[HN Gopher] Peter Norvig: Singularity is in the eye of the beholder
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Peter Norvig: Singularity is in the eye of the beholder
Author : astdb
Score : 68 points
Date : 2021-06-06 12:16 UTC (10 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (wandb.ai)
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| I've always been a bit of an A.I. skeptic/grinch, but there are
| things to very much like here.
|
| Firstly, is an idea that we've deeper learned ML quite a lot, and
| we need more representations / abstract thinking again to make
| more fundamental progress. Nice, I like the sound of that.
|
| Secondly,
|
| > ... So Christian Szegedy and Sarah Loos have the system where
| you take sort of a regular theorem prover and you give it a
| problem. And then you have a neural net decide out of the million
| axioms I have, which 100 are most relevant to this problem. ...
|
| I also thought combining machine learning with theorem provers
| would be an excellent avenue for further research: we have
| abstract reasoning that doesn't "go wrong" as it does in many end
| applications ("expert systems don't work"), but is also still
| extremely "rich", and not trivially automated because it's
| intractable without intuition/heuristics.
|
| Glad to hear the big leagers are also interested.
| endtime wrote:
| > But if you've got log paper, then all the lines are straight
| lines and there's nothing special about right now. It was a
| straight line yesterday and it'll be a straight line tomorrow.
|
| I don't understand this point. If a point is interesting on an
| exponential curve, e.g. because it's within a human lifespan of
| human intelligence being exceeded (which I think is the context
| of the quote; I'm not looking to debate this point), how does
| changing the Y axis to a log scale make that any less
| interesting?
| cgearhart wrote:
| His point seems to be that progress isn't accelerating faster
| than it has previously, and there's already a long history of
| computers overtaking human performance at various tasks for
| decades--chess, go, handwriting recognition, and so on--so
| which task is the final step to reach singularity? If there is
| no single moment, then each advancement is just part of the
| normal expected progress like all the others before it. And if
| the pace of progress isn't accelerating faster now than it ever
| has before then there's really nothing special about this point
| in time.
|
| I suspect that computers will be vastly superior to humans in
| many, many tasks long before we acknowledge that the
| singularity has already happened.
| paganel wrote:
| Really interesting transcript, highly recommend it. Regarding
| this:
|
| > Well, what if I do that an infinite number of times, then it's
| no longer a mountain. When does it not become a mountain, right?
| So we don't quite have answers to that.
|
| Is interesting how 21st century technologists are basically
| asking the same questions as Socrates and his disciples were
| asking ~2500 years ago. If I remember correctly (I last read some
| Plato about 15 years ago) the example that Socrates gives related
| to that is one about a table. Is a table with only 3 legs still a
| table? Probably, many would say. Is a table with only 2 legs
| still a table. Less probably. Is a table without any legs still a
| table? Probably not. Is it correct to ask about the _idea_ of a
| table? i.e. is there such a thing as a table in the abstract? (or
| a mountain in the abstract, to go back to Norvig 's example).
| Plato famously thought that there was such an _idea_ , many other
| Greek philosophers were a lot more ambivalent about it (with
| Heraclitus I think the best-known example).
|
| What I'm trying to say is that maybe today's engineers should go
| back to reading some philosophy, not the modern US-version of
| analytical philosophy which doesn't teach anyone almost anything,
| but all the way back from the Greeks up until the late 19th-early
| 20th century, maybe that way those engineers would also be more
| forthcoming in accepting their ethical responsibilities. I
| personally didn't like how Norvig was quick to set aside AI's
| ethical responsibilities, passing the hot potato to the general
| field of engineering, i.e. to no-one in particular.
| [deleted]
| vintagedave wrote:
| > Is it correct to ask about the idea of a table? i.e. is there
| such a thing as a table in the abstract?
|
| If you rephrase the question as, "Is there such a thing as a
| more real table than this table?", or if "Ceci n'est pas une
| pipe" sparks joy (or puzzlement) in your heart, you might enjoy
| reading Neal Stephenson's Anathem.
|
| I can't write why, for spoilers. I can say the book is heavily
| inspired by Platonism, as well as many other things. If a
| science fiction story about philosophical monks, astronomy, and
| adventure appeals to you, give it a read.
| machello13 wrote:
| In general, many engineers could benefit from a well-rounded
| education in the humanities.
| ithkuil wrote:
| And vice versa
| enw wrote:
| > Is it correct to ask about the idea of a table? i.e. is there
| such a thing as a table in the abstract?
|
| I don't understand. The "idea" of a table is an object that
| provides a level surface to place stuff on.
|
| What am I missing? What is the interesting part?
| herbstein wrote:
| > The "idea" of a table is an object that provides a level
| surface to place stuff on.
|
| You surely wouldn't call a boulder sticking out of the earth
| "a table", even if it did have a conveniently level surface
| to place stuff on? The point is that what we call "a table"
| is not just about function - it's also about form.
| webmaven wrote:
| Is a stone altar a table?
