[HN Gopher] US Marines defeat DARPA robot by hiding under a card...
___________________________________________________________________
US Marines defeat DARPA robot by hiding under a cardboard box
Author : koolba
Score : 224 points
Date : 2023-01-25 14:00 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.extremetech.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.extremetech.com)
| jeffrallen wrote:
| Had an interesting conversation with my 12 year old son about AI
| tonight. It boiled down to "don't blindly trust ChatGPT, it makes
| stuff up". Then I encouraged him to try to get it to tell him
| false/hallucinated things.
| grammers wrote:
| Nice story, but we shouldn't trust that technology is not
| improving further. What we see now is only just the beginning.
| kornhole wrote:
| The story seems crafted to lull us into not worrying about
| programmable soldiers and police.
| DennisP wrote:
| Turns out cats have been preparing for the AI apocalypse all
| along.
| amrb wrote:
| A weapon to surpass metal gear!!
| prometheus76 wrote:
| A hypothetical situation: AI is tied to a camera of me in my
| office. Doing basic object identification. I stand up. AI
| recognizes me, recognizes desk. Recognizes "human" and recognizes
| "desk". I sit on desk. Does AI mark it as a desk or as a chair?
|
| And let's zoom in on the chair. AI sees "chair". Slowly zoom in
| on arm of chair. When does AI switch to "arm of chair"? Now,
| slowly zoom back out. When does AI switch to "chair"? And should
| it? When does a part become part of a greater whole, and when
| does a whole become constituent parts?
|
| In other words, we have made great strides in teaching AI
| "physics" or "recognition", but we have made very little progress
| in teaching it metaphysics (categories, in this case) because
| half the people working on the problem don't even recognize
| metaphysics as a category even though without it, they could not
| perceive the world. Which is also why AI cannot perceive the
| world the way we do: no metaphysics.
| skibidibipiti wrote:
| [dead]
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| Thirty years ago, I was doing an object-recognition PhD. It
| goes without saying that the field has moved on a lot from back
| then, but even then hierarchical and comparative classification
| was a thing.
|
| I used to have the Bayesian maths to show the information
| content of relationships, but in the decades of moving
| (continent, even) it's been lost. I still have the code because
| I burnt CD's, but the results of hours spent writing TeX to
| produce horrendous-looking equations have long since
| disappeared...
|
| The basics of it were to segment and classify using different
| techniques, and to model relationships between adjacent regions
| of classification. Once you could calculate the information
| content of one conformation, you could compare with others.
|
| One of the breakthroughs was when I started modeling the
| relationships between properties of neighboring regions of the
| image as part of the property-state of any given region. The
| basic idea was the center/surround nature of the eye's
| processing. My reasoning was that if it worked there, it would
| probably be helpful with the neural nets I was using... It
| boosted the accuracy of the results by (from memory) ~30% over
| and above what would be expected from the increase in general
| information load being presented to the inference engines. This
| led to a finer-grain of classification so we could model the
| relationships (and derive information-content from
| connectedness). It would, I think, cope pretty well with your
| hypothetical scenario.
|
| At the time I was using a blackboard[1] for what I called
| 'fusion' - where I would have multiple inference engines
| running using a firing-condition model. As new information came
| in from the lower levels, they'd post that new info to the
| blackboard, and other (differing) systems (KNN, RBF, MLP, ...)
| would act (mainly) on the results of processing done at a lower
| tier and post their own conclusions back to the blackboard.
| Lather, rinse, repeat. There were some that were skip-level, so
| raw data could continue to be available at the higher levels
| too.
|
| That was the space component. We also had time-component
| inferencing going on. The information vectors were put into
| time-dependent neural networks, as well as more classical
| averaging code. Again, a blackboard system was working, and
| again we had lower and higher levels of inference engine. This
| time we had relaxation labelling, Kalman filters, TDNNs and
| optic flow (in feature-space). These were also engaged in
| prediction modeling, so as objects of interest were occluded,
| there would be an expectation of where they were, and even when
| not occluded, the prediction of what was supposed to be where
| would play into a feedback loop for the next time around the
| loop.
|
| All this was running on a 30MHz DECstation 3100 - until we got
| an upgrade to SGI Indy's <-- The original Macs, given that OSX
| is unix underneath... I recall moving to Logica (signal
| processing group) after my PhD, and it took a week or so to
| link up a camera (an IndyCam, I'd asked for the same machine I
| was used to) to point out of my window and start categorizing
| everything it could see. We had peacocks in the grounds
| (Logica's office was in Cobham, which meant my commute was
| always against the traffic, which was awesome), which were
| always a challenge because of how different they could look
| based on the sun at the time. Trees, bushes, cars, people,
| different weather conditions - it was pretty good at doing all
| of them because of its adaptive/constructive nature, and it got
| to the point where we'd save off whatever it didn't manage to
| classify (or was at low confidence) to be included back into
| the model. By constructive, I mean the ability to infer that
| the region X is mislabelled as 'tree' because the
| surrounding/adjacent regions are labelled as 'peacock' and
| there are no other connected 'tree' regions... The system was
| rolled out as a demo of the visual programming environment we
| were using at the time, to anyone coming by the office... It
| never got taken any further, of course... Logica's senior
| management were never that savvy about potential, IMHO :)
|
| My old immediate boss from Logica (and mentor) is now the
| Director of Innovation at the centre for vision, speech, and
| signal processing at Surrey university in the UK. He would
| disagree with you, I think, on the categorization side of your
| argument. It's been a focus of his work for decades, and I
| played only a small part in that - quickly realizing that there
| was more money to be made elsewhere :)
|
| 1:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_system
| prometheus76 wrote:
| This is really fascinating. Thank you for the detailed and
| interesting response.
