Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.

gen.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 384 posts

Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.

#371

Post by anon284271 »

pslam wrote: post #347
sgt101 wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not serious : back-propogation is the origin point of modern AI. This is the algorithm that powers the deep network revoultion. It's not the end point, it's not a magic box, but it is fundamentally an AI algorithm. Just saying "no it isn't" is just not helpful or useful.

You are missing the entire point of the article if you continue to call these algorithms "AI". Inflating simple things like this to mean "AI" has led to the term being meaningless. You are the example it is making.

I thought one of the key principles in this discussion is that the goalposts keep moving: before it's a solved problem, it requires Artificial Intelligence; once solved, it's just basic algorithms. The bar for what constitutes 'AI' keeps getting raised.

Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.

#372

Post by p1esk »

anon284271 wrote: post #371
pslam wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are missing the entire point of the article if you continue to call these algorithms "AI". Inflating simple things like this to mean "AI" has led to the term being meaningless. You are the example it is making.

I thought one of the key principles in this discussion is that the goalposts keep moving: before it's a solved problem, it requires Artificial Intelligence; once solved, it's just basic algorithms. The bar for what constitutes 'AI' keeps getting raised.

People have often believed some narrow tasks require general AI (AGI), however it turns out that almost any specific task can be solved without building an AGI first. This does not change the meaning of "AGI" - a system that is able to perform any mental task as well as an average human.

Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.

#373

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

pslam wrote: post #334
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Accidentally (?) she managed to create the best representation of AI I have seen in art: all that counts is that you call it AI even if it is a simple algorithm. Backpropagation, which most researchers will agree is an AI algorithm, is a "simple algorithm". So are many other AI algorithms, some of which are simple enough to be understood so well that most people don't recognise them as AI anymore: search algorithm…

> Backpropagation, which most researchers will agree is an AI algorithm, is a "simple algorithm". Back-propogation is not an "AI" algorithm. You are ironically doing exactly what this article is about.

Without meaning to sound patronising, I believe I understand your confusion. Allow me to explain.

My comment is making an entirely uncontroversial statement: that "backpropagation is an AI algorithm". Not that "backpropagation is AI". The latter could be taken to mean that backpropagation is itself artificially intelligent, that it exhibits some kind of intelligence (leaving aside for the moment the fact that we have no agreed upon definition of "intelligence", artificial or otherwise). If I understand your comment correctly, this is the interpretation you make of my comment.

However, what my comment says, and this should be clear from the context ("most researchers will agree"), is that backpropagation is an algorithm from the field of research that is known as AI.

In that context, "AI", "Artificial Intelligence", is the field of research that investigates methods to construct "AI", "Artificial Intelligence(s)". Backpropagation is a component of one such method, neural networks.

I think then that the confusion, which is also discussed, and exhibited, in the article, stems from the fact that the same word is used to describe both "artificial intelligence" and the field that researches artificial intelligence.

And I hope this clarifies the confusion.

Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.

#374

Post by ecmascript »

evanagon wrote: post #310
ecmascript wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No this is not what I am saying. I am saying it isn't some kind of magical thing going on that we can't replicate given enough technical progress and skills. Yeah sure, but so is the claim for that consciousness does exist.

It might not be magical, but I wouldn't underestimate the complexity of replicating even simple cells. We haven't been able to replicate an amoeba let alone neurons let alone a brain.

This is a valid and good point.

Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.

#375

Post by sgt101 »

Wiretrip wrote: post #367
sgt101 wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok : define Intelligence. Define Life. There are no accepted definitions of these terms. Are they meaningless? AI that does not include backpropagation or logical deduction or GA's or optimisation is... is... magical thinking. AI without the nuts and bolts from the last 50 years of work is meaningless. The article is heartfelt, and we all agree with the tenant that people pretending that they are using AI when they a…

There are tonnes of other approaches to machine learning that don't involve backprop! There are also other approaches to neural netwroks that don't use backprop (have a look at Numenta's stuff for example). I suggest you watch Pat Winston's brilliant MIT AI lectures to see how huge the range of techniques is.

I direct you to lectures 12a and 12b.

Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.

#377

Post by anon284271 »

p1esk wrote: post #372
anon284271 wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought one of the key principles in this discussion is that the goalposts keep moving: before it's a solved problem, it requires Artificial Intelligence; once solved, it's just basic algorithms. The bar for what constitutes 'AI' keeps getting raised.

People have often believed some narrow tasks require general AI (AGI), however it turns out that almost any specific task can be solved without building an AGI first. This does not change the meaning of "AGI" - a system that is able to perform any mental task as well as an average human.

Most of the use of the term 'AI' I see isn't referring to AGI at all.

Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.

#378

Post by slavik81 »

stoobs wrote: post #369
slavik81 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ants are from the other branch of creatures with bilateral symmetry. That fork would have occurred before the Cambrian explosion, so that's at least a half a billion years ago. That's a long time!

Which is relatively new compared to geological or cosmological time.

It's a while even on a geological time scale. By comparison, Pangea was a mere 175 million years ago. Half a billion years is 1/9th of the age of the Earth. Another half billion years in the future, geological changes are expected to have ended the carbon cycle, killing most plant life on Earth.

Re: The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.

#379

Post by sjy »

skybrian wrote: post #223
sjy wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels harsh to call him naïve because I'm sure I wouldn't have had any more insight, but it is surprising how little we knew about the science of language pre-Chomsky, considering that we have been learning languages for millions of years. Now that we have had several generations of computer technology fall short of the abilities of human translators, it seems obvious that you're probably not going to be able to w…

Did you mean post-Chomsky? It's my understanding that machine translation started to become semi-useful after abandoning traditional grammars (or anything Chomsky would recognize) and switched to statistics.

I did mean pre-Chomsky. I was using him as a rough reference point for when linguistics started to get serious as a scientific discipline.

Because people have been informally studying linguistics for all of human history (by trying to learn new languages in adulthood), it's surprising to me that we ever thought that natural language processing would be easily solved by computers. To me, it seems quite obvious that this is a fundamentally very challenging problem for computers, like theorem proving or painting, rather than accounting or printing.

I was born with the benefit of hindsight here, but I find it strange that computability theory was formalised in the 1930s (before we could actually build powerful computers), and yet decades later, leading experts still failed to realise that language processing was fundamentally difficult, and intractable on the hardware they had at the time. This seems like an obvious consequence of a number of facts which they did know, like "describing an algorithm is very different to having a normal conversation," and "texts are open to interpretation and cannot be perfectly translated into other languages."

Post reply on HN