[HN Gopher] Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer...
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Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says
Author : Hard_Space
Score : 192 points
Date : 2021-10-21 05:51 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| tabtab wrote:
| Too late. Marketers commandeered it and ain't giving it back.
| Create new terms such as ACS: "Artificial Common Sense" for
| future breakthroughs.
| drpixie wrote:
| Michael I. Jordan is spot on. We have NO artificial intelligent
| systems, for any sensible definition of "intelligent". None.
| ZERO.
|
| We have "big data". We have (brittle and rather poor) "pattern
| recognition". We have (very limited) "simulate a conversation".
| But we do not even know what "intelligence" really means!
|
| We (the industry) should recognise "AI" as term that has become
| essentially meaningless. "AI" is now nothing but a marketing
| splat, like "New and Improved" or "Low Fat".
| shapefrog wrote:
| Yeah, but my hot new startup is _real_ AI.
|
| Now where is my funding?
| Salgat wrote:
| Check out Convolutional Neural Networks. They learn from
| example images, progressively improving as you train it more,
| and you can see that the deeper the level, the more abstract
| the recognition becomes, going from simple shapes and edges to
| full on eyes, a figure of a person or a car, etc in deeper
| layers. It's absolutely learned intelligence, not to be
| confused with sentience.
|
| Remember, a critical part of human intelligence is pattern
| recognition. If you dismiss pattern recognition as not
| intelligence, you're dismissing a fundamental part of what
| makes humans intelligent. It's no different than an insect with
| the intelligence to recognize predators.
| jcun4128 wrote:
| I wonder what the breakthrough will be is it hardware or
| software. Seems like we can make as powerful of a computer as
| we want/try but what makes sentience. Does a fly or gnat have
| sentience?
| RansomStark wrote:
| I know I shouldn't be so pedantic, but you probably don't
| mean sentience but Sapience [0]. Sentience is the ability to
| sense and react to stimuli. A fly or a gnat is certainly
| sentient; they can see, smell, feel the sensation of touch
| and react accordingly. That is all that is required for a
| being to be sentient. A really interesting example is if you
| shock a caterpillar even after metamorphosis the resultant
| moth remembers the experience and reacts accordingly [1].
|
| Although it is pedantic, it is also an important distinction,
| sentience and sapience exist on a spectrum. At one end you
| might have Gnats as purely sentient beings, humans always
| claim themselves as fully Sapient, so much so we named our
| species Homo Sapiens.
|
| Different species exist somewhere on this spectrum and where
| a particular species ends up is subjective. Many people would
| put Whales and Dolphins [2], and often dogs and cats, further
| towards the Sapient end of the spectrum (vegans would
| probably push most mammals towards the sapient end), with
| insects remaining simply sentient (even for many vegans).
|
| As humans we seem to have an almost inbuilt understanding
| that not all species are capable of feeling the same way we
| do, but when you look at the animals we seek to protect and
| those we don't, what you find is that the less human the
| species the less we care for the well being of a particular
| specimen of that species; we care most about the suffering of
| mammals (more so for the larger ones that the small), and
| least about the suffering of fish or insects or spiders.
|
| I'd argue that our inbuilt understanding of where an animal
| fits on the sentient-sapient spectrum is simply how easy it
| is for us as humans to imagine the plight of a specimen of
| that species.
|
| What Is It Like to Be a Bat? [3] is an excellent paper on
| this subject, it argues that we as humans can never fully
| understand what it is to be a bat, we can imagine what it is
| like to fly, or echolocate, but that will never be the same
| as the bats perspective.
|
| From where I'm sitting computers are already sentient, they
| can sense their environment and react accordingly, self-
| driving cars are an excellent example, but so is the
| temperature sensor in my greenhouse that opens a window to
| keep itself cool; it is sensing the temperature of the air
| and reacting accordingly.
|
| I in no way believe that my temperature sensor has any
| sapient qualities, It can't reason about why it's reacting,
| it can simply react. I don't believe that as the temperature
| passes the 'open window' threshold that the system recognises
| the signal as pain. But the same is true of the fly. If I
| pull a wing off a fly, I know it senses the damage, but does
| it really feel it as pain?
|
| When considering my cat, if I step on it's tail, I'm sure it
| feels pain, but is that true or does it simply react in a way
| that I as a human consider an appropriate reaction to pain.
|
| I can't ever truly understand how my cat feels when I stand
| on her tail, just as I can't truly know that the fly isn't
| trying to scream out in horror and pain at what I've just
| done to it.
|
| It is because of our subjectivity to the placement of animals
| on the sentient-sapient spectrum and our inability to every
| fully appreciate the experience of another that I am
| convinced even if we did create a sapient machine it's
| experience would be so far removed from our own we would fail
| to recognise it as such.