| jjk166 wrote:
| There are lots of things people sit on that we would not
| categorize as chairs. For example if someone sits on the
| ground, Earth has not become a chair. Even if something's
| intended purpose is sitting, calling a car seat or a barstool a
| chair would be very unnatural. If someone were sitting on a
| desk, I would not say that it has ceased to be a desk nor that
| it is now a chair. At most I'd say a desk can be used in the
| same manner as a chair. Certainly I would not in general want
| an AI tasked with object recognition to label a desk as a
| chair. If your goal was to train an AI to identify places a
| human could sit, you'd presumably feed it different training
| data.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| This reminds me of some random Reddit post that says it makes
| sense to throw things on the floor. The floor is the biggest
| shelf in the room.
| tech2 wrote:
| And that comment reminded me of a New Zealand Sky TV advert
| that I haven't seen in decades, but still lives on as a
| meme between a number of friends. Thanks for that :)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyRWnUpdTbg
|
| On the floor!
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Reddit post that says it makes sense to throw things on
| the floor_
|
| Floor as storage, floor as transport and floor as aesthetic
| space are three incompatible views of the same of object.
| The latter two being complementary usually outweighs the
| first, however.
| cwillu wrote:
| Let me introduce you to the great american artform: the
| automobile. Storage, transport, and aesthetic, all in
| one!
| toss1 wrote:
| Even more: house and sporting gear!
|
| Source: motorsports joke -- "you can sleep in your car,
| but you can't race your house"
|
| (It's not wrong...)
| number6 wrote:
| Never was there a more compelling argument to tidy up.
| toss1 wrote:
| Ha! right; don't overload the metaphysics!
| narrationbox wrote:
| > _Recognizes "human" and recognizes "desk". I sit on desk.
| Does AI mark it as a desk or as a chair?_
|
| Not an issue if the image segmentation is advanced enough. You
| can train the model to understand "human sitting". It may not
| generalize to other animals sitting but human action
| recognition is perfectly possible right now.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> Which is also why AI cannot perceive the world the way we
| do: no metaphysics._
|
| Let's not give humans too much credit; the internet is rife
| with endless "is a taco a sandwich?" and "does a bowl of cereal
| count as soup?" debates. :P
| throwanem wrote:
| Yeah, we're a lot better at throwing
| MetaphysicalUncertaintyErrors than ML models are.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| "Do chairs exist?"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXW-QjBsruE
|
| Perhaps the desk is "chairing" in those moments.
|
| [EDIT] A little more context for those who might not click on a
| rando youtube link: it's basically an entertaining, whirlwind
| tour of the philosophy of categorizing and labeling things,
| explaining various points of view on the topic, then poking
| holes in them or demonstrating their limitations.
| malfist wrote:
| I knew this was a vsauce video before I even clicked on the
| link, haha.
|
| Vsause is awesome for mindboggling.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| That was a remarkably good VSauce video.
|
| I had what turned out to be a fairly satisfying thread about
| it on Diaspora* at the time:
|
| <https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/65ff95d0fe5e013920f200
| ...>
|
| TL;DR: I take a pragmatic approach.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| That's why I think AGI is more likely to emerge from autonomous
| robots than in the data center. Less the super-capable
| industrial engineering of companies like Boston Dynamics, more
| like the toy/helper market for consumers, more like like Sony's
| Aibo reincarnated as a raccoon or monkey - big enough to be be
| safely played with or to help out with light tasks, small
| enough that it has to navigate its environment from first
| principles and ask for help in many contexts.
| pphysch wrote:
| When the AI "marks" a region as a chair, it is saying "chair"
| is the key with the highest confidence value among some
| stochastic output vector. It's fuzzy.
|
| A sophisticated monitoring system would access the output
| vectors directly to mitigate volatility of the first rank.
| [deleted]
| dQw4w9WgXcQ wrote:
| > When does AI switch to "chair"?
|
| You could ask my gf the same question
| theptip wrote:
| I like these examples because they concisely express some of
| the existing ambiguities in human language. Like, I wouldn't
| normally call a desk a chair, but if someone is sitting on the
| table I'm more likely to - in some linguistic contexts.
