Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google DeepMind Founder Demis Hassabis: Three Truths about AI

techrepublic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 144 posts

Re: Google DeepMind Founder Demis Hassabis: Three Truths about AI

#91

Post by Notorious_BLT »

glitchc wrote: post #80
TeMPOraL wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly, I can't really understand how come people believe what you just wrote. Yes, technology created many problems, but we can't solve them by doing less technology, without reintroducing problems we've already solved. We can either not solve them, or try to solve it with more progress (likely introducing new problems as well). In other words: we dug a hole for ourselves with technology, but the only way we can di…

Let's play with that notion for a bit: If technology is a tool, let's say akin to a spade. A spade gets you into a hole. Will more spades ever get you out of a hole? Sounds like you need a ladder instead.

Sure a spade can get you out of a hole, you can dig a ramp. And many hands make light work. Weak metaphor, really.

Re: Google DeepMind Founder Demis Hassabis: Three Truths about AI

#92

Post by miscreanity »

adwhit wrote: post #49

I always find it strange to hear people talk about climate change as if it is some sort of tricky challenge we need to solve, like improving education or curing cancer. It is a 'problem' of completely different magnitude. It is on track to end civilization as we know it within two generations. A rational society would think about nothing else. Our children will be astonished and mystified - and furious - to see all t…

First off, I want my amazing AI and renewable/sustainable energy generation via microgrids and all manner of eco-friendly technologies. However, the economics and individual freedom aspects are pushing those forward; there largely orthogonal to the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming issue.

The greatest source of energy beyond anything humanity could possibly hope to attain in the immediate future is reducing its output[1]. Man can cause localized disruptions and pollution but cannot yet alter the entire planet - that is sheer arrogance.

Volatility increases during periods of change. It is therefore no surprise that strange weather is being experienced where few or no living people can recall these occurrences.

It was hotter during the Roman empire than it is now, yet people survived and thrived. If I were you, I'd be digging deeper and preparing for colder weather instead of listening to politically-motivated, fund-seeking charlatans proclaiming we're all going to fry.

[1] https://spaceweatherarchive.com/2018/09/27/the-chill-of-sola...

Re: Google DeepMind Founder Demis Hassabis: Three Truths about AI

#93

Post by mindcrime »

I've been spending a lot of time lately digging into "outdated" 80's era approaches to AI. Some people think I'm wasting my time and ask "why aren't you doing Deep Learning?" This is the reason why:

"You can think about deep learning as it currently is today as the equivalent in the brain to our sensory cortices: our visual cortex or auditory cortex. But, of course, true intelligence is a lot more than just that, you have to recombine it into higher-level thinking and symbolic reasoning, a lot of the things classical AI tried to deal with in the 80s. One way you can think about our research program is [that it's investigating] 'Can we build out from our perception, using deep-learning systems and learning from first principles? Can we build out all the way to high-level thinking and symbolic thinking?'. In order to do that we need to crack problems like learning concepts, things that humans find effortless but our current learning systems can't do."

I basically completely agree with Demis on this. A lot of the stuff that was being done in the 80's wasn't "wrong" so much as it was ahead of its time. And just like advances in data, algorithms, and compute power helped propel Neural Networks (which are actually a really old idea) to another level, I suspect some other "old" approaches will also experience a similar resurgence due to that same confluence of factors.

Re: Google DeepMind Founder Demis Hassabis: Three Truths about AI

#94

Post by mrhappyunhappy »

hyperbovine wrote: post #71
adwhit wrote: post #49

I always find it strange to hear people talk about climate change as if it is some sort of tricky challenge we need to solve, like improving education or curing cancer. It is a 'problem' of completely different magnitude. It is on track to end civilization as we know it within two generations. A rational society would think about nothing else. Our children will be astonished and mystified - and furious - to see all t…

One potential solution is to not have children.

What’s the point of living if you can’t achieve your biological function?

Re: Google DeepMind Founder Demis Hassabis: Three Truths about AI

#95

Post by titzer »

miscreanity wrote: post #92
adwhit wrote: post #49

I always find it strange to hear people talk about climate change as if it is some sort of tricky challenge we need to solve, like improving education or curing cancer. It is a 'problem' of completely different magnitude. It is on track to end civilization as we know it within two generations. A rational society would think about nothing else. Our children will be astonished and mystified - and furious - to see all t…

First off, I want my amazing AI and renewable/sustainable energy generation via microgrids and all manner of eco-friendly technologies. However, the economics and individual freedom aspects are pushing those forward; there largely orthogonal to the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming issue. The greatest source of energy beyond anything humanity could possibly hope to attain in the immediate future is reducing i…

