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Barack Obama on A.I., Autonomous Cars, and the Future of Humanity

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Re: Barack Obama on A.I., Autonomous Cars, and the Future of Humanity

#51

Post by mlechha »

squirreltalk wrote: post #46
mlechha wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What people mean by generalized and special AI is not consistent in the field, but everyone agrees that the current brand of AI driven by statistical learning techniques and large scale neural networks is far from explaining how even the simplest of nervous systems work. The key obstacle is adaptation. Several people believe that they've more or less solved the recognition problem. However, adaptation is a totally di…

And we have a complete wiring diagram for C. elegans, and no clue how it does any of the things you talked about. So, yeah, general AI is really far off.

To be honest, the wiring diagram is a bit of a distraction from the really big questions. It has its uses for sure, and is really essential in many situations but overall it gives this illusion that we understand something important about the system, where in reality we don't. Understanding a biological system from its wiring diagram is something like understanding a city by studying its road map.

Re: Barack Obama on A.I., Autonomous Cars, and the Future of Humanity

#52

Post by mlechha »

schrodinger wrote: post #50
squirreltalk wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And we have a complete wiring diagram for C. elegans, and no clue how it does any of the things you talked about. So, yeah, general AI is really far off.

I have no idea what I'm talking about. But why couldn't we build some sort of bio-computer hybrid system around a simple form of life, like "C. elegans" but augmented with traditional CPUs?

That's another option and there are people who do that https://blog.inf.ed.ac.uk/insectrobotics/.

Re: Barack Obama on A.I., Autonomous Cars, and the Future of Humanity

#53

Post by pakl »

msvan wrote: post #16

What does Hacker News think about AI? Is it real this time, or are we in for another winter? I'm seeing a lot of grand claims, and it certainly seems like there are plenty of applications, but I'm still not totally convinced that it will turn the entire economy upside down. Given the enormous amount of press, tweets, blog posts, conferences, degree programs, seminars and interviews popping up it seems like there has…

I'm optimistic about what'll happen right after the upcoming AI winter. :)

So long as AI remains tasked with categorizing human-taken photos or playing human-created games (no matter how "complex"), AI will remain just that -- artificial -- and not "real".

Given the rate of hype that you point out, I suspect a winter of some kind will hit before enough folks realize this.

[edited: reorder]

Re: Barack Obama on A.I., Autonomous Cars, and the Future of Humanity

#54

Post by pakl »

Swizec wrote: post #20
msvan wrote: post #16

What does Hacker News think about AI? Is it real this time, or are we in for another winter? I'm seeing a lot of grand claims, and it certainly seems like there are plenty of applications, but I'm still not totally convinced that it will turn the entire economy upside down. Given the enormous amount of press, tweets, blog posts, conferences, degree programs, seminars and interviews popping up it seems like there has…

Unlike 30, 20, or even 10 years ago, we have heaps upon heaps of labeled datasets now. So much human life happens through technology that we are doing an astounding job of producing labeled datasets. And computers are fast now. And RAM is infinite. And GPUs are fast and plentiful. And all of this is cheap. AI stuff is already real more than most of us realize on a day-to-day basis. While machines might not be "intell…

There are some promising ideas out there based on unsupervised ("self-supervised") learning. There, the problem of needing big labeled datasets doesn't exist: just turn on a camera and have a motor point it at the surrounding world. Data of this kind is and always has been super abundant. But using it requires making a conceptual leap away from supervised pattern recognition -- which is pretty much what today's "AI" does...

Re: Barack Obama on A.I., Autonomous Cars, and the Future of Humanity

#55

Post by chriswarbo »

darawk wrote: post #29
imh wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like they say in the article, there's general AI (think sci-fi computers with minds) and specialized AI (think good old fashioned statistical models, but applied to more things and super effective). Specialized AI (and I hate calling it AI) is coming along really quickly. We're getting better at it in existing fields and learning to apply it to new fields. More than anything, we just have so much data on everything n…

Honest question: Why do you think that generalized and specialized AI are distinct things? Is it not possible that general AI is a specialized AI applied over the field of specialized AI generation?

> Is it not possible that general AI is a specialized AI applied over the field of specialized AI generation?

AI problems can be characterised as those where there's no clear path to a solution (otherwise we just call it "programming"); tackling them necessarily involves trial-and-error, backtracking, etc.