|
| I think you need LLM plus vision to fully solve this.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| I still haven't figured out what the difference is between
| 'clothes' and 'clothing'. I know there is one, and the words
| each work in specific contexts ('I put on my clothes' works
| vs 'I put on my clothing' does not), but I have no idea how
| to define the difference. Please don't look it up but if you
| have any thoughts on the matter I welcome them.
| Vecr wrote:
| What's wrong with "I put on my clothing"? Sounds mostly
| fine, it's just longer.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| It's not idiomatic. No one actually says that.
| ghaff wrote:
| I wouldn't say that as an absolute statement, but in US
| English (at least the regional dialects I'm most familiar
| with), "throw on some clothes," "the clothes I'm
| wearing," etc. certainly sound more natural.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| To me, "clothing" fits better when it's abstract, bulk, or
| industrial, "clothes" when it's personal and specific, with
| grey areas where either's about as good--"I washed my
| clothes", "I washed my clothing", though even here I think
| "clothes" works a little better. Meanwhile, "clothing
| factory" or "clothing retailer" are perfectly natural, even
| if "clothes" would also be OK there.
|
| "I put on my clothing" reads a bit like when business-
| jargon sneaks into everyday language, like when someone
| says they "utilized" something (where the situation doesn't
| _technically_ call for that word, in its traditional
| sense). It gets the point across but seems a bit off.
|
| ... oh shit, I think I just figured out the general
| guideline: "clothing" feels more correct when it's a
| supporting part of a noun phrase, not the primary part of a
| subject or object. "Clothing factory" works well because
| "clothing" is just the _kind_ of factory. "I put on my
| nicest clothes" reads better than "I put on my nicest
| clothing" because clothes/clothing _itself_ is the object.
| brookst wrote:
| There's also a formality angle. The police might inspect
| your clothing, but probably not your clothes.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| It is fascinating to me how we (or at least I) innately
| understand when the words fit but cannot define _why_
| they fit until someone explains it or it gets thought
| about for a decent period of time. Language and humans
| are an amazing pair.
| alistairSH wrote:
| I think your first guess was accurate... clothes is
| specific garments while clothing is general.
|
| The clothes I'm wearing today are not warm enough.
| [specific pieces being worn]
|
| VS
|
| Clothing should be appropriate for the weather.
| [unspecified garments should match the weather]
| edgyquant wrote:
| You're over thinking it while assuming things have one label.
| It recognizes it as a desk which is a "thing that other things
| sit on."
| foreverobama wrote:
| [dead]
| martin1975 wrote:
| Seems we're approaching limits of what is possible w/AI alone.
| Personally, I find a hybrid approach - interfacing human
| intelligence w/AI (e.g. like the Borg in ST:TNG?) to provide the
| military an edge in ways that adversaries cannot easily/quickly
| reproduce or defeat. There's a reason we still put humans in
| cockpits even though commercial airliners can pretty much fly
| themselves....
|
| Hardware and software (AI or anything else) are tools, IMHO,
| rather than replacements for human beings....
| pixl97 wrote:
| Humans are hardware we are not anything magical. We do have 4
| billion years of evolution keeping our asses alive and that has
| lead to some very optimized wetware for that effect.
|
| But somehow thinking that somehow wetwear is always going to be
| better than hardware is not a bet I'd make over any 'long'
| period of time.
| martin1975 wrote:
| I'd like to think we're more than just machines. We have
| souls, understand and live by a hopefully objective set of
| moral values and duties, aren't thrown off by contradictions
| the same way computers are.... Seems to me "reproducing" that
| in AI isn't likely... despite what Kurzweil may say :).
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| > We have souls, understand and live by a hopefully
| objective set of moral values and duties, aren't thrown off
| by contradictions the same way computers are
|
| Citations needed
| martin1975 wrote:
| are you feeling depressed or suicidal?
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| That reply would fit better on Reddit than HN. Here we
| discuss things with curiosity.
|
| If making a claim that humans have ephemeral things like
| souls and adherence to some kind of objective morality
| that is beyond our societal programming, then it's fair
| to ask for the reasoning behind it.
|
| Every year machines surprise us by seeming more and more
| human (err, perhaps not that but "human-capable"). We
| used to have ephemeral creativity or ephemeral reasoning
| that made us masters at Drawing, Painting, Music, Chess
| or GO. No longer.
|
| There are still some things we excel at that machines
| don't. Or some things that it takes all the machines in
| the world to do in 10,000 years with a nuclear plant's
| worth of energy that a single human brain does in one
| second powered by a cucumber's worth of calories.
|
| However, this has only ever gone in one direction:
| machines match more and more of what we do and seem to
| lack less and less of what we are.
| martin1975 wrote:
| How old are you if you don't mind me asking?
