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Good Old Fashioned AI is dead, long live New-Fangled AI

billwadge.com

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Re: Good Old Fashioned AI is dead, long live New-Fangled AI

#21

Post by nonrandomstring »

falcolas wrote: post #19
triska wrote: post #2

The "new-fangled" AI, as the article calls it, is often useful when the stakes are low, and you can accept mistakes in outcomes. Examples of such applications are: trying to determine which of your friends occur in a photo, which movies a subscriber may be interested in, or which action could lead to victory in a computer game. Getting a rough translation of a newspaper entry, as mentioned in the article, is also a g…

So, there's an area of research that's under way called "AI Assurance" which seeks to answer many of these questions. Some things they're attempting: - Creating explainable outcomes by tracing the inner works of ML models. - Looking for biases in models using random inputs & looking for biased outputs. - Using training sets with differently weighted models to find attacks and biases. etc.

The tragedy is that GOFAI did all these things as built-ins. Procedural expert systems have been doing introspection, backtracing, declaring confidence intervals etc since the 1960s. Layering "assurance" on top of inherently jittery statistical/stochastic and neural systems seems to misunderstand how these models evolved, where they come from and why there are alternatives.

Re: Good Old Fashioned AI is dead, long live New-Fangled AI

#22

Post by mattnewton »

short_sells_poo wrote: post #20
falcolas wrote: post #18

As always, they mis-spelled the acronym for "Machine Learning". There's nothing "Artificial" or "Intelligent" here but a mathematical algorithm operating on an algorithmically-encoded dataset. If anything, it's closer to an encryption algorithm where the keys can decrypt deterministic parts of the plantext from the cyphertext and soften the edges a bit.

I like to equate it to a lossy compression.

Auto encoders really hit this home for me- you are trying to find an efficient compressed notation of the dataset, and the most efficient way to do that hopefully ends up learning useful rules about the data.

Re: Good Old Fashioned AI is dead, long live New-Fangled AI

#23

Post by shafoshaf »

triska wrote: post #2

The "new-fangled" AI, as the article calls it, is often useful when the stakes are low, and you can accept mistakes in outcomes. Examples of such applications are: trying to determine which of your friends occur in a photo, which movies a subscriber may be interested in, or which action could lead to victory in a computer game. Getting a rough translation of a newspaper entry, as mentioned in the article, is also a g…

The only barrier for higher stakes applications is going to be the frequency of errors. Flying an airplane or running a factory has a lot less margin for error, but humans don't do those things perfectly either (Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Union Carbide-Bhopal disaster). It doesn't have to be perfect, just better than humans. And in fact, I'd argue that by having no deterministic outcomes prevents systemic failure, like having a single point of failure for all those drones in the crappy episodes of Star Wars.

Re: Good Old Fashioned AI is dead, long live New-Fangled AI

#24

Post by dleslie »

synapticpaint wrote: post #13

"Finally, a vital question is, how will this affect today’s working artists? Here the answer is not so optimistic." I have a different take on this. I think this technology will allow more people, not less, to make money as a living (so, professionally) in a visual arts related industry. So I'm broadening the field to include not just "artists" but "commercial art" as well (designers, commercial illustrators, video/f…

> I think this technology will allow more people, not less, to make money as a living (so, professionally) in a visual arts related industry. > ... > Whenever something becomes cheaper (in this case, labor for art), its consumption increases.

But not its price, and definitely not the compensation for the labour to produce it.

Making a living as a mediocre-to-good artist is already incredibly difficult; increasing the supply of poor-to-good artists through AI-assistance isn't going to make it any easier.

> The analogy would be something like a word processor reducing the number of secretaries needed in the workforce, but increasing the number of office workers.

Only if the word processor wrote documents without the assistance of a typist, or an author.

Re: Good Old Fashioned AI is dead, long live New-Fangled AI

#25

Post by vagrantJin »

time_to_smile wrote: post #10

People spend an awful lot of time talking about current successes in AI without often reflecting on how much (or little actually) AI impacts their lives. Despite all of the energy put into current gen AI, as far as every day impacts the biggest things I can think of are: - Spam filtering/email sorting - Web search - GPS/Wayfinding - Voice assistants These are the only practical applications of "AI" that I use more or…

I agree with your take mostly. But also, some things are getting better work-wise like video/image editing. Where something can take an animator a week or two now takes all of 1 minute or less. Some startups in the motion capture space are doing some wild things and in a few years even small indie game studios will have mocap parity with AAAs.

Re: Good Old Fashioned AI is dead, long live New-Fangled AI

#26

Post by IanCal »

falcolas wrote: post #18

As always, they mis-spelled the acronym for "Machine Learning". There's nothing "Artificial" or "Intelligent" here but a mathematical algorithm operating on an algorithmically-encoded dataset. If anything, it's closer to an encryption algorithm where the keys can decrypt deterministic parts of the plantext from the cyphertext and soften the edges a bit.

