What you wanted to know about AI • Hacker News Board

Re: What you wanted to know about AI

#51

Post by AndrewKemendo » Mon, Mar 16, 2015, 5:02 PM UTC

aamar wrote: post #49

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about this instead: Current AI technologies give us no insight about the probability of an AGI Because that is exactly the point. We can't look at what we have built today and extrapolate that AGI will come from it. All anyone can do is speculate wildly on AGI just as they were able to in 1956 [1]. The difference is that we see automation/computing as ubiquitous (smartphones/computers in 2015), rather than around…

Well, yes, but that's still a straw man. It's not as if Hawking and Gates and so on saw an Atari-bot and on that basis came to worry about AGI. Current AI technologies shouldn't update our estimates much about AGI, unless they push us way off of Kurzweil's (or someone else's) chart. I do agree that we lack evidence of a broad community of AI experts who have been able to make good predictions, which potentially puts…

Or the third option: they want to get in on the AI buzz that is happening.

Re: What you wanted to know about AI

#52

Post by ccvannorman » Mon, Mar 16, 2015, 5:06 PM UTC

The most common misconception about AI is that it will "mimic human level intelligence or better". Human intelligence is an infinitesimally small sliver of possible conscious entities with agency, and whatever "wakes up" enough for headlines to declare AI is real will almost certainly be worlds apart from us.

Re: What you wanted to know about AI

#53

Post by arethuza » Mon, Mar 16, 2015, 5:07 PM UTC

jallmann wrote: post #39

When I started school, my dream was to figure out a theory to underpin a grand unified model of artificial intelligence. Imagine my disappointment once I started studying the subject in detail. Most functional AI nowadays consists of algorithms that are carefully tuned to solve a very specific problem in a narrowly defined environment. All the research nowadays is pushing the boundaries of a local optimum. Right now,…

I had a very passionate interesting in AI at high school - did a CS degree then was lucky enough to get a paid RA post (UK - Research Associate a contract researcher paid for by a project where the research work overlaps to a greater or lesser extent with your PhD topic).

I don't think my own interest in AI recovered from reading Drew McDermott's A critique of pure reason - fortunately that was about 1992 and I found this really cool networked hypertext thing that was far more interesting....

Re: What you wanted to know about AI

#54

Post by aamar » Mon, Mar 16, 2015, 5:11 PM UTC

pqomdv wrote: post #23

aamar wrote: post #15

There's some good comments about some new AI tools; it's a shame that the article's premise is a straw man. The fears of machine superintelligence are based on the belief that true AI is just around a corner. After all, we’re so advanced and the progress is only accelerating, it’s probably a few years away, at most. Analogously, public figures started warning us about climate change, so it must be just a few years be…

The global warming comparison isn't very good. We had the capabilities for carbon output 50 years ago and it has slowly been increasing. But we don't yet have an AI. So there is no need to warn anyone, except out of irrational fear. Once we actually get it, it would make sense to start warning about its applications, so it doesn't get out of control. If I apply your analogy correctly, then warning about AI now, is th…

I think even most skeptics would agree that we have had for some time technology worthy of being called "AI". It's not "Artificial General Intelligence" for sure. And it is to date not materially strong enough to harm large numbers of people.

But AI is plausibly 50 years away from harming large numbers of people[1]. By that standard of "years until harm", global warming should have been first publicly discussed in the 1980s or 90s. That is a bit later than it happened, and later than some would like.

[1] If researchers develop models that say it's more like 100 or 500 years out, I think that would be great and very helpful. But several researchers have put out credible models which put a crisis in the 40s to 60s. Skepticism about their approaches that identifies specific flaws or produces improved models is good, much better than hand-waved dismissals.