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| https://www.visitnc.com/listing/FmKV/table-rock
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Questions like that, "the paradox of the heap", etc are kind of
| the unanswered question of ontology. Modern AI research has
| been criticized for not being especially interested in those
| questions when building their devices.
|
| Such questions reappear on higher levels when you're reasoning
| about AI. But since the field hasn't been grappling with them
| overall, I'm doubtful they'll come up with great insight at
| this point.
| bsaul wrote:
| My personnal favorite regarding this kind of philosophical
| thinking similarities is Husserl "eidetic variations" method
| for finding what properties constitutes the essence of a
| concept (*).
|
| We programmer do it instinctively, but having read about it
| gives me such a greater confidence to actually apply it
| methodically every time i design a type hierarchy...
|
| (*) basically, the idea is to mutate the property, and see if
| the object's essence is unchanged. If it is unchanged, then the
| property _isn 't_ constitutive of its essence. As an example,
| changing the color of a table doesn't change the fact that it's
| a table, so "color" isn't an attribute of the "Table" concept.
| Number of feet, however, could very well be (or at least a
| boolean "has feet" ;)
| ineedasername wrote:
| _Is it correct to ask about the idea of a table?_
|
| That's pretty much what Plato believed, but also that for the
| most part we can never access that Platonic Ideal. We could
| only, in effect, access the equivalent of shadows on the wall
| case by light against objects. Seeing only shadows for all of
| our lives, we believe they are the true reality since that is
| all of reality that we perceive.
|
| As a concept it is a strong precursor (and no doubt a strong
| influence) on Immanuel Kant's work. He basically pointed out
| that we have only 5 senses, and each those are intermediated by
| various layers, and so even through those sense we do not
| experience the thing in itself, and are limited by those 5
| senses. And of course we know that other animals have other
| senses. We have invented some of artificial ones of our own
| (vision that is heat based instead of light based, etc).
|
| If you're interests go in that direction. his work _Prolegomena
| to all Future Metaphysics_ is where he begins to explore this.
| It 's dense, but not too inaccessible as philosophical texts go
| especially if you have the background in logical reasoning and
| layered abstractions that programming instills. Here's a link
| to a free Google Books version that also allows PDF download:
| https://www.google.com/books/edition/Kant_s_Prolegomena_to_A...
|
| Incidentally, Kant was 100% correct: His ideas were so
| compelling that pretty much any philosopher after him looking
| to explore metaphysics could not simply dismiss them out of
| hand.
|
| Secondarily, _Prolegomena_ was also somewhat of a response to
| work by David Hume on the nature & human perception of
| causality, and together they formed the foundations upon which
| science has continued develop that area of physics, even if it
| has moved on somewhat from those earlier ideas.
|
| I think Philosophy often gets a bad name today as a useless of
| self-indulgent field, but it's important to remember that
| philosophers were in many ways the first scientists and refined
| the ideas & practices that ultimately developed into the
| scientific method, breaking off into a separate (but still
| connected) branch of study. For modern examples where that
| synergy still exists, the works of Danielle Dennet are an
| excellent example.
| ethn wrote:
| Critique is the response to Hume vs Berkeley, not
| Prolegomena.
|
| Prolegomena is less rigorous and in-style than Critique.
| yesenadam wrote:
| i.e. _The Critique of Pure Reason_. (Kant wrote 3
| _Critiques_ ) It's known as one of the most difficult-to-
| read philosophy books in history, though, so don't expect
| to pick it up and understand what he's saying. I did an
| entire university course on the book--I mostly studied
| philosophy at university--which was gruelling, and sometime
| later when a girlfriend saw the fat book on my shelf and
| asked what it's about, looked horrified when I couldn't
| tell her. Never heard anyone say he was 100% right, though.
| Particularly his own successors (Neo-Kantians) who, I
| believe, thought important parts of his system should be
| dropped--mainly, Kant's reality/the noumenon/thing-in-
| itself that we can never know or say anything about.
|
| (The most helpful link I can think of is James Franklin's
| article on Stove's Gem, the "Worst Argument in the World"--
| Very lucid writing, and not a bad introduction to talk of
| things-in-themselves.
| https://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/worst.html )
| tim333 wrote:
| For what it's worth the original tech singularity idea was from
| John von Neumann in the 1950s:
|
| "The ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the
| mode of human life give the appearance of approaching some
| essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which
| human affairs, as we know them, could not continue."
|
| Which I guess is kind of in the eye of the beholder.
|
| That said he misrepresents Kurzweil a bit with "if you're
| Kurzweil all the curves are exponential and they're going up. And
| right now is a special time." Kurzweil has already said the
| singularity will be about 2045 and now is not a special time in
| that way.
| [deleted]
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