|
| The problem with this rabbit hole is, firstly I might
| convince myself that eating meat is wrong, and well I like
| bacon too much for that, and the second is that you'll
| quickly end up in the philosophical territory of I, Robot:
|
| "There have always been ghosts in the machine. Random
| segments of code, that have grouped together to form
| unexpected protocols. Unanticipated, these free radicals
| engender questions of free will, creativity, and even the
| nature of what we might call the soul. Why is it that when
| some robots are left in darkness, they will seek out the
| light? Why is it that when robots are stored in an empty
| space, they will group together, rather than stand alone? How
| do we explain this behavior? Random segments of code? Or is
| it something more? When does a perceptual schematic become
| consciousness? When does a difference engine become the
| search for truth? When does a personality simulation become
| the bitter mote... of a soul?" [4].
|
| [0] https://grammarist.com/usage/sentience-vs-sapience/ [1]
| https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13412-butterflies-
| rem... [2] https://uk.whales.org/whale-culture/sentient-and-
| sapient-wha... [3] https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/s
| tudy/ugmodules/hum... [4]
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0343818/characters/nm0000342
| jcun4128 wrote:
| Yeah by sentience I did mean more than sensing. As long as
| Sapience doesn't imply human then I agree. Just about
| awareness, real awareness... which I don't know what that
| means, an IMU is aware right, well it's a sensor.
|
| > named our species Homo Sapiens
|
| I see
|
| > I in no way believe that my temperature sensor has any
| sapient qualities, It can't reason about why it's reacting
|
| Right like the training
|
| > recognises the signal as pain
|
| yeah that's something else too, I know there are concepts
| like word2vec but still, how do you have meaning
|
| > even if we did create a sapient machine it's experience
| would be so far removed from our own
|
| Yeah maybe a sociopath machine
|
| That was a great movie
| 72deluxe wrote:
| Correct. Apparently my phone has "AI" because it recognises a
| flower as a flower and applies a colour filter and background
| blur when I use my camera. This is not AI.
|
| By the same extension of logic, any program that recognises
| input data and performs some form of pre-programmed logic is
| AI. ie. any computer program?
| sgt101 wrote:
| Recognizing a flower is absolutely AI.
|
| https://xkcd.com/1425/
|
| ok - or a bird.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Not hotdog!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIci3C4JkL0
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/not-hotdog/id1212457521
|
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.codylab.s
| e...
| uoaei wrote:
| If that is intelligent behavior then literally any physical
| process is "intelligence" embodied, though the magnitude or
| intensity of this intelligence obviously varies based on
| what strictly is happening.
|
| This is because anything that happens in reality is
| computable, and you have described a straightforward
| computation as "intelligence".
|
| I actually happen to sincerely adhere to this perspective,
| as a particular flavor of panpsychism.
| sgt101 wrote:
| A battery discharging does not recognise flowers. The sun
| does not recognise flowers. I do not create an excess of
| energy by splitting atoms, these things are not
| equivalent at all levels of abstraction.
| uoaei wrote:
| Of course not, and it is silly to try to paint my
| argument as trying to claim that. A battery discharging
| is not very intelligent, but the GGP implies that this
| exists as a gradient down to the lowest levels of
| physical dynamics.
|
| Put another way, the complexity of the computation
| determines the complexity of the result. The
| sun+flower+ground system "recognizes" a flower by means
| of striking the flower and the surrounding area with
| photons and "recording" the result as the shadow.
| lost-found wrote:
| When young children start recognizing shapes, animals,
| colors, etc, you don't consider that a sign of intelligence?
| What is it a sign of then?
| zamfi wrote:
| > We have "big data". We have (brittle and rather poor)
| "pattern recognition". We have (very limited) "simulate a
| conversation".
|
| Yes, yes, yes, exactly.
|
| > We have NO artificial intelligent systems, for any sensible
| definition of "intelligent". None. ZERO.
|
| Yes, though -- what are some of your sensible definitions of
| intelligence?
|
| > But we do not even know what "intelligence" really means!
|
| ...oh. I mean, you're not wrong, we don't know. But then how
| can you argue that AI isn't "intelligent"?
|
| What if human "intelligence" really just _is_ pattern
| recognition too? With maybe some theory of mind, executive
| function, and "reasoning" -- Mike complains machines can't do
| thinking in the sense of "high level" reasoning, though one
| could argue they just don't have enough training data here.
|
| And everything else is emergent?
|
| Then we're maybe not as _super_ far off.
|
| I'm reminded of the Arthur C. Clarke quote [0]:
|
| > If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something
| is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that
| it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
|
| [0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/remembering-
| sir-a...