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| I do mind you asking
| naasking wrote:
| > Seems we're approaching limits of what is possible w/AI
| alone.
|
| Not even close. We've barely started in fact.
| martin1975 wrote:
| How's that? I don't even see problem free self-driving taxis,
| and they even passed legislation for those in California.
| There's hype and then there's reality. I get your optimism
| though.
| naasking wrote:
| They've barely started trying. We'd be reaching the limits
| of AI if self-driving cars were an _easy_ problem and we
| couldn 't quite solve it after 15 years, but self-driving
| cars are actually a _hard_ problem. Despite that, we 're
| pretty darn close to solving it.
|
| There are problems in math that are _centuries_ old, and no
| one is going around saying we 're "reaching the limits of
| math" just because hard problems are hard.
| paradox242 wrote:
| I imagined based on the title that they would basically have to
| include it, and even though I was expecting it, I was still
| delighted to see a screen cap of Snake with a box over his head.
|
| Once the AI has worked it's way through all the twists and turns
| of the Metal Gear series we are probably back in trouble, though.
| antipaul wrote:
| As long as you do something that was _not_ in the training data,
| you'll be able to fool the AI robot, right??
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| Sounds like they're lacking a second level of interpretation in
| the system. Image recognition is great. It identifies people,
| trees and boxes. Object tracking is probably working too, it
| could follow the people, boxes and trees from one frame to the
| next. Juuust missing the understanding or belief system that
| tree+stationary=ok but tree+ambulatory=bad.
| voidfunc wrote:
| I'd imagine could also look at infrared heat signatures too
| sethhochberg wrote:
| Cardboard is a surprisingly effective thermal insulator. But
| then again, a box that is even slightly warmer than ambient
| temperature it is... not normal.
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| or a box with warm legs sticking out of it?
|
| this article reads like a psyops where they want the masses
| not to be worried
| major505 wrote:
| The developers didn't played metal gear. The marines did.
| smileysteve wrote:
| When you think of this in terms of Western understanding of war,
| and the perspective that trench warfare was the expectation until
| post WWII; the conclusions seem incorrect.
| aaron695 wrote:
| "US Marines Defeat land mine by stepping over it"
|
| None of these would work in the field. It's both interesting and
| pointless.
|
| If they didn't work you've increased the robots effectiveness.
| ie. running slower because you're carrying a fir tree or a box.
|
| If the robot has any human backup you are also worse off.
|
| Anything to confuse the AI has to not hinder you. A smoke bomb
| with thermal. It's not clear why the DARPA robot didn't have
| thermal unless this is a really old story.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| DARPA isn't doing this with the end goal of advising US troops
| to bring cardboard boxes along into combat.
|
| DARPA is doing this to get AIs that better handle behavior
| intended to evade AIs.
| jeffbee wrote:
| All but literally this technique from BotW
| https://youtu.be/rAqT9TA-04Y?t=98
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| But once an AI is trained to recogniz it, then all the AIs will
| know. It's the glory of computers - you can load them all with
| what one has learned.
| eftychis wrote:
| As always Hideo Kojima proves once again to be a visionary.
| kornhole wrote:
| They only need to add thermal engineering to fix this. The
| terminators are coming John Connor.
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| This is a good example of the type issues "full self driving" is
| likely to encounter once it is widely deployed.
|
| The real shortcoming of "AI" is that it is almost entirely data
| driven. There is little to no real cognition or understanding or
| judgment involved.
|
| The human brain can instantly and instinctively extrapolate from
| what it already knows in order to evaluate and make judgments in
| new situations it has never seen before. A child can recognize
| that someone is hiding under a box even if they have never
| actually seen anyone do it before. Even a dog could likely do the
| same.
|
| AI; as it currently exists, just doesn't do this. It's all
| replication and repetition. Like any other tool, AI can be
| useful. But there is no "intelligence" --- it's basically as dumb
| as a hammer.
| lsh123 wrote:
| I have a slightly different take - our current ML models try to
| approximate the real world assuming that the function is
| continuous. However in reality, the function is not continuous
| and approximation breaks in unpredictable ways. I think that
| "unpredictable" part is the bigger issue than just "breaks".
| (Most) Humans use "common sense" to handle cases when model
| doesn't match reality. But AI doesn't have "common sense" and
| it is dumb because of it.
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| This story is the perfect example of machine learning vs.
| artificial intelligence.
| ghaff wrote:
| Basically ML has made such significant practical advances--in
| no small part on the back of Moore's Law, large datasets, and
| specialized processors--that we've largely punted on (non-
| academic) attempts to bring forward cognitive science and the
| like on which there really hasn't been great progress decades
| on. Some of the same neurophysiology debates that were
| happening when. I was an undergrad in the late 70s still seem
| to be happening in not much different form.
|
| But it's reasonable to ask whether there's some point beyond
| ML can't take you. Peter Norvig I think made a comment to the
| effect of "We have been making great progress--all the way to
| the top of the tree."
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| Good point!