Re: What you wanted to know about AI

#55

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Mar 16, 2015, 5:17 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: What you wanted to know about AI

#56

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Mar 16, 2015, 5:25 PM UTC

aamar wrote: post #15

There's some good comments about some new AI tools; it's a shame that the article's premise is a straw man. The fears of machine superintelligence are based on the belief that true AI is just around a corner. After all, we’re so advanced and the progress is only accelerating, it’s probably a few years away, at most. Analogously, public figures started warning us about climate change, so it must be just a few years be…

[deleted]

Re: What you wanted to know about AI

#57

Post by maaku » Mon, Mar 16, 2015, 5:28 PM UTC

jallmann wrote: post #39

When I started school, my dream was to figure out a theory to underpin a grand unified model of artificial intelligence. Imagine my disappointment once I started studying the subject in detail. Most functional AI nowadays consists of algorithms that are carefully tuned to solve a very specific problem in a narrowly defined environment. All the research nowadays is pushing the boundaries of a local optimum. Right now,…

Do you know there is a field studying general artificial intelligence? They have a conference[1], journal[2], and a slew of competing architectures.

What you've basically described is that mainstream "AI" is actually quite divorced from what the public thinks of as "AI" -- something matching or improving upon human-level intelligence. Still, there are those still working on original grand dream of artificial intelligence.

[1] http://agi-conference.org/ [2] http://www.agi-society.org/journal/

Re: What you wanted to know about AI

#58

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Mar 16, 2015, 5:31 PM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #53

jallmann wrote: post #39

When I started school, my dream was to figure out a theory to underpin a grand unified model of artificial intelligence. Imagine my disappointment once I started studying the subject in detail. Most functional AI nowadays consists of algorithms that are carefully tuned to solve a very specific problem in a narrowly defined environment. All the research nowadays is pushing the boundaries of a local optimum. Right now,…

I had a very passionate interesting in AI at high school - did a CS degree then was lucky enough to get a paid RA post (UK - Research Associate a contract researcher paid for by a project where the research work overlaps to a greater or lesser extent with your PhD topic). I don't think my own interest in AI recovered from reading Drew McDermott's A critique of pure reason - fortunately that was about 1992 and I found…

[deleted]

Re: What you wanted to know about AI

#59

Post by maaaats » Mon, Mar 16, 2015, 5:35 PM UTC

foobarqux wrote: post #33

> The fears of machine superintelligence are based on the belief that true AI is just around a corner. No, the fear of AGI is that the time between when we first start to see promising progess in AI to the point where AI is out of our control would be so short that we would not be able to react to prevent it.

But the fear and thoughts should instead be directed to how one can solve the economical an social challenges that arise when AI removes a lot of jobs. That is the issue here, not some Skynet-thingy destroying humanity.

Re: What you wanted to know about AI

#60

Post by jallmann » Mon, Mar 16, 2015, 5:38 PM UTC

foreigner wrote: post #48

jallmann wrote: post #39

When I started school, my dream was to figure out a theory to underpin a grand unified model of artificial intelligence. Imagine my disappointment once I started studying the subject in detail. Most functional AI nowadays consists of algorithms that are carefully tuned to solve a very specific problem in a narrowly defined environment. All the research nowadays is pushing the boundaries of a local optimum. Right now,…

The key to self-driving cars is to realize that they don't have to be perfect - they just have to be better than us. It's not that the AI driver so good - it's that human drivers are SO BAD! I agree with you that AI is a pipe dream but I do think self-driving cars will succeed. I don't think the computers will ever match our judgement but it's trivially easy for them to beat us on attention span and reaction time, wh…

> The key to self-driving cars is to realize that they don't have to be perfect - they just have to be better than us.

Again, that's skirting the issue. Do you have any idea how close self-driving cars are to being "better than us" ? As someone who's done computer vision research: not close at all.

> I don't think the computers will ever match our judgement

That is exactly the problem.

> it's trivially easy for them to beat us on attention span and reaction time

Attention span and reaction time are not the hard parts of building an autonomous vehicle.

This kind of comment beautifully illustrates the problem with casual discussions about AI technology. Humans and computers have very different operating characteristics, and discussions all focus on the wrong things: typically, they look at human weaknesses, and emphasize where computers are obviously, trivially superior. What about the contrapositive: the gap between where computers are weak, and where humans are vastly superior? More importantly, what is the actual state of that gap? That question is often completely ignored, or dismissed outright. Which is disappointing, especially among a technically literate audience such as HN.