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The Artificial Intelligentsia

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Re: The Artificial Intelligentsia

#81

Post by yourapostasy »

ThomPete wrote: post #56
yourapostasy wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is the AI that can fold laundry (clothes, linen, towels)? Do laundry (sort, pre-treat, load, unload, clean lint filter)? Do dishes (clear table, scrape food into compost or trash as appropriate, separate to recycling as appropriate, load, unload, put up)? Keep a lawn (mow, edge, trim hedges, move trimmings to compost, trim trees)? Put up Legos after a 5 year old? Pick up around the house and tell you where it p…

This is the wrong way to think about it to be frank. Animals can do things humans can't that doesn't mean that humans can't come up with ways to make what those animals can obsolete. Humans don't need wings to fly, we don't need to be able to run faster than a leopard to be able to move faster than a leopard. AI will not always represent itself in a one to one relationship with humans to be able to compete or outcomp…

> ...but it's literally just a matter of training and improving not some fundamental problem that can't be solved.

I heard this echoed many before when pawing through the library stacks in my uni days looking through the littered corpses of AI trends in the past. I believe that we will eventually get to strong AGI. But after either reading or seeing in-person the hype machine sprout up and wither around symbolic programming, semantic programming, neural nets, fourth generation, expert systems, perceptrons, Connection Machine, etc., I'm gun-shy around any proclamation that achieving strong AGI is "just a matter of...". The results so far seem to indicate pure cognitive processing is very amenable to the toolbox we have built up to-date in AI research, hence the breakthroughs in game playing.

Manipulating and interacting with the material world and humans however, and the results are a little patchier; I suspect we have lots more work and research ahead of us than we currently realize. When we do get some initial results like the laundry-folding machines, they're single-purpose and uneconomic for mainstream middle-class adoption (not to speak of working-class), and often with lots of attached caveats like Tesla AutoPilot. Instead of all these discussions of whether or not we will get strong AGI, I prefer to see everyone assume it will happen, and when we don't get the incremental result we were anticipating, say, hmm, that's interesting, I wonder why...

I want to see the hype tamped down to the point we can steadily chip away at the overall problem space, and accelerate AI research results and organically reach strong, economically-available AGI sooner than continue experiencing the disappointing two-steps-forward-one-step-back our industry seems to so far historically take in this field. The hype says we're a sprint away from unlocking all sorts of benefits promised by strong AGI, when we are better served accepting the organic incremental benefits as they occur during our acknowledged marathon, and using those incremental benefits as stepping stones to greater understanding.

Re: The Artificial Intelligentsia

#82

Post by cjauvin »

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…

This is a very interesting interpretation of Searle's argument (which also has some overlap I believe with some of Douglas Hofstadter's ideas), and I will begin to read Blindsight shortly, as it seems a very intriguing novel.

Re: The Artificial Intelligentsia

#83

Post by goatlover »

adrianN wrote: post #32
goatlover wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> idiotic article about the brain not processing information How about the brain creates information from constant interaction with the world based on the kinds of bodies we have and our needs/wants? This information doesn't exist as information until the brain creates it. Information is the product of minds. It doesn't exist in the world on it's own to be processed. As such, the brain is something other than a compu…

Computers interact with the world too. I'm looking at a screen that produces patterns of light based on the internal state of my computer. How is this different from a brain interacting with the world? The brain is a finitely sized hunk of matter and matter seems to follow laws. We currently have no reason to assume that those laws can't be simulated by sufficiently sized computer, so anything observable the brain do…

Yes, computers are physical systems. But what does their interaction mean without humans around to interpret their output?

Re: The Artificial Intelligentsia

#84

Post by goatlover »

ghostcluster wrote: post #73
sgt101 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument at the moment seems to be "define a problem that a computer can't do that a human brain can"... "I can't because expressing that problem is beyond the machinery I have developed for cognition, and it may always be". What is certain is that there are uncomputable problems, but are any of the problems that humans solve in order to speak, act, socialise uncomputable? Some people think that because they are…

> Some people think that because they are solved within the physical universe then they must be computable but that implies that the physical universe can be simulated If you believe the brain exists in the physical universe, that means you can build a physical system that also solves the same problems.

> If you believe the brain exists in the physical universe, that means you can build a physical system that also solves the same problems.

Sure, but in the case of computation, is it possible to make a computing system that has subjective experiences? Maybe consciousness isn't something that can be expressed in computational terms, because computation is itself based on abstraction.

