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On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

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Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#51

Post by hyperpallium2 »

wyattpeak wrote: post #45
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…

If you showed somebody from 1921 a page of text produced by GPT-3, told them that it was written by a machine, and then told them that we'd made no progress towards artificial intelligence, they'd laugh in your face. You can take from that what you will, but I suspect it will always seem as though we've made no progress, because anything we learn to emulate we necessarily understand well enough that it will no longer…

The humans move goalposts because intelligence is political.

Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#52

Post by theaeolist »

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…

I wonder if there isn't some fundamental misunderstanding here. What if it's not "just the neurons". If you found a Regency TR-1 radio you could wonder "how can this 4-transistor device produce a continuous stream of music, much like Spotify, which requires billions of transistor to run?". Of course, the radio also has an antenna, which is a completely different device than a transistor.

The device running Spotify may also have an antenna, but I hope you get the analogy. My analogy is not meant to be taken faithfully, so that we need to start looking for antennas now instead of neurons. I am just saying that maybe the neuron-counting game is not the only thing. Maybe there is something else -- not magical, not divine, but physical and as-of-yet unknown. Humanity didn't always know everything, and maybe still doesn't.

Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#53

Post by Cyphase »

wyattpeak wrote: post #45
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…

If you showed somebody from 1921 a page of text produced by GPT-3, told them that it was written by a machine, and then told them that we'd made no progress towards artificial intelligence, they'd laugh in your face. You can take from that what you will, but I suspect it will always seem as though we've made no progress, because anything we learn to emulate we necessarily understand well enough that it will no longer…

This is the AI effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#54

Post by theaeolist »

abetusk wrote: post #28
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.

The human brain is estimated at 2.5 Pb of storage [0]. Assuming a "Moore's Law" like behavior of storage price, so that price halves every 2-3 years and assuming we use storage as a proxy for the space, access speed and computational power, the time it will take to have a $1000 computer that has the storage capacity of the brain will be in the 10-16 year time horizon. This puts the timeline to about 2029-2035. [0] ht…

We DO have PB-grade storage facilities and they lack full AI. Moving the memory inside a single box instead of having interconnected devices is not going to bring AI just like that.

Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#55

Post by theaeolist »

ethanbond wrote: post #16
hooande wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 have natural “general” intelligence which appears to be generated by boring old chemical/thermal/electrical interactions. Why wouldn’t we be able to recreate that at some (IMO very far) point?

Can you recreate all phenomena computationally? Could you replace the antenna of your radio or mobile phone with a special CPU? Could you bomb a country with CPUs? I don't think so.

Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#57

Post by hyperpallium2 »

When we understand Caenorhabditis elegans intelligence, we will be at the beginning of the beginning of understanding human intelligence, maybe.

THE BRAIN-CIRCUIT EVEN THE SIMPLEST NETWORKS OF NEURONS DEFY UNDERSTANDING. SO HOW DO NEUROSCIENTISTS HOPE TO UNTANGLE BRAINS WITH BILLIONS OF CELLS? https://www.nature.com/articles/548150a

Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#58

Post by akamoonknight »

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…

One thing sort of related to language that I see (as an entire outside observer to the field) as being required is some sort of shared communication 'channel'. Biological life works with atoms to form proteins that seem to do much of the communication that eventually guides higher level functions. Computers and computational processes can work on bytes and bits and package those into messages or results but on their own I'm not sure what it means for one process to consume another processes bytes/bits/messages, whereas proteins have physical results that lead to responses. Not that biological life should necessarily be the goal, but its definitely been good at guiding us in a lot of different ways. It seems like some sort of shared medium (that can be dynamically combined/recombined as needed) is required to communicate between disparate processes is required to dynamically change/improve systems and I just don't have any idea what that really looks like.

Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#59

Post by Ginden »

Causality1 wrote: post #29
mlyle wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Calculate how many transistors and watts of power you'd need to replicate that functionality. I'm curious as to your answer. Because if one's building a purpose-built analog computer for the task, my estimate is a few hundred transistors, a few thousand passives, and ... an absolutely trivial amount of power on modern process.

I'm curious how we're even going to manage 420,000 pixels' worth (60,000 ommatidia, approximately 7 pixels each) of input with only a few hundred transistors, let alone do vector analysis on it. But let's say we can. Let's say we need 320 transistors, which would be 20 transistors per pixel. That's pretending 99.7% of the seven thousand synapses each neuron has are useless for our purpose, but we'll do it. A chimp br…

> 1.28 trillion transistors

So, basically, 45 x RTX 3080?

Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#60

Post by more_corn »

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 don't think AGI is likely, I think it is inevitable. We can make specialized neural networks that can do specific tasks quite well. There's nothing stopping us from chaining those together. We have the pieces to make neural networks that can train on new data, thus creating new layers atop previous networks. We can even train those layers based on the data generated by the action of the network itself. The pieces seem to be present, the tooling around putting them together seems to be lacking for the time being. I expect to see AGI in my lifetime, artificial super intelligence shortly thereafter and then the event horizon of the singularity.
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