap or provide firm dates for the arrival of superhuman machine…

Well, color me disappointed. I think there are many arguments against the viewpoints of MIRI and Bostrom, both discrediting the perceived risk of super-intelligences and the the idea that we could build a "provably friendly" alternative. But I don't think it's at all a fair criticism to say that you need a technical roadmap to engage in that debate. I would rather say that they need to be willing to discuss specific…

I would rather say that they need to be willing to discuss specific architectural details in order to even sit at the table, sure.

We are in violent agreement then. When I say roadmap I certainly don't intend to mean that each step needs to be perfectly detailed.

The field of "AI safety" needs more engineering and less philosophy. But that doesn't require unity around a single roadmap, or any concept of deliverable dates.

Exactly exactly and well said! That is 100% the point. Mind meld complete.

Re: What you wanted to know about AI

#124

Post by krapp »

zanny wrote: post #77
dangerlibrary wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suspect that the current google car is already safer than the overall average driver. Based on what? Even Google admits that the car is essentially blind (~30 feet visibility) in light rain. They've done little to no road testing in poor weather conditions. The vast majority of their "total miles driven" are highway miles in good weather, with the tricky city-driving bits at either end taken over by humans. Googl…

A self-driving car that can only do highways and can't drive in bad weather still destroys the trucker industry overnight. And that is today. No, I'm not drinking the AI koolaid here thinking there will be some breakout solution to fuzzy visibility problems these cars have. The difficulty differentiating contextual moving objects correctly, knowing what is "safe" debris and what is not, etc, are all neural net proble…

>All you need is something that, given a sunny day and a highway, beats the human at driving the truck, and suddenly you lose three million jobs when it hits the market.

I don't see how, given a sunny day and a highway, an autonomous vehicle can quantifiably beat a human driver to the degree of 'destroying the trucker industry overnight.'

Unless you're assuming that there are few human drivers capable of managing a trip down a highway under the best possible conditions, the results between the two would have to be more or less equal. Those human drivers can, meanwhile, still manage night, sleet, snow, fog, and arbitrary backroads and detours.

Re: What you wanted to know about AI

#125

Post by blixt »

lsz9 wrote: post #113
blixt wrote: post #69

I would agree with this article that every independent solution today does not have the slightest chance to be iteratively improved to some kind of real intelligence. Even the "generic" game playing AI is very limited outside the scope of a pixel buffer and some digital output signals. However, I don't understand how the arguments correlate to "there is no need to worry about AI". The real worry should come from the…

No doubt increased funding and interests will increase the odds of stumbling upon "cheap" strong AI - a faster-than-brute-force solution. But consider the only strong intelligence we know: say intelligence only relied on the brain (which might well not be the case). This organ consumes a large fraction of the energy available to the individual. I'm not saying evolution produces optimal solutions but I guess its fair…

This is all very vague theorizing of course, but I believe that once we reach a level of artificial intelligence that resembles biological intelligence, scaling it will be quite feasible on a silicon platform. You've also removed the element of maintaining a body (exercise, eating, hygiene) as well as expanded potential interfaces (direct connection to the internet) so that even a 1:1 silicon brain would presumably be more efficient.

The next thing you can do is optimize the time step element, so that for every 1 second of thinking in a silicon brain, it has performed the equivalent of 10 seconds of thinking in a human brain. At that point, you've surpassed human intelligence. It's also safe to assume that if we do reach this point, we've learned a lot more about how biological intelligence works, and may be able to use to our advantage the beneficial intelligence properties of savants.

The really big downside with all these approaches is that the intelligence will be built from a blueprint that includes emotions, and we may do something that is very morally wrong towards the intelligence that we created.

Re: What you wanted to know about AI

#126

Post by deeviant »

davmre wrote: post #18

A lot of respected AI researchers and practitioners are writing these "AIs are really stupid" articles to rebut superintelligence fearmongering in the popular press. That's a valuable service, and everything this article says is correct. Deepmind's Atari network is not going to kick off the singularity. I worry that the flurry of articles like this, rational and well-reasoned all, will be seen as a "win" for the noth…

Whose to say that the world wouldn't be a better place, with an advanced AGI entity in control?

Re: What you wanted to know about AI

#127

Post by krapp »

therealwill wrote: post #81
vlunkr wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be right that they are safer, but you're totally failing to contest the point. Yes computers are lots better than humans at lots of things, but they are worse at other things. They can't reliably tell the difference between a cat and a bench. Things that may be important when the computer is going 80 mph with humans on board.

Why would a self driving car need to know the difference between a cat and a bench? All it really has to know is that it is an object of a certain size and not to hit it. The things that the car needs to know are largely standardized: the lines on the road, road signs, speed limits, etc.

>The things that the car needs to know are largely standardized: the lines on the road, road signs, speed limits, etc.

These are things humans need to know as well, and yet autonomous car cheerleaders constantly argue that human drivers are death machines, despite the fact that most human drivers know perfectly well how to follow these norms, and even deviate from them, without incident, most of the time.

I suspect that in their enthusiasm to set the bar of human intelligence as low as possible in order to make the case for autonomous cars seem urgent and necessary, some vastly underestimate the actual complexity of the problem. An autonomous car that only knows to 'avoid the boxes' has worse AI than many modern video games.

Re: What you wanted to know about AI

#128

Post by themgt »

davmre wrote: post #45
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't attempt to engage with the arguments of Stuart Russell, Nick Bostrom, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and others who are worried, not about current methods, but about what will happen when the time comes -- in ten, fifty, or a hundred years -- that AI does exceed general human intelligence. That's because it would be arguing a straw-man. So there is no reason to engage the argument.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "straw man" here. The usual meaning is that to attack a straw man means to argue against a position that no one actually holds, but which is easier to attack than your opponent's actual position. The concerns about the long-term future of AI are real, actual beliefs held by serious people. At this point there's a respectable literature on the potential dangers of unconstrain…

Really I would describe these people as bikeshedding. They're pontificating about the only abstractions they understand, some hand-wavey idea of AI and then the sci-fi short stories of the imagined dangers. Because if you can't do, fanfic.

Re: What you wanted to know about AI

#129

Post by hartator »

gradys wrote: post #120
hartator wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human minds don't run on statistics. Some can be explained by statistical modeling but we don't really understand how an organic brain works.

Your first sentences needs some more support. We know that some of it can be explained by statistical modelling, and we don't yet know how to explain the rest of it. Why does that make you sure that it doesn't run on statistics?

What makes intelligence is organic and doesn't seem to map easily on statistical modeling. We can oversimplify some behaviors and claim some math on it but we at best scratch the surface.

Re: What you wanted to know about AI

#130

Post by [deleted] »

themgt wrote: post #37

I've begun to think about AI more in terms of "artificial will" than "artificial intelligence". Intelligence and will seem mostly orthogonal, in that advanced computational reductionism appears capable of extremely intelligent behavior without anywhere near the amount of self-determinism shown by insects. Whether artificial will is something that can be implemented in a turing machine and run on silicon seems an open…

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