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On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

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Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#91

Post by jjoonathan »

Ginden wrote: post #50
wyattpeak wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you showed somebody from 1921 a page of text produced by GPT-3, told them that it was written by a machine, and then told them that we'd made no progress towards artificial intelligence, they'd laugh in your face. You can take from that what you will, but I suspect it will always seem as though we've made no progress, because anything we learn to emulate we necessarily understand well enough that it will no longer…

> If you showed somebody from 1921 a page of text produced by GPT-3, told them that it was written by a machine, and then told them that we'd made no progress towards artificial intelligence, they'd laugh in your face. You can actually do it. 100 year old people usually don't follow news on artificial intelligence, so they will act genuine.

Unless the people running GPT-2 bots all over the internet suddenly gave up when GPT-3 came out, it's been passing Turing tests on audiences much younger than 100 years.

Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#92

Post by wyattpeak »

djsbs wrote: post #85
wyattpeak wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you showed somebody from 1921 a page of text produced by GPT-3, told them that it was written by a machine, and then told them that we'd made no progress towards artificial intelligence, they'd laugh in your face. You can take from that what you will, but I suspect it will always seem as though we've made no progress, because anything we learn to emulate we necessarily understand well enough that it will no longer…

“The machine stops” [1]written in 1909 has AI composing things (I forget if it was poetry or music) Orwell’s 1984, written in the mid forties, has pop songs written by machine. In both cases the AI composed works are described in the same way Id describe modern AI composing things - dreadful. The concept of AI is quite old. Even Medieval Europe you had philosophers making quite penetrating insights on mechanical crea…

I'm not saying the idea would be new to them, the idea of thinking machines had been around for a lot longer than that. I'm saying that the idea that modern text-generation is "zero progress on anything even remotely resembling Artificial Intelligence" would be absurd to them.

Jules Verne wrote about a trip to the moon. It doesn't follow that he would regard the NASA missions as old-hat.

Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#93

Post by alfor »

Just to think about how this comment will reach y’all:

- the modulation in high frequency 5Ghz transmitted to my router, that get modulated again for ethernet and then for the cable modem, and then who know what happen, modulated again as light waves, etc.

None of these feats were managed by evolution, yet we did it, and it’s now usual, we don’t even notice it.

I think that AI will be the same. Yes it’s a bit complicated, but in the last 10 years we made an astonishing great amount of progress. 10 more years and we might surpass our fixed capacities. What happen after that ?

So far our brain seems to be a physical process (not magical), and there is no reason to believe that we can not emulate or even surpass our abilities in silicon.

Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#94

Post by EdwardDiego »

hyperpallium2 wrote: post #57

When we understand Caenorhabditis elegans intelligence, we will be at the beginning of the beginning of understanding human intelligence, maybe. THE BRAIN-CIRCUIT EVEN THE SIMPLEST NETWORKS OF NEURONS DEFY UNDERSTANDING. SO HOW DO NEUROSCIENTISTS HOPE TO UNTANGLE BRAINS WITH BILLIONS OF CELLS? https://www.nature.com/articles/548150a

I wonder if our switch from analogue to digital computing is what makes this so very hard to model? I'm just spitballing wildly, as I know near nothing about neurons, but from what little I understood from a neuroscientist friend, neural signals propagate based on electric and chemical thresholds being reached, but then there's so many interactions that can amplify or reduce these things, and it all sounded rather like old school signal engineering to me (I used to hang out with radio engineers at an old job, and also listened avidly while understanding little).

One thing that stuck with me from the radio engineers is that something as commonplace as a Yagi antenna can't be fully modeled due the to sheer number of interactions, and developing new designs often requires an iterative trial and error approach.

Caveat - I was told this in the mid 2000s, so maybe it's changed since then.

Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#96

Post by rembicilious »

Ginden wrote: post #70
hooande wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How far are we away from gene editing that will allow humans to be born with working gills or wings? Animals have these things, so we know it's possible. But having the technology to do that is very far off, if ever. The same is true of AGI. Of course it's possible. but right now no one has any clear idea how to do it without extreme brute force. Personally, I think it's more likely that we'll have a working Alcubier…

> How far are we away from gene editing that will allow humans to be born with working gills or wings? Impossible due to physics limits. Human lungs have 57 square meters for extracting oxygen from fluid with 21% volume oxygen. 30°C air-saturated water have 0.5% of oxygen, so working gills for human would need surface area of 2394 square meters.