This is a long lost battle since AI has been a term used to describe far simpler things than that for over 60 years.

Re: Good Old Fashioned AI is dead, long live New-Fangled AI

#27

Post by nradov »

shafoshaf wrote: post #23
triska wrote: post #2

The "new-fangled" AI, as the article calls it, is often useful when the stakes are low, and you can accept mistakes in outcomes. Examples of such applications are: trying to determine which of your friends occur in a photo, which movies a subscriber may be interested in, or which action could lead to victory in a computer game. Getting a rough translation of a newspaper entry, as mentioned in the article, is also a g…

The only barrier for higher stakes applications is going to be the frequency of errors. Flying an airplane or running a factory has a lot less margin for error, but humans don't do those things perfectly either (Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Union Carbide-Bhopal disaster). It doesn't have to be perfect, just better than humans. And in fact, I'd argue that by having no deterministic outcomes prevents systemic failure,…

But there's the rub. It's impossible to determine through testing whether a particular AI system will actually have a lower frequency of errors than humans. You can program an AI system to handle certain failure modes and test for those in simulation. But complex systems tend to have hidden failure modes which no one ever anticipated, so by definition it's impossible to test how the AI will handle those. Whereas an experienced human can often determine the correct course of action based on first principles.

For example, see US Airways Flight 1549. Airbus had never tested a double engine failure in those exact circumstances so the flight crew disregarded some steps in the written checklist and improvised a new procedure. Would an AI have handled the emergency as well? Doubtful.

Re: Good Old Fashioned AI is dead, long live New-Fangled AI

#28

Post by joe_the_user »

shafoshaf wrote: post #23
triska wrote: post #2

The "new-fangled" AI, as the article calls it, is often useful when the stakes are low, and you can accept mistakes in outcomes. Examples of such applications are: trying to determine which of your friends occur in a photo, which movies a subscriber may be interested in, or which action could lead to victory in a computer game. Getting a rough translation of a newspaper entry, as mentioned in the article, is also a g…

The only barrier for higher stakes applications is going to be the frequency of errors. Flying an airplane or running a factory has a lot less margin for error, but humans don't do those things perfectly either (Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Union Carbide-Bhopal disaster). It doesn't have to be perfect, just better than humans. And in fact, I'd argue that by having no deterministic outcomes prevents systemic failure,…

The only barrier for higher stakes applications is going to be the frequency of errors.

IE, "The only barrier to the software working perfectly is it's tendency to fail".

Which is to say this sort of argument effectively assumes, without proof, that are no structural barriers to improving neural network performance in the real world. The thing is, the slow progress on self-driving cars shows that reducing the "frequency of errors" can turn from a simple exercise in optimizing and pumping in more data to a decades long debug process.

Re: Good Old Fashioned AI is dead, long live New-Fangled AI

#29

Post by hbn »

synapticpaint wrote: post #13

"Finally, a vital question is, how will this affect today’s working artists? Here the answer is not so optimistic." I have a different take on this. I think this technology will allow more people, not less, to make money as a living (so, professionally) in a visual arts related industry. So I'm broadening the field to include not just "artists" but "commercial art" as well (designers, commercial illustrators, video/f…

> Whenever something becomes cheaper (in this case, labor for art), its consumption increases. So in the future, because producing commercial art is so much cheaper, it will be consumed a lot more.

I'm not sure how that would apply here. There's never been a shortage of art. Art has always had more supply than demand, and now we just added even more supply to saturate the market. I was previously a more likely client for an artist than I am now where I can get my computer to spit out any image I want in like 30 seconds. But I have no more desire for art than I did before.

Re: Good Old Fashioned AI is dead, long live New-Fangled AI

#30

Post by MonkeyMalarky »

shafoshaf wrote: post #23
triska wrote: post #2

The "new-fangled" AI, as the article calls it, is often useful when the stakes are low, and you can accept mistakes in outcomes. Examples of such applications are: trying to determine which of your friends occur in a photo, which movies a subscriber may be interested in, or which action could lead to victory in a computer game. Getting a rough translation of a newspaper entry, as mentioned in the article, is also a g…

The only barrier for higher stakes applications is going to be the frequency of errors. Flying an airplane or running a factory has a lot less margin for error, but humans don't do those things perfectly either (Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Union Carbide-Bhopal disaster). It doesn't have to be perfect, just better than humans. And in fact, I'd argue that by having no deterministic outcomes prevents systemic failure,…

There's a weird bit of induced demand like widening a freeway, makes errors less often than a human but is more scalable so the absolute number of errors increases. I guess in the case of self driving cars, it could be from hordes of autonomous shipping trucks that outnumber existing truck drivers.
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