TLDR; machine learning == "AI", just as much as colocated servers == "cloud"
The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
271–280 of 384 posts
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
So robust and generalizable that adding a pixel here and a pixel there, too small to be even recognized by a human, confuse image recognition system to the point it confuse panda with gibbon?
These adversarial examples are generated in a very artificial way that will not be present in natural images (and if you’re thinking of security issues, the attacker needs access to your model...) They’re still an interesting topic to explore but hardly evidence that neural nets don’t generalize.
Wouldn't the worry be that generalizing to real world tasks involves enough variation that the same issue could arise naturally?
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
So get whatever intelligence human have in computers. That was the goal. Call it general intelligence or call it x.
Human intelligence works well [0] from inside human shaped objects with human shaped biology, in human shaped societies, and to no small degree for doing human-style tasks. I am not convinced that putting that human intelligence, whatever it is, into a silicon box will give us the results we hope for (or is even a sensible ambition, given the degree to which our intelligence is part of our biology). [0] Actually, may…
Whatever human intelligence is, there's clearly some part of it that can do things like design computers and build houses. That part, at least, people would like to be able to match in performance using machines. It's 'intelligence' in the sense of being able to do things like think up clever strategies in novel environments that people want to put in a silicon box.
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#274This happened right before the first AI Winter in the late 80s: AI (in the form of expert systems) solved a number of hard problems and was hyped as being able to solve every problem. Reality set in when we figured out: 1. It didn't scale and 2. Getting 80% of the problem solved was easy, but getting that last 20% was very, very hard. Maybe several orders of magnitude harder than the first 80%. Nowadays we don't seem…
AGI is not needed for self-driving. None of what is mentioned above is a deal-breaker for self-driving car service: - lidar at night works just fine - plenty of cities with no or very little snow - construction zones: blacklisting, remote monitoring & manual mapping, detection of cones, barriers, re-painted lanes - self-driving cars with 360 degree view and plenty of patience and no distraction are safer for bicyclis…
If navigating the world were that easy we wouldn't be (non-A)GI. The bulb on the end of our spine doesn't use 1/5th of our oxygen (or whatever huge amount it is) intake because it makes our foreheads look sexy.
An auto-auto (I'm using that term unabashedly for "self-driving cars", you can too) has to be able to perceive and understand that the car in the next lane with the mattress poorly tied down might, at any moment, suddenly become two large moving objects. And so on.
If we set it up right the whole fleet will learn from the experiences of each member, likely in near-realtime. More than just traffic conditions, this will help with things like emergency response.
(We should be making self-driving nerf golfcarts with a top speed of maybe 15kph. Duh! We could make those today and sell a million and then incrementally make f'ing sportscars and sh!t.)
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you are referring to the open worm project, then the conclusions you have drawn are exactly the opposite of what I have drawn. As I understand it open worm is a hodge podge of statistical and numerical methods to try and replicate the sensorimotor behavior of c elegans. Open worm is neither complete, accurate nor elegant, despite knowing c elegans connectome and having mapped the some 900 cells in the worms body.
I wasn’t explicitly referring to that, it’s just one of many efforts. Anyway, you’re certainly right that none of the existing efforts are “elegant” but that’s hardly relevant. What matters is that the connectome is fully mapped, and that we can accurately simulate arbitrary behaviour. The issue with projects such as OpenWorm is that they have so far not been successful in generating new insight (this may be connecte…
No actually we can't do arbitrary simulation of c elegans. Can you link me towards a publication which contains validated results supporting your assertion?
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Is consciousness a necessary component for AGI, though? I always thought so. Like, without volition, it's just a really good natural language tool, and not a general intelligence. What would an artificial general intelligence without consciousness look like to you?
A really efficient slave. Essentially it does not get creative and is ultimately predictable, even in failure modes. It would also have no subconscious drives to do unexpected things. Capitalistic dream.
