[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 : 451 points
Date : 2023-01-25 14:00 UTC (1 days 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.
| davewritescode wrote:
| These types of ML approaches seem to always break down in the
| face of adversarial input.
|
| Security folks are going to have a field day if we're not careful
| to make sure that people really understand the limitations of
| these types of systems.
| exabrial wrote:
| This sounds like a really fun day at work to me.
| johnnylambada wrote:
| Oh great, now the robots know the "Dunder Mifflin" maneuver!
| 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.
| andsoitis wrote:
| When intelligence is artificial, understanding and imagination
| are shallow.
| 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.
| amelius wrote:
| The error is in asking for a categorization. Categorizations
| always fail, ask any biologist.
| bnralt wrote:
| > 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.
|
| A bold claim, but I'm not sure it's one that accurately matches
| reality. It reminds me of reading about attempts in the 80's to
| construct AI by having linguists come in and trying to develop
| rules for the system.
|
| From my experience, current methods of developing AI are a lot
| closer to how most humans think and interact with the world
| than academic philosophy is. Academic philosophy might be fine,
| but it's quite possible it's no more useful for navigating the
| world than the debates over theological minutiae have been.
| 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
| feoren wrote:
| > we have made very little progress in teaching it metaphysics
| (categories, in this case)
|
| That's because ontology, metaphysics, categorization, and all
| that, is _completely worthless bullshit_. It 's a crutch our
| limited human brains use, and it causes all sorts of problems.
| Half of what I do in data modeling is trying to fight _against_
| all of the worthless categorizations I come across. There Is No
| Shelf.
|
| Why are categories so bad? Two reasons:
|
| 1. They're too easily divorced from their models. Is a tomato a
| fruit? The questions is faulty: there's no such thing as a
| "fruit" without a model behind it. When people say
| "botanically, a tomato is a fruit", they're identifying their
| model: botany. Okay, are you bio-engineering plants? Or are you
| cooking dinner? You're cooking dinner. So a tomato _is not a
| fruit_. Because when you 're cooking dinner, your model is not
| Botany, it's something culinary, and in any half-decent
| culinary model, a tomato is a vegetable, not a fruit. So unless
| we're bio-engineering some plants, shut the hell up about a
| tomato being a fruit. It's not wisdom/intelligence, it's
| spouting useless mouth-garbage.
|
| And remember that all models are wrong, but _some_ models are
| useful. Some! Not most. Most models are shit. Categories
| divorced from a model are worthless, and categories of a shit
| model are shit.
|
| 2. Even good categories of useful models have extremely fuzzy
| boundaries, and we too often fall into the false dichotomy of
| thinking something must either "be" or "not be" part of a
| category. Is an SUV a car? Is a car with a rocket engine on it
| still a car? Is a car with six wheels still a car? Who cares!?
| If you're charging tolls for your toll bridge, you instead
| settle for some countable characteristic like number of axles,
| and you amend this later if you start seeing lots of vehicles
| with something that stretches your definition of "axle". In
| fact the category "car" is worthless most of the time. It's an
| OK noun, but nouns are only averages; only mental shortcuts to
| a reasonable approximation of the actual object. If you ever
| see "class Car : Vehicle", you know you're working in a shit,
| doomed codebase.
|
| And yet you waste time arguing over the definitions of these
| shit, worthless categories. These worthless things become
| central to your database and software designs and object
| hierarchies. Of course you end up with unmaintainable shit.
|
| Edit: Three reasons!
|
| 3. They're always given too much weight. Male/female: PICK ONE.
| IT'S VERY IMPORTANT THAT YOU CHOOSE ONE! It is vastly important
| to our music streaming app that we know whether your skin is
| black or instead that your ancestors came from the Caucus
| Mountains or Mongolia. THOSE ARE YOUR ONLY OPTIONS PICK ONE!
|
| Employee table