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Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Win 2024 Turing Award

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Re: Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Win 2024 Turing Award

#111
post #75

Good time to remind everyone that Sutton is a human successionist and doesn't care if humans all die. He is not to be trusted nor celebrated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgHFMolXs3U

Have you ever met Sutton? He is the most heart-warming, caring and passionate hippy I have ever met. He does not want all humans to die. The talk you link also doesn't support your claim. Perhaps I missed it, in that case, do leave a timestamp. In the talk, he says it will lead to an era of prosperity for humanity, however without humanity being in sole control of their destiny. His conclusion slide (at 12:33) litera…

Here's the difference, you are not personally building the device which will cause your demise and your succession. We as humanity ARE doing that and have agency to choose NOT to do that.

Re: Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Win 2024 Turing Award

#112
post #107

These guys are great but unfortunately the ai sutton and barto book is really bad. You would do better with Grokking Machine Learning by trask, and then a couple months of implementing ml papers.

These books are about different topics? Sutton and Barto is about Reinforcement learning, and the other book you mention by Trask is on Deep Learning?

The sutton and barto book is often given as an introductory ai book to people with no experience in ai or rl. This is unfortunate as it functions as neither a good rl book nor a good ai book.

Wheras the introductory book Grokking Deep Learning walks you through implementing your own pytorch, and has a portion about rl near the end, then has a follow up book on rl, and it is trivial to have your own from scratch model and framework playing tic tac toe, snake, even without any math skills beyond multiplication.

This happens without just smacking the reader with the modified bellman equation, and a bunch of chain rule backwards, and padded paragraphs intended to sell additional versions to universities.

Re: Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Win 2024 Turing Award

#113

Good time to remind everyone that Sutton is a human successionist and doesn't care if humans all die. He is not to be trusted nor celebrated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgHFMolXs3U

Very disappointing. I do not understand how people earnestly defend the successionist view as a good future, but I thought he might at least give some interesting arguments. This talk isn't that. There are no substantive arguments for why we should embrace this future and his representation of the opposite side isn't in good faith either, instead he chose to present straw-man versions of them. He concludes with "A su…

I'm not trying to be edgy or misanthropic but I don't understand why would you attach emotional value to the abstract concept of existence of humanity over next millennia. Isn't it the same kind of extrapolation of kin selection instincts far into the domain of values as for example favouring your race over others?

To me robots are just as cool.

Re: Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Win 2024 Turing Award

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember the article, and remember how badly it missed the point... The goal of writing a chess program that could beat a world champion wasn't to beat the world champion... the goal was to gain understanding into how anyone can play chess well. The victory in that match would've been equivalent to eg. drugging Kasparov prior to the match, or putting a gun to his head and telling him to lose: even cheaper and more…

"The goal of Automated driving is not to drive automatically but to understand how anyone can drive well"... The goal of DeepBlue was to beat the human with a machine, nothing more. While the conquest of deeper understanding is used for a lot of research, most AI (read modern DL) research is not about understanding human intelligence, but automatic things we could not do before. (Understanding human intelligence is n…

Seems like you missed the point too: I'm not talking about DeepBlue, I'm talking about using the game of chess as a "lab rat" in order to understand something more general. DeepBlue was the opposite to the desire of understanding "something more general". It just found a creative way to cheat at chess. Like that Japanese pole jumper (I think he was Japanese, cannot find this atm) who instead of jumping learned how to climb a stationary pole, and, in this way, won a particular contest.

> most AI (read modern DL) research is not about understanding human intelligence, but automatic things we could not do before.

Yes, and that's a bad thing. I don't care if shopping site recommendations are 82% accurate rather than 78%, or w/e. We've traded an attempt at answering an immensely important question for a fidget spinner.

> Understanding human intelligence is nowadays a different field

And what would that be?

Re: Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Win 2024 Turing Award

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custode... excerpt of the first few paragraphs, sorry about any wrong formatting, links becoming plain text, etc. just pasted it as is: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? is a Latin phrase found in the Satires (Satire VI, lines 347–348), a work of the 1st–2nd century Roman poet Juvenal. It may be translated as "Who will guard the guards t…

Apologies for taking the phrase in a slightly farcical (& incurious ?) direction: Who will take custody of the custodians?

#!/usr/bin/badlatininterpreter

no comprendere tu commentum

but

apologia unneeded est

Re: Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Win 2024 Turing Award

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Best lesson for me - vowed never to be the person opposed to new approaches that work. I think you'll be surprised at how hard that will be to do. The reason many people feel that way is because: (a) they've become an expert (often recognized) in the old approach. (b) They make significant money (or something else). At the end of the day, when a new approach greatly encroaches into your way of life -- you'll likely…

Of course it is difficult, for precisely the reasons you indicate. It's one of those lifetime skills that you have to continuously polish, and if you fall behind it is incredibly hard to recover. But such skills are necessary for being a resilient person.

You are acting like it was obvious that machine learning was the future, but this person was just stubborn. I don't think that was necessarily the case in the early 2010s and skepticism was warranted. If you see results and ignore them, sure that is a problem. But it wasn't until ML vision results really started dominating conferences such as CVPR that it became clear. It's all a tradeoff of exploration/exploitation.

Re: Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Win 2024 Turing Award

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apologies for taking the phrase in a slightly farcical (& incurious ?) direction: Who will take custody of the custodians?

#!/usr/bin/badlatininterpreter no comprendere tu commentum but apologia unneeded est

"Take custody" => infantilize, as of children => handling people with power like children => copium, wankery

Apologia not uh in the realm of consideration, marginally insightful because shitty latin marginally enjoyable

Re: Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto Win 2024 Turing Award

#119

Good time to remind everyone that Sutton is a human successionist and doesn't care if humans all die. He is not to be trusted nor celebrated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgHFMolXs3U

> doesn't care if humans all die

His last slide literally says “best hope for a long-term future for humanity”. That’s literally the opposite of what you’re claiming.

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