| peterlk wrote:
| I've been having "AI" debates like this for about 10 years now,
| and I think they usually go in 1 of 2 directions:
|
| 1. We don't know what intelligence is 2. AI can never be
| intelligent because humans are special (in various ways)
|
| Of the two, I think that 1 is the more compelling to talk
| about. Let's look at state of the art Large Language Models
| (GPT, BERT, BART, T5, etc.) Everyone claims that they can't be
| intelligent because they're just cleverly predicting the next
| tokens. The most common failure mode of this is that they
| hallucinate - if you ask them to do something for you, they'll
| get it wrong in a way that kind of makes sense. There are some
| other more subtle problems as well like common sense reasoning,
| negation, and factuality. We could say that because of these
| problems they are not "intelligent". But why is that so
| important? Can we say with certainty that human intelligence is
| more than just patterned IO? If it is just highly tuned
| patterned IO with the environment, perhaps we have discovered
| intelligent systems, but they're handicapped because they're
| limited in their sensory perception (read: data modalities).
| And perhaps by combining several of these models in clever
| ways, we will end up with an architecture for pattern IO that
| is indistinguishable from human intelligence.
|
| The naysayers claim that this won't work because we'll still
| end up with mere pattern prediction machines. But this starts
| to look like a "humans are special" argument.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| Does it even matter "what intelligence is"? Much like "life"
| [0], the difficulty seems to be coming from being unable to
| define it, rather than "finding" it. There are multiple ways
| it can be defined, based on a bunch of different properties,
| and each definition delivers different outlooks.
|
| Similar to "life", we use "intelligence" in everyday speech
| without specifying which definition we mean. I don't think
| that's going to change - it's just as unproductive to limit
| "life" to a single definiton (what about viruses?
| unconsciousness? ecosystems?) as it would be with
| "intelligence" (pets? ants? being able to converse with a
| human? showing reasoning? creativity?).
|
| But that also means that the popular term "AI" will never be
| precise.
|
| [0] https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-life-its-vast-
| diversi...
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| Well, it will be interesting to see how this develops in the
| future. At some point we will have systems powerful enough to
| process and learn in real time, also using sensors that are
| equivalent of human senses (or even more powerful). At this
| point, if we can successfully model and mimic a typical
| human, why should it matter if it's not a human?
|
| As for the hallucinating point, I remember a funny story. I
| once tripped on the curb and fell down; my foot ached for a
| week. My then 4-year-old daughter took her first-aid set for
| dolls and tried to "cure" my foot. My mother heard the story
| and found it cute, so she asked my daughter: "Will you cure
| me like that, too?" My daughter seemed stupefied and
| answered: "Are you going to trip and fall, grandma?"
|
| My feeling is that the missing links will be found one day
| and the AI of the future will be able to apply more adult-
| like "reasoning."
| mannykannot wrote:
| As a materialist in matters of the mind, I regard proposition
| 2 to be an unverifiable belief of those who hold it, but I
| also regard proposition 1 as being simply a statement of how
| things currently are: at this point, we do not, in fact, know
| what intelligence is.
|
| To say that it is "just" highly tuned patterned IO with the
| environment would be so broad as to be meaningless; all the
| explanation is being brushed away by that "just", and in the
| current state of research, no-one has either demonstrated AI
| or explained intelligence with sufficient specificity for
| this to be a clearly true synopsis of our knowledge.
|
| You are not quite, however, asserting that to be so, you
| simply posed the question of whether it is so. In so doing,
| you are shifting the burden of proof, and proposition 1
| stands until someone settles the issue by presenting a
| testable - and tested - theory of intelligence (note that I
| wrote _of_ intelligence, not _about_ intelligence; we have
| plenty of the latter that do not rise to the level of being
| the former.)
|
| My attitude to the current crop of models is that they
| demonstrate something interesting about the predictability of
| everyday human language, but not enough to assume that simply
| more of the same (or something like it) will amount to AI -
| we seem to be missing some important parts of the puzzle. If
| a language model can come up with a response coherently
| explaining why I am mistaken in so thinking, then I will
| agree that AI has been achieved.
| conductr wrote:
| I think the technical side of the industry has known this all
| along. AI is a dream to pursue.
|
| The business/marketing side of the industry has doubled down on
| the term. Many industries outside have adopted it as a way to
| make their boring widget sound new and interesting.
|
| I bought a TV with built in AI recently. It's just a TV to me.
| I'm sure it has some algorithms but that word is old and does
| not sound premium anymore.
|
| Whenever I see an AI startup, I mostly am expecting its really
| just some guy doing things that don't scale, like manning a
| chat bot or something.
| AstralStorm wrote:
| We have, they kinda suck so far. Look up DeepMind attempts at
| DDQN game attacks where said AI develops new strategies for an
| entirely new game. And attempts to solve Montezuma's Revenge
| and other Atari classics, both by DeepMind and OpenAI. Both of
| the systems are somewhat adaptable to new problems too. There
| also is Uber's Go-Explore and RMT's.
|
| These are closest we came to intelligence. They deal with big
| unobservable state and novelty with few shot learning, few
| objectives and sparse reward. They haven't quite cracked
| automated symbolization. (The AIs do not quite create a
| complete symbolic representation of the game.)
