Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis: AGI is nowhere close to being a reality • Hacker News Board

Re: Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis: AGI is nowhere close to being a reality

#81

Post by nuguy » Thu, Dec 20, 2018, 12:55 AM UTC

nradov wrote: post #73

nuguy wrote: post #68

I take huge offense to this article. They claim that when it comes to AGI, Hinton and Hassabis “know what they are talking about.” Nothing could be further from the truth. These are people who have narrow expertise in one framework of AI. AGI does not yet exist so they are not experts in it, in how long it will be, or how it will work. A layman is just as qualified to speculate about AGI as these people so I find it…

Stating something more times doesn't make it true. Everything you've written is pure speculation, and alarmist at that. There's no proof that AGI is even possible, and if it is possible there's no proof that it will end humanity.

Even anti-alarmists don’t ask for proof that AGI is possible. Obviously it is possible. Speculation is the best you get because nobody is going to be able to prove anything. We haven’t proven global warming is caused by humans but it’s still worth it to be proactive about greenhouse gasses. This is because when something is extremely dangerous, you don’t wait around for someone to finish proving it beyond any shadow of a doubt. You probably also think that god exists because nobody can prove otherwise?

And what does alarmist even mean? Do you call global warming advocates alarmists? It’s such an annoying, nonsense word that boils down to name-calling really. Discuss the merits of my actual argument. If you think my speculation is wrong, point out a flaw in the chain of logic that leads to my conclusion. Don’t just wave your hand and say that “you can’t prove it” like some evangelical christian talking about god or global warming. Seriously infuriating when there is so much at stake.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis: AGI is nowhere close to being a reality

#82

Post by sophistication » Thu, Dec 20, 2018, 12:55 AM UTC

nuguy wrote: post #68

I take huge offense to this article. They claim that when it comes to AGI, Hinton and Hassabis “know what they are talking about.” Nothing could be further from the truth. These are people who have narrow expertise in one framework of AI. AGI does not yet exist so they are not experts in it, in how long it will be, or how it will work. A layman is just as qualified to speculate about AGI as these people so I find it…

AI is likely simple and won't require much processing power after all, so it will be impossible to ban it because it would imply more regulation and surveillance than what would be sustainable. Also global warming will likely kill us anyhow. The rational conclusion is to enjoy our supermarkets and warm showers as long as they last. They will probably last longer if we deny these threats so as to avoid causing mass panic and nihilism.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis: AGI is nowhere close to being a reality

#83

Post by Gibbon1 » Thu, Dec 20, 2018, 1:06 AM UTC

kahoon wrote: post #51

karmasimida wrote: post #17

And no one should be surprised by this. The NN advancement of late doesn't help addressing human-style symbolic reasoning at all. All we have is a much more powerful function approximator with a drastic increased capacity (very deep networks with billions of parameters) and scalable training scheme (SGD and its variants). Such architecture works great for differentiable data, such's images/audios, but the improvement…

I don't understand this fixation on symbolic reasoning. Do any other animals practice this? If the answer is no, then it is probably not the most important milestone to AGI or at least not the one we should be currently aiming for. Right now we can not replicate the cognition of a mouse. Feels like we want to go to Mars before figuring out how to build a rocket.

I think the the fixation on symbolic reasoning comes from ignorance at how hard classification is vs how hard pure mechanical symbolic operations are for humans. It's easy to make the mistake of thinking that since a computer can rapidly multiply two numbers together (hard for humans) that they were operating at a higher level than human brains.

Turns out this is wrong. Human brains are very efficient.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis: AGI is nowhere close to being a reality

#84

Post by nuguy » Thu, Dec 20, 2018, 1:07 AM UTC

AgentME wrote: post #78

nuguy wrote: post #68

I take huge offense to this article. They claim that when it comes to AGI, Hinton and Hassabis “know what they are talking about.” Nothing could be further from the truth. These are people who have narrow expertise in one framework of AI. AGI does not yet exist so they are not experts in it, in how long it will be, or how it will work. A layman is just as qualified to speculate about AGI as these people so I find it…

There are non-doomsday possibilities for AGI. Imagine a super-intelligent AI that was built from the start to value humanity and our way of life, and from there it chooses to protect us and enable us all to do what we want more. (Of course, this could go in dystopian directions, but even those are better than extinction.) A super-intelligent AI that is built to value humans could decide to "uplift" humans' intelligen…

You don’t even begin to comprehend what I’m saying. You need to think about this more deeply.

