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Confession of a so-called AI expert

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Re: Confession of a so-called AI expert

#91

Post by p1esk »

jcoffland wrote: post #8
Dzugaru wrote: post #3

> Even though I’m one of the beneficiary of this AI craze, I can’t help but thinking this will burst. I don't think it will. Level off - maybe. I've started my work in Computer Vision with classical algorithms (SIFT features, geometry, correlation filters and things alike people were researching for decades). These really worked like garbage, it was a nightmare. Then we jumped on DL bandwagon - and CV just clicked fo…

Pattern matching is the one thing DL is good for. Which is why it's a good match for CV. Calling DL AI in the first place was a mistake or at least over zealous marketing. Playing go or chess or matching patterns are all things intelligent begins can do but that does not imply that doing those thing means you are intelligent.

Ok, so what ability is worthy of "AI" name?

Re: Confession of a so-called AI expert

#92

Post by visarga »

rubidium wrote: post #35
visarga wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computer vision is the part of DL that is most suited to produce economic value. CV will be worth trillions of dollars in a couple of decades. All those cars, drones, agricultural equipment, medical scanners, robots and security cameras will be able to understand what they see and act intelligently. It's like the most universally useful thing since the invention of the wheel.

"It's like the most universally useful thing since the invention of the wheel." I'll choose refrigeration, combustion engine, concrete, and probably hundreds of other things before computer vision.

I said universally useful - a refrigerator is just that. A CV system can be used in hundreds of totally different applications. Like the wheel and yes, the engine. The engine is universal as well, you could see it as the upgrade of the wheel.

Re: Confession of a so-called AI expert

#93

Post by jcoffland »

p1esk wrote: post #91
jcoffland wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pattern matching is the one thing DL is good for. Which is why it's a good match for CV. Calling DL AI in the first place was a mistake or at least over zealous marketing. Playing go or chess or matching patterns are all things intelligent begins can do but that does not imply that doing those thing means you are intelligent.

Ok, so what ability is worthy of "AI" name?

Getting the nations of the world to stop bickering and balance our resource usage fairly and with in the capacity of our planet.

Re: Confession of a so-called AI expert

#94

Post by jcoffland »

PeterisP wrote: post #31
jcoffland wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pattern matching is the one thing DL is good for. Which is why it's a good match for CV. Calling DL AI in the first place was a mistake or at least over zealous marketing. Playing go or chess or matching patterns are all things intelligent begins can do but that does not imply that doing those thing means you are intelligent.

One can argue that the parts of our brain that make us intelligent, the prefrontal cortex that is so much bigger than in "lesser" animals, is essentially an overgrown, glorified pattern matching engine. Pattern matching is the one thing our brains are good for - there's good reason to suppose that quite many intelligence-related tasks can be reduced to a form of pattern matching.

One could argue a lot of things. Humans once argued quite seriously that the human brain was composed of microscopic gears because that was the technology of the time.

Re: Confession of a so-called AI expert

#95

Post by pron »

alexcnwy wrote: post #89
pron wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computers were able to perform some tasks better than humans since they were first built in the 40s. Computers are only used for things they are better at than humans. There is nothing to suggest, however, that there is anything closer to "intelligence" in recognizing images as in compiling census statistics, and no software is as adept in "general problem solving" as insects.

Honestly I think you're playing a language game. I'm sure you're familiar with the line of reasoning that if you asked someone 50 years ago to describe tasks that require intelligence, they'd for sure say recognizing objects in images is one of them. Now that computers can do that, it's no longer 'intelligence' and the goalposts get moved. In what sense is no software 'as adept in "general problem solving" as insects…

People also characterized doing arithmetic as intelligent, and there's little doubt that the entire idea of calulating machines -- from the time of Leibniz -- was motivated by the desire to emulate the human mind, so there's no point in describing intelligence as a binary quality. Therefore, I don't need to define what intelligent means in order to demonstrate my point. There are cognitive tasks that insects do better than computers, ergo, we are not yet at insect-level cognition. Only once computers can do everything better than an insect can we claim that they are more intelligent than insects.