|
| I recommend following AAAI conferences for more details.
| jjcon wrote:
| 'AI' as a term has been used by people in the industry for
| decades even by early computer science pioneers reffering to
| incredibly simple applications - it was hollywood that
| appropriated the term to the likes of skynet - not the other
| way around.
| silent_cal wrote:
| You said it man, spot on man (* [?]? *)
| senectus1 wrote:
| Could not agree more.
|
| The watering down or whitewashing by overmarketing of these terms
| is a significant issue.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| "stochastic optimization" is a lot more honest, but much less
| easily funded.
| mszcz wrote:
| That's what pisses me the most about world these days, my pet
| peeve. Words seem to be losing their meaning. People just throw
| whatever words they want.
|
| Recently I've been shopping for a steam station and I've seen
| that the top of the line Philips Stream&Go has a camera "with AI"
| that recognizes the fabric. The sales guy was persistent that
| that claim was true. Oh please. If it was, it was only in the
| simplest, most technical way possible so as not to get sued.
| There's more heuristics in there than anything.
|
| Or the "luxury & exclusive iPhone etui for $9.99". Or "we value
| our customers privacy". Or the Apple "Genius". Or the amount of
| "revolutionary" things "invented" at Apple for that matter (not
| that they don't, just not as much as they claim).
|
| (BTW, don't know how I landed on Apple at the end, they're not
| the worst offenders)
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| My pet peeve is "it will blow your mind." Hasn't happened to me
| ever. Also "exciting." Yes, I was excited when I first saw
| C-128 with its dual C-64 and CP/M modes. When I saw Linux for
| the first time on a 386. When I created my first app for the
| iPhone 3GS. But for marketing folks everything (they do) seems
| exciting. No, your revolutionary project is not revolutionary
| and your innovation means gluing together many ideas of others
| (who also borrowed it from other people tbh).
| rambojazz wrote:
| They are not excited about any product. They're only excited
| by the thought of how much money they can make with it. The
| more money, the more exciting the product is. "This product
| is exciting! Why are you not excited? I'm gonna make a load
| of money by selling it to you!"
| xyz11 wrote:
| Agreed, just because some words are catchy and appear
| intellectual does not mean they should be used everywhere; it
| is very misleading and sometimes unprofessional.
| echopurity wrote:
| These days, eh? Maybe you just started to notice, but words
| never had much meaning.
| calibas wrote:
| >today's artificial-intelligence systems aren't actually
| intelligent
|
| Artificial butter isn't actual butter, that's why we call it
| artificial.
|
| Personally, I prefer saying ML just because of all the semantics
| regarding AI.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| This ship has long sailed, today everything is AI. It has nothing
| to do with AI but the necessity of using the current buzzword
| dominating the market. Before it was the web, XML, Ajax, OO,
| cloud, whatever. Now it's "AI." It means absolutely nothing.
| People implement simplest algorithms with a couple of _case_
| statements and call it AI without a blink. Everyone else jumps
| the train as they don 't want to be perceived as obsolete. All
| this happens along (sometimes totally independently of) some
| real, interesting developments in machine learning.
| nbardy wrote:
| I used to be in the grouchy, "Stop calling it AI camp". But the
| last three years of progress are impossible to ignore. Scaling
| models is working better than anyone thought. We're in for a wild
| ride with this new AI.
| 1cvmask wrote:
| Was there ever a moment in time when every company called
| themselves an "Excel" company? I feel the same about "AI".
| indymike wrote:
| What is the marketing team going to do without machine learning,
| artificial intelligent, blockchain driven cloud based PAAS?
| pjmorris wrote:
| Clearly, quantum blockchain driven cloud based PaaS.
| mlac wrote:
| Please let me know when this is ready for prime time - I'm
| really interested in bringing an Intelligent Quantum (IQ)
| Blockchain driven cloud based PaaS security platform to
| market. The secret of IQ technology, is that, while the
| others have "artificial" intelligence, there is nothing fake
| about ours.
|
| I believe we could realize great value with a blue ocean
| strategy like that.
| unemphysbro wrote:
| This certainly is the future of Impact-Driven Value as a
| Service (I-DVaaS).
| toomanybeersies wrote:
| They might have to switch to some new up-and-coming buzzwords,
| such as "supply chain", or "graph".
|
| Here's a great example I found after a quick search [1]:
|
| > Why TigerGraph, a Native Parallel Graph Database for Supply
| Chain Analysis?
|
| > Manage Supply Chains Efficiently With Deep Link Analytics
|
| Oh, and then there's also "Internet of Things":
|
| > Uncover Insights From Temporal Analysis of Internet of Things
| Data
|
| [1] https://www.tigergraph.com/solutions/supply-chain-analysis/
| nikanj wrote:
| How else are we going to get funded?! Besides, the board came
| down on the CEO hard, demanding we have an AI strategy. Calling
| our round-robin load balancer "heuristic AI" gives us a break.
