[HN Gopher] Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer...
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Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says
Author : tmfi
Score : 211 points
Date : 2021-03-31 18:03 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| SinasinaX wrote:
| I agree with the article. I think calling machine learning as it
| is today AI is just plain wrong, it started as pure marketing
| about 5 years ago & now it's almost like people are believing it,
| even in the industry.
| rvz wrote:
| But I heard the florist across the street telling me they are
| just now getting into the 'deep learning AI' (what they said)
| just to pick the right flowers for my mother for mothers day
| several weeks ago. Since they are 'going to use' deep learning
| soon, they must be turning into an AI company. /s
|
| Every time I see a new company preaching endlessly about 'AI' to
| address a non issue at this point is straight-up begging to VCs
| to fund their $0 revenue so-called 'tech startup'.
| astrange wrote:
| That sounds kind of real. Image recognition is one of the most
| useful ML areas and it's good at identifying plants.
|
| Doesn't have to be deep learning though:
| https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-past...
| lokimedes wrote:
| I tried convincing the business developers and marketing for
| years that what we did was machine learning, applied statistics
| or gulp "data-driven" functionality - but no, only thing that
| worked was "<Company> AI Engine"... hurray for throwing my PhD at
| the wind...
| Sebb767 wrote:
| The alternative is to go full buzzword - we, for example, host
| our code on the blockchain [0] - and get technical in some
| lower layers of marketing or documentation, so that people who
| actually know what they're looking for can find out.
|
| [0] git, that is. Yes, git is technically a blockchain.
| whatshisface wrote:
| What something _is_ has almost no relationship to what sales
| could be the most successful calling it. That 's a consequence
| of the lamentable but maybe unavoidable fact that so rarely are
| customers experts in what they buy.
| anonu wrote:
| Unfortunately marketing is everything. Engineers like to build
| nice shiny things without much of an eye on how to sell it. If
| you can slap "AI" on it and make some $, then why not? The end
| customer may not really care. Its not exactly like calling an
| apple "organic". Theres no certification process or consensus
| on what AI actually is or means.
| gspr wrote:
| We, the people doing the actual work, have a moral
| responsibility to resist our work being dishonestly marketed.
| And certainly a moral responsibility not to engage in it
| ourselves.
| colesantiago wrote:
| usually marketing always wins.
|
| I remember when 'GANs' were 'marketed' as 'deepfakes' to
| the public and watched it enter the english lexicon.
| ku-man wrote:
| Well said. If we consider ourselves engineers we should
| always have the public as our first responsibility.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _only thing that worked was " <Company> AI Engine"... hurray
| for throwing my PhD at the wind..._
|
| You're lucky it didn't end up being "<Company> AI Blockchain."
| lightgreen wrote:
| "When reading a text about AI, replace AI with matrix
| multiplication, it will make much more sense"
| fdsafdsfdsf wrote:
| http://www.vdkgentdames.be/ins/video-dwa-v-vla-liv01.html
|
| http://www.vdkgentdames.be/ins/video-dwa-v-vla-liv02.html
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| http://www.vdkgentdames.be/ins/video-dwa-v-vla-liv03.html
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| http://www.vdkgentdames.be/ins/video-dwa-v-vla-liv04.html
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| http://www.vdkgentdames.be/ins/video-dwa-v-vla-liv05.html
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| http://preak.jp/htx/video-osa-v-shik-jptv05.html
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| http://preak.jp/htx/video-osa-v-shik-jptv04.html
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| http://preak.jp/htx/video-osa-v-shik-jptv03.html
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| http://preak.jp/htx/video-osa-v-shik-jptv02.html
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| http://preak.jp/htx/video-osa-v-shik-jptv01.html
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| http://preak.jp/htx/video-osa-v-shik-cap1.html
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| http://preak.jp/htx/video-osa-v-shik-cap2.html
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| http://preak.jp/htx/video-osa-v-shik-cap3.html
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| http://preak.jp/htx/video-osa-v-shik-cap4.html
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| http://preak.jp/htx/video-osaka-v-shik-tvc2.html
|
| http://preak.jp/htx/video-osaka-v-shik-tvc1.html
|
| http://preak.jp/htx/video-m-v-n-jp01.html
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| http://preak.jp/htx/video-m-v-n-jp02.html
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| http://preak.jp/htx/video-m-v-n-jp03.html
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| http://preak.jp/htx/video-m-v-n-jp04.html
| ipsum2 wrote:
| 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.