Re: Confession of a so-called AI expert

#96

Post by alexcnwy »

pron wrote: post #95
alexcnwy wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I think you're playing a language game. I'm sure you're familiar with the line of reasoning that if you asked someone 50 years ago to describe tasks that require intelligence, they'd for sure say recognizing objects in images is one of them. Now that computers can do that, it's no longer 'intelligence' and the goalposts get moved. In what sense is no software 'as adept in "general problem solving" as insects…

People also characterized doing arithmetic as intelligent, and there's little doubt that the entire idea of calulating machines -- from the time of Leibniz -- was motivated by the desire to emulate the human mind, so there's no point in describing intelligence as a binary quality. Therefore, I don't need to define what intelligent means in order to demonstrate my point. There are cognitive tasks that insects do bette…

Humans can't do _everything_ better than insects, does that mean insects are more intelligent than humans?

Chimpanzees have better short term memory on certain tasks than humans [1] - humans not being better at _everything_ than chimpanzees doesn't make chimpanzees more intelligent.

[1] https://www.livescience.com/27199-chimps-smarter-memory-huma...

Re: Confession of a so-called AI expert

#97

Post by [deleted] »

_qbxp wrote: post #20
frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #2

The article is an interesting mix of imposter syndrome and bubble speculation. I guess a good question is: if you know you're in a bubble and you feel like an imposter, are you right?

Sort of tangential, but I felt this exact same way when I moved from being a post-doc in neuroscience to being a data scientist. The impostor syndrome was so strong it was painful. It has subsided now a bit because I know I'm able to bring value to my company - despite the fact that I know there are much more capable and qualified data scientists (by a large margin) out there, and despite the fact that by-and-large '…

[deleted]

Re: Confession of a so-called AI expert

#98

Post by gaius »

_qbxp wrote: post #20
frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #2

The article is an interesting mix of imposter syndrome and bubble speculation. I guess a good question is: if you know you're in a bubble and you feel like an imposter, are you right?

Sort of tangential, but I felt this exact same way when I moved from being a post-doc in neuroscience to being a data scientist. The impostor syndrome was so strong it was painful. It has subsided now a bit because I know I'm able to bring value to my company - despite the fact that I know there are much more capable and qualified data scientists (by a large margin) out there, and despite the fact that by-and-large '…

they literally duplicated a column in the feature matrix

This is called colinearity - you can check for it by comparing the rank of the matrix to its number of columns. In R qr(X)$rank. Good to add this to your EDA workflow.

Re: Confession of a so-called AI expert

#99

Post by pron »

alexcnwy wrote: post #96
pron wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People also characterized doing arithmetic as intelligent, and there's little doubt that the entire idea of calulating machines -- from the time of Leibniz -- was motivated by the desire to emulate the human mind, so there's no point in describing intelligence as a binary quality. Therefore, I don't need to define what intelligent means in order to demonstrate my point. There are cognitive tasks that insects do bette…

Humans can't do _everything_ better than insects, does that mean insects are more intelligent than humans? Chimpanzees have better short term memory on certain tasks than humans [1] - humans not being better at _everything_ than chimpanzees doesn't make chimpanzees more intelligent. [1] https://www.livescience.com/27199-chimps-smarter-memory-huma...

You are being very literal. That people are amazed that chimps are better at some particular task is exactly the point. It's the exception that proves the rule. When we're amazed that insects are better than computers at something we can start arguing over which is smarter.

Re: Confession of a so-called AI expert

#100

Post by CalRobert »

mncharity wrote: post #84
CalRobert wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just out of curiosity, where would you recommend starting for those outdated people? Machine Learning, Deep Learning, AI (for lack of a more specific acronym), NLP - these things are kind of daunting for newcomers, if only due to the acronym du jour changing constantly.

> where would you recommend starting [emphasis mine] Play with http://playground.tensorflow.org/ . Read today's https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14992865 about https://pair-code.github.io/deeplearnjs/ .

Thank you! much appreciated.
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