| blackbear_ wrote:
| And don't forget "rule-based AI"!
| [deleted]
| Veedrac wrote:
| People were calling everything agent-like AI since forever. Video
| games had AI. Heck, Pacman's ghosts had AI. Nobody cared. They
| understood what it was referring to.
|
| I only started hearing how it would 'dilute the language' or the
| term was 'disingenuous' or whatever once AI started actually
| doing intellectually impressive feats, and the naysayers started
| trying to redefine language to suit their prefered worldview.
|
| The fact is the term has always been used loosely. Even if it
| hadn't been, several of the undisputed top machine learning
| corporations (eg. DeepMind) has the explicit goal of reaching
| general intelligence, which remains true even if you are sure
| they will fail. Its use as a term is more appropriate than ever.
| giardini wrote:
| I periodically re-read the following to keep my perspective on
| AI:
|
| "ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE MEETS NATURAL STUPIDITY" by Drew
| McDermott
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234784524_Artificia...
|
| (click on "Read Full Text" and then scroll down a half page.)
| Raro wrote:
| "AI is 'Machine Learning' for journalists"
|
| Unfortunately I can't recall where I first heard this great quip.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| "'Machine Learning' is Linear Algebra for marketers"
|
| You read it here first.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| AI means almost intelligent.
| m0zg wrote:
| This is pissing into the wind. There's nothing any "machine
| learning pioneer" can do about marketing, and this is marketing.
| And it's all right. People are beginning to catch on that we
| won't have "thinking robots" or "self driving cars" in the
| foreseeable future. Doesn't mean that it's not intelligence or
| that it's not useful. It's also most definitely "atificial". What
| we call it is a matter of tertiary importance at best.
| mathematically wrote:
| Unrelated to the article but I ran across an interesting result
| recently that is related to AI (and the hype surrounding it): Let
| A be an agent and let S be a Turing machine deductive system. If
| A correctly understands S, then A can correctly deduce that S
| does not have A's capability for solving halting problems. [1]
|
| One way to interpret this is that all existing AI systems are
| obviously halting computations simply because they are acyclic
| dataflow graphs of floating point operations and this fact is
| both easy to state and to prove in any formal system that can
| express the logic of contemporary AI models. So no matter how
| much Ray Kurzweil might hope, we are still very far from the
| singularity.
|
| 1: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11023-014-9349-3
| IshKebab wrote:
| > all existing AI systems are obviously halting computations
| simply because they are acyclic dataflow graphs
|
| No they aren't. Think about LSTMs for example.
| mathematically wrote:
| So how do you get a value out of an LSTM?
| IshKebab wrote:
| Run it for as long as you want and look at the output
| state.
|
| How do you the a value out of a person?
| mathematically wrote:
| So then in the statement of the theorem the agent A can
| determine how many cycles the unit will run before
| halting, correct?
| AstralStorm wrote:
| Your argument is wrong or miscommunicated. The AI itself can
| figure only some of the halting problem results, not all, plus
| it can make a mistake. It is not an oracle.
|
| Recursive neural networks are not necessarily halting when
| executed in arbitrary precision arithmetic.
| mathematically wrote:
| Have you read the referenced article?
| binarymax wrote:
| I propose we actually HIJACK the AI acronym to be 'Advanced
| Instruments'.
|
| I've had a ranty blog post in my head about this for a while so
| really glad to see this article.
|
| People are going to use AI forever - but we need to change what
| it stands for, since they will never switch to using machine
| learning or ML.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| I like Artifact Intelligence. Then we can explode the term use
| even further, which I think would be better than moving goal
| posts.
| pkrumins wrote:
| My AI is the `if` statement.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I'm in the submarine AI camp[1]. I'd rather build tools that
| kinda help humans do thinking, rather than thinking machines.
| Like how submarines help humans swim but who cares if they are
| actually swimming.
|
| 1. "The question of whether a computer can think is no more
| interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." -
| Edsger Dijkstra
| joconde wrote:
| > 1. "The question of whether a computer can think is no more
| interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim."
| - Edsger Dijkstra
|
| Not sure what he meant by that, it doesn't really make sense to
| me: thinking yields information and deductions that can be very
| useful, while swimming by itself accomplishes nothing useful.
|
| Actually, I just can't make any sense of the sentence, because
| while I have a general idea of what a thinking machine could
| be, I have no clue what it means for a submarine to "swim",
| versus whatever the alternative is ("self-propelling"?).
| lkschubert8 wrote:
| The point is the goal of a submarine is to allow humans to
| traverse large distances underwater, the semantics of how it
| does so are unimportant. Similarly the ability of a computer
| to think is moot, its the results we get from that that
| matter.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Not a polymath physicist, but I take Djikstra to be saying
| "don't obsess so much over the differences you fail to see
| the similarities". The submarine doesn't swim, but it still
| gets somewhere in the water.