| wunderflix wrote:
| I am pretty sure there is an AI toothbrush already...
|
| (Haven't googled it yet, I swear!)
| joe_the_user wrote:
| If computing ability were to become as cheap and low-power as
| human/animal brains, you could have the full capacities of a
| present day dentist contained in the area of a present day
| powered tooth. Just make the bristles freely moving, add some
| hard pieces for plaque and you have a thing that could use that
| intelligence.
|
| Which is to say, sure, today "AI" is just a marketing term but
| that's 'cause they don't have it, not because real intelligence
| isn't something that would be very useful in many, seemingly
| trivial places.
| djoldman wrote:
| :(
|
| https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/10/25/20932250/...
| choxi wrote:
| if brush_time < 2.minutes return "Brush longer"
| else if brush_time > 5.minutes return "Brush less"
| end
| dublin wrote:
| In the real world, most AI is just a bunch of IF
| statements, anyway, just abstracted away enough that it's
| no longer obvious.
| sidpatil wrote:
| I.e. using bleeding-edge decision-tree models to disrupt
| the oral hygiene space.
| dwighttk wrote:
| Lotta bleeding edges in the oral hygiene space
| [deleted]
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| That's happened:
|
| https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/10/25/20932250/...
| merhard wrote:
| But what if I want to put my toothbrush in the blockchain as
| well?
| Jugurtha wrote:
| Oh, the puns I can make... DentAI care?
|
| In French: Intelligencive Artificielle? EmAI brillant?
| Recarie Neural Networks? MolAIre.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| It's the new "nano-."
| TecoAndJix wrote:
| The Ad for the "x-ray stove polish" lists "cannot explode" as a
| feature which makes me wonder about their competitions polish
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| 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.
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| The problem might be less with the chemicals in the polish
| _per se_ and more with the mechanical processes surrounding
| its manufacture and use. Many otherwise safe substances
| become explosive when aerosolized.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_explosion
| [deleted]
| svieira wrote:
| > Stove Polish Explodes. [by the Associated Press ]
|
| > LOS ANGELES, Feb. 24 Mrs. Sylvia Olds wife of George
| Olds, of Gardena was probably fatally burned by the
| explosion of a bottle of stove polish today.
| dwighttk wrote:
| Usually the goal...
|
| Our toothpaste contains 0% raw sewage!
| unanswered wrote:
| Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/641
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| This still happens a lot with some more mundane things. I
| picked up a bag of sugar the other day that said "gluten-
| free sugar!"
| beambot wrote:
| It doesn't help when formal classifications such as
| "organic" muddy the waters:
|
| "Of course it's organic, it comes from a plant!"
|
| "That's not what organic means..."
|
| "Guh, wat?"
| dublin wrote:
| It's generally a good idea to avoid more than trace
| amounts of inorganic foods. Just Sayin'...
| Lammy wrote:
| Relevant Achewood:
| http://achewood.com/index.php?date=02112003
| [deleted]
| ketralnis wrote:
| That's exactly why they say it
| kemitche wrote:
| See also "Clean bathrooms!" billboards when road tripping.
| dublin wrote:
| I promise you the AI toothbrushes ARE coming. Just wait...
| tgb wrote:
| Some of those do seem to be claiming to contain X-rays but
| others, like the golf balls, just seem to be using it as a
| brand name. I don't see the problem with that: we don't
| complain about the lack of snakes in Python. The "calling
| everything AI" problem seems to be exclusively claiming that
| your product actually uses AI.
