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What does it mean for a machine to “understand”?

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Re: What does it mean for a machine to “understand”?

#31

Post by prvnsmpth »

nutanc wrote: post #22

This is a good balanced article that gets a lot of things right. We should take a forgiving approach when we talk about AI systems. And as the author points out the problem is not that AI systems dont have understanding yet. The problem is with the hype which leads many to believe that we are close to building systems which can understand us. That said, I have a small problem with the examples presented to say that a…

> It did not understand what you meant because it did not take the whole environment into consideration.

This is the crux of the matter. These voice recognition agents are trained with goal of accurately modelling a function that converts recorded sound to a series of words, and then act on those words to perform the most appropriate action. They are NOT trained to model the entire world, which is an incredibly complex task that no one has been able to formulate as a problem that computers can solve, yet. Humans on the other hand, have a machine that is extremely well-equipped to do just that - the brain. And that is exactly why humans are able to "understand" things, while we feel that machines are not, with our definition of "understand".

In the far distant future, if and when we do figure out a way to model the entire world, come up with suitable objective function, and solve it on a computer, there's no reason why that machine should be any less capable of understanding things than the average human.

Re: What does it mean for a machine to “understand”?

#33

Post by julvo »

visarga wrote: post #20

Does AlphaGo 'understand' go? I think the key ingredient is 'being in the game', that means, having a body, being in an environment with a purpose. Humans are by default playing this game called 'life', we have to understand otherwise we perish, or our genes perish. It's not about symbolic vs connectionist, or qualia, or self consciousness. It's about being in the world, acting and observing the effects of actions, a…

If the Agent would 'understand' Go, we'd expect it to adapt to a round board easily. Humans probably would. (argument from Gary Marcus)

Re: What does it mean for a machine to “understand”?

#34

Post by BoppreH »

I don't remember where I first saw it, but the best definition of "understanding" I've seen is "being able to encode and compress".

For example, imagine a system that has as input the picture of a human face in RAW format. If the system runs the picture through JPEG compression, for example, and returns something substantially smaller, it has shown some understanding of the input (color, spatial repetition, etc).

A more advanced system, with more understanding, may recognize it as a human face, and convert it to a template like the ones used for facial recognition. It doesn't care about individual pixels anymore, or the lighting, just general features of faces. It understands faces.

An even more advanced system may recognize the specific person and compress the whole thing to a few bits.

I would say that an OCR scanner understands the alphabet and how text is laid out, GPT-2 understands the relationship between words and how text is written. And a physics simulator understands basic physics because it can approximately compress a sequence of object movements into only initial conditions and small corrections.

Lossy compression makes this concept non-trivial to measure, but it's still a world's away from the normal philosophical arguments.

Re: What does it mean for a machine to “understand”?

#35

Post by jplayer01 »

goto11 wrote: post #8
_xnmw wrote: post #4

I'm with John Searle on the Chinese room [1] opinion, i.e. that a machine cannot be said to "understand" language even if it is able to pass the Turing Test. That is because when we say "understand", we are referring to particular kind of human experience (qualia?) that a machine simply doesn't seem to have, but animals, for example, do. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

Unfortunately you have no way of determining if a machine or animal have this particular experience qualia. You cant even determine of other people beside yourself have it, which gives rise to solipsism. It like saying that red-headed people doesn't have a soul - there is no way to disprove that assertion.

That's the fundamental issue underlying the discussion. Pointing this out doesn't add anything. It's like saying water is wet. Yes, but how do we quantify human understanding such that we can implement it in AI? Well, we've been puzzling over that for decades and we sill haven't found an answer.

Re: What does it mean for a machine to “understand”?

#36

Post by friendlybus »

prvnsmpth wrote: post #27
friendlybus wrote: post #24

I don't think it's possible for machines to understand. Numbers are meaningless, our human actions give them a useful function. All of the meaning a computer appears to provide is the preassigned values of layers and layers of programming work done by humans. Even today AI has a lot of human tagging and categorization that makes it useful. The idea that a new self- sustaining meaning generation can arise out of the i…

Well, what does it mean for humans to "understand"? Don't humans understand things by altering the state and connections of neurons in the brain? You could make the argument that the brain is also an "incredibly sophisticated loop". My point is that humans are also highly-sophisticated, biological machines, so if you say machines cannot "understand", you are making the same claim for humans as well.

Humans also squirt fluids around in their brains. Brains as machines is one of many ways to think about humans. Humans can conceive of and move past thoughts or concepts that would cause a machine to crash. I think more ideas describe human brains than being simply machines, though that idea is useful in places.

Making the claim about what a human is in the absolute, is more about what you fill the unknown with than the nature of a human.

Understanding is the difficult question. I would argue the understanding people want out of machines is the ability to generate, use and self-manage tools and that the machine knows the tool's place or context under a human value, story or intent and adapt to the implications of that higher order. That in the most exaggerated sense would be perceived as a machine that understands, but of course people mean different things when they say that.

Re: What does it mean for a machine to “understand”?

#37

Post by jplayer01 »

msla wrote: post #6
_xnmw wrote: post #4

I'm with John Searle on the Chinese room [1] opinion, i.e. that a machine cannot be said to "understand" language even if it is able to pass the Turing Test. That is because when we say "understand", we are referring to particular kind of human experience (qualia?) that a machine simply doesn't seem to have, but animals, for example, do. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

I can say that you don't have qualia and you can't prove me wrong. Does that seem dangerous to anyone else? I also don't see any distinction between "qualia" and "soul" other than spelling, but perhaps it's because I don't have one. Finally, I have this question for Searle: Say you understand English. Does any specific neuron in your brain understand English? No, the larger system of neurons+neuronal connections does…

I'm not sure where you're going with this. Are you implying that thinking about this problem is dangerous in itself? That would be absurd. We've been philosophizing about qualia or what it means to be human or whether we can even be certain anybody else shares the same experience of reality or even if they're human at all for centuries. I mean, what else does Descartes do in the process of his discourse? I don't think that's caused undue suffering in the same way that organized religion has.

All it shows is that after hundreds of years, we still don't know how to explain or quantify human consciousness.

Re: What does it mean for a machine to “understand”?

#38

Post by deepbake »

js8 wrote: post #13

I have a straightforward definition of "understand". To understand means to be able to give a (representative) example of the (intensionally) given set. Though it is harder than it seems, as it usually means solving the constraint satisfaction problem. For example, take the classical AI knowledgebase fragment, "bird is animal that flies". If I ask example of bird, it can say "eagle", and exhibit some understanding. W…

"bat" would be a correct response based on the knowledge fragment wouldn't it?

Re: What does it mean for a machine to “understand”?

#40

Post by _xnmw »

baddox wrote: post #5
_xnmw wrote: post #4

I'm with John Searle on the Chinese room [1] opinion, i.e. that a machine cannot be said to "understand" language even if it is able to pass the Turing Test. That is because when we say "understand", we are referring to particular kind of human experience (qualia?) that a machine simply doesn't seem to have, but animals, for example, do. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

It’s interesting that you said the machine doesn’t seem to have the experience, but animals do seem to have it. Can you explain what you mean by that?

It’s a feeling. Understanding is a feeling, not just a logical set of inputs and outputs.
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