So what if it is possible to create a benevolent ai? Nobody said this isn’t possible or even likely. We can also invent a machine that scrubs all the moss off of stones. Just because it’s possible for it to exist doesn’t mean it’s going to proliferate in the free-market of the world and everything in it. The only thing that is important is the fact that

1: we will enter an unstable configuration where any AI implementation that can exist will exist

2: the AI implementations that proliferate will be those that are not hamstrung by being forced to include humans in the loop

3: humans will be out of the loop for every conceivable task and therefore not enjoy the high standard of living that they do in 2018

Re: Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis: AGI is nowhere close to being a reality

#85

Post by nuguy » Thu, Dec 20, 2018, 1:10 AM UTC

sophistication wrote: post #82

nuguy wrote: post #68

I take huge offense to this article. They claim that when it comes to AGI, Hinton and Hassabis “know what they are talking about.” Nothing could be further from the truth. These are people who have narrow expertise in one framework of AI. AGI does not yet exist so they are not experts in it, in how long it will be, or how it will work. A layman is just as qualified to speculate about AGI as these people so I find it…

AI is likely simple and won't require much processing power after all, so it will be impossible to ban it because it would imply more regulation and surveillance than what would be sustainable. Also global warming will likely kill us anyhow. The rational conclusion is to enjoy our supermarkets and warm showers as long as they last. They will probably last longer if we deny these threats so as to avoid causing mass pa…

We can survive global warming. We can fix it. We can come back from it. We will never come back from ai. It’s not impossible to ban ai. And we would be stupid to assume it’s impossible instead of trying to find out through an effort to save ourselves.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis: AGI is nowhere close to being a reality

#86

Post by joe_the_user » Thu, Dec 20, 2018, 1:14 AM UTC

narag wrote: post #72

joe_the_user wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I attempt to use a translate site to translate more than a paragraph (Facebook or Google), it comes out a garbled mess - doesn't mean some sentences are seemingly clear and meaningful. The big thing is it chokes on idioms, not understanding, not leaving them as is but guessing some clearly wrong meaning. I occasionally find single-sentence posts on Facebook apparently translated astonishingly well, in the se…

Cada vez que intento usar un sitio de traducción para traducir más de un párrafo (Facebook o Google), sale un lío confuso - no significa que algunas oraciones sean aparentemente claras y significativas. Lo importante es que se atraganta con los modismos, no entendiéndolos, no dejándolos como están, sino adivinando algún significado claramente erróneo. Ocasionalmente encuentro que las publicaciones de una sola oración…

Oh, that just means I happen to write in clear, unidiomatic English ;-). Add just a smidgen of irregular usage, contemporary metaphors and such and things can go South pretty quickly.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis: AGI is nowhere close to being a reality

#87

Post by jeremyjh » Thu, Dec 20, 2018, 1:20 AM UTC

nuguy wrote: post #68

I take huge offense to this article. They claim that when it comes to AGI, Hinton and Hassabis “know what they are talking about.” Nothing could be further from the truth. These are people who have narrow expertise in one framework of AI. AGI does not yet exist so they are not experts in it, in how long it will be, or how it will work. A layman is just as qualified to speculate about AGI as these people so I find it…

> the only way to ensure that human life continues as we know it is for AI to be banned

Is that because you think banned things do not happen? Even if the thing that is banned could confer a massive advantage to the entities developing it?

