since it was using movies maybe the 8 legs is for a human centipede?
AI’s Language Problem
181–190 of 244 posts
Re: AI’s Language Problem
#182No one would ever imagine that locking a baby in a featureless room with a giant stack of books would give them general intelligence. I don't understand why AI researchers think it will work for AIs. They need bodies that are biologically connected with the rest of the biosphere, with an intrinsic biological imperative, if they are ever to understand the world. I'm not saying they have to be exactly like us, but they…
It's probably a mistake to assume that just because it's the way we do it that it has to be the way machines do it. Although that's usually the initial assumption. In the early days of flight most attempts were based on birds, similarly submersible vehicles were based on fish. We know now it's better to use propellers. It could be we just haven't found what is analogous to a propeller for the AI world.
I agree that machines won't necessarily have to do everything the same way we do things to be "intelligent". On the other hand, the concept of artificial general intelligence implies a machine that can perform all of the same functions a human can: "Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the intelligence of a (hypothetical) machine that could successfully perform any intellectual task that a human being can."[0]
And if you look at what humans do that we characterize as "intelligence", it's a substantial list of different functions: "Human intelligence is the intellectual capacity of humans, which is characterized by perception, consciousness, self-awareness, and volition. Through their intelligence, humans possess the cognitive abilities to learn, form concepts, understand, apply logic, and reason, including the capacities to recognize patterns, comprehend ideas, plan, problem solve, make decisions, retain information, and use language to communicate. Intelligence enables humans to experience and think."[1] If I take an engineering perspective and look at the list of functions that an AGI would have to perform to be an AGI, I would definitely want to give it more than a text-in, text-out interface so that it could have, for example, perception and volition.
For example, imagine a theoretical "AGI" that exclusively deals with a stream of text in (as human language) and a stream of text out (again, as human language). If you ask it any questions about its physical surroundings, it's either going to make things up (which isn't perception and therefore fails both at being useful and meeting the definition of intelligence above), or it's going to get information about its physical surroundings via some proxy that feeds it a linguistic stream of information about its surroundings. But it doesn't matter if it's getting perceptual information from a proxy or from more directly embedded sensory interfaces; if it's getting perceptual information and able to use it sensibly, then it's performing the function of perception. And in that case the proxy source of perceptual information may as well be considered part of the "intelligent" system.
These kinds of articles seem a bit silly to me, because they seem to imply that we should expect to be able to create a system which is "intelligent" but which only performs the function of understanding and producing meaningful language. But if you're only handling language, you're taking away all of the other functions that are part of the definition of "intelligence" above, which leaves you with a system which is far short of anything we'd consider "intelligent".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...
Re: AI’s Language Problem
#183No one would ever imagine that locking a baby in a featureless room with a giant stack of books would give them general intelligence. I don't understand why AI researchers think it will work for AIs. They need bodies that are biologically connected with the rest of the biosphere, with an intrinsic biological imperative, if they are ever to understand the world. I'm not saying they have to be exactly like us, but they…
Helen Keller's life argues against the proposition that a machine requires the same sort of interaction with its environment that the average human experiences, before it can achieve intelligence.
Re: AI’s Language Problem
#184Id rather see an AI that is smarter than humans. People are trying to make human-like entities but lets think outside the box a little more.
Re: AI’s Language Problem
#185It seems to me that a full mastery of language requires a grasp of semantics, that is the ability to understand what a sentence means. I doubt it's possible to do that without having basic common sense along with an overall representation of the world, and that looks very close to strong AI, imho. So I'm not surprised computers keep on struggling with language applications. Once they succeed strong AI will not be muc…
I am inclined to agree with you, but then I remember that people used to say the same thing about chess. Perhaps completely solving language requires strong AI, but maybe we can get 99% there with something like the "chinese room", an AI that works like a well learned parrot.
Re: AI’s Language Problem
#186Reminds me a lot of that classic Stephen Bond essay: https://web.archive.org/web/20131204031113/http://plover.net...
Is there a story behind the pictures accompanying that article?
Re: AI’s Language Problem
#187You cannot understand apples by analyzing the word "apple". Language is just the paper trail. There are plenty of examples: You can't understand a bank or money by just analyzing bank statements. You can't understand food or supermarkets by analyzing their receipts. You can't understand the internet by analyzing TCP/IP.
Regardless of the rich context a word may reside, or the infinite sample pool of text upon which we may unleash our learning robots, as long as they are all words, you will never encounter the real apple to which the symbol is linked, nor reach the reality to which all the symbols are linked. The machine will learn something. It just won't be anything like what we know or understand, or what generated the paper trail in the first place. They will be awkward simulations, which is exactly what we have.
