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On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

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Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#31

Post by simonh »

hooande wrote: post #14
scubakid wrote: post #8

Makes me wonder: how's the HN community feeling these days about the actual plausibility / timeline of humans developing true AGI? Personally the more I learn about the current state of AI, and in comparison the way the human brain works, the more skeptical (and slightly disappointed) I tend to get.

AGI is currently as likely as teleportation, time travel or warp drives. You can write a computer program to do just about anything. Artificial "General" intelligence is simply not a thing. We're not even making progress toward it.

We do not observe teleportation, time travel or warp drive in nature. We also don’t have any practical theory for achieving them as depicted in science fiction. It seems unlikely we will achieve such technologies.

Do we observe general intelligence in nature though, here on Earth implemented with the materials available in our environment? If so, it’s a bold claim to make that it will always be impossible to achieve it artificially.

Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#32

Post by rbanffy »

ALittleLight wrote: post #9
et2o wrote: post #3

I don’t find this April Fool’s joke (2017) very funny. What are they parodying exactly?

This was posted today, I assume there is some relation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29289431

Unfortunately, for the authors, this was not posted on April 1st.

Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#33

Post by coldtea »

kromem wrote: post #17
scubakid wrote: post #8

Makes me wonder: how's the HN community feeling these days about the actual plausibility / timeline of humans developing true AGI? Personally the more I learn about the current state of AI, and in comparison the way the human brain works, the more skeptical (and slightly disappointed) I tend to get.

I think that many people throwing their hat in the ring commenting on the unlikeliness of AGI are missing the impact of compounding effects. Yes, on a linear basis it's not going to happen anytime soon. But the trends in the space are developing around self-interacting discrete models to great effect (see OpenAI's Dall-E). The better and broader that systems manage to self-interact, the faster we're going to see impr…

>are missing the impact of compounding effects.

On the other hand those saying "it will sure happen" are missing the impact of diminishing returns.

Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#34

Post by benlivengood »

scubakid wrote: post #8

Makes me wonder: how's the HN community feeling these days about the actual plausibility / timeline of humans developing true AGI? Personally the more I learn about the current state of AI, and in comparison the way the human brain works, the more skeptical (and slightly disappointed) I tend to get.

We have superhuman performance at most narrow skills; the exceptions seem to be object manipulation with limbs/digits and semantic/logical thinking and planning. Given the advances by Boston Dynamics and others with limb-based mobility I'm guessing that's not too far off. With recent models proving a significant subset of the Metamath theorems, that doesn't look too far away either. Google/DeepMind are playing around with sparse model combinations of many useful superhuman domain models with additional layers to determine which domain to use for particular inputs.

The last and most difficult step in safe AGI is moral/value alignment. That is unfortunately probably last on the timeline of likely achievements because it requires general solutions to both planning and reasoning, and also an accurate world model and understand of physical actions and their consequences.

Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#35

Post by rbanffy »

scubakid wrote: post #8

Makes me wonder: how's the HN community feeling these days about the actual plausibility / timeline of humans developing true AGI? Personally the more I learn about the current state of AI, and in comparison the way the human brain works, the more skeptical (and slightly disappointed) I tend to get.

My guess is as good as any other layperson's, but I don't see much work being done for it, and no real good definition of what it is so we could plan how to create it.

OTOH, we see specialized intelligences do all soft of superhuman feats, all the time, and more impressive abilities join these all the time. These, however, are not human-like intelligences. They aren't even bee-like. They are so alien we don't see "general intelligence" in them.

So, my guess is that we'll have some extremely complex and capable systems that are extremely alien in nature well before we can have a conversation with a human-like intelligent system. They'll be useful and treated like oracles - we won't be able to understand their reasoning, but they'll be right most of the time.

It is, however, a matter of time and desire. There is nothing inherently magical in our mammalian brains and our organic bodies that can't be simulated by a sufficiently capable machine and technology for that will, eventually, become possible, then available, then practical, and then ubiquitous.

Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#36

Post by scubakid »

coldtea wrote: post #33
kromem wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that many people throwing their hat in the ring commenting on the unlikeliness of AGI are missing the impact of compounding effects. Yes, on a linear basis it's not going to happen anytime soon. But the trends in the space are developing around self-interacting discrete models to great effect (see OpenAI's Dall-E). The better and broader that systems manage to self-interact, the faster we're going to see impr…

> are missing the impact of compounding effects. On the other hand those saying "it will sure happen" are missing the impact of diminishing returns.

True, at a high level I think the central issue is what kind of curve we're on.

Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#37

Post by somewhereoutth »

In case anyone is wondering, we have made zero progress on anything even remotely resembling Artificial Intelligence. Zero.

Unfortunately of course, the people who might have some of the skills needed to actually build such a thing (at the bricks and mortar level anyway), are nearly those people whose understanding of what intelligence actually is may be less than ideal. As a hint, it has nothing to do with passing tests or other such mundanity.

A more interesting approach would be to consider language - if cooperating entities can be constructed that (eventually yet spontaneously) created ways to communicate between each other, then maybe some progress has been made.

Further, if we appreciate that any idea, discovery, anything, can be communicated to even the most recently discovered humans in their own language (though we may need to build up the various concepts from basic terms), and that no such feat is possible with the other animals, then we might wonder if another intelligence (artificial or otherwise) might be able to encode concepts that are unreachable in our (any of our) language and thus thoughts - or, alternatively, that our (any of our) language is conceptually complete in some fundamental sense, and so there simply cannot be such 'higher' intelligence (artificial of otherwise).

Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#38

Post by 323 »

Causality1 wrote: post #18
scubakid wrote: post #8

Makes me wonder: how's the HN community feeling these days about the actual plausibility / timeline of humans developing true AGI? Personally the more I learn about the current state of AI, and in comparison the way the human brain works, the more skeptical (and slightly disappointed) I tend to get.

Personally I think we're going to need a revolution in the fundamental physics of computation. The example I like to use is that a dragonfly brain uses just sixteen neurons to take input from thousands of ommatidia and track prey in 3D space, plot intercept vectors, and send that data to the motor centers of the brain. Calculate how many transistors and watts of power you'd need to replicate that functionality. Now m…

We don't need the first AGI to be human efficient. Nobody would mind if it would require 10 data centers and a nuclear power plant to run.

ENIAC also started big and slow. Now it fits in a microSD card.

Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#39

Post by hiddencost »

somewhereoutth wrote: post #37

In case anyone is wondering, we have made zero progress on anything even remotely resembling Artificial Intelligence. Zero . Unfortunately of course, the people who might have some of the skills needed to actually build such a thing (at the bricks and mortar level anyway), are nearly those people whose understanding of what intelligence actually is may be less than ideal. As a hint, it has nothing to do with passing…

Checkv out the reinforcement learning on hanabi task. A cool approach to cooperation.

Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#40

Post by scubakid »

rbanffy wrote: post #35
scubakid wrote: post #8

Makes me wonder: how's the HN community feeling these days about the actual plausibility / timeline of humans developing true AGI? Personally the more I learn about the current state of AI, and in comparison the way the human brain works, the more skeptical (and slightly disappointed) I tend to get.

My guess is as good as any other layperson's, but I don't see much work being done for it, and no real good definition of what it is so we could plan how to create it. OTOH, we see specialized intelligences do all soft of superhuman feats, all the time, and more impressive abilities join these all the time. These, however, are not human-like intelligences. They aren't even bee-like. They are so alien we don't see "ge…

To me, the term "alien" connotes a level of capability much more interesting than what I've actually seen from most modern systems. But point taken.

And I'd like to believe that you're right about it only being a matter of time and desire, but I do also worry about the possibility that we're actually on a different kind of exponential curve and will instead reach a point where we see diminishing returns.

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