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There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence

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Re: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence

#101

Post by darepublic »

denzil_correa wrote: post #35
astdb wrote: post #28

Having done some work with the state-of-the-art of AI, I personally don't think AGI is near - might not even be possible. But the catch is the unreliability of (even expert) predictions on technology futures. My take is that it's worth taking pragmatic steps towards studying AI safety measures (i.e. OpenAI), but not going as far as to talk the likes of 'AI research regulation'.

> My take is that it's worth taking pragmatic steps towards studying AI safety measures (i.e. OpenAI), but not going as far as to talk the likes of 'AI research regulation'. Sometimes, it makes more sense being cautiously optimistic (pro-active) rather than reactive. We have already gone down that reactive slope and it's better to act now before it's all too late [0]. [0] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of…

I think the kind of people who would fill these ai regulation roles would be pseudo technical bureaucratic types who would prove to have offered no value if sudden unexpected agi really did come about

Re: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence

#102

Post by WhitneyLand »

It’s such a thoughtfully reasoned post, I hate to disagree with it, and don’t even have time now to fully argue it’s merits.

Say generally available computing power was instantly 1 million times greater. How much closer would that put us to AGI?

Its not even clear how much the recent impressive machine learning feats demonstrated will even serve as a precursor or building block to what the real AGI solutions are. It’s so much less of a hard coded problem than what’s being done now, the real solutions could require radical changes in direction. How do we know it’s even fair to use these as part of the argument?

Re: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence

#103

Post by mrfusion »

rl3 wrote: post #64
sago wrote: post #33

I've been around AI since the end of the last big hype in the late 80s. The recent leap in machine learning has felt rather hyped to me. I don't think AGI is near. But I find myself agreeing with this article. Strongly. And I have long suspected that, we miss a lot of the significance and opportunities in AI, because we have only one exemplar of 'higher' intelligence: a human being. AI folk are so concerned with gett…

> The recent leap in machine learning has felt rather hyped to me. I don't think AGI is near. I've always thought it's never too early to start allocating significant resources to AGI research and safety given the potential impact. That said, I've up until very recently agreed with your take on the situation. What changed my mind was an article detailing the latest advances in silver nanowire mesh networks.[0] I knew…

Thanks for pointing me to that. Very fascinating!

I’m wondering if it’s possible to code a simulation of what these wires are doing? Since most of us don’t have access to the nanoscale silver contraption we could still be studying the operation.

Re: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence

#104

Post by bitL »

sago wrote: post #33

I've been around AI since the end of the last big hype in the late 80s. The recent leap in machine learning has felt rather hyped to me. I don't think AGI is near. But I find myself agreeing with this article. Strongly. And I have long suspected that, we miss a lot of the significance and opportunities in AI, because we have only one exemplar of 'higher' intelligence: a human being. AI folk are so concerned with gett…

AI is already superhuman, but not in those areas we associate as strongly human :)

Re: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence

#105

Post by mannykannot »

SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #69
leereeves wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ability to compute intelligence given infinite time and compute power isn't proof that NNs are a useful approach. For that, a technique must be able to compute human intelligence at a useful speed on a constructable system.

Didn't the same argument apply in general to why NNs weren't particularly useful for anything ~30 years ago? Using a network of tensors to compute intelligence is incredibly old (I believe, dating back about 80 years), but has only recently become tractable to do for any complex tasks. However, in the past ~30 years, we've gone from "intractable for moderate problems" to "world champion at go", "able to detect cancer…

> Didn't the same argument apply in general to why NNs weren't particularly useful for anything ~30 years ago?

Not unless there was good reason to expect that every other possible application of NNs would be as difficult to achieve as general intelligence.

Re: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence

#106

Post by deong »

sago wrote: post #33

I've been around AI since the end of the last big hype in the late 80s. The recent leap in machine learning has felt rather hyped to me. I don't think AGI is near. But I find myself agreeing with this article. Strongly. And I have long suspected that, we miss a lot of the significance and opportunities in AI, because we have only one exemplar of 'higher' intelligence: a human being. AI folk are so concerned with gett…

The article makes a lot of good points, but for me, the critical error is in assuming that if short term prediction is hard, long term prediction must be massively harder.

He asked a panel for the least impressive thing they did not believe would be possible within a few years. In other words, pick the point closest to the boundary of that classifier. Obviously my future knowledge is imperfect, and anything close to the boundary is subject to a lot of uncertainty. From that difficulty, he hand waves an argument that long term prediction of the unlikelihood of AGI is folly.

The problem is that these aren't in the same class of predictions. One is detailed and precise; the other coarse and broad. Predicting that it will rain at 2:00 PM November 10, 2017 is much more difficult than predicting that the average summer of 2040-2060 will be hotter than the average from 1980-2000. Precise local predictions just arent the same thing as broad global predictions, and difficulty doesn't transfer, because I'm not bootstrapping my global prediction on the local one. I'm using different methods entirely.

There's a similar thing with AI, I think. I can't confidently tell you what the big splash we'll see at NIPS next year or the year after. But I can look at the way we know how to do AI and say I don't think 30 years will see a machine that can make dinner by gathering ingredients from a supermarket, driving home, and preparing the meal.

Re: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence

#107

Post by Retra »

Tossrock wrote: post #77

For me, the "smoke under the door" moment was Karpathy and Li's Deep Visual-Semantic Alignments for Generating Image Descriptions [1]. The almost perfectly grammatical machine-generated captions of photos were unnerving to me in a way that simple categorization was not. It somehow called to mind the image of a blank-eyed person speaking in a monotone while images flashed in front of them. What if they wake up? [1]: h…

What is "wake up"? How can a machine "wake up" in a way that we can't shutdown with a trivial disconnect? Our computer systems are exceedingly fragile and bottlenecked. No runaway bandwidth-hogging super intelligence is going to be able to 'wake up' without pissing off someone sitting next to a power switch.

Re: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence

#109

Post by lgas »

Santosh83 wrote: post #31

Why do we fear other intelligences anyway? Isn't that just a sign of our own immaturity? Maybe we need to evolve more before we start think about creating AGI...

Well, most people assume the development of AGI will in short order lead to the rise of superintelligent AGI and then the reason is precedent -- look at how we treat creatures that are less intelligent than we are. If you're lucky you're a dog or a cat and you're kept as a pet and treated as a member of the family, but you're still a pet. If you're not so lucky you're a cow or a pig and used primarily as a food source. If you're even less lucky you're an insect that gets stepped on for wandering too close to the picnic where we're eating the cow and pig while we watch our dog play.

Re: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence

#110

Post by psyc »

baxtr wrote: post #3

That seems to be a very interesting article. However, it’s quite long. Anybody ok with writing a short synthesis or abstract? Thanks

When GAI is imminent, there will be no consensus that it is imminent. Therefore now is as good a time as any to prepare.
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