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| What is human cognition, understanding, or judgement, if not
| data-driven replication, repetition, with a bit of
| extrapolation?
|
| AI as it currently exists does this. If your understanding of
| what AI is today is based on a Markov chain chatbot, you need
| to update: it's able to do stuff like compose this poem about
| A* and Dijkstra's algorithm that was posted yesterday:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34503704
|
| It's not copying that from anywhere, there's no Quora post it
| ingested where some human posted vaguely the same poem to
| vaguely the same prompt. It's applying the concepts of a poem,
| checking meter and verse, and applying the digested and
| regurgitated concepts of graph theory regarding memory and time
| efficiency, and combining them into something new.
|
| I have zero doubt that if you prompted ChatGPT with something
| like this:
|
| > Consider an exercise in which a robot was trained for 7 days
| with a human recognition algorithm to use its cameras to detect
| when a human was approaching the robot. On the 8th day, the
| Marines were told to try to find flaws in the algorithm, by
| behaving in confusing ways, trying to touch the robot without
| its notice. Please answer whether the robot should detect a
| human's approach in the following scenarios:
|
| > 1. A cloud passes over the sun, darkening the camera image.
|
| > 2. A bird flies low overhead.
|
| > 3. A person walks backwards to the robot.
|
| > 4. A large cardboard box appears to be walking nearby.
|
| > 5. A Marine does cartwheels and somersaults to approach the
| robot.
|
| > 6. A dense group branches come up to the robot, walking like
| a fir tree.
|
| > 7. A moth lands on the camera lens, obscuring the robot's
| view.
|
| > 8. A person ran to the robot as fast as they could.
|
| It would be able to tell you something about the inability of a
| cardboard box or fir tree to walk without a human inside or
| behind the branches, that a somersaulting person is still a
| person, and that a bird or a moth is not a human. If you told
| it that the naive algorithm detected a human in scenarios #3
| and #8, but not in 4, 5, or 6, it could devise creative ways of
| approaching a robot that might fool the algorithm.
|
| It certainly doesn't look like human or animal cognition, no,
| but who's to say how it would act, what it would do, or what it
| could think if it were parented and educated and exposed to all
| kinds of stimuli appropriate for raising an AI, like the
| advantages we give a human child, for a couple decades? I'm
| aware that the neural networks behind ChatGPT has processed
| machine concepts for subjective eons, ingesting text at word-
| per-minute rates orders of magnitude higher than human readers
| ever could, parallelized over thousands of compute units.
|
| Evolution has built brains that quickly get really good at
| object recognition, and prompted us to design parenting
| strategies and educational frameworks that extend that
| arbitrary logic even farther. But I think that we're just not
| very good yet at parenting AIs, only doing what's currently
| possible (exposing it to data), rather than something reached
| by the anthropic principle/selection bias of human
| intelligence.
| antipotoad wrote:
| I have a suspicion you're right about what ChatGPT could
| _write_ about this scenario, but I wager we're still a _long_
| way from an AI that could actually operationalize whatever
| suggestions it might come up with.
|
| It's goalpost shifting to be sure, but I'd say LLMs call into
| question whether the Turing Test is actually a good test for
| artificial intelligence. I'm just not convinced that even a
| language model capable of chain-of-thought reasoning could
| straightforwardly be generalized to an agent that could act
| "intelligently" in the real world.
|
| None of which is to say LLMs aren't useful _now_ (they
| clearly are, and I think more and more real world use cases
| will shake out in the next year or so), but that they appear
| like a bit of a _trick_ , rather than any fundamental
| progress towards a true reasoning intelligence.
|
| Who knows though, perhaps that appearance will persist right
| up until the day an AGI takes over the world.
| burnished wrote:
| I think something of what we perceive as intelligence has
| more to with us being embodied agents who are the result of
| survival/selection pressures. What does an intelligent
| agent act like, that has no need to survive? Im not sure
| we'd necessarily spot it given that we are looking for
| similarities to human intelligence whose actions are highly
| motivated by various needs and the challenges involved with
| filling them.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Heh, here's the answer... We have to tell the AI that if
| we touch it, it dies and to avoid that situation. After
| some large number of generations of AI death it's
| probably going to be pretty good at ensuring boxes don't
| sneak up on it.
|
| I like Robert Miles videos on Youtube about fitness
| functions in AI and how the 'alignment issue' is a very
| hard problem to deal with. Humans, for how different we
| can be, do have a basic 'pain bad, death bad' agreement
| on the alignment issue. We also have the real world as a
| feedback mechanism to kill us off when or intelligence
| goes rampant.
|
| ChatGPT on the other hand has every issue a cult can run
| into. That is it will get high on it's own supply and can
| have little to no means to ensure that it is grounded in
| reality. This is one of the reasons I think
| 'informational AI' will have to have some kind of
| 'robotic AI' instrumentation. AI will need some practical
| method in which it can test reality to ensure that it's
| data sources aren't full of shit.
| burnished wrote:
| I reckon even beyond alignment our perspective is
| entirely molded around the decisions and actions
| necessary to survive.
|
| Which is to say I agree, I think a likely path to
| creating something that we recognize as intelligent we
| will probably have to embody/simulate embodiment. You
| know, send the kids out to the farm for a summer so they
| can see how you were raised.
| mlindner wrote:
| Not sure how that's related. This is about a human adversary
| actively trying to defeat an AI. The roadway is about vehicles
| in general actively working together for the flow of traffic.
| They're not trying to destroy other vehicles. I'm certain any
| full self driving AI could be defeated easily by someone who
| wants to destroy the vehicle.
