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Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says

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Re: Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says

#81
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends. If the pop up is something along the lines of "we only have functional cookies", that's okay anyway. If they try to force advertising cookies I'll look for an alternative site (i.e. for coding help) or skip the article. Same if the popup is designed in way that skipping is more work than the content is worth. Of course, sometimes you direly need some info and can't skip it, but these situations are extremely…

Curious. Did you skip this article ? from their privacy policy https://www.ieee.org/security-privacy.html > What information do we collect? IEEE collects the following personal data in line with the use purposes explained in a subsequent section: - Your name and contact details - Date of birth - Online profile data/usage - Emergency contact information - Social media profile information - Copies of identification doc…

> Curious. Did you skip this article ?

In this case no, as I did not need to click "accept" in order to read articles. With an intrusive pop up, I most likely would have. Overall, though, I'd probably need to make an exception for IEEE anyway as it hosts a lot of papers for my field of study.

To be fair, though, I'm not a hardcore data protection activists. It might be possible to start a complaint or check whether the website does tracking without clicking "I accept" (and I'm pretty sure most do), but unfortunately my life is only so long and the effect is probably rather small. I highly dislike that this tactic works for them, but I'm only willing to sacrifice so much. Also, I still run no script and ad blockers, so the effective tracking is hopefully limited anyway.

Re: Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says

#82

What would be a better way to call 'AI' then for the general public? pattern recognition? matrix multiplication? fancy statistics? or maybe enhanced statistics? gah, might as well just say 'algorithm' and just be done with it.

'Algorithm' is too long and hard to pronounce to gain popularity. Better shorten it to 'Al'.

Re: Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says

#83

When machine learning was a buzz word then companies started using it to describe almost everything they do. Recently I have also noticed that more companies (and PMs) are using AI in its place, at least in their marketing speak. Often the AI or machine learning that is being sold to their customers (or if it’s a startup, to their investors) is in fact a team or a group of teams creating static rules. If it is image…

I interviewed with one of these startup with these .ai domains. I was super impressed that somehow they could decode human speech over a phone into orders. Until I asked them about that and they had a call center farm that does all that. And a "prototype" of an AI that doesn't work at all lol

Re: Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says

#84

While I mostly agree with Michael Jordan, I think that he overstates his argument a small bit. I feel comfortable applying the "AI" label to projects if they: 1) achieve human level of performance or better. 2) They use any or all of standard techniques like deep learning, NLP, knowledge representation, reinforcement learning, etc. I am just about to hit my 40 year anniversary for getting paid to be doing "AI" relate…

Serious question, are calculators AI because they perform arithmetic much better than humans and use standard techniques like Taylor series expansion and numerical methods? I feel like you want to add that the technique has to use data as a core part of its algorithm that represents “learning”. But then we’re just back to machine learning that beats humans at a specific task. Is there a need for this term? We already have “superhuman algorithm”. AI has more syllables and we could also use SA which could double as State of the Art.

Re: Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says

#85
post #14

Reminds me when X-rays first were discovered, everyone claimed their product contained them, including X-ray headache tablets, golf balls, stove polish, razor blades. https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/full/10.1148/rg.242035157 for some fun pictures. I won't be surprised when AI toothbrushes come out.

That's happened: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/10/25/20932250/...

Oh, the puns I can make... DentAI care?

In French: Intelligencive Artificielle? ÉmAI brillant? Recarie Neural Networks? MolAIre.

Re: Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says

#86
post #15

"Computers have not become intelligent per se, but they have provided capabilities that augment human intelligence, he writes. Moreover, they have excelled at low-level pattern-recognition capabilities that could be performed in principle by humans but at great cost. " It's odd how under-appreciated this is. There is no "intelligence" here as we know it, not even a hint. There are algorithms operating on data for ver…

You can blame a lack of metaphysical sophistication for this and a lack of self-awareness around how "intelligence" is being projected or read into things.

One obvious feature of intelligence is that it can abstract from particulars. We form and reason about universal concepts. I know the concept of "squarishness" which means something definite without being some specific square (of which there is an infinite number). I can imagine a square, but those are always particular squares, whereas the concept is universal. But material things are only ever particular. Can you show me a material thing that is "squarishness"? No. Computers are physical objects, right? So how can the universal "squarishness" exist in a physical object without being a particular square?

Even here we often fool our selves when we fails to recognize that computer programs, like the text in a book, need humans to grant them their identity and make sense of them because their meaning and identity are assigned by the observer and not intrinsic to them like mind-independent things. A "Square" class, defined as record with two fields corresponding to width and length, is not the concept of a square. Instances of that class are not squares. Even "class" and "instance" are mental models which do not exist "out there" like real entities or phenomena. What we call computers just have affordances that allow us to configure them to correspond and cooperate with the models in our minds. But strictly speaking, computers don't really have an objective reality and neither does the computation within them. The machine is real in the sense that we have arranged a bunch of stuff to be a certain causal ensemble, but this causal ensemble is not objectively a computer nor is it computing. Rather, we are using it to compute. But if you erased all human beings from the planet, and left a bunch of computers running, objectively, they would only be arrays of things with magnetic and electrical components changing physical state. You need someone to interpret what computers do to make them useful. Just like three beads on an abacus doesn't mean "3" and pushing a bead toward those three doesn't mean "adding 1". You need a person to assign those meanings to it. Computers don't magically break free of that reality.

Re: Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says

#87
post #37

I really liked the definition of AI (back in 2015) by Seth Godin - a marketer! > One common insightful definition of AI: Artificial Intelligence is everything a computer can't do yet. As soon as it can, we call it obvious. If the term is used like that it does make sense to me. https://seths.blog/2015/04/the-noise-in-our-head-and-artific...

Products are shipped which claim to use "AI". This is self-contradictory with this definition, and no product can ever exist claiming AI with it. I'm fine with that, but then it seems that the term would be completely useless, when "science-fiction" already exist (and, even if it is not always, can be realistic)

That's not self-contradictory, it's just proof that products which claim to use "AI" can't possibly work. Quite consistent with what's observed in practice.

Re: Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says

#88

What would be a better way to call 'AI' then for the general public? pattern recognition? matrix multiplication? fancy statistics? or maybe enhanced statistics? gah, might as well just say 'algorithm' and just be done with it.

'Algorithm' is too long and hard to pronounce to gain popularity. Better shorten it to 'Al'.

welp, back to square one then.

Re: Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says

#89

While I mostly agree with Michael Jordan, I think that he overstates his argument a small bit. I feel comfortable applying the "AI" label to projects if they: 1) achieve human level of performance or better. 2) They use any or all of standard techniques like deep learning, NLP, knowledge representation, reinforcement learning, etc. I am just about to hit my 40 year anniversary for getting paid to be doing "AI" relate…

> 2) They use any or all of standard techniques like deep learning, NLP, knowledge representation, reinforcement learning, etc. But why that? There isn't a principled reason for singling those out. It's just a matter of convention that we call those AI. Pretend you never heard of AI before and you came across these algorithms. No amount of analysis or poking around would lead you to think "oh, man, this is artificial…

What would a principled reason for association look like beyond mere convention? Language is used by different groups to mean different things. Machine learning, logic, control, robotics, linguistics, and cognitive science were publishing in artificial intelligence venues decades ago. Now AI seems to just mean DL/RL.

Re: Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Ad for the "x-ray stove polish" lists "cannot explode" as a feature which makes me wonder about their competitions polish

https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=SJMN19060225.2.77&e=-------en--2... Exploding Stove Polish was apparently a problem. Gotta wonder what chemical it was causing the problem.

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