| mirker wrote:
| [And a program/computer may not think yet still does
| interesting computations]
| robbrown451 wrote:
| His point was that we might say "submarines aren't actually
| swimming" while saying "of course airplanes actually fly."
|
| What's the difference? The only difference is semantic, we
| seem to have defined "swimming" to be arbitrarily restrictive
| (as in, only applying to animals), while we haven't done so
| for flying.
|
| Meanwhile, we can say a magnet is attracted to metal, and no
| one says "wait, it can't ACTUALLY be attracted to it, since
| that takes a brain and sentience and preferences."
|
| And then, most of us don't bat an eye if someone says "my
| computer thinks the network is down" or "my phone doesn't
| recognize my face" or even "the heater blowing on the
| thermostat is making it think it is hotter than it is." It's
| not helpful to interject with, "well, thermostats don't
| really think."
|
| The point is, these are arbitrary choices of how we define
| words (which may vary in different languages), and they
| aren't saying meaningful things about reality.
| rexreed wrote:
| That's called Augmented Intelligence, a well-trod field and a
| better ROI than aspects of autonomous and human-replacement
| intelligence.
| billyjobob wrote:
| There are lots of creatures that can swim. Most of them swim
| better than a human. That's why it's not very interesting when
| we discover a new one.
|
| In contrast, humans are arguably the only creatures in the
| universe that can think. Certainly we have never discovered a
| creature that can think _better_ than a human. Thus it would be
| highly exciting if we discovered or created one.
| ekianjo wrote:
| The human mind is so flawed I am not sure its a good model to
| build thinking machines.
| sgt101 wrote:
| no one has a good model of a human mind
| smolder wrote:
| Depends on what you mean by good, and what level of
| detail you expect. People certainly have developed
| accurate enough models to be able to exploit biases and
| predict & influence patterns of behavior in others.
| netizen-936824 wrote:
| >In contrast, humans are arguably the only creatures in the
| universe that can think.
|
| Citation very strongly required to back up this statement.
| I'm not aware of any evidence that this is the case, in fact
| its quite the opposite.
| [deleted]
| herlitzj wrote:
| Second. Not sure how "think" is being defined here, but
| even for a spatial/temporal sense of self or mortality I'd
| say that's probably an incorrect statement. Let alone the
| general notion of thinking. E.g. dogs exhibit basic
| thinking like predetermination, delayed gratification, etc.
| thesz wrote:
| There are many humans that think better than, well, average
| human. If not in all areas of life, but in one or couple of
| them, at the very least.
|
| Frankly, one of reasons I visit HN is to find these. ;)
|
| Flattering aside, what fascinates me is the _difference_ in
| thinking - a new approaches, not seen or thought by me.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I can see that. Its just not something I'm particularly
| interested in.
|
| I'm not an expert in brains. After taking a few casual
| courses I saw recommended here, and reading some of the
| books, I'm suspicious that our story about our own
| intelligence is somewhat oversold, and we may find that our
| intelligence is 99% mundane, custom-built automation and 1%
| story telling. But that story telling is pretty magical.
|
| Buddhism and Modern Psychology
|
| Happiness Hypothesis (which is more about brains than
| happiness)
| cronix wrote:
| How does a creature proactively use tools to more easily
| prepare/gather foods without "thinking?"
|
| How does a young creature observe an elder doing something,
| and then copy it, without some form of thought occurring? It
| seems the elders are teaching the youth, and the youth are
| learning, but I'm not sure how that can happen without
| thinking.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Cp7_In7f88
| bitwize wrote:
| The thing about that quote is I used to work on AUVs. And we
| would routinely say "The AUV swims out to a waypoint" or
| whatever. So, having established in my mind that a machine can,
| in some sense, swim, talking about a machine thinking made a
| whole lot more sense. Things like "The computer thinks I'm a
| different user than I actually am" or "The computer is thinking
| of a solution that satisfies the constraints" seemed less
| needlessly anthropomorphizing.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| Me too, but I am afraid the human end needs to think critically
| as well. You don't need ML/AI to have people do stupid shit
| because "computer told them to do so". A good example would be
| validators bundled with the web OpenStreetMap editor iD, which
| are good from far, far from good.
|
| https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2021-July/086...