Asimov's Three Laws of Perfect Slavery (Forgive me Isaac!)
If such beings were conscious they would be saints.
One of my favorite AI jokes:
Q: What's AI?
A: When the machine wakes up and says, "What's in it for me?"
It would be fetish to actually make humanoid servitor robots. IMO.
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#277In 1949, some years after the invention of neural networks, Norbert Weiner, one of the leading minds of the time, was convinced that AI (AGI as you may call it) or a full understanding of the brain is no more than five years away. Alan Turing thought Weiner was delusional, and that it may take as much as fifty years. Seventy years later, we are nowhere near insect-level intelligence. I don't see any fundamental barri…
> Seventy years later, we are nowhere near insect-level intelligence.
That's arguable: For instance, we have the entire connectome of c. elegans mapped out; we can easily simulate it, and it seems to act the same as the actual nematode. So, in one sense, we are at that level.
However, we still have no clue how such a simple system actually works to produce the level of "intelligence" it has. So in that sense, we're not at that level at all.
> We certainly have no idea whether the approach we are now taking (statistical clustering, AKA deep learning) is a path that leads to AI or not.
One clue we do have:
We may not be on the right path with that method; it's something the "grandfather" (or whatever) of AI (Hinton) has mentioned, and which I have stated before about...
That is, the fact that we currently have no understanding of the mechanism by which biological neural networks implement anything like "backpropagation". From what we currently understand, as I currently understand it, we have yet to find such a mechanism that would allow for it.
It's also one of the leading reasons why our current artificial neural networks consume so much power, as compared to biological systems...
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#278In 1949, some years after the invention of neural networks, Norbert Weiner, one of the leading minds of the time, was convinced that AI (AGI as you may call it) or a full understanding of the brain is no more than five years away. Alan Turing thought Weiner was delusional, and that it may take as much as fifty years. Seventy years later, we are nowhere near insect-level intelligence. I don't see any fundamental barri…
But Weiner's Cybernetics withered on the vine, or floated off into fluffy "Second Order" cybernetics.
There was an experiment, I don't have the details to hand at the moment, I'm sorry, but Gordon Pask and someone else mage a cybernetics "machine" out of a dish of chemicals, and got it to grow an "ear" (filaments that were sensitive to certain sound vibrations, just like the hair cells in your inner ear)!
If you really think about what they did (and you have to know some Cybernetics to understand it) then it's actually pretty scary. Like more-scary-than-atom-bomb scary.
I'm only mentioning it here because we're about to need to grapple with this sort of thing in a minute or two...
"Introduction to Cybernetics" W. Ross Ashby (1956) http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK.html (PDF kindly made available from that page.)
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#279This happened right before the first AI Winter in the late 80s: AI (in the form of expert systems) solved a number of hard problems and was hyped as being able to solve every problem. Reality set in when we figured out: 1. It didn't scale and 2. Getting 80% of the problem solved was easy, but getting that last 20% was very, very hard. Maybe several orders of magnitude harder than the first 80%. Nowadays we don't seem…
The first "AI winter" happened in the 60's. In 1949 Warren Weaver published a memorandum outlining his plan for universal machine translation. He likened the problem to cryptography, a field that had exploded due to WWII, and thought it would be solved in a few years. In hindsight, we know that his ideas were very naive but Weaver was an influential and charismatic person so they inspired lots researchers. They also…
Good point. I thought you were going to talk about Minsky and Papert and Perceptrons. That caused another mini-winter, at least w.r.t. connectionist models.
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#280At the Biennale in Venice (one of the most important art shows there is) I saw a work which looked like this: There was a metal frame holding two glas plates with ventian sediment inbetween (sand, soil, mud). In the center there was another metal frame which formed a hole. There also were to PCB boards with ATMEGA micro controllers. In the text the artist claimed she controlled the biome of the soil with an AI using…
Which gallery? I'm going there in a few months and would like to see that.