| SergeAx wrote:
| There's a rule of thumb literally for years. If it's Python - we
| are seeng a ML. If it's PowerPoint - ladies and gentlemen, let me
| present to you an AI.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Artificial Intelligence - The Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet
| (2018)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25530178 - Dec
| 2020 (120 comments)
|
| _The AI Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16873778 - April 2018 (161
| comments)
|
| Others?
| psing wrote:
| The hero HN doesn't deserve.
| benja123 wrote:
| 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
| recognition the they will often have a large team of manual
| reviewers. Yes there maybe some AI or machine learning models
| that are assisting in the decision making, but they are usually
| much less effective than people realize.
|
| Today whenever I hear AI or machine learning, my default is to
| assume it is marketing speak.
|
| I don't doubt there are models, I just doubt their effectiveness.
| But saying "we use AI to do X", sounds much better than saying,
| "we have a team of experts who help us do X really well"
|
| With that said I have worked and continue to work with some
| amazing data scientist who really are pushing the limits of what
| can be done with machine learning.
| redisman wrote:
| 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
| ArnoVW wrote:
| Sounds like they're building an annotated dataset, whilst at
| the same time claiming the space and testing market fit /
| appetance.
|
| Sure, the risk is that they can't make it work in the medium
| term. But without knowing much about the complexity of the
| orders / domain, that doesn't sound like a huge risk, given
| the current SoTA
| jmfldn wrote:
| "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 very prescribed use cases. When
| you break it down its pretty primitive stuff really. Clever sure,
| but don't think we're building a mind here, that language just
| confuses things. So much of the public conversation around this
| stuff is polluted with this sort of sci fi nonsense claiming all
| sorts of properties for AI and implying some sort of singularity
| is around the corner. Pure fantasy.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > There is no "intelligence" here as we know it, not even a
| hint. There are algorithms operating on data for very
| prescribed use cases.
|
| I agree with your general point, but if you break it down, our
| brains a nothing "intelligent" either. It's just a network of
| neurons searching for patterns in the sensor input. Sure, it
| can reconfigure itself, but from a really abstract perspective
| it's nothing more than a ultra-scaled neural network as we
| currently use them. So this really boils down to the definition
| of intelligence, which is by no means easy.
| dublin wrote:
| No, the difference is we can understand and apply knowledge
| in different contexts. I'm not saying machines will never
| mimic that (GPT3 is getting kinda close at times), but as my
| good friend Dewayne Perry (co-author of the most cited paper
| in SW engineering and Motorola Regent Chair at UTexas) says,
| "Artificial intelligence has a long way to go just to catch
| up to natural stupidity!" Try getting Alexa (famously trained
| daily by millions) to do _anything_ in anything other than
| the predefined prescribed way. I 'd wait, but I've got a life
| to live...
| omnicognate wrote:
| > it's nothing more than a ultra-scaled neural network as we
| currently use them
|
| You state this as if it is an undisputed/obvious fact, but it
| isn't.
| jmfldn wrote:
| Maybe, maybe not. I'm not sure if it's just a matter of scale
| or of the fundamental nature of the thing. It might be that
| the computer / neural network metaphor, whilst isomorphic to
| certain brain procesees, may ultimately not tell us very much
| about the larger system and what it actually is.
|
| I tend to think that because computers are the current peak
| of civilisation / engineering, and in some ways, "alive", we
| think we might be like a computer. In the Victorian machine
| age they talked of humans as machines. Maybe some, hitherto
| unthinkable invention is around the corner, and we will say
| humans / brains are like that too.
| 256lie wrote:
| Is DNA intelligent? What about virus? Ants? Dolphins? A
| corporation?
| bobthechef wrote:
| 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.
| clircle wrote:
| I prefer to call AI "random number generators"
| an-allen wrote:
| I think IEEE has had it right for several decades now -
| Computational Intelligence. I'll never forget when my undergrad
| research adviser in Artificial Neural Networks and Self
| Organising Maps (circa 2003) corrected me - "we call it
| computational intelligence as artificial intelligence is science
| fiction".
