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

The Artificial Intelligentsia

thebaffler.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 95 posts

Re: The Artificial Intelligentsia

#61

Post by Barrin92 »

ThomPete wrote: post #53
ghostcluster wrote: post #3

I found the author to be slightly irritating on several occasions, dropping veiled references to Valleywag-style anti Silicon Valley memes, and then I got to the part where he regurgitates that idiotic article about the brain not processing information, and there being something magical about human brains that cannot be simulated [0]. He is right about his claim of having no right to be called a “director of research…

The article you reference makes the same mistake as Searles Chinese room argument. It somehow assumes there is something magical about the human mind. I had a brief argument with Robert Epstein (the author of that article) because I find the argument that humans don't actually store information to be quite misleadning and missing the point. The most obvious mistake is this: "We don’t store words or the rules that tel…

Searle's argument isn't that there is something 'magical' about the human mind, it is that biological systems are fundamentally different from mechanical or digital systems and that sentience (not intelligence!) is a unique feature of biological systems.

This argument deserves much more recognition than it gets because 1. it's at this point still empirically true, we have not observed non-organic sentient life and more importantly, because not Searle but everybody else employs 'magic'.

Searle's point is simple. Computation is subjective. Electricity flowing through a machine doing complex things is just a physical process like anything else. You (the sentient observer) classify that physical process as meaningful, but a computer is no more 'computing' things than a falling pen computes gravity.

So sentience really is related to physical agency and sensory experience in the world, which creates conscience in organic brains. That doesn't imply complexity or intelligence or understanding. Syntax and Semantics are different things. Your pocket calculator processes the syntax of mathematics, but it does not understand the semantics of mathematics. A compiler processes symbols according to rules, but it does not understand the meaning of the computation, it has no cognition. It might be very good at what it does, but it has no capacity to understand. That's the essence of the Chinese room, and it's still a convincing argument.

An even stronger point might be made, namely that sentience actually limits intelligence. That it requires a degree of slowness and introspection that is unsuited for fast decision-making. For a fictional treatment of this, Blindsight by Peter Watts is an excellent read.

Re: The Artificial Intelligentsia

#62

Post by jstewartmobile »

gaius wrote: post #11
visarga wrote: post #6

It's an ad for their company posed as an opinion piece.

It's an ad for their company I guess I'm not in their target market then because it reads like a hit piece - so much so that I was sure that all the names were changed!

I Googled because it sounded too harsh to be real, but they are all real people!

The author is out of his damn mind for not changing names, but NMP.

Re: The Artificial Intelligentsia

#63

Post by atrexler »

Outside of the firms owned/operated by the real clever boys, I wouldn't be surprised if this describes the vast majority of "AI" efforts unfolding at dozens/hundreds/thousands of companies. Everybody is getting on the bandwagon and either don't have any clue or find out that their customers don't even want what they are selling at the end of the day.

I'd be shocked if anyone in the industry hasn't worked for or with a Jim. Spot-on.

Re: The Artificial Intelligentsia

#64

Post by beefield »

pron wrote: post #10
ghostcluster wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He doesn't present an honest understanding of his own field, or the field of neuroscience, or the ongoing developments in the technology surrounding his own business, or its implications. Even without extrapolating from the pattern recognition tools we have today, whole classes and ranges of jobs can be fully or partially eliminated. Here is what he says about the state of AI: > Even the most eye-catching successes c…

> He doesn't present an honest understanding of his own field, or the field of neuroscience, or the ongoing developments in the technology surrounding his own business, or its implications. Yes, but I don't think you are, either. The fact is that chess and Go abilities aside, we are probably not even close to insect-level intelligence, and we don't have a clear path of getting there soon -- let-alone anything human-l…

> we are probably not even close to insect-level intelligence

I think the problem is that we do not have a slightest clue what is (even insect-level) intelligence (or consciousness, which is often mixed up in the discussion).

Re: The Artificial Intelligentsia

#65

Post by untangle »

indescions_2018 wrote: post #27

Excellent Sunday morning long read! Some of PreData's recent "insights": "China Trade War Fears Still Running High" "Mall Blaze Sparks Outrage Across Russia" In short, nothing that couldn't be revealed from the briefest skim of headlines from tomorrow morning's WSJ.com. One can stay better informed leaving a Bloomberg TicToc (which is partially machine generated) tab open all day. My takeaway is that the world of the…

The Jim Shinns of the world are often LPs in VCs like Edison Partners. And/or they have led a major exit for the VC. Either of these situations gives them ample leverage for a "vanity" Series A/B. Even without the pool or country club.