> Man can cause localized disruptions and pollution but cannot yet alter the entire planet - that is sheer arrogance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise

Re: Google DeepMind Founder Demis Hassabis: Three Truths about AI

#96

Post by dmreedy »

mindcrime wrote: post #93

I've been spending a lot of time lately digging into "outdated" 80's era approaches to AI. Some people think I'm wasting my time and ask "why aren't you doing Deep Learning?" This is the reason why: "You can think about deep learning as it currently is today as the equivalent in the brain to our sensory cortices: our visual cortex or auditory cortex. But, of course, true intelligence is a lot more than just that, you…

Yes, I like to separate, such as they can be separated, the tasks of 'parsing' and 'thinking' when it comes to AI. In the 80s (and really, all the way back to the 50s when we started trying computational AI), the tasks that we were attempting to solve were in the `thinking` category; solving tasks at a high level of abstraction with complex ontologies.

The revolution in Deep Learning has been almost entirely on the parsing side of things. The conversion of unstructured data from sensors (an array of pixels, say) into semi-structured semantic units in the beginnings of an ontology. This makes sense, because some of the greatest success has come from modeling a part of the brain that we understand pretty well; the occipital lobe (specifically, V1), which is responsible for parsing the input from the eyes and feeding the resulting information in to the rest of the brain. This is the motivation behind the layered, columned CNN architecture.

We've seen some success performing some tasks that exist in the (quite large) grey space between parsing and thinking (which are probably platonic ideals anyway, more than they are real things), but I get the feeling we're reaching the limit of how far we can reach into the grey starting from the left side of this continuum.

So I don't think it's a waste of time at all to consider the deep, impressive work from the 80s and the 60s in Philosophy and logic and GOFAI.

Re: Google DeepMind Founder Demis Hassabis: Three Truths about AI

#97

Post by wsy »

AI has been a marketing terms from its invention, and is very misleading.

Whenever you read something about 'Artificial Intelligence', try to replace this term with an actual technology, such as 'Deep Learning'. If the sentence doesn't make sense with any such replacement, it is most probably just marketing bullshit.

Re: Google DeepMind Founder Demis Hassabis: Three Truths about AI

#98

Post by titzer »

ThomPete wrote: post #72
adwhit wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a creature capable of empathy, I am quite upset at the thought of incalculable suffering we are condemning future generations to just because we can't be bothered not to.

Some future generation is going to go extinct whether by astroid, super nova or end of the universe. The idea that the coming generations are more important than the current is frankly the most unemphatic thing I have heard in a long time.

> The idea that the coming generations are more important than the current is frankly the most unemphatic thing I have heard in a long time.

You're right. We should definitely continue with the status quo of stuffing our fat faces with slop and burning oil like there's no tomorrow, literally.

Re: Google DeepMind Founder Demis Hassabis: Three Truths about AI

#99

Post by titzer »

ur-whale wrote: post #78
adwhit wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a creature capable of empathy, I am quite upset at the thought of incalculable suffering we are condemning future generations to just because we can't be bothered not to.

That's because you have a working assumption there's something we can do about it. I don't believe there is: in that regard, humanity is as much in control of its own destiny as a mold colony growing on a slice of bread under a glass dome. To wit: we have been incapable of solving basic problems like ending hunger or war for our entire history. There is zero reason to believe we can actually do anything about somethi…

I was with you up until:

> If a solution exists to global warming, it's expansion, nothing else. Musk is correct in that regard.

And then I was like: yeah, this is exactly why we should not expand; we don't deserve it.

But I'm an optimist. The universe is a whole hell of a lot smarter than we are, and it will properly contain and eliminate us.

Re: Google DeepMind Founder Demis Hassabis: Three Truths about AI

#100

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

mindcrime wrote: post #93

I've been spending a lot of time lately digging into "outdated" 80's era approaches to AI. Some people think I'm wasting my time and ask "why aren't you doing Deep Learning?" This is the reason why: "You can think about deep learning as it currently is today as the equivalent in the brain to our sensory cortices: our visual cortex or auditory cortex. But, of course, true intelligence is a lot more than just that, you…

That particular comment is very likely traceable to some work undertaken by DeepMind in learning symbolic representations using deep learning, described here:

Learning explanatory rules from noisy data

https://deepmind.com/blog/learning-explanatory-rules-noisy-d...

From where I'm standing (studying symbolic machine learning algorithms) the obvious next step in machine learning and AI is the combination of sub-symbolic, with symbolic approaches. It's just, nobody has quite figured out how to make it all work yet. There are reasons for this, not all technical, but it seems to me it's the easiest "next big thing" to at least try.

Post reply on HN