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Artificial Intelligence Software Is Booming, But Why Now?

nytimes.com

121–130 of 141 posts

Re: Artificial Intelligence Software Is Booming, But Why Now?

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Which might be a good thing. Terrifying visions of AI are all about certainty and the authoritarianism it creates. Indeed, may the gods protect us all from some things actually being true and other things actually being false. That would be terrible!

(I sense/assume a missing /s in your post, Eli.) The objection here would be that entertaining that we can assert T/F of all propositions, given results of halting problem [computation], incompleteness [formalism], and uncertainty [physics], is unreasonable.

>The objection here would be that entertaining that we can assert T/F of all propositions, given results of halting problem [computation], incompleteness [formalism], and uncertainty [physics], is unreasonable.

This displays a radical misunderstanding of the phenomena mentioned. The Halting Problem and logical incompleteness are the same thing underneath, and while they do hold in all formal systems, this never actually matters for non-meta-level mathematics. Basically any theorem about a structure we actually care about will be sub-Turing-complete, and with modern type theories, we can tear down inductive types and rebuild them with stronger axioms when we need to. As a result, some self-referencing theorems are true-but-unprovable, but we never actually need those theorems.

Uncertainty in physics is either just probabilistic (in the case of typical experiments), or, in the special case of Heisenberg uncertainty... no actually, that's just probabilistic imprecision too. That's what Heisenberg's inequalities actually say: "the product of the standard deviations of these measurements must always be at least this much."

Nowhere are we encountering the kind of radical, existential "we can't know anything and had better give up" uncertainty without which /u/mbrock seems to think we will all fall into political authoritarianism. He's been reading too many liberal philosophers of World War II, or maybe just watched that BBC thing "Dangerous Knowledge" and took it seriously.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Software Is Booming, But Why Now?

#122
post #120

Date Approximate cost per GFLOPS inflation adjusted to 2013 US dollars --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1961 $8.3 trillion 1984 $42,780,000 1997 $42,000 April 2000 $1,300 May 2000 $836 August 2003 $100 August 2007 $52 March 2011 $1.80 August 2012 $0.73 June 2013 $0.22 November 2013 $0.16 December 2013 $0.12 January 2015 $0.06

That's counting the GPU processing power, which is not so easy to use. No way the CPU FLOPS have become 30x cheaper since 2011 (its increase really slowed down since then).

There have been a lot of smartphones sold since 2011.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Software Is Booming, But Why Now?

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I sense/assume a missing /s in your post, Eli.) The objection here would be that entertaining that we can assert T/F of all propositions, given results of halting problem [computation], incompleteness [formalism], and uncertainty [physics], is unreasonable.

>The objection here would be that entertaining that we can assert T/F of all propositions, given results of halting problem [computation], incompleteness [formalism], and uncertainty [physics], is unreasonable. This displays a radical misunderstanding of the phenomena mentioned. The Halting Problem and logical incompleteness are the same thing underneath, and while they do hold in all formal systems, this never actua…

It seems irrelevant that, as of now, "any problem we care about" is sub-Turing-complete. We're still taking baby steps as a species and the relevant timelines in context of this thread are futuristic. Agreed?

The point is that to maximally insist that "we can't know anything", and/or, "we can know everything" are both equally unreasonable positions.

> Nowhere are we encountering the kind of radical, existential "we can't know anything and had better give up" uncertainty without which /u/mbrock seems to think we will all fall into political authoritarianism. He's been reading too many liberal philosophers of World War II, or maybe just watched that BBC thing "Dangerous Knowledge" and took it seriously.

S/he can address your concerns -- that was not my intent, but hopefully you agree that unreasonable insistence on maximalist positions inherently carries the danger of "political" authoritarianism.

Your practical position reminds of a purported exchange between Wittgenstein and Turing, per Hewitt [ref]. I am sympathetic to it. But reminder again that my initial comments here were in context of intelligent machines. In fact as I am writing this little note, I am entertaining the thought that a veritable intelligent machine may in fact review the 3 (methodological) constraints noted, and shrug it off as practically unimportant. Or it may become alarmed. :)

[edit/p.s. ref:http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4302]

Re: Artificial Intelligence Software Is Booming, But Why Now?

#124
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is moving fast. Faster than it has in a long time. In research circles, "supervised learning", or data classification problems, are considered solved. Consider the magnitude of that statement: If we have sufficient labeled data, we can predict those labels accurately on data we haven't been exposed to: fraud, faces, diseases, you name it. AI is moving fast for three reasons, which Andrew Ng summarizes neatly: 1) W…

"the way the French decided to fight German panzers with mounted cavalry in WWI" Quick note: I think this is historically inaccurate. In World War One, the Germans had essentially no tanks, unlike the British and French. In World War II, there's a popular rumor that Polish (not French) cavalry forces charged German tanks at Krojanty, but this is itself a myth (the cavalry attack was against infantry, tanks arrived af…

Sorry, that should have been WWII, you're right. Anyone who wishes to know more about France's lack of preparation for both wars should read the French historian Marc Bloch, who fought in both and died in the resistance. L'Etrange defaite is his great work.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Software Is Booming, But Why Now?