| flowerlad wrote:
| What is considered "AI" changes over time. At any point in
| history, if a machine appears to do a task that only a human
| brain used to be able to do, then that's considered "AI".
|
| So in the mid 1900s a calculator that is able to do arithmetic
| was considered "AI", and in the late 1900s chess playing machines
| were considered "AI". Today those things are not considered "AI".
|
| What is considered "AI" today will not be considered "AI" a
| decade or two from now.
|
| More: https://ai100.stanford.edu/2016-report/section-i-what-
| artifi...
| ahepp wrote:
| >So in the mid 1900s a calculator that is able to do arithmetic
| was considered "AI"
|
| Is this true? The citation you link doesn't seem to clearly
| state that.
|
| I see the linked page says:
|
| >A simple electronic calculator performs calculations much
| faster than the human brain, and almost never makes a
| mistake.[4] Is a calculator intelligent?
|
| But I don't see where it says anyone in the mid 1900s thought a
| calculator was AI.
|
| I am no historian, but I can think of numerous examples of AI
| in science fiction throughout the 1900s and perhaps earlier.
| Metropolis, Rossum's Universal Robots, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
| Heck, one could probably even draw the line all the way back to
| Frankenstein.
|
| Maybe the lower bound for what gets called AI to sell stuff has
| changed over time, but it seems like there's been a pretty
| clear and consistent (if poorly defined) goal of human-like
| intelligence.
| xwdv wrote:
| Maybe we should also stop calling everything "tech". Seems like
| every company that uses computers is a tech company.
| rvz wrote:
| Can't wait for anyone who has a cryptocurrency wallet to call
| themselves a 'blockchain' company.
| kimi wrote:
| You mean we have to go back to "Blockchain"?
| colesantiago wrote:
| 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.
| Aeronwen wrote:
| 'Algorithm' is too long and hard to pronounce to gain
| popularity. Better shorten it to 'Al'.
| colesantiago wrote:
| welp, back to square one then.
| Corence wrote:
| If a rule-based system can get as good of results as a deep
| neural net, why is the deep neural net "AI" but the rule-based
| system is "dumb and hard-coded"?
|
| AI is not a precise term. If you can make a product that feels
| intelligent to the user, why does the implementation matter?
| fdsafdsfdsf wrote:
| http://www.vdkgentdames.be/ins/video-dwa-v-vla-liv01.html
|
| http://www.vdkgentdames.be/ins/video-dwa-v-vla-liv02.html
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| akamia wrote:
| The last time I was at a start up (~2 years ago), it was a
| running joke that the easiest way to raise money was to say your
| product had something to do with AI. We saw so many companies
| that were branding everything as AI simply to raise a round.
|
| One of the funniest cases was a start up that claimed to be using
| AI to process their customers' requests but was actually just
| farming out the work to contractors who were doing everything by
| hand.
| amoorthy wrote:
| Sadly our marketing tests show that when we say our product uses
| ML we get far less engagement than when we say AI. I don't know
| that net-conversion is better with AI but ML sure doesn't capture
| people's imagination. Sigh.
|
| Btw, reminds me of the old joke that goes something like this: AI
| for marketing, ML for recruiting, Regression for design,
| multiplication for implementation.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| 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" related work, with a lenient definition of AI.
|
| On the other hand, Artificial General Intelligence is a much
| stronger term, and is something that I don't expect to see in my
| lifetime.
| hervature wrote:
| 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.
| bobthechef wrote:
| > 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 intelligence!". No,
| you'd see a bunch of statistical techniques that do X, Y, and
| Z, none of which would jump out at you as "wow, this is AI".
| All that computers give us is the ability to run tedious
| computations over larger data sets that would be impractical
| for human beings to perform.
|
| "AI" is what we read into these things. There really is no such
| thing as such.
| 256lie wrote:
| 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.
| dominotw wrote:
| Off topic: This website needs me to 'accept & close' cookies
| before i read the article.
|
| I had people respond to me in a gdpr thread saying that they
| never accept cookies
|
| example : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26360345
|
| What do such ppl do here? just not read the article?