Re: The Artificial Intelligentsia

#85

Post by ThomPete »

yourapostasy wrote: post #81
ThomPete wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the wrong way to think about it to be frank. Animals can do things humans can't that doesn't mean that humans can't come up with ways to make what those animals can obsolete. Humans don't need wings to fly, we don't need to be able to run faster than a leopard to be able to move faster than a leopard. AI will not always represent itself in a one to one relationship with humans to be able to compete or outcomp…

> ...but it's literally just a matter of training and improving not some fundamental problem that can't be solved. I heard this echoed many before when pawing through the library stacks in my uni days looking through the littered corpses of AI trends in the past. I believe that we will eventually get to strong AGI. But after either reading or seeing in-person the hype machine sprout up and wither around symbolic prog…

It took billions of years to evolve us. We have only been working on this seriously for less than 100 years and the progress is reminiscent of the Cambrian explosion.

Again humans evolved from dumb atoms why is that easier to believe?

Re: The Artificial Intelligentsia

#86

Post by ghostcluster »

sgt101 wrote: post #79
ghostcluster wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to rise to an 'empereor has no clothes' caliber piece, it would help to demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of the fields you're criticizing, and not arrogantly cite bad science essays, and not ignore the actual state of the art techniques in that domain. You need to present the best arguments from the side you want to critique and then prssent a case why you think they are wrong. Calling people nam…

Well - I'm not so sure, you're setting a very high bar which makes it difficult for people with a different background to make points (badly in your view, but pretty well in mine) which the community needs to hear. This isn't a Ph.D. exam, this isn't a thesis - it's an outsider calling BS. I'm not impressed by the counter arguments advanced so far. Let's be honest, Alpha Go and Alpha Go Zero are surprises in that the…

If you don't even understand the basics of what's possible in a field and what's not, you can't make a convincing refutation of that field by just calling certain people names and citing bad science essays that you also don't understand.

Re: The Artificial Intelligentsia

#87

Post by ghostcluster »

mogget wrote: post #60

A thought: Don't let some of the (valid) criticism alone dissuade you from reading this. IMO the author makes some very valid points about fuzzy products and endpoints in the current AI/data/ML/magic craze. These are under-articulated elsewhere, because, well hey there's a lot of money flowing! Who wants to be a killjoy and not "get it" (just like in 1999 ;)? Two more specific points: 1. The descriptions of the CEO a…

The problem, besides the condescending tone towards everyone around him, is that he doesn't present an understanding of the actual state of the field of AI and deep learning, and what's worse, he cites bad science essays that will misinform more people about how a brain works.

There's a meme going round about how the best way to refute an argument is to 'steelman' it: present the best arguments of the opposing side before refuting them. He doesn't do that here, which is one of the reasons I found it frustrating.

I agree that the way the venture raising market works today rightfully deserves some fair criticism.

Re: The Artificial Intelligentsia

#88

Post by aerodog »

jstewartmobile wrote: post #62
gaius wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He said he didn't have to sign an NDA. I suppose he felt free to say what he wished!

Re: The Artificial Intelligentsia

#89

Post by adrianN »

goatlover wrote: post #84
ghostcluster wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some people think that because they are solved within the physical universe then they must be computable but that implies that the physical universe can be simulated If you believe the brain exists in the physical universe, that means you can build a physical system that also solves the same problems.

> If you believe the brain exists in the physical universe, that means you can build a physical system that also solves the same problems. Sure, but in the case of computation, is it possible to make a computing system that has subjective experiences? Maybe consciousness isn't something that can be expressed in computational terms, because computation is itself based on abstraction.

There is no way to define subjective experience such that you can tell whether something has them or not. The question is meaningless.

Re: The Artificial Intelligentsia

#90

Post by blackbagboys »

dsacco wrote: post #17

Offtopic, but I have a really difficult time reading articles like this. I don’t know if this reflects a problem with the style or my ability to focus, but I find it really annoying: > “SANDHOGS,” THEY CALLED THE LABORERS who built the tunnels leading into New York’s Penn Station at the beginning of the last century. Work distorted their humanity, sometimes literally. Resurfacing at the end of each day from their bur…

I appreciate the irony of assuming that the writing style of an article about how data-obsessive engineering cultures strip away the capacity for creative thought and engagement must have been determined by profit-maximizing analytics, especially when the article in question was written for a nonprofit leftist magazine.
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