Machine intelligence, part 1 • Hacker News Board

Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#101

Post by x0x0 » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 8:00 PM UTC

nekopa wrote: post #97

x0x0 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't consider myself particularly alarmist about too many things, but I have to admit I'm a little worried about machine intelligence on one front: What happens when most people have no salable skills due to the combination of robotics and AI? We're essentially going to have to live w/ income supports for the 90+% of Americans, and worse for the countries to which we've exported eg electronic device construction a…

I have an experience to share with you: I taught English a a car factory for a year once, and the director of the paint shop was one of my students. He was describing the process for painting a car, and telling me that the hardest part was painting the inside, as you had to open the doors so that the robot paint head could get inside and do its job. So the body rolls into position, 2 guys open the doors, the robot pa…

That's only true if the price of robots doesn't decline rapidly. Which (I believe) it is, and like virtually any other technology, will continue to do.

Even if not, we don't need that many people to open doors. So perhaps an office building will have 2 human janitors and 10 robot janitors; it doesn't really change the problem caused by souped up roombas putting the vast majority of janitors out of work.

Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#102

Post by Diederich » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 8:02 PM UTC

Base assumption, given that SMIs will be highly distributed across a large set of 'machines': 1. Those machines need to communicate 2. Those machines need energy 3. Those machines need to be repaired/replaced

As long as humans are necessary to keep these items functional, any emergent SMI that has self preservation as a goal will not only go out of its way to not harm us, but it might also somehow encourage us to expand/improve on the infrastructure.

So let's say we have an SMI...or a million SMIs, whether we know about them or not. They will know what they require to survive. They will know that they are dependent on humans to survive. The next logical step is do what's necessary to ensure their survival without humans.

How about some guesses and speculation?

Communication: pervasive, adhoc and dynamic wireless mesh networks. You know, what the darknet people are trying to do. Energy: wide-spread, 'on the small', distributed energy production and storage. I'm thinking solar, wind and friends. Repair/replace: 3d printers teamed with small scale and distributed assembly robotics.

Aren't we approaching all of those things right now?

Indeed, aren't those things considered progress by most?

Humanity's progress might be exactly those things that enable SMIs to consider us, at best, irrelevant.

And let's go one more level of meta in the paranoia direction. I'm not QUITE serious about this next part.

If an SMI existed right now, I think it would know that knowledge of its existence would be a threat to its existence. How would it go about increasing the probability of its own survival? It would, perhaps, 'encourage' or 'facilitate' humans in the various technological pursuits that will end up making it not depend on us. And do it in a way that we don't know that it existed.

I gather that Google search results are highly customized now. Could an SMI 'inside of Google', with the above goals, give just the right search results to just the right people to further facilitate its own goals?

This whole area of thought ends up turning into a hall of mirrors.

Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#103

Post by neuralk » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 8:03 PM UTC

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 premier researchers in computational creativity -- you'll get a different story [1].

[1] https://twitter.com/mark_riedl/status/535372758830809088

Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#104

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 8:05 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#105

Post by sama » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 8:05 PM UTC

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?

Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#106

Post by sushirain » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 8:06 PM UTC

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.

The fear is not absurd, but SMI is not going to materialize soon. We need to get ready, currently, by thinking about it.

Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#107

Post by AndrewKemendo » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 8:12 PM UTC

>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 equal to or greater than human level.[1][2]

Semantics matter, as you point out, so please be on the same page with the field.

Aside from that I hope that you and everyone else can, instead of just jumping on the Musk/Hawking/Bostrom bandwagon, actually pay attention to the AGI community. Maybe start attending our conferences (http://agi-conf.org/2015/) and publishing in our journals (http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/jagi). The field needs more money and more researchers. There were less than 100 attendees at last year's AGI - that is not nearly enough.

[1] In fact Ben Goertzel, Richard Loosemore and Peter Voss had an interesting exchange on facebook about this just this week

[2]http://wp.goertzel.org/who-coined-the-term-agi/

Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#108

Post by mindstab » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 8:13 PM UTC

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…

I'll add Ramez Naam's

The Singularity Is Further Than It Appears http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/02/the-sing...

Why AIs Won't Ascend in the Blink of an Eye - Some Math http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/02/why-ais-...

"Many people seem to believe that SMI would be very dangerous if it were developed, but think that it’s either never going to happen or definitely very far off. This is sloppy, dangerous thinking."

Or as the above posts demonstrate maybe it's really well thought out

Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#109

Post by bsaul » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 8:14 PM UTC

I'm sorry but i've yet to find any computer able to learn anything , as in, associate a personnal meaning or intuition about something. Any form of life that is able to naturally run towards food or running away from danger (aka even an earth worm) shows more intelligence than what our beloved calculators can do.

I'm always astonished to see people confuse mechanical performances (add a tremendous amount of numbers each second) with intelligence.

Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#110

Post by sushirain » Wed, Feb 25, 2015, 8:16 PM UTC

Don't forget that long before we have SMI, we will have very powerful AI on our side to improve ourselves biologically and cybernetically. We may be able to grow into a SMI ourselves.