"I was able to bullshit about A.I., so the whole field is bullshit."
The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
31–40 of 384 posts
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#32This 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 to have problem 1 quite so much, but problem 2 is still there in a big way. Witness self-driving cars, where driving on an interstate highway in broad daylight is easy, but driving through a snow-covered construction zone at night is impossible. Or just dealing with a bicyclist on the road without killing them.
We're not going to have AGI any time soon.
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
The real issue we are facing is that everything that we thought was not going to be pattern matching and tree search has turned out to be pattern matching and tree search. I remember my father telling me computers were never going to be able to play Chess, because it required creativity for example. Nowadays a neural network with tree search plays chess that looks remarkably human. A lot of problem domains have falle…
I'd be interested in knowing what coungerarguments the people downvoting this comment might know of, which I apparently don't.
>> The list of discrete tasks (games, decision making once
the parameters are defined) a computer can't do is a very
short list.
> I'd be interested in knowing what coungerarguments the people downvoting this comment might know of, which I apparently don't.
I didn't downvote, but I will cite artistic endeavours.
How long until a film crew of computers can shoot, edit and score a documentary or film that would be interesting to humans to watch?
How long until they could develop an AAA computer game worth playing?
How long until we could assemble an orchestra of computers that can interpret sheet music with feeling well enough to impress a human audience?
I could go on and on finding other examples of human endeavours that computers/robots/AI will suck at for an extremely long time, if not forever.
As we've seen recently, we are further from completely autonomous self driving cars than was hyped over the past few years.
In my experience, programmers typically like to underestimate the breadth of human endeavour outside the domain of programming, particularly where the arts are concerned. And larger groups of humans working on larger artistic endeavours will take even longer to be displaced by AI, IMHO.
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#34I've been collecting examples of where the ads that I see are based on extremely simple algorithms of the type that could have easily been supported 30 years ago, and yet I keep reading articles that suggest that the advertising industry is deploying sophisticated tools to target ads to me. I wrote about this recently:
-------------------------
Despite much talk about Machine Learning and AI improving advertising results, what I’m seeing is getting worse and worse. Despite billions invested, the ads shown to me are much less relevant than that ads that I saw on the Web 10 years ago.
I hired 3 developers from Fullstack Academy. They were all great, so I went and checked out the website, curious about the curriculum. And now, every website I go to, I see an advertisement for Fullstack Academy. (See screenshot.)
I’ve been writing software for 20 years. I’ve written semi-famous essays about software development. I am not going back to school. I do not need to go to a dev bootcamp. So why show me ads, as if I’m thinking of going to school?
For the last several years I’ve been seeing articles about the surveillance economy. In theory, advertisers know more about me than ever before. In theory, they know about my entire life. And yet, the ads I see are less targeted than what I used to see online 10 years ago.
http://www.smashcompany.com/business/when-will-machine-learn...
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
While it's true the AI hype is getting a bit overboard, couldn't one make the argument that humans, and to a lesser extent other animals, are just a collection responses to pattern recognition like when I see a thing that looks like this I should eat it, but when I see a thing that sounds like that I should run away? After all, what is common sense but "believe it when I see it" type thinking which is most certainly…
> After all, what is common sense but "believe it when I see it" type thinking which is most certainly pattern intuition? I guess I would argue that common sense encompasses something outside of pure pattern intuition, which is the ability to synthesize not just solutions to a known problem/question but to figure out what question to ask in the first place, across a variety of situations include some that have never…
So at what point in a life of a human does general intelligence, or common sense, develop? Watching a baby do things feels like watching a robot trying to perform a task for the very first time. It seems like pattern matching overall with a very complex and fine grained sensory input system.
Also some things are definitely preprogrammed and passed on from one generation to the next. There are many examples regarding animals, like small pigeons reacting to the shape of an eagle which they have never seen before.
Now add a decade long learning phase and you get general intelligence? Or is it all just layers and layers of pattern matching, imitation and preprogrammed behavior?