Gills work by continually “filtering” water as is flows through them. Lungs are filled and then emptied according to some pattern of breath. The difference in volume of fluid processed must be significant. Also, can’t gills have a higher surface area to volume ratio than lungs?

Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#97

Post by wyattpeak »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #82
wyattpeak wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you showed somebody from 1921 a page of text produced by GPT-3, told them that it was written by a machine, and then told them that we'd made no progress towards artificial intelligence, they'd laugh in your face. You can take from that what you will, but I suspect it will always seem as though we've made no progress, because anything we learn to emulate we necessarily understand well enough that it will no longer…

Alternatively, they could have said, ‘oh great! Computers continued to improve and you were finally able to implement our algorithms on enough data!’

To whatever extent that people in the 1920s can be said to have had algorithms for machine learning, they certainly didn't bear any relation to modern algorithms.

Even the idea of requiring enough data to build a good system is fairly new. As late as the 1980s, expert systems were the dominant approach to artificial intelligence, and they didn't require information corpi at all but instead involved experts programming in all of the rules they could think of for a system.

Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#98

Post by simonh »

hooande wrote: post #65
simonh wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do not observe teleportation, time travel or warp drive in nature. We also don’t have any practical theory for achieving them as depicted in science fiction. It seems unlikely we will achieve such technologies. Do we observe general intelligence in nature though, here on Earth implemented with the materials available in our environment? If so, it’s a bold claim to make that it will always be impossible to achieve…

How far are we away from gene editing that will allow humans to be born with working gills or wings? Animals have these things, so we know it's possible. But having the technology to do that is very far off, if ever. The same is true of AGI. Of course it's possible. but right now no one has any clear idea how to do it without extreme brute force. Personally, I think it's more likely that we'll have a working Alcubier…

We can extract oxygen from water right now, so we can already do this. Requiring a specific implementation technology is unreasonably stacking the deck.

You’re making the same mistake as those who critiqued the concept of heavier than air flying machines, starting from the assumption they must work by flapping their wings. As it happens now we have wing flapping drones anyway though.

“Ever” is a very, very, very long time.

Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#99

Post by KronisLV »

kromem wrote: post #17
scubakid wrote: post #8

Makes me wonder: how's the HN community feeling these days about the actual plausibility / timeline of humans developing true AGI? Personally the more I learn about the current state of AI, and in comparison the way the human brain works, the more skeptical (and slightly disappointed) I tend to get.

I think that many people throwing their hat in the ring commenting on the unlikeliness of AGI are missing the impact of compounding effects. Yes, on a linear basis it's not going to happen anytime soon. But the trends in the space are developing around self-interacting discrete models to great effect (see OpenAI's Dall-E). The better and broader that systems manage to self-interact, the faster we're going to see impr…

> And from 200,000 years of marginal progress we suddenly went in less than 7,000 years from no writing and thinking the ground below our feet the largest thing in existence to measuring how long it takes the fastest thing in our universe (light) to cross the smallest stable object in our universe (a hydrogen atom).

Personally, i don't doubt that AGI is possible, even though it becoming a reality might take any number of centuries or millennia, if humanity even sticks around for that long and AGI is still a goal that they pursue.

The problem lies in everyone thinking on a more human timescale: "Will we see AGI during my lifetime?" The answer to that is almost certainly no, no matter how much the industry tries to sell state machines as AI or fledgling efforts as revolutionary advances.

Being overly optimistic in regards to time scales only hurts oneself, like expecting that we'd all have flying cars or even that we'll be able to get rid of ICE vehicles or make significant improvements to slowing the pace of climate change.

Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

#100

Post by mensetmanusman »

wyattpeak wrote: post #97
mensetmanusman wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, they could have said, ‘oh great! Computers continued to improve and you were finally able to implement our algorithms on enough data!’

To whatever extent that people in the 1920s can be said to have had algorithms for machine learning, they certainly didn't bear any relation to modern algorithms. Even the idea of requiring enough data to build a good system is fairly new. As late as the 1980s, expert systems were the dominant approach to artificial intelligence, and they didn't require information corpi at all but instead involved experts programmin…

Do we know who published the first conceptual framework for the algorithms behind AlphaGo etc? It seems like they would get a Nobel prize at some point…
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