| matt-attack wrote:
| I typically use "reader mode" in whatever browser I'm on. It
| typically shows the article nicely even when either a cookie
| consent modal, or an ad would otherwise be blocking the
| content.
|
| The MiniHack app on iOS does this as well.
| gvb wrote:
| Disable Javascript. I use NoScript on Firefox. For IEEE, I had
| to (temporarily) whitelist the main site to get the article
| sans all the crap. I find this is pretty common when browsing
| with Javascript mostly disabled.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| 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 rare.
| dominotw wrote:
| 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
| documents - Education and professional information -
| Communication information including IEEE Online Support and
| Contact Center communications - Purchasing and payment
| information - Registration and participation in IEEE events
| and activities - Subscription preferences - Information about
| the device(s) you use - Information about service usage -
| Cookies - Authentication data - Location information - Author
| and peer review information - Other information you upload or
| provide to us
|
| How do we use your information?
|
| To engage with third parties. IEEE may share your personal
| data with third parties in connection with services that
| these individuals or entities perform for or with IEEE.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > 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.
| bobthechef wrote:
| AI isn't really a thing per se and it adds a kind of patina of
| false mystique to computation that is essentially no different
| than any other computation (which itself is also not really "a
| thing" out there in the world as a phenomenon). The only way AI
| really means anything is because the person in question has
| decided to frame something as AI. He is choosing to append to
| something meaning that it itself does not possess. Take a the
| linear regression type stuff lots of AI today uses. You put that
| in another context and it ceases to be AI. Why? Because it's not
| AI per se! If it were a real thing or real phenomenon, it would
| be mind-independent and the mental context wouldn't determine its
| identity.
|
| Basically, it seems that whenever someone mechanizes something
| that previous only a thinking person could do, then its viewed as
| AI.
| kerblang wrote:
| Hey, would somebody mind breaking down the different not-
| necessarily-AI things? Like is machine learning the same as
| neural nets or a subset? This would be tremendously useful! I
| would assume "expert systems" falls somewhere at the bottom of
| the list, right above "good old vanilla programming". Dunno how
| linear regression fits in.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Whew boy, this guy reminds me of Frank Grimes: mad that he can't
| control the world. I don't really think it matters, "computers"
| originally meant the women computed ballistics tables for the
| military in the early 40's... language changes, one person can't
| change that.
| slibhb wrote:
| The rebuttal to this view is "provide a principled definition of
| intelligence". Doesn't seem like the article does this.
|
| A hint appears partway through: "computers will not be able to
| match humans in their ability to reason abstractly about real-
| world situations". Does human intelligence distinguish itself by
| its "abstractness" and by its application to "the real world"?
| There's also "the systems do not form the kinds of semantic
| representations and inferences that humans are capable of". Seems
| like a promising direction for some definition of intelligence.
|
| For my money, we will never consider any machine intelligent as
| long as we mass produce it. The only way we'll accept machines as
| intelligent is if, as the singularity theorists say, the machines
| build themselves. Then we aren't really mass producing them,
| we're just kicking off a process that we don't totally
| understand, a bit like gestation.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _The rebuttal to this view is "provide a principled definition
| of intelligence". Doesn't seem like the article does this._
|
| If someone could do that, it would be a significant stride
| towards producing an intelligent entity.
|
| As far as "AI research" we're somewhat stuck in the position
| that humans "can't define intelligence but know it when they
| see it". But if we abandon this intuition based approach, it
| seems like we wind-up with the argument, "this toaster is
| intelligent 'cause you can't prove it's not".