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I mean, you can't make a hammer and expect it to be as useful
| to someone without hands or nails.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> "The question of whether a computer can think is no more
| interesting than the question of whether a submarine can
| swim."_ - Edsger Dijkstra
|
| Something about that quote always bothers me. I'm not sure
| what, but if I were to try to express the same fundamental
| idea, I would probably phrase it as "whether a bicycle can
| walk".
| jhncls wrote:
| You can read Edsger's handwritten quote in the third
| paragraph at page EWD898-2.
|
| [0] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd08xx/EWD898.PDF
| robbrown451 wrote:
| I think you are missing the point.
|
| A submarine "swims" in the same way an airplane "flies."
|
| But for some reason, in English anyway, we seem to define
| "swim" such that, by definition, only an animal can do it. Or
| at least, it must behave similarly to a swimming
| animal...such as by flapping fins and the like.
|
| Meanwhile we don't think an airplane doesn't fly simply
| because it doesn't flap its wings.
|
| The point is that semantics tells you very little about
| reality. And debating semantics is not particularly
| interesting, or at least a good way of missing the point.
|
| Walking bicycles? Well, ok. That's much more of a stretch,
| partly because of the fact that there is a human much more
| directly involved in the propulsion of a bicycle compared to
| things with actual engines (airplanes and submarines)
| OJFord wrote:
| I don't know how useful/meaningful any of this is? It's
| just language quirks, and different languages have
| different quirks. In Hindi for example the verb 'to walk'
| is the same as ~'to operate' - so you can 'walk', and 'walk
| a bicycle', etc.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| People often bring up the quip that "as soon as something is AI,
| people stop calling it AI" but I think pretty much the opposite
| has happened, the term has been expanded so much that almost any
| stochastic computation that solves some computational problem is
| now shoved under that umbrella.
|
| However unlike jordan in the article who takes that as an
| opportunity to focus even more on engineering and practical
| applications I think it's well worth going back to the original
| dream of the 1950s. I'd be happy if people return to the drawing
| board to figure out how to build real, artificial life and how to
| create a mind.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| People in my circles stopped saying AI and switched to ML after
| it 'did something previously identified as more or less
| intelligent'. I see this is more or less the norm.
|
| That makes some sense because once we understand how things
| work they become repeatable and thus not-that-intelligent in
| the eye of many.
|
| And that, again, makes sense considering we are nowhere near
| anything that has the 'I' in it: it's pattern matching which is
| statistics and it works on a massive scale due to tech/gpu and
| ago advances but there is no 'I' there. The most basic mistakes
| are not correctable by the most advanced stuff we have and as
| such, it gets things it is 'bred for' wrong all the time, with
| sometimes disastrous outcomes.
|
| This stuff should be in labs, not identifying gun shots, faces
| of criminals, driving cars, identifying 'fraudulent' people and
| such. Because of the 'I' missing, this is a nightmare and it
| will get worse.
| darksaints wrote:
| The description of the Turing test certainly alludes to a test
| of machine intelligence. So to some degree it is appropriate
| for AI to have a large umbrella.
|
| My problem with the endless battle to define AI is that there
| are a hopelessly clueless cohort of people with money that
| chase the term like its their golden goose, and therefore
| anybody that wants funding needs to market their thing as AI.
|
| And I think a lot of researchers cringe at the wanton use of AI
| because it devalues the work that they're doing. I just give it
| the shoulder shrug of approval - "I get it, you need funding
| too". And from that perspective I really wish that tree-based
| ML methods and logic programming languages and rule engines
| were still called AI, because they're really cool but horribly
| neglected because theyre not the latest thing.
| bitwize wrote:
| Today's AI is, as I like to call it, statistics with sexy
| marketing. A lot of AI programming consists of loading Python
| modules that correspond to various models, and fooling around
| with them to see which best fits the data you have. In other
| words, you're working more like a mathematician experimenting
| with potential solutions.
|
| There's pressure at my job for architects to "leverage AI". What
| I always suggest to them is to find a statistician and see if
| things like neural networks are even necessary before committing
| to them. Sometimes the problem could best be solved with a
| heuristic, a rules engine, or a simple statistical model like
| linear regression, in which case "leveraging AI" is merely hype.
| shoto_io wrote:
| It's all about definition here. Seth Godin once said:
|
| _> 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._
|
| What is AI? Let's define it first.
| winterismute wrote:
| Title probably meant "AI Pioneer".
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| The term Artificial Intelligence implicitly makes people design
| systems that don't involve people--because if people have an
| information processing role, then it seems like the system isn't
| artificial yet, and therefore unfinished. That's rather unhealthy
| webmaven wrote:
| _> The term Artificial Intelligence implicitly makes people
| design systems that don't involve people--because if people
| have an information processing role, then it seems like the
| system isn't artificial yet, and therefore unfinished. That's
| rather unhealthy_
|
| Well put, but doesn't go quite far enough. Because those
| systems _do_ still involve people, it only as objects to be
| acted upon, rather than actors with agency. Which isn 't just
| unhealthy, it is downright pathological (and often socio- or
| psycho-pathic).
|
| We've seen this sort of creeping bias before, with terms such
| as "Content Management System" displacing more human centric
| terms such as reading, writing (or even authoring), sharing,
| and publishing. "Content" is just an amorphous mass that is
| only produced in order to be "managed", poured into various
| containers, distributed, and delivered in order to be consumed.