Could be the reason why humans are so bad at adressing some problems like climate change, plastic pollution or poverty. There is no clear pattern we can match, learned through individual sensory input, leading us to a solution.
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
While it's true the AI hype is getting a bit overboard, couldn't one make the argument that humans, and to a lesser extent other animals, are just a collection responses to pattern recognition like when I see a thing that looks like this I should eat it, but when I see a thing that sounds like that I should run away? After all, what is common sense but "believe it when I see it" type thinking which is most certainly…
Sure, one could make that argument. But suggesting that we are close to creating a general intelligence on-par with humans is entirely unfounded. Even if we assume that the only thing differentiating humans from other forms of intelligence (including artificial neural networks) is more pattern to learn, then that still requires data sets millions if not billions the size of what we currently have. Plus, we know very…
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Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#37> The technologists know it’s bullshit. Fed up with the fog that marketers have created, they’ve simply ditched A.I. and moved on to a new term called “artificial general intelligence.” Not to detract from an otherwise excellent BS takedown, but unfortunately the author fails to mention that there’s a non-zero possibility that AGI itself is merely taking the bullshit to the next level. It continues to astound me how…
> AGI itself is merely taking the bullshit to the next level.
You sir are a heretic! Are you saying that transformers along with a gazillion GPU-years of compute, and tons of intern-descent at the hallowed halls of OpenAI, Google and Facebook, can't solve AGI ? You must be out of your mind!
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
The real issue we are facing is that everything that we thought was not going to be pattern matching and tree search has turned out to be pattern matching and tree search. I remember my father telling me computers were never going to be able to play Chess, because it required creativity for example. Nowadays a neural network with tree search plays chess that looks remarkably human. A lot of problem domains have falle…
I kinda see it this way: AGI is Data in Star Trek TNG - trying to be human, making decisions to want to be alive, eventually dreaming and finally using an emotion chip. Another alternative here would be Moriarty or the various doctors in Voyager. AI is the Ship in TNG - lots of heuristics to figure out what the user is trying to do. Past usage of commands and relating major events outside the ship with algorithms for…
Your comment reminds me of this xkcd cartoon:
https://xkcd.com/1425/
It's 5 years old now (coincidentally the time span quoted to develop a solution), but recognizing a bird was already considered a solved problem 3 years ago, less than 2 years after the publication of the cartoon.
Predicting the future is hard.
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
> After all, what is common sense but "believe it when I see it" type thinking which is most certainly pattern intuition? I guess I would argue that common sense encompasses something outside of pure pattern intuition, which is the ability to synthesize not just solutions to a known problem/question but to figure out what question to ask in the first place, across a variety of situations include some that have never…
So at what point in a life of a human does general intelligence, or common sense, develop? Watching a baby do things feels like watching a robot trying to perform a task for the very first time. It seems like pattern matching overall with a very complex and fine grained sensory input system. Also some things are definitely preprogrammed and passed on from one generation to the next. There are many examples regarding…
> Could be the reason why humans are so bad at adressing some problems like climate change, plastic pollution or poverty.
I think that basically comes down to greed and ignorance.
> There is no clear pattern we can match [...] leading us to a solution.
Except, as best I know, both the problem and solution were recognised in the 80s but it wasn't in the companies' interests to torpedo their profits at the time.
e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...
Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
#40What's the most difficult thing AI should be be able to solve but can not as of yet?
I would say it is writing a program which writes an AI program. Why? Because it is so difficult for us to define what exactly an AI program should be able to do.
This shows that we have an issue with not being able to ask the right question. If we could answer exactly what the AI should be able to do then it would be much easier to create such a program and also create a program that writes such a program.
We could say that an AI program should pass the Turing Test and many have written programs that more or less pass it. But so now, write a program that writes several different programs that all pass the Turing Test one better than the previous one.
I don't really have an idea how I would start writing such a program that writes a program that passes the Turing Test better than previous AI programs. That makes me guess we are still far off from General AI. But I of course may be wrong, just because I don't know how to do something does not mean others would not.