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > For my money, we will never consider any machine intelligent
| as long as we mass produce it.
|
| We won't consider machines intelligent until they have and
| demonstrate the capacity to consider us not-intelligent.
|
| It's an open question of how long we will consider anything
| after that point.
| tachyonbeam wrote:
| > We won't consider machines intelligent until they have and
| demonstrate the capacity to consider us not-intelligent.
|
| I don't think it needs to go that far. Birds that can solve
| simple puzzles are obviously intelligent, so are cats who can
| open doors, etc. I think the human perception if intelligence
| is hugely based on the notion of, "is this thing self-aware?"
| or "is there someone in there?", "does it have a mind of its
| own?"
|
| I would say we'll consider machines intelligent when they're
| able to have some amount of independence. Right now, they
| can't solve problems they're not specifically
| designed/engineered to solve. We don't have any kind of
| general-purpose artificial intelligence. You might try to
| argue that reinforcement learning is that, but no, RL doesn't
| really work outside of a sandbox with an artificial reward
| function, and it's very sensitive to hyper-parameters.
|
| If you could have a chat bot that can pass the Turing Test
| with a high degree of success, I think most people would
| consider that intelligent. Same thing for a robot that can do
| your laundry, wash your dishes and make some mac and cheese
| without days of training and without fucking up more than a
| typical human child would.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _We won 't consider machines intelligent until they have and
| demonstrate the capacity to consider us not-intelligent._
|
| I can't see how this claim is even slightly illuminating
| aside from it's pure "quip-ness". A robot playing, say, the
| game of go, might spit-out "you are not intelligent" whenever
| it wins. Is that "the capacity to consider us not-
| intelligent"?
|
| You could even set-up a micro-world where virtual entities
| interact, evolve and rate their opponent. It wouldn't be hard
| for these entities to compete with humans in this arena, to
| do better than humans and so to give human poor poor
| evaluations but the entities to be pretty simplistic and far
| from what humans consider intelligent and far from fit
| outside the micro-world (you could do it with adaptive game-
| theory solvers, say).
| joenathanone wrote:
| Marketing team says "no".
| cyberlab wrote:
| AI these days can be seen as nothing more than a bunch of code
| used to offload human manual labor to machines, and nothing more.
| Strong AI[0] is the real sought after gem we all want, but also
| the one that could cause problems (since it could 'run away' from
| the inventors and end up controlling humanity in some form).
|
| I imagine if we really wanted to build our final invention[1]
| then we would have to be under some existential pressure to do
| so. In other words: we would build a 'run away' AI if it could
| potentially save humanity. Also worth reading this:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_artificial_intellige...
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_AI
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Final_Invention
| SolarNet wrote:
| This so much.
|
| To say nothing of the fact there is a risk of another AI winter
| when NN/ML continues to not produce (the promised) results.
| mattnewton wrote:
| I think it's producing plenty, but it will never live up to the
| hype of singularity-enabling Asimov-style superior super-
| intelligences that are being promised regularly to be just
| around the corner.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| I think there's some "missing link" here, I think we'll have
| human brains merging with computers to create a symbiotic AI
| relationship that's less artificial but more "enhanced" for
| already existing "intelligence", this enhancing is probably
| the equivalent of the singularity, or pre-cursor to it, as we
| are able to research faster and faster with our computer-
| aided brains, we might get to AGI easier/quicker.
|
| We're at least 30 years away from that though, if not 100.
| Immortality tech, may be easier to accomplish.
| northisup wrote:
| how many dimensions does my linear equation need before it is AI?
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| "Ok, we'll call it Quantum instead." /s
| colesantiago wrote:
| "No wait... I got it, 'Quantum Leap', this is huge, I'm sure
| our R&D team won't mind this." /s
| 8note wrote:
| Most things are quantized anyways, so at least it's accurate
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Having grown up with 8 and 16 bit games systems and the term AI
| being used to describe the computer opponents (eg in beat em ups)
| I've long since learned not to take the term AI literally.
|
| The problem is the term never had a technical definition. It was
| always just a hand waving marketing phrase for "clever
| algorithms".
| butterknife wrote:
| Yes please! It's disheartening to engage in discussions where
| Airbus' autopilot is used as an example of advanced AI.
| Guest42 wrote:
| I appreciate this notion. It seems as though AI has become a
| fancy marketing term for stats. I also think there are times when
| knowing which types of models are used would be really helpful.
| Having built models with neural nets and glms on the same data
| sets, there are pros and cons to a variety of approaches and
| oftentimes the simple ones win, even after a 6 month detailed
| analysis of all the predictors.
