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A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

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Re: A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

#61

This author makes broad sweeping claims, supprting them with numerous references that (in all instances that I checked) actually counter their argument. I'm not even sure the author knows _what subject they want to talk about_, never mind what argument to present.

Yep... didn't read past the headline of the article.

Yes. "AI" (read Deep Learning/LogReg/SVM models) do indeed perform better given more data. I can vouch for this myself. And there was also a paper regarding this.

Everyone is an expert in AI now!

Re: A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

#62
I read the whole article and thought it was worth my time. I liked to broad strokes of goals of anti fragile AI.

I have been thinking of hybrid AI systems since I retired from managing a deep learning team a few years ago. My intuition is that hybrid AI systems will be much more expensive to build but should in general be more resilient, kind of like old fashioned multi agent systems with a control mechanism to decide which agent to use.

Re: A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

#63
post #39
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don’t make better decisions when given more data, so why do we assume A.I. will? It's recognized that many machine learning systems today need very large amounts of training data, far more than humans facing the same task. That's a property of the current brute-force approaches, where you often go from no prior knowledge to some specific classification in one step. This often works better than previous approac…

Every single adult person has a 20+ year learning lead on any machine, so it's a bit unfair to say humans can do the same task with less data. And computers are already better at tasks involving a lot of math, which is the main reasons they've become commonplace.

Yep, 20+ year learning based on 10.000+ years of wisdom taught from generation to generation. People take both things for granted when comparing humans with "AIs".

Re: A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

#64
post #4

> After decades of investment, oversight, and standards development, we are not closer to total situational awareness through a computerized brain than we were in the 1970s. Hard to see how that could be true. In just about any field, computers today provide much better situational awareness than was possible in 1970. The article makes the usual complaints about self driving cars: > Despite $16 billion in investment…

> Yet cars are much more intelligent today than they were in the 1970s Therein lies the problem. Your definition of intelligence presumes that it is a simple quantitative scale, measuring I guess, something like "system complexity". The relevant sense here, in which no progress has been made, is qualitative -- ie., it is a distinct property. And this property has not been acquired. What is the property? It is dynamic…

And yet computers continue to perform tasks that were talked about for years as something uniquely human / intelligence driven. This is a nice philosophical debate, but in practice I think it falls flat.

Re: A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

#65
post #27
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wondering if this article is written by GTP-3. FYI, it was written by a woman. I looked up her book, Kill It with Fire, and as a mainframer I have to say it seems pretty interesting. I think what she alludes to in this essay, though, is more like that AI cannot solve socioeconomic problems of humans. And even humans seem to struggle with it. Whenever I read stories where the metrics became the targets, and the like…

If we can't understand the problem, will we be able to understand the solution presented by that AI? Or we'd just apply it, trusting blindly the unfathomable reasons the AI used? Do we have an AI where the decision tree can be grasped by humans?

It seems inevitable to me the moment AI capacity seriously surpasses human (as a whole) capacity in any specific topic, it becomes an oracle. I hear of efforts to translate machine decision making to human understandable terms, but if it is a question of raw intelligence, it will quickly become impossible to understand.

Re: A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

#66
post #4

> After decades of investment, oversight, and standards development, we are not closer to total situational awareness through a computerized brain than we were in the 1970s. Hard to see how that could be true. In just about any field, computers today provide much better situational awareness than was possible in 1970. The article makes the usual complaints about self driving cars: > Despite $16 billion in investment…

I remember in 2015 when we were decades away from a computer topping a Go champion...

Re: A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

#67
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A dog is not.made of metal but I have yet to see a dog that drives better than a waymo self-driving car.

A dog's environment isn't roads. And no car has been design for a dog to drive. Were such a car to exist, it is clear the dog would win in very very many environments (almost all). As would a mouse, let alone a dog. That it may be possible to rig a human environment to be replete with so many symbols (road signs, etc.) that an incredibly dumb automated system can follow them is hardly here-nor-there. Personally, I do…

> Were such a car to exist, it is clear the dog would win in very very many environments (almost all). As would a mouse, let alone a dog.

This seems incredibly unlikely. AI vastly outperforms 99.99% of humans on various video games, and 100% on many others. I'll bet on a well trained ml model over a dog every time.

> That it may be possible to rig a human environment to be replete with so many symbols (road signs, etc.) that an incredibly dumb automated system can follow them is hardly here-nor-there.

We already have above average human performance with just normal road signs, and could also simply use digital information.

> Self-driving cars may work on highways and motorways; I don't see there being any in cities. Not for centuries.

Goalpost shifting

Re: A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

#68
Hmmm...

>> Jeff Bezos’s Amazon operated on extremely tight margins and was not profitable

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312509...

Amazon made $645 million net profit in 2008, $476 net profit in 2007, and $190 million in 2006.

Where did this myth of "Amazon doesn't make profits" come from? Why are people seemingly unable to check publicly shared historical 10k and fact-check themselves before making statements like this?

Re: A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

#69
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A dog is not.made of metal but I have yet to see a dog that drives better than a waymo self-driving car.

A dog's environment isn't roads. And no car has been design for a dog to drive. Were such a car to exist, it is clear the dog would win in very very many environments (almost all). As would a mouse, let alone a dog. That it may be possible to rig a human environment to be replete with so many symbols (road signs, etc.) that an incredibly dumb automated system can follow them is hardly here-nor-there. Personally, I do…

IMHO the biggest problem is the moral problem; even once the tech achieves better reliability in general (as compared to human drivers, who are quite crappy but we're all used to them), the cases when it will fail will be so spectacular and cause so much outrage because we're ill equipped to deal with situations where there is nobody to blame: we always try to find somebody to hold responsible. When there is none, we make them up (deities and whatnot).

When natural disaster strike, people feel plenty of emotions, including anger. Often that anger though cannot be directed to anybody in particular. ("God isn't easily sued

When machines misbehave, being by definition human made, it's harder to accept it "as just the way the world works".

Re: A.I. Is Solving the Wrong Problem

#70
post #47
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A dog is not.made of metal but I have yet to see a dog that drives better than a waymo self-driving car.

A waymo self-driving car is not made of flesh and bones but I have yet to see a waymo self-driving car that performs better than a dog at: rescuing humans, detecting cancers and disease, shepherding and playing with other animals, protecting family from threats...

> rescuing humans

Vague and undefined, mostly a hardware problem, not an intelligence problem

> detecting cancers and disease

AI is a strong tool for detecting many cancers, and in some areas of research, just using the same olfactory data as dogs: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

> shepherding

Again, not so much an intelligence problem, but a hardware problem. Nonetheless

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/09/stress-test-au...

> protecting family from threats

In terms of ability to recognize and classify a threat, AI is clearly superior here. Dogs have terrible false positive rates.

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