My now 20 month old son wasn't born literate, but already spoke. A grunt, a groan, a giggle, and a moan. These are his words. There is nuance, there is rhythm, there is intention, and there is tone. Not that I'm any good at writing baby books, but there is a reason babies enjoy rhyming and puns and silliness. The point is, words offer so much more than their meaning. This is the language they understand. They don't know English, and we aren't teaching them English. But they are slowly but surely articulating themselves, be it that they're hungry, lonely, or just want that grape. In fact, who is teaching who? Parents learn the language of their child first to be any good at parenting. Their expressions of their intelligence precludes the expressions of our own. Maybe all we need is a machine that groans.
I find it no coincidence that the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein evolved with his experiences teaching children. And if I were to make a bold prediction, it appears the field of AI will benefit immensely from all the young and talented AI researches who start having kids of their own. The comments here already seem to attest to this. It's either that or giving up and deciding to teach preschoolers for a while. Either way, we'll soon have our book on AI that will do what Philosophical Investigations did for philosophy. And I can't wait.
Re: AI’s Language Problem
#188No one would ever imagine that locking a baby in a featureless room with a giant stack of books would give them general intelligence. I don't understand why AI researchers think it will work for AIs. They need bodies that are biologically connected with the rest of the biosphere, with an intrinsic biological imperative, if they are ever to understand the world. I'm not saying they have to be exactly like us, but they…
I believe we can get AI from just text. Obviously that won't work for babies, because babies get bored quickly looking at text. AIs can be forced to read billions of words in mere hours! Look at word2vec. By using simple dimensionality reduction on the frequency that words that occur near to each other in news articles, it can learn really interesting things about the meaning of words. The famous example is the vecto…
> All of the information of our world is contained in text
Communicate the concept of "green" to me in text.
The sound of a dog barking, a motor turning over, a sonic boom, or the experience of a Doppler shift. Beethoven's symphony.
Sour. Sweet. What does "mint" taste like? Shame. Merit. Learn facial and object recognition via text.
Vertigo.
Tell a boxer how to box by reading?
Hand eye coordination, bodies in 3 dimensional space.
Look, I love text, maybe even more than yourself. But all these things imbibe, structure and influence or text, but are not contained in them.
To make substantial inroads to something that looks like human esque AI, text is not enough. The division of these fields are artificial and based on our current limited tech and the specialisation of our researchers, faculties and limitations.
When we read, we play back memories, visions, sounds, feelings, etc, and inherent ideas gained through experience of ourselves as physical bodies in space.
Strong AI, at least to be vaguely recognised as such, must work with algorithms and machinery that understand these things, but which then works at that next level of abstraction to combine them into proper human type concepts.
Of course, there is the question about why we would want to create a human like AI, it's my contention that human like AI isn't actually what many of us would want, but that's another topic...
Re: AI’s Language Problem
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe we can get AI from just text. Obviously that won't work for babies, because babies get bored quickly looking at text. AIs can be forced to read billions of words in mere hours! Look at word2vec. By using simple dimensionality reduction on the frequency that words that occur near to each other in news articles, it can learn really interesting things about the meaning of words. The famous example is the vecto…
> All of the information of our world is contained in text Communicate the concept of "green" to me in text. The sound of a dog barking, a motor turning over, a sonic boom, or the experience of a Doppler shift. Beethoven's symphony. Sour. Sweet. What does "mint" taste like? Shame. Merit. Learn facial and object recognition via text. Vertigo. Tell a boxer how to box by reading? Hand eye coordination, bodies in 3 dimen…
I think you're over-romanticizing the problem.
I won't touch the qualia aspect, but everything necessary to flawlessly pretend to understand the color green, the sound of a dog's bark, or the experience of hearing a sonic boom can be represented with text. As an existence proof, you could encode an adult human as a serial stream of characters.
Re: AI’s Language Problem
#190No one would ever imagine that locking a baby in a featureless room with a giant stack of books would give them general intelligence. I don't understand why AI researchers think it will work for AIs. They need bodies that are biologically connected with the rest of the biosphere, with an intrinsic biological imperative, if they are ever to understand the world. I'm not saying they have to be exactly like us, but they…
I second this. To further illustrate that semantics is far more than syntax and that emotions are an inseparable part of understanding language, do the following experiment: take any word or concept and look up its definition in a dictionary. Take note of the words used in the definition and look up the meaning of those words. Repeat recursively and if you go far enough down the tree you will find that all words lead to self-recursive definitions that state "it is a feeling of" this or that. This is proof that semantics of language - and intelligence required to grasp it's semantics - is inseparable from subjective states.