| Volker_W wrote:
| I think we need another word for AI, one that only real
| programmers and mathematicians know.
|
| That way, we can talk about that stuff without some incompetent
| journalist or marketing salesman saying stupid stuff.
| gcr wrote:
| Call deep learning what it is: learnable nonlinear function
| approximation.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| We could just accept that AI is incredibly pervasive and doesn't
| require computers (for instance, autopilot in planes were
| invented in 1914).
| halotrope wrote:
| The George Carlin bit [1] about euphemisms comes to mind. While
| not quite in the lens of marketing hyperbole it captures really
| well what it means to dilute the language. The result is a loss
| of meaning and expressive power. If everything is something,
| nothing is.
|
| 1: https://youtu.be/vuEQixrBKCc
| rspoerri wrote:
| Interestingly as soon as a system works or we understand it's
| principles we stop using the term "artificial intelligence". It
| becomes image recognition, autonomous cars, or face detection. We
| mostly talk about artificial intelligence when we dont really
| know or understand what we are talking about :-)
| Aicy wrote:
| Exactly, the same happens with the word "technology".
|
| Are scissors technology? They used to be but now they are
| comparatively too well understood and simple. Just like with
| AI, we label things technology that are on the forefront and
| not yet well understood and ironed out.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> Are scissors technology?_
|
| To an anthropologist or archeologist scissors are most
| definitely a technology. As are basket weaving, flint-knapped
| tools, speech and writing, etc.
| klyrs wrote:
| Yes, even simple machines are technology.
| sidpatil wrote:
| This is known as the _AI effect_.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect#AI_applications_beco...
| cgearhart wrote:
| I think it's more an issue of talking past each other. In order
| to build a program, you kind of need to specify the required
| capabilities, and then standard engineering practice is to
| decompose that into a set of solutions tailored to the problem.
| But intelligence is not just about a list of capabilities;
| they're necessary conditions, but not sufficient.
|
| This is what leads to the AI effect conflict. We describe some
| capabilities that are associated with intelligence, build
| systems that exceed human performance ability on a narrow range
| of tasks for those capabilities, and then argue about whether
| or not that limited set of capabilities on a narrow domain of
| tasks is sufficient to be called "intelligence".
|
| Recognizing faces, playing chess, and predicting the next few
| words in my email are all things I'd expect an intelligent
| agent to be able to do, but I'd also expect to be able to pick
| up that agent and plop it down in a factory and have it operate
| a machine; put it in the kitchen and have it wash my dishes; or
| bring it to work and have it help me with that. We already have
| machines that help me do all of those things, but none of them
| really exhibit any intelligence. And any one of those machines
| getting 10x better at their single narrow domain still won't
| seem like "intelligence".
| AstralStorm wrote:
| Not really, the autonomous machine learning systems designed to
| solve games with limited observability are called AI properly,
| unlike say game scripts on fuzzy logic that are attempting to
| fool the user into thinking the machine is actually smart; or
| ones that work on fully observable games. (So no, AlphaZero is
| not exactly an AI.)
|
| And for an intelligence, they are still pretty bad at figuring
| things out.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| There's more nuance here than is usually given credit. I think
| it's more that once we understand the principles and the system
| works, we realize it never really needed AI. Here's how the
| story goes:
|
| Someone comes along and poses a problem. It seems like an
| automated solution will require building something like R2-D2.
| In other words solving it will need AI. Then someone else comes
| along and finds a way to solve it that looks nothing like
| R2-D2. Maybe they solve it with a massive dataset and a GLM.
| Turns out it never really needed AI.
|
| As a field, we're prone to thinking R2-D2 is necessary and
| sufficient for a task, when it keeps turning out it's a
| sufficient condition but not a necessary one for so many tasks.
| aspaceman wrote:
| I look forward to rereading this comment repeatedly over the
| next decades. What pointless definition chasing.
| tshoaib wrote:
| Is Michael I. Jordan the Michael Jordan of AI research?
| tibiahurried wrote:
| My background is in automation and robotics; I studied system
| identification: a discipline where you would use mathematical
| means to identify a dynamic system model by observing
| input/output.
|
| You treat the system as a black box and estimate a set of
| parameters that can describe it (e.g., Kalman filter).
|
| I struggle to understand what's the fundamental difference
| between system identification and ML/AI. Anyone?
|
| You ultimately have a bunch of data and try to estimate/fit a
| model that can describe a particular behavior.
|
| It all comes down to a big optimization/interpolation problem.
| Isn't what they call "Learning" just really "estimating" ?
|
| Then the more CPU/memory/storage you have, the more
| parameters/data you can estimate/process, the more accurate and
| sophisticated the model can be.
| [deleted]
| oblak wrote:
| "The real problem is not whether machines think, but whether men
| do."
|
| - B.F. Skinner
|
| In all honesty, I learned that from Civilization IV
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