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> how many generations of selective breeding do you think it would take to evolve a spider that could beat the best humans at go? That's a different issue. Spiders, as all insects, don't learn . It seems that insects have some kind of firmware-style programming that can't change, because they don't have the cognitive ability to change it. This firmware can be unbelievably complex, like in the case of Portia spiders…

That's exactly my point. Spiders can't learn. Maybe they are amazing for what they do, but the comparison is apples to oranges. They do fundamentally different things. Of course spiders are complex. Everything in biology is complex. It's been slowly refined over millions and millions of years. Countless trillions of tweaks to its DNA tested and rejected until it hit upon something that worked. No human could design s…

In terms of number of nodes, complexity of the arrangement of nodes, and amount of computation performed by each node, even a small biological brain is incalculably more complicated than a top ANN.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Software Is Booming, But Why Now?

#126
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy that. Spiders can't beat a human at Go. Sure, they weren't evolved to do that. But how many generations of selective breeding do you think it would take to evolve a spider that could beat the best humans at go? Whereas if you made a spider hunting video game, I bet researchers could train AI's that could beat it within a few months. Video game playing has actually become a big area of research recently an…

I agree that mastering board games requires intelligence. I also agree that good chess players are usually intelligent, even quite smart. But it's not like people's abilities in chess are directly proportional to their intelligence, is it? I mean, you would probably have mediocre chess players that could beat Plato or Darwin or Einstein. Why is it that computers' abilities to win chess or Go are seen as the proxy for…

Actually bulk of what we call human intelligence is basically nothing more than a chain of facts we built up, each fact derived based on the truths we learned(or perceived) before.

Intelligence therefore is that process where you get from A to B, with steps in between that require consciously investigating the already available knowledge to us.

This is already happening with machines today. Someday a person will come up with a generic learning algorithm, which has a meta component to either search for answers in the space it already knows, or use external means to learn more about it.

Please also note without means to move around, use your hand/legs/eyes et al to test around and build your experiences, we will likely have the same primitive intelligence. Only difference now is instead of giving the machines these sensory organs, we are only working with an algorithm with inputs and outputs and then have it evolve.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Software Is Booming, But Why Now?

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> how many generations of selective breeding do you think it would take to evolve a spider that could beat the best humans at go? That's a different issue. Spiders, as all insects, don't learn . It seems that insects have some kind of firmware-style programming that can't change, because they don't have the cognitive ability to change it. This firmware can be unbelievably complex, like in the case of Portia spiders…

>> Spiders, as all insects, don't learn. That is blatantly false. A recent paper has shown that bees can even be trained to distinguishing a handful of human faces( a task which they are of course not optimized for). for starters: http://insects.about.com/od/behaviorcommunication/f/caninsec...

It might be more accurate to say that bees have the innate ability to distinguish and remember faces. An insect cannot learn a novel concept they are not able to do innately.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Software Is Booming, But Why Now?

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ISTM you may have found the answer to TFA's question. In the early days of AI, they were looking for actual intelligence. Eventually everyone realized that won't be found soon. Today's success is mostly a successful refocusing on attainable heuristics, rather than solving many problems related to actual intelligence.

Love it. So we today have "A.I." and hopefully someday we may finally get A.A.I. So what happened to Machine Learning and Computational Intelligence? Not sexy enough?

The original goal of AI is now called AGI, for "artificial general intelligence".

Re: Artificial Intelligence Software Is Booming, But Why Now?

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy that. Spiders can't beat a human at Go. Sure, they weren't evolved to do that. But how many generations of selective breeding do you think it would take to evolve a spider that could beat the best humans at go? Whereas if you made a spider hunting video game, I bet researchers could train AI's that could beat it within a few months. Video game playing has actually become a big area of research recently an…

>> how many generations of selective breeding do you think it would take to evolve a spider that could beat the best humans at go? That's a different issue. Spiders, as all insects, don't learn . It seems that insects have some kind of firmware-style programming that can't change, because they don't have the cognitive ability to change it. This firmware can be unbelievably complex, like in the case of Portia spiders…

>Spiders, as all insects, don't learn

>Spiders

>insects

For shame!

Re: Artificial Intelligence Software Is Booming, But Why Now?

#130

I'm still not comfortable calling the thing that is booming "artificial intelligence". It is mostly pattern recognition and classification. Intelligence is something else.

To be fair most of human "intelligence" seems to be pattern recognition and extrapolating data from those patterns. My guess is that if you made a robot that is really, really good at recognizing and extrapolating from arbitrary patterns and then gave it some intrinsic goals then you are pretty much at "true" AI.
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