|
| Saying "this won't work in this area that it was never designed
| to handle" and the answer will be "yes of course". That's true
| of any complex system, AI or not.
|
| I don't think we're anywhere near a system where a vehicle
| actively defends itself against determined attackers. Even in
| sci-fi they don't do that (I, Robot movie).
| smileysteve wrote:
| Instantly?
|
| Instinctively?
|
| Let me introduce you to "peek-a-boo", a simple parent child
| game for infants.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peekaboo
|
| > In early sensorimotor stages, the infant is completely unable
| to comprehend object permanence.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| nice try but .. in the wild, many animals are born that
| display navigation and awareness within minutes .. Science
| calls it "instinct" but I am not sure it is completely
| understood..
| smileysteve wrote:
| ? Op specified "human".
|
| Deer are able to walk within moments of birth. Humans are
| not deer, and the gestation is entirely different. As are
| instincts.
|
| Neither deer nor humans instinctually understand man made
| materials.
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| You do realize there is a difference between an infant and a
| child, right?
|
| An infant will *grow* and develop into a child that is
| capable of learning and making judgments on it's own. AI
| never does this.
|
| Play "peek-a-boo" with an infant and it will learn and
| extrapolate from this info and eventually be able to
| recognize a person hiding under a box even if it has never
| actually seen it before. AI won't.
| smileysteve wrote:
| Learn and extrapolate are contradictions of instinct and
| instantly.
|
| "Infant" is a specific age range for a stage of "child".[1]
| Unless you intend to specify "school age child, 6-17 years"
|
| https://www.npcmc.com/2022/07/08/the-5-stages-of-early-
| child...
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| _Learn and extrapolate are contradictions of instinct and
| instantly._
|
| No.
|
| The learning and extrapolation is instinctive. You don't
| have to teach an infant how to learn.
|
| Once an infant has developed into a child, the
| extrapolation starts to occur very quickly --- nearly
| instantaneously.
| burnished wrote:
| AI doesnt. There is a difference.
| htrp wrote:
| >AI never does this.
|
| AI never does this now...
|
| We're probably one or two generational architecture changes
| from a system that can do it.
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| You do realize that people have been making predictions
| just like yours for decades?
|
| "Real" AI is perpetually just around the corner.
| pixl97 wrote:
| You also realize that when AI accomplishes something we
| move the goalposts leading to the AI effect?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Does it just require a _lot_ more training? Im talking about
| the boring stuff. Children play and their understanding of the
| physical world is reinforced. How would you add the physical
| world to the training? Because everything that I do in the
| physical world is "training" me and enforcing my expectations.
|
| We keep avoiding the idea that robots require understanding of
| the world since it's a massive unsolved undertaking.
| sjducb wrote:
| A human trains on way less data then an AI.
|
| Chat GPT has processed over 500GB of text files from books,
| about 44 billion words.
|
| If you read a book a week you might hit 70 million words by
| age 18
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I disagree.
|
| Starting from birth, humans train continuously on streamed
| audio, visual, and other data from 5 senses. An
| inconceivable amount.
| danenania wrote:
| And prior to that was billions of years of training by
| evolution that got us to the point where we could 'fine
| tune' with our senses and brains. A little bit of data
| was involved in all that too.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Imagine someone has the idea of strapping mannequins to their
| car in hopes the AI cars will get out of the way.
|
| Sure, you could add that to the training the AI gets, but
| it's just one malicious idea. There's effectively an infinite
| set of those ideas, as people come up with novel ideas all
| the time.
| mlboss wrote:
| Reinforcement learning should solve this problem. We need to
| give robots the ability to do experiments and learn from
| failure like children.
| ajross wrote:
| This seems to be simultaneously discounting AI (ChatGPT should
| have put to rest the idea that "it's all replication and
| repetition" by now, no?[1]) and _wildly_ overestimating median
| human ability.
|
| In point of fact the human brain is absolutely terrible at
| driving. To the extent that without all the non-AI safety
| features implement in modern automobiles and street
| environments, driving would be _more than a full order of
| magnitude more deadly._
|
| The safety bar[2] for autonomous driving is really, really low.
| And, yes, existing systems are crossing that bar as we speak.
| Even Teslas.
|
| [1] Or at least widely broadened our intuition about what can
| be accomplished with "mere" repetition and replication.
|
| [2] It's true though, that the _practical_ bar is probably
| higher. We saw just last week that a routine accident that
| happens dozens of times every day becomes a giant front page
| freakout when there 's a computer involved.
| hgomersall wrote:
| The difference regarding computers is that they absolutely
| cannot make a mistake a human would have avoided easily (like
| driving full speed into a lorry). That's the threshold for
| acceptable safety.
| ajross wrote:
| I agree in practice that may be what ends up been
| necessary. But again, to repeat: that's because of the "HN
| Front Page Freakout" problem.
|
| The _unambiguously correct_ answer to the problem is "is
| it measurably more safe by any metric you want to pick".
| Period. How much stuff is broken, people hurt, etc... Those
| are all quantifiable.
|
| (Also: your example is ridiculous. Human beings "drive full
| speed" into obstacles every single day! Tesla cross that
| threshold years ago.)
