Introducing OpenAI • Hacker News Board

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#371

Post by ZenoArrow » Sun, Dec 13, 2015, 10:38 AM UTC

rebootthesystem wrote: post #356

ZenoArrow wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Normal people don't take a gun out of their safe, load it, throw a bunch of rounds in the back of their car, put on a bullet-proof vest and go shoot-up the neighborhood community center, church, school or mall." You've missed the point of the article I shared with you. The point was normal people under extraordinary circumstances can be pushed to breaking point and take it out on others. Normal people do not alway…

No, I read the article and stand by my conviction that the people you are referring to are not normal. Lot's of folks experience extraordinary circumstances during their lives, few, very very few, resort to violence as a result. Not everyone is "wired" to deal with life's challenges the same way. I had a friend who committed suicide after losing his business in 2009. Sad. On the other hand, I've been bankrupt --as in…

Sure, not everyone deals with stress in the same way, but an 'us vs. them' mentality isn't helpful. We're all capable of bad things, just like we're all capable of good things.

As for the article's agenda, perhaps it had one, but it appears to be an agenda backed up with facts, for example:

“Fewer than 5 percent of the 120,000 gun-related killings in the United States between 2001 and 2010 were perpetrated by people diagnosed with mental illness,”

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#372

Post by DanBC » Sun, Dec 13, 2015, 11:33 AM UTC

rebootthesystem wrote: post #356

ZenoArrow wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Normal people don't take a gun out of their safe, load it, throw a bunch of rounds in the back of their car, put on a bullet-proof vest and go shoot-up the neighborhood community center, church, school or mall." You've missed the point of the article I shared with you. The point was normal people under extraordinary circumstances can be pushed to breaking point and take it out on others. Normal people do not alway…

No, I read the article and stand by my conviction that the people you are referring to are not normal. Lot's of folks experience extraordinary circumstances during their lives, few, very very few, resort to violence as a result. Not everyone is "wired" to deal with life's challenges the same way. I had a friend who committed suicide after losing his business in 2009. Sad. On the other hand, I've been bankrupt --as in…

People with a mental illness are very much more likely to be the victims, not perpetrators, of violent crime.

When we look at violent crime we see almost all perpetrators do not have a diagnosed illness, and also they do not have a diagnosable illness.

You are falling for the conjunction fallacy. You see "violent", and insist "violent and mentally ill" even though violent is more probable.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#373

Post by richardw » Sun, Dec 13, 2015, 11:42 AM UTC

andreyf wrote: post #273

richardw wrote: post #187

How to prevent Future ISIS from getting Future AI, or do we just shift from us trying to out-think them to our AI trying to out-think their AI? If the answer to the latter is "resources" then we're back where we started. Whoever has the biggest AI wins. The picture seems to be of many AI's all keeping each other in check, but that outcome seems less likely to result in the AI-UN and more like a primordial soup of com…

ISIS does not have access to many CS researchers nor server farms, as far as I am aware.

Yes, but I did say "If the answer to the latter is "resources" then we're back where we started."

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#374

Post by sawwit » Sun, Dec 13, 2015, 12:19 PM UTC

Houshalter wrote: post #369

sawwit wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The risks of things like rogue drones made from cheap commodity hardware, which might be sensible as well … In Prof. Tegmark’s recent presentation at the UN he mentioned the possibility of extremely cheap drones that approach the victim's face very quickly and pierce a bolt into their brain through one of their eyes. Such a drone wouldn't require high precision projectiles which would make it cheap to build. > Of c…

>the possibility of extremely cheap drones that approach the victim's face very quickly and pierce a bolt into their brain through one of their eyes. That's super impractical for many reasons. Drones don't move fast enough, nor can they change their velocity quickly enough to do that. People will almost certainly react if they see the drone coming for them, and cover their face, or swat it down, etc. But even if it d…

It will be interesting to test whether one can react fast enough if a drone like this approaches from a shallow angle from the side. It could even approach in free fall the last few meters, so it would be almost noiseless: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxOdXYCRAds

I think a new quality about this kind of weapon is that it can be controlled remotely or can even operate semi-autonomously. Deadly pipe bombs are certainly heavier than a crossbow and ignition mechanisms aren't trivial to build.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#375

Post by marvin » Sun, Dec 13, 2015, 9:18 PM UTC

p1esk wrote: post #358

astrofinch wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a small demonstration of the dangers of putting computer programs that do exactly as they are programmed in charge of making important decisions. Let's say we program an AI and get one little detail wrong and things go to hell as a result. We can call that "human error" or "AI error" but either way it's a reason for caution. I am actually somewhat concerned by this OpenAI project, and here's why. Let's say there…

It seems like most people expect the emergence of the strong AI to be a sudden event, something similar to the creation of a nuclear bomb. However, it's far more likely that AI will undergo gradual development, becoming more and more capable, until it is similar in its cognitive and problem solving abilities to a human. It's likely that we won't even notice that exact point. I'm not even sure governments are interest…

There's good reason to suspect that when AGI appears, it will quickly be developed to clearly super-human capabilities, just from the differences in capability between species that we are very closely related to.

Bostrom and others makes an argument that the difference in intelligence between a person with extremely low IQ and extremely high IQ could be relatively very small related to the possible differences in intelligence/capability of various (hypothetical or actual) sentient entities.