Re: The Artificial Intelligentsia

#66

Post by untangle »

graycat wrote: post #59
gaius wrote: post #9

Faced with the impossibility of determining whether a technology is intelligent or not—since we don’t know what intelligence is—Silicon Valley’s funders are left instead to judge the merit of a new idea in AI according to the perceived intelligence of its developers. What did they study? Where did they go to school? These are the questions that matter This is a perfect summary of the VC situation today. Too much mone…

From all I've been able to see, that statement "... judge the merit of a new idea in AI according to the perceived intelligence of its developers." about information technology VCs and AI is just totally wrong: I don't believe VCs do that. Why? Generally, from 50,000 feet up, it's too far from the norms of the accounting, banking, and investing communities respected by the limited partners of the VCs. Uh, the limited…

I think that you are over-generalizing. VCs use a number of disparate investment theses, including gut feel and betting-the-team in a "hot" (trendy?) space. Another dynamic is funding a team that previously produced a big win for the VC firm (as appears to be the case here).

And do you have a reference for the "fantastically high batting average" of US DoD research? Are you familiar with the SBIR program, for example?

I would judge that neither DoD/DARPA nor VCs have a great batting average. But both have some spectacular wins.

Re: The Artificial Intelligentsia

#67

Post by untangle »

Flawed? You bet. Overwrought? A bit.

But I found this Sunday AM read enjoyable, articulate, and largely on-point (overlooking a few minor scientific errors).

The core themes here are about the hubris of a rich CEO/founder, the zaniness of the current AI "market," and their resultant effect on a particular NYC startup.

This is a season of "Silicon Valley" (HBO) done east-coast, hedge fund, Ivy League style.

Re: The Artificial Intelligentsia

#68

Post by imh »

modzu wrote: post #36
dsacco wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should clarify: I don't mind "unfocused" writing like this. I can definitely appreciate a creative take on exposition. But I think the introduction of an article is not the most appropriate place to do it. An upfront paragraph - even a few sentences - explaining what is happening would basically resolve this for me.

would you expect the same of a novel? why not similarly temper your expectation given the source; some pieces are simply more literary. (nb. im only speaking generally because i havent read the article). and hey at least we have the comments of hn to scan for the tldr :)

It still applies to creative writing. IIRC, I heard it called a promise in a creative writing course. E.g. if you open with an action scene and the rest of the story has no action, that's a broken promise to the reader. It's useful to give the reader an indication of what they're starting in any piece.

Re: The Artificial Intelligentsia

#69

Post by ThomPete »

Barrin92 wrote: post #61
ThomPete wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article you reference makes the same mistake as Searles Chinese room argument. It somehow assumes there is something magical about the human mind. I had a brief argument with Robert Epstein (the author of that article) because I find the argument that humans don't actually store information to be quite misleadning and missing the point. The most obvious mistake is this: "We don’t store words or the rules that tel…

Searle's argument isn't that there is something 'magical' about the human mind, it is that biological systems are fundamentally different from mechanical or digital systems and that sentience ( not intelligence!) is a unique feature of biological systems. This argument deserves much more recognition than it gets because 1. it's at this point still empirically true, we have not observed non-organic sentient life and m…

It really don't in my opinion.

Of course, the person in the room doesn't understand Chinese just like the individual neuron in a Chines person doesn't understand Chinese.

It's the entire house where the person in the room is just one part of the entire system.

And yes he does imply that there is something magical about the way humans are pattern recognizing feedback loops vs. machines as humans came from immaterial matter ourselves if he doesn't his argument simply do not hold up as there is nothing magical either in the way human conscience is a byproduct of simpler systems all forming to become a scentient one.

If you can buy that humans have evolved from dumb atoms then you have too look that not how humans and "machines" are different but how they are the same.

The samenes is that we are pattern recognizing feedback loops and that our sentience comes out of something non-sentient.

So either something magical is in play or there is nothing that hinders machines to become sentient either from what we know.

A human consists of milions of sub-systems like a calculator and yet we are somehow sentient.

Furthermore there is no know upper limit to how complex silicon based systems can be and so the right answer really is if anything "we don't know" not "because the person in the room doesn't understand chinese it proves that systems can" the person in the room is not the system the entire house including everything happening outside of the room.

In other words unless searle is claiming magic at some level nothing, absolutely nothing indicates that machines can't become sentient.

With regards to your last point then that's the wrong way to look at it.

A better way to understand why it's possible is to start from omniscience and then realize that omniscience means you are aware of everything and thus have no perspective where as all systems that can handle information potentially can become sentient the more complex they become.

Re: The Artificial Intelligentsia

#70

Post by pron »

JacobiX wrote: post #48
pron wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He doesn't present an honest understanding of his own field, or the field of neuroscience, or the ongoing developments in the technology surrounding his own business, or its implications. Yes, but I don't think you are, either. The fact is that chess and Go abilities aside, we are probably not even close to insect-level intelligence, and we don't have a clear path of getting there soon -- let-alone anything human-l…

> hardware progress is slowing down quickly) I would be interested to know more about this. I haven't heard yet that the progress of GPUs cores for example is declining quickly ...

The problem is Amdahl's law. You can only parallelize so much. While the brain is certainly extremely parallelized, neural nets do not employ the same algorithms as the brain, and so, unless we find algorithms that are more amenable to parallelization, Amdahl's law is going to get us.
Post reply on HN