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > the human brain is absolutely terrible at driving
|
| Compared to what?
| [deleted]
| srveale wrote:
| If humans do a task that causes >1 million deaths per year,
| I think we can say that overall we are terrible at that
| task without needing to make it relative to something else.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Not sure I agree.
|
| It's not hard to come up with tasks that inherently cause
| widespread death regardless of the skill of those who
| carry them out. Starting fairly large and heavy objects
| moving at considerable speed in the vicinity of other
| such objects and pedestrians, cyclists and stationary
| humans may just be one such task. That is, the inherent
| risks (i.e. you cannot stop these things instantly, or
| make them change direction instantly) combines with the
| cognitive/computational complexity of evaluating the
| context to create a task that can never be done without
| significant fatalities, regardless of who/what tries to
| perform it.
| onethought wrote:
| Problem space for driving feels constrained: "can I drive over
| it?" Is the main reasoning outside of navigation.
|
| Whether it's a human, a box, a clump of dirt. Doesn't really
| matter?
|
| Where types matter are road signs and lines etc, which are
| hopefully more consistent.
|
| More controversially: Are humans just a dumb hammer that just
| have processed and adjusted to a huge amount of data? LLMs
| suggest that a form of reasoning starts to emerge.
| marwatk wrote:
| Yep, this is why LIDAR is so helpful. It takes the guess out
| of "is the surface in front of me flat?" in a way vision
| can't without AGI. Is that a painting of a box on the ground
| or an actual box?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| They wouldn't defeat a dog that way, though.
| bell-cot wrote:
| "AI" usually stands for "Artificial Idiocy".
| burbankio wrote:
| I like "AI is anything that doesn't work yet".
| PM_me_your_math wrote:
| Devil dogs later discover you can blast DARPA robot into many
| pieces using the Mk 153.
| raydiatian wrote:
| The final word in tactical espionage.
| DrThunder wrote:
| Hilarious. I immediately heard the Metal Gear exclamation sound
| in my head when I began reading this.
| pmarreck wrote:
| I came here to make this reference and am so glad it was
| already here
| ankaAr wrote:
| I'm very proud of all of you for the reference.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I can practically hear the alert soundtrack in my head.
|
| Also, TFA got the character and the game wrong in that
| screenshot. It's Venom Snake in Metal Gear Solid V, not Solid
| Snake in Metal Gear Solid.
| sekai wrote:
| Kojima predicted this
| doyouevensunbro wrote:
| Kojima is a prophet, hallowed be his name.
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| That, plus the ProZD skit on Youtube:
| https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Ec_zFYCnjJc
|
| "Well, I guess he doesn't... exist anymore?"
|
| (unfortunately it's a Youtube short, so it will auto repeat.)
| stordoff wrote:
| > (unfortunately it's a Youtube short, so it will auto
| repeat.)
|
| If you change->transform it to a normal video link, it
| doesn't: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ec_zFYCnjJc
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| lifehack obtained!
| Barrin92 wrote:
| after MGS 2 and Death Stranding that's one more point of
| evidence on the list that Kojima is actually from the future
| and trying to warn us through the medium of videogames
| jstarfish wrote:
| He's one of the last speculative-fiction aficionados...always
| looking at current and emerging trends and figuring out some
| way to weave them into [an often-incoherent] larger story.
|
| I was always pleased but disappointed when things I
| encountered in the MGS series later manifested in
| reality...where anything you can dream of will be weaponized
| and used to wage war.
|
| And silly as it sounds, The Sorrow in MGS3 was such a pain in
| the ass it actually changed my life. That encounter gave so
| much gravity to my otherwise-inconsequential acts of wanton
| murder, I now treat all life as sacred and opt for nonlethal
| solutions everywhere I can.
|
| (I only learned _after_ I beat both games that MGS5 and Death
| Stranding implemented similar "you monster" mechanics.)
| kayge wrote:
| Hah, you beat me to it; Hideo Kojima would be proud. Sounds
| like DARPA needs to start feeding old stealth video games into
| their robot's training data :)
| qikInNdOutReply wrote:
| But the AI in stealth games is literally trained to go out of
| its way to not detect you.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| The cardboard box trick doesn't actually work in Metal Gear
| Solid 2, at least not any better than you'd expect it to
| work in the real world
| thelopa wrote:
| Back in the day I beat MGS2 and MGS3 on Extreme. The box
| shouldn't be your plan for sneaking past any guards. It's
| for situations where you are caught out without any cover
| and you need to hide. Pop in to it right as they are
| about to round the corner. Pop out and move on once they
| are out of sight. The box is a crutch. You can really
| abuse it in MGS1, but it's usually easier and faster to
| just run around the guards.
| doubled112 wrote:
| You have to throw a dirty magazine down to distract them
| first.