I think AGI is unlikely to be a thing in my lifetime, or even my children's. But if I were worried about it, I'd probably focus on developing a strategy to create a benevolent intelligence FIRST, rather than try to prevent everyone else from ever creating one via agreements and laws.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis: AGI is nowhere close to being a reality

#88

Post by nuguy » Thu, Dec 20, 2018, 1:23 AM UTC

jeremyjh wrote: post #87

nuguy wrote: post #68

I take huge offense to this article. They claim that when it comes to AGI, Hinton and Hassabis “know what they are talking about.” Nothing could be further from the truth. These are people who have narrow expertise in one framework of AI. AGI does not yet exist so they are not experts in it, in how long it will be, or how it will work. A layman is just as qualified to speculate about AGI as these people so I find it…

> the only way to ensure that human life continues as we know it is for AI to be banned Is that because you think banned things do not happen? Even if the thing that is banned could confer a massive advantage to the entities developing it? I think AGI is unlikely to be a thing in my lifetime, or even my children's. But if I were worried about it, I'd probably focus on developing a strategy to create a benevolent inte…

I appreciate that you actually suggest a solution. Nobody knows when AGI will come but it could come tomorrow. It could come in 1000 years. No harm in being proactive.

Developing a good ai first is useless because as I have said, the creation of ai enters us into an unstable configuration where bad ai will crop up regardless. Keeping bad ai from existing is infinitely easier when ai does not exist as a technology as opposed to when it’s a turnkey thing.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis: AGI is nowhere close to being a reality

#89

Post by meroes » Thu, Dec 20, 2018, 1:27 AM UTC

sdenton4 wrote: post #36

karmasimida wrote: post #17

And no one should be surprised by this. The NN advancement of late doesn't help addressing human-style symbolic reasoning at all. All we have is a much more powerful function approximator with a drastic increased capacity (very deep networks with billions of parameters) and scalable training scheme (SGD and its variants). Such architecture works great for differentiable data, such's images/audios, but the improvement…

Maaaaybe. I tend to think that symbolic reasoning is a learning tool, rather than a goalpost for general intelligence. For example, we use symbolic reasoning quite extensively when learning to read a new language, but once fluent can rely on something closer to raw processing - no more reading and sounding out character sequences. Similarly with chess - eventually we have good mnemonics for what make good plays, and…

As a layman, is this just saying we learn by training an intuition of what's what/what's correct, rather than actually calculating deep reality/referencing our entire memory set every time we intake some information or need to solve a task problem? Meaning, we develop tons of rules/heuristics after repeated pattern exposures, and use the simplified rules rather than a deep theory or 'brute-forcing' every possibility until we find one that's right. For example with chess, we don't know at the deepest possible level why this move might be best, it just feels right due to a massive learned intuition.

If that's the case, then to me it seems like AGI is limited by the amount and type of data a NN can be fed. To have an intelligence like homo sapiens, wouldnt you expect that no matter the underlying NN, it has to take in a comparable amount of data to what the 5+ human senses take in over lifetime, plus the actual internal 'learning' (i.e pattern recognition, heuristics, and intuition) + some kind of meta awareness (consciousness) to speed up and aid this process + dedicated pieces of the brain such as Broca's/Wernicke's

Re: Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis: AGI is nowhere close to being a reality

#90

Post by mindgam3 » Thu, Dec 20, 2018, 1:31 AM UTC

rozim wrote: post #67

mindgam3 wrote: post #54

Demis Hassabis (true) statements here would be much more credible if DeepMind wasn't currently making a mint by promoting AlphaZero to the masses as a "general purpose artificial intelligence system". Don't believe me? Check out this series of marketing videos on YouTube by GM Matthew Sadler. 1. “Hi, I’m GM Matthew Sadler, and in this series of videos we’re taking a look at new games between AlphaZero, DeepMind’s gen…

I suspect "general purpose artificial intelligence system" means the same architecture applied to 3 games (western Chess, Shogi, Go).

Wouldn't that be a "general purpose game-playing intelligence system" at best? (without mentioning that it only applies to certain types of perfect-information games)

Maybe it's just me, but "general purpose artificial intelligence system" sounds like, well, General Artificial Intelligence. Which sounds like Artificial General Intelligence, which is the holy grail.