The end of AI winter? • Hacker News Board

Re: The end of AI winter?

#51

Post by abossy » Fri, Oct 02, 2009, 7:39 AM UTC

WilliamLP wrote: post #27

lliiffee wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From an outside perspective it seems the "God of the gaps" argument - AI is what AI researchers haven't done yet - is used as a smokescreen to cover up that AI research hasn't really done much in the last 30 years. Here is what you don't understand: There are very, very, very few people who do research on "AI". People research medical diagnosis, or search, or data mining, or speech recognition, or vision, or chess.…

The trouble with that argument is that if you'd have asked anyone (anyone!), in any AI related field in 1980, where AI would be in thirty years what would they have said? Surely not "Well, for instance one of the greatest achievements might be that we will work on chess algorithms, and we will see some incremental improvements resulting from tweaking certain heuristics and more intelligent pruning through more specia…

We have cars that drive themselves!

Re: The end of AI winter?

#52

Post by JulianMorrison » Fri, Oct 02, 2009, 10:31 AM UTC

WilliamLP wrote: post #21

> machine translation, data mining, industrial robotics, logistics, speech recognition, banking software, medical diagnosis and Google's search engine, to name a few. Do these things really directly descend from pure AI reasearch? Or are they really the result of a bunch of clever, yet extremely specialized algorithms, independently developed, combined with an incredible increase in hardware power? Not to say such th…

A lot of "narrow AI" (what real AI researchers spend their time doing) has made its way into a lot of products. However I doubt this is what you were thinking of as pure AI.

There's more, though. Neuroscience continues piecing together how brains work. I've heard that the brain's embodied algorithms are recognizable from eg computer vision research. This seems to imply that there is more of a natural ramp-up from "narrow AI" into "humanlike AI" than at first it would appear.

Re: The end of AI winter?

#53

Post by jacquesm » Fri, Oct 02, 2009, 10:56 AM UTC

Agent101 wrote: post #38

WilliamLP wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is techniques that are developed for special purposes, but turn out to be useful for more general cases, versus techniques that become more and more specialized, resulting in a decreased possibility of ever using them for anything but increasingly specialized areas. Perhaps the human brain's neural wiring that was required for throwing could have been, and was, subverted into something else. Better neg…

I think the problem with building generalized intelligence is that it needs to built on a general platform, like the x86 architecture in flexibility but designed to be self-maintaining and self-upgradeable to the highest degree possible. This means you kind of have to start from scratch as it is not backwards compatible (the idea of a superuser is baked into most archs), which is an enormous amount of effort. I'm thi…

Please continue to think along those lines, that's one very interesting thing and some people should actually go and do it.

Check out the fleet architecture while you're at it.

Re: The end of AI winter?

#54

Post by Tichy » Fri, Oct 02, 2009, 11:05 AM UTC

WilliamLP wrote: post #27

lliiffee wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From an outside perspective it seems the "God of the gaps" argument - AI is what AI researchers haven't done yet - is used as a smokescreen to cover up that AI research hasn't really done much in the last 30 years. Here is what you don't understand: There are very, very, very few people who do research on "AI". People research medical diagnosis, or search, or data mining, or speech recognition, or vision, or chess.…

The trouble with that argument is that if you'd have asked anyone (anyone!), in any AI related field in 1980, where AI would be in thirty years what would they have said? Surely not "Well, for instance one of the greatest achievements might be that we will work on chess algorithms, and we will see some incremental improvements resulting from tweaking certain heuristics and more intelligent pruning through more specia…

The DARPA car racing thing seems to be a breakthrough. Granted, 30 years ago people would have expected more. But it is more than just a chess algorithm.

Re: The end of AI winter?

#55

Post by Tichy » Fri, Oct 02, 2009, 11:08 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #12

lacker wrote: post #9

We do have search engines, which are pretty sweet and vaguely related to artificial intelligence. The future of AI will probably be similar - we'll get more cool stuff, but it will not be Data from Star Trek, it will be something we didn't expect.

I don't see search engines as being 'vaguely related to artificial intelligence' at all.

Why not? Suppose you had an agent you could tell "find me the best papers on the subject so and so", you would not consider that intelligent?

Re: The end of AI winter?

#56

Post by eru » Fri, Oct 02, 2009, 1:22 PM UTC

randallsquared wrote: post #14

lux wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think another problem is the expectation of what AI will look like at all. We think of intelligent human-like robots like something from science fiction, when in reality AI could just be a bit of code running on a standard machine with specific and likely specialized inputs and outputs. Think of an AI machine working with atmospheric data as one "sense" combined with seismic data and some others, with the directed…

I think the best defintion of "free will" basically boils down to "unpredictable in detail absent simulation". This sounds weird at first, but the results probably match your intuitive understanding of free will. Given that, I think that any general intelligence approaching human level will have free will. That doesn't mean that it won't have certain goals, though it remains to be seen whether it will be possible to…

Would a good Pseudo-Random number generator satisfy your definition?

(By the way, humans, when asked directly for random numbers, are terrible at the task.)

Re: The end of AI winter?

#57

Post by JabavuAdams » Fri, Oct 02, 2009, 2:09 PM UTC

Why care about this faddishness?

Anyone with a desktop computer (or pen and paper, for that matter) can do cutting-edge research in GAI. So it's not popular with the VC's and military-industrial-corporate-welfare-system.

The point is if you're interested, just do the research. You don't need $$$. If you want $$$, over-promise about crappy little web apps, and get funding that way.

Re: The end of AI winter?

#58

Post by joeyo » Fri, Oct 02, 2009, 2:14 PM UTC

hegemonicon wrote: post #31

csallen wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took a class with leading AI researcher Patrick Winston in the spring... it really is one of the most fascinating fields right now. If there is to truly be an "AI spring" then it will likely require massive collaboration between not just computer scientists, but researchers in a wide span of fields including neuroscientists, general biologists, psychologists, and even philosophers. Free will and emotions are other…

There's nothing particularly magical about emotion - it's just a low level computation by our subconscious that we don't have conscious access to. Happiness, anger, fear, etc are all responses to the environment we evolved because they produce (or at least, did at one time) useful actions. It's the mechanism the brain used to make predictions based on data before it developed a consciousness. An AI would make predict…

Indeed. So goes the James-Damasio argument, in any rate.

Perhaps the parent actually was referring to the qualia component to emotion--or indeed qualia in general--which is much more difficult to explain.

Re: The end of AI winter?

#59

Post by jacquesm » Fri, Oct 02, 2009, 2:20 PM UTC

Tichy wrote: post #55

jacquesm wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see search engines as being 'vaguely related to artificial intelligence' at all.

Why not? Suppose you had an agent you could tell "find me the best papers on the subject so and so", you would not consider that intelligent?

Absolutely, that'd be great. Where do I sign up for this service ?

Re: The end of AI winter?

#60

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Oct 02, 2009, 2:21 PM UTC

Tichy wrote: post #54

WilliamLP wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble with that argument is that if you'd have asked anyone (anyone!), in any AI related field in 1980, where AI would be in thirty years what would they have said? Surely not "Well, for instance one of the greatest achievements might be that we will work on chess algorithms, and we will see some incremental improvements resulting from tweaking certain heuristics and more intelligent pruning through more specia…

The DARPA car racing thing seems to be a breakthrough. Granted, 30 years ago people would have expected more. But it is more than just a chess algorithm.

[deleted]