| codetrotter wrote:
| > "People are getting confused about the meaning of AI in
| discussions of technology trends--that there is some kind of
| intelligent thought in computers that is responsible for the
| progress and which is competing with humans," he says. "We don't
| have that, but people are talking as if we do."
|
| How much more am I as a human really than the machine learning
| algorithms are?
| 256lie wrote:
| How much more of a human are you than a radio? A computer?
| nerdponx wrote:
| A lot? A machine learning algorithm is a task-specific pattern
| matching algorithm. Sea cucumbers are probably more
| "intelligent" than any ML algorithm.
| [deleted]
| josefx wrote:
| Most are pre trained and intentionally left incapable of
| learning on the go. One probably would count that as a rather
| major issue when encountered in a human.
| stagger87 wrote:
| I guess when we understand how the brain works, we'll be able
| to answer this.
| jmfldn wrote:
| Fundamentally different I would say. I understand enough
| about the brain to say that talking about any kind of machine
| intelligence in relation to brains, is comparing apples and
| oranges. Its not computing things in any way analogous to how
| a computer works. Why would it be?
|
| Of course, computers might be able to imitate some things and
| far exceed some things that our brains do. That's different
| though.
| stagger87 wrote:
| I guess when we understand how the brain works, we can
| determine if your statements are true.
| hervature wrote:
| I get that you comment is tongue in cheek, but your brain
| doesn't have a clock signal. Easily verifiable and we
| could easily detect it if it did. Thus, computers are
| fundamentally different than brains. Also, computers have
| nearly perfect recall and perform arithmetic much better
| than humans. So both statements of GP are true.
| arduinomancer wrote:
| It annoyed me at first but I don't think it matters.
|
| The technical people involved have since moved on to using AGI as
| the term for "actual AI" for years now.
| 256lie wrote:
| That presumes technical people believe in AGI. I would think
| more ML researchers don't so just avoid the term "AI".
| Lammy wrote:
| "AI" always feels like a slur to me honestly. Who am I to call
| other intelligence artificial?
| csimon80 wrote:
| A little late for that now...
| gfaure wrote:
| I admire the reach of "Two Minute Papers", but that guy has got
| to stop calling everything an AI for the sake of YouTube views.
| veltas wrote:
| >Stop Calling Everything AI, AI Pioneer Says
| wunderflix wrote:
| 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...
| baron_harkonnen wrote:
| > Seth Godin - a marketer!
|
| Like most clever things marketers do, that quote is borrowed
| nearly verbatim from a _much_ older quote without reference.
|
| "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet."
|
| From Douglas Hofstadter quoting Larry Tesler in 1980
|
| Anyone who has studied AI and its history at all knows that
| similar quotes to Godin have been going on since the 70s an
| even that quote from Tesler.
|
| There's an entire wikipedia article on the AI effect[0] if you
| want to dive deeper.
|
| 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
| temac wrote:
| 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)
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| hervature wrote:
| Well unless you read it as "humans do the hard part" and so a
| product with AI can make substantial use of computer systems
| as long as humans are at the helm. The definition is
| obviously bad because you wouldn't consider a fire AI because
| a computer can't do that. The definition needs an additional
| stipulation that AI is a computing program.
| wunderflix wrote:
| I understand what you are saying and I tend to agree. But: AI
| would then be way more specific to computers. Science Fiction
| is a very broad term also applied to biology, engineering
| etc.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| When I listen to marketers and journalists I always assume AI
| means "Algorithm" and Blockchain means "Decentralised"
| Semiapies wrote:
| I assume "AI" means there's at least one conditional branch in
| the code.
| s0rce wrote:
| The worst is when marketers and journalists talk about your own
| research.
| whatshisface wrote:
| I would say that blockchain usually means "with hash trees."
| There are a lot of centralized hash tree products marketed as
| blockchain technology.
|
| Also, "Algorithm" might be a little too narrow, "computer
| program" fits the colloquial use of AI a little better. :)
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