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Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

theatlantic.com

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Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

#21

Post by thwest »

stephencanon wrote: post #15
thwest wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you approach Heidegger's or Derrida's arguments that 'language is complicated, something magical must be going on'? Will you allow for no qualitatively different meaning to language than probabilistic associations of sounds with objects?

I can't speak to the OP, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence; we are yet to observe anything in the natural world where "something magical [really turned out to be] going on", so this really is an extraordinary claim. It has been several years since I was current with the linguistics literature, but as far as I know no extraordinary evidence has been produced. I don't think that requires that we v…

I did not reference linguistics literature, but philosophy literature (a distinction worth making because they are approaching the problem at different levels). I've never been good at the 'language problem' elevator speech, but how is it possible that we can capture the full power of language while using language to describe it? Language is a technology that allows for the production of concepts like 'probability' or 'apple'. Language as a tool is so fundamental to cognition that it becomes difficult to separate the two. Heidegger's Being and Time explores that line of thinking, and Derrida loves to play the game of "well that means you can't say anything!" Both have provided me with insight into what "magic" is referencing here (rather than your fairly pithy absence-of-evidence reference).

Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

#22

Post by AndyNemmity »

jholman wrote: post #4

I haven't finished reading TFA yet, but so far it's really good, because it sounds like Chomsky is actually getting to the point.... which he sometimes does, and sometimes absolutely doesn't (or so it often seems to me). If you're interested in this area, which you might call the philosophy of artificial mind, or philosophy of cognitive science, I strongly suggest reading the link to Norvig's article (linked in TFA,…

I don't see any mysticism in Chomsky's approach.

You seem to agree with Norvig that doing massive data analysis on language will come to a scientific understanding, which would be a first in science.

Chomsky doesn't. If anything, Chomsky is grounded in reality, and Norvig and AI researchers are grounded in hope that this way of mapping out something will create meaningful understanding of the system.

Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

#24

Post by thwest »

zmj wrote: post #17
thwest wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you approach Heidegger's or Derrida's arguments that 'language is complicated, something magical must be going on'? Will you allow for no qualitatively different meaning to language than probabilistic associations of sounds with objects?

What could 'meaning' possibly be other than probabilistic associations of sounds and concepts?

That is EXACTLY the stance that Chomsky is challenging here. Don't get me wrong, I think the probabilistic view has truth value and is a powerful predictive tool. However, I don't think it captures the phenomenological properties of the act of language based cognition. See my cousin reply referencing Heidegger.

Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

#25

Post by AndyNemmity »

zepolud wrote: post #19

I've always considered Norvig's position pretty much self-evident for anybody who has dealt with real world problems. At the same time, Chomsky is still way more interesting to read, even if he's wrong. And he's wrong mostly for assuming that unsupervised learning has to be the end result when in fact it could be an intermediate step to more refined symbolic theories. In any case, this kind of antagonism between the…

By real world problems you're talking about engineering and not science. Chomsky says Norvig's position is great for engineering, just not science.

The whole disagreement stems from the idea that this will help us with a scientific understanding of language or not. The burden is on Norvig's side to prove it, and it hasn't.

Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

#26

Post by jcfrei »

iandanforth wrote: post #10

Chomsky is right up there with Minsky in being part of the problem. His ideas about language being part of the genome are fanciful nonsense. Skinner produce reams of reproducible empirical observations of behavior which are, today, critical to the evaluation of the performance of AIs. Chomsky has produced interesting theories, but mostly derailed linguistics on the basis of the argument 'language is complicated, some…

I had the same notion from the first part of the interview - wondering whether Chomsky would actually bring something to the table to "unriddle" this mystical machine in our head. Leaving his aversion to computational systems aside, I believe he makes a good point about our language being computationally inefficient (at least externally). maybe his insight [that our language is computationally inefficient] can be explained by molecular mechanisms that are efficient in terms of energy consumption (rather than on a computational level). looking which neural systems are most likely to evolve given a simple genetic code and reengineering (computationally inefficient and obscure) algorithms based on that might provide some valuable insight into the human brain - whereas probability measures alone might fail to explain underlying mechanisms.

Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

#27

Post by achy »

Like many things, Chomsky is both right and wrong. He's right in that if we studied the structure and functioning of the brain we could built more accurate AI. He's terribly wrong because the structures of the brain are fuzzy and give rise to probabilistic and 'statistical' functioning that is itself based on training (much like the models he derides).

Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

#28

Post by 6ren » 

  What it strongly suggests is that in the evolution of language, a computational
  system developed, and later on it was externalized.
So, the beginning of human language was not communication, but a computational system. Interesting stuff starting at that quote. NB: lots of mistakes in the transcript, sometimes rendering it unintelligible.

Re: Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

#29

Post by iandanforth »

barrkel wrote: post #13
iandanforth wrote: post #10

Chomsky is right up there with Minsky in being part of the problem. His ideas about language being part of the genome are fanciful nonsense. Skinner produce reams of reproducible empirical observations of behavior which are, today, critical to the evaluation of the performance of AIs. Chomsky has produced interesting theories, but mostly derailed linguistics on the basis of the argument 'language is complicated, some…

What do you think of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language ? It certainly makes me doubt language (the technology of it) as purely cultural and learned.

Language is a set of behaviors Behavior for humans and other animals requires a brain and body (almost always) The organisation, growth, and function of the brain and body are influenced by genetics.

So we can say first and formost that language is influenced by genetics. Having a tongue, vocal chords, hands, ears. These all help to acquire language.

So now the question is to what degree does genetics influence language and language acquisition?

Is it fully governed by genetics? We know that removing a child from the company of others during development eliminates complex language and severely stunts their ability to acquire language. So, in a single individual, language has never been observed to arise spontaneously and the facility to acquire language is something you can lose.

If you damage certain portions of the brain aspects of language can be removed. See Fluent Aphasia for a particularly odd example. However, these aphasias are known to remit and studies show that other portions of the brain have taken over from the damaged portion. So we know that the capacity for language is not entirely localized to a genetically determined location.

We also know there was a time when there wasn't language and now there is, so at least once in human history language did arise spontaneously. The article you mention is evidence that language can evolve spontaneously in groups of humans. In fact there is evidence that the rudiments of language arise in groups of many animal species including apes, whales, and dolphins. Many animals communicate, but with insufficient sophistication as to be described as a language.

So it is safe to say that there are genetic factors in producing communicative behavior. Sounds, postures, marking etc. I feel it is also safe to say that there are genetic factors that predispose groups of some species to develop more complex systems of communication (but these are not limited to humans) and that groups of humans are particularly good at complex communication.

Unfortunately for Chomsky there is little to no evidence that any one type of language is more likely than another. Grammars, phonemes, words, abstract concepts ... all of these have huge between language variation. The similarities between languages are well explained by either physical characteristics of speech production or regularities in the environment of the languages origin.

So yes, language is both learned, and cultural, even if it isn't purely so.

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