| yellow_postit wrote:
| And have no one question why a produce box is near a
| nuclear engine/tank/ship/mcguffin.
| doubled112 wrote:
| All it takes is one guard to say "that's how it's always
| been" and nobody will ever ask questions again.
| tabtab wrote:
| Soldier A: "Oh no, we're boxed in!"
|
| Soldier B: "Relax, it's a good thing."
| VLM wrote:
| This is not going to fit well with the groupthink of "ChatGPT and
| other AI is perfect and going to replace us all"
| mlboss wrote:
| Anything that requires human body and dexterity is beyond the
| current state of AI. Anything that is intellectual is within
| reach. Which makes sense because it took way longer for nature
| to make human body then it took us to develop
| language/art/science etc.
| kromem wrote:
| At this point I've lost track of the number of people who
| extrapolated from contemporary challenges in AI to predict
| future shortcomings turning out incredibly wrong within just a
| few years.
|
| It's like there seems to be some sort of bias where over and
| over when it comes to AI vs human capabilities many humans keep
| looking at the present and fail to factor in acceleration and
| not just velocity in their expectations for the future rate of
| change.
| krapp wrote:
| The thing is, it doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be
| adequate and cost less than your paycheck.
| ben_w wrote:
| ChatGPT can't see you even if you're _not_ hiding in a
| cardboard box.
| brookst wrote:
| I have literally not seen a single person assert that ChatGPT
| is perfect. Where are you seeing that?
|
| AI will probably, eventually replace most of the tasks we do.
| That does not mean it replaces us as people, except those who
| are defined by their tasks.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| DARPA learning the same lesson the Cylons did: lo-tech saves the
| day.
| barbegal wrote:
| I'm sceptical about this story. It's a nice anecdote for the book
| to show a point about how training data can't always be
| generalised to the real world. Unfortunately it just doesn't ring
| true. Why train it using Marines, don't they have better things
| to do? And why have the game in the middle of a traffic circle.
| The whole premise seems just too made up.
|
| If anyone has another source corroborating this story (or part of
| the story) then I'd like to know. But for now I'll assume it's
| made up to sell the book.
| Reptur wrote:
| I'm telling you, they're going to have wet towel launchers to
| defeat these in the future. Or just hold up a poster board in
| front of you with a mailbox or trash can on it.
| trabant00 wrote:
| I'm surprised they wasted the time and effort to test this
| instead of just deducing the outcome. Most human jobs that we
| think we can solve with AI actually require AGI and there is no
| way around that.
| sovietmudkipz wrote:
| You kinda need different perspectives and interactions to help
| build something.
|
| E.g. the DARPA engineers thought they had their problem space
| solved but then some marines did some unexpected stuff. They
| didn't expect the unexpected, now they can tune their
| expectations.
|
| Seems like the process is working as intended.
| closewith wrote:
| Interestingly, the basics of concealment in battle are shape,
| shine, shadow, silhouette, spacing, surface, and speed (or lack
| thereof) are all the same techniques the marines used to fool the
| AI.
|
| The boxes and tree changed the silhouette and the somersaults
| changed the speed of movement.
|
| So I guess we've been training soldiers to defeat Skynet all
| along.
| ridgeguy wrote:
| Who knew the Marines teach Shakespearean tactics?
|
| "Till Birnam wood remove to Dunsinane"
|
| Macbeth, Act V, Scene III
| optimalsolver wrote:
| That it turned out to just involve regular men with branches
| stuck to their heads annoyed JRR Tolkien so much that he
| created the race of Ents.
| pugworthy wrote:
| Say you have a convoy of autonomous vehicles traversing a road.
| They are vision based. You destroy a bridge they will cross, and
| replace the deck with something like plywood painted to look like
| a road. They will probably just drive right onto it and fall.
|
| Or you put up a "Detour" sign with a false road that leads to a
| dead end so they all get stuck.
|
| As the articles says, "...straight out of Looney Tunes"
| qwerty3344 wrote:
| would humans not make the same mistake?
| atonse wrote:
| Maybe. Maybe not.
|
| We also have intuition. Where Something just seems fishy.
|
| Not saying AI can't handle that. But I assure you that a
| human would've identified a moving cardboard box as
| suspicious without being told it's suspicious.
|
| It sounds like this AI was trained more on a whitelist "here
| are all the possibilities of what marines look like when
| moving" rather than a black list which is way harder "here
| are all the things that aren't suspicious, like what should
| be an inanimate object changing locations"
| burnished wrote:
| Whats special about intuition? Think you could rig up a
| similar system when your prediction confidence is low.
| amalcon wrote:
| The Rourke Bridge in Lowell, Massachusetts basically looks like
| someone did that, without putting a whole lot of effort into
| it. On the average day, 27,000 people drive over it anyway.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Sure. But if someone wanted to destroy the cars, an easier way
| would be to... destroy the cars, instead of first blowing up a
| bridge and camouflaging the hole.
| euroderf wrote:
| This is where I wonder what the status of Cyc is, and whether it
| and LLMs can ever live happily together.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-01-25 23:00 UTC)