There's also the case of easy expansion in hardware or knowledge/learning resources once a software-based intelligent entity exists. E.g. if we're thinking of purely a speed difference in thinking, optimization by a significant factor could be possible purely by software optimization, and further still if specialized computing hardware is developed for the time-critical parts of the AI's processes. Ten PhDs working on a problem is clearly more formidable than one PhD working on a problem, even if they are all of equal intelligence.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#376

Post by marvin » Sun, Dec 13, 2015, 9:29 PM UTC

Jach wrote: post #267

argonaut wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are those researchers? I'll admit I don't follow the stuff written by the friendly AI folks very much; I only know of Bostrom/Yudkowsky, both of whom are very much philosophers. All of the hype around ML today is in deep learning (let's be honest, OpenAI would not exist if that wasn't the case), and AFAIk there is almost no overlap between people who are prolific in deep learning and prolific in FAI.

You won't find direct ML work from MIRI because: 1. AI / ML is not AGI. 2. Deep learning may be a tool used by an AGI, but is not itself capable of becoming an AGI. 3. MIRI believes it would be irresponsible to build, or make a serious effort at building, an AGI before the problem of friendliness / value alignment is solved. So are they philosophers? Of a sort, but at least Eliezer is one who can do heavy math and co…

Using the term philosopher for researchers in friendly AI is not derogatory anyway. Much of the interesting stuff that has been written about AGI in the last decade is absolutely philosophy, in the same way that the more concrete pre-industrial thoughts on space and the celestial were philosophy. Philosophy and science go hand in hand, and there is often an overlap when our fundamental understanding of a subject is shifting.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#377

Post by marvin » Sun, Dec 13, 2015, 9:44 PM UTC

kayamon wrote: post #365

mrdrozdov wrote: post #364

Imagine you've programmed a spider-like robot which sole purpose is to maintain some energy level (by plugging into an outlet), gather resources, and create a clone of itself when it has enough resources. How do you defend against something like that?

That isn't really any different from say, a tiger, which is currently facing extinction due to our actions against it.

Or even a bacteria. Thankfully, no current biological entity is sufficiently versatile to take over the world ;)

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#378

Post by p1esk » Sun, Dec 13, 2015, 11:38 PM UTC

Houshalter wrote: post #350

wyager wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But we can't prevent it from killing the programmer and stealing the button for itself. Not to be condescending, but do you have any idea what practical AI actually looks like? The scenario you've imagined makes about as much sense as a laptop sprouting arms and strangling its owner.

Yes, I'm very familiar with current AI. It's my hobby. I'm not really talking about current AI though. I'm talking about a machine with thousands of times more intelligence than humans.

thousands of times more intelligence than humans

I see this phrase thrown around a lot by Kurzweil and fans. What does it even mean? How do you measure intelligence? Smarter than whom?

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#379

Post by hodgesrm » Mon, Dec 14, 2015, 6:16 AM UTC

argonaut wrote: post #79

I find it a bit disappointing that despite originally stating that YC Research would target underfunded/underserved areas of research, they've decided to fund and dive into one of the most-hyped, well-funded areas of research: deep learning, an area of research where companies are hiring like crazy and even universities are hiring faculty like crazy. I'm reasonably sure all the research scientists had multiple job of…

Looking at it a different way, I find this initiative rather heartening. A lot of AI applications have been extensions of mechanical efficiency--doing more with fewer people. More than a few people are worried about the consequences of this progression since there's not an obvious place for displaced workers to go the way manufacturing has soaked up agricultural works in the past.

The authors of the manifesto seem to be concerned with avoiding some of the obviously bad possible outcomes of widespread AI use by explicitly looking for ways that it can also change society for the better. Just being able to articulate what we mean "by benefitting humanity as a whole" would already be a good contribution.

Re: Introducing OpenAI

#380

Post by rpglover64 » Mon, Dec 14, 2015, 6:13 PM UTC

p1esk wrote: post #378

Houshalter wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I'm very familiar with current AI. It's my hobby. I'm not really talking about current AI though. I'm talking about a machine with thousands of times more intelligence than humans.

thousands of times more intelligence than humans I see this phrase thrown around a lot by Kurzweil and fans. What does it even mean? How do you measure intelligence? Smarter than whom?

I don't know if this is a definition other people use, but here's one possibility.

Intelligence (in a domain) is measured by how well you solve problems in that domain. If problems in the domain have binary solutions and no external input, a good measure of quality is average time to solution. Sometimes, you can get a benefit by batching the problems, so lets permit that. In other cases, quality is best measured by probability of success given a certain amount of time (think winning a timed chess or go game). Sometimes instead of a binary option, we want to minimize error in a given time (like computing pi).

Pick a measure appropriate to the problem. These measures require thinking of the system as a whole, so an AI is not just a program but a physical device, running a program.

The domain for the unrestricted claim of intelligence is "reasonable problems". Having an AI tell you what the mass of Jupiter or find Earth-like planets is reasonable. Having it move its arms (when it doesn't have any) is not. Having it move _your_ arms is reasonable, though.

The comparison is to the human who is or was most qualified to solve the problem, with the exception of people uniquely qualified to solve the problem (I'm not claiming that the AI is better than you are at moving your own arms).