Since there are far too many possibilities to enumerate, solving such problems requires reasoning about the domain, e.g. finding representations which are smooth enough to allow gradient descent (or even exact derivatives); finding general patterns which will apply to unseen data; finding rules which facilitate long chains of deduction; etc.

The difficulty is that there's usually a tradeoff between the capability/expressiveness of a system, and how much it can be reasoned about. If we choose a domain powerful enough to represent "the field of specialised AI generation", for example turing machines or neural networks, methods like deduction, pattern-finding, gradient following, etc. get less and less applicable and we end up relying more on brute-force.

To me, this is where the AI breakthroughs are lurking. For example, discovering a representation for arbitrary programs which allows a meaningful form of gradient descent to be used, without degenerating into million-dimensional white noise; or to take deductive knowledge regarding one program and cheaply "patch" it to apply to another; and so on.

Re: Barack Obama on A.I., Autonomous Cars, and the Future of Humanity

#56

Post by haalcion2 »

> Ito: I generally agree. The only caveat is that there are a few people who believe that there is a fairly high-percentage chance that a generalized AI will happen in the next 10 years. But the way I look at it is that in order for that to happen, we’re going to need a dozen or two different breakthroughs. So you can monitor when you think these breakthroughs will happen.

> Obama: And you just have to have somebody close to the power cord. [Laughs.] Right when you see it about to happen, you gotta yank that electricity out of the wall, man.

Do we seriously think that it would be that easy? I think an a "generalized" AI, if aware of the ability for a human to remove its power and so that as a bad thing, would not be stopped by unplugging it. By the point you realized you needed to unplug it, it would have already convinced a human that to help it spread and it would have found other sources of power.

Re: Barack Obama on A.I., Autonomous Cars, and the Future of Humanity

#57

Post by ebfe »

s_q_b wrote: post #34
cjbprime wrote: post #5

> OBAMA: The way I’ve been thinking about the regulatory structure as AI emerges is that, early in a technology, a thousand flowers should bloom. I gotta say, I thought he'd be more familiar with that metaphor. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign

I think he knew the origin, but chose it anyway. It is an elegant phrase. Communists could be very eloquent. How else do you think they managed to convince so many people to be communists?

The free stuff?

Re: Barack Obama on A.I., Autonomous Cars, and the Future of Humanity

#58

Post by jpfed »

imh wrote: post #39
darawk wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: Why do you think that generalized and specialized AI are distinct things? Is it not possible that general AI is a specialized AI applied over the field of specialized AI generation?

Specialized AI is all about X,Y pairs. Given X, predict Y. There are other problems it's good at too, like given X, choose a Y to optimize Z, but at it's core it's largely the same. On the fringes, you have stuff about exploration, which is AWESOME, but still pretty niche. At least 99% of the "AI" you hear about is of the X,Y variety. More to your point, if we can make generalized AI from "given X, predict Y," then n…

>Then you can get interesting and philosophical about it, where you might even say that emulating intelligence and intelligence are different.

This would be a very surprising result. For example, if I can make a TSP-solver-emulator... I have a TSP solver.

Re: Barack Obama on A.I., Autonomous Cars, and the Future of Humanity

#59

Post by GunboatDiplomat »

ebfe wrote: post #57
s_q_b wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he knew the origin, but chose it anyway. It is an elegant phrase. Communists could be very eloquent. How else do you think they managed to convince so many people to be communists?

The free stuff?

Free food. Unless you are parasite, in which case, gulag for you.

Re: Barack Obama on A.I., Autonomous Cars, and the Future of Humanity

#60

Post by asimuvPR »

msvan wrote: post #16

What does Hacker News think about AI? Is it real this time, or are we in for another winter? I'm seeing a lot of grand claims, and it certainly seems like there are plenty of applications, but I'm still not totally convinced that it will turn the entire economy upside down. Given the enormous amount of press, tweets, blog posts, conferences, degree programs, seminars and interviews popping up it seems like there has…

There is a real risk related to goal oriented AI. It does not need to feel or dream. Merely having survival as its goal is sufficient to make it dangerous to other life forms. Worse is that it can happen at any time (it may have happened already). Given the computing power, tools, and availability of knowledge we can assume that it can be done outside of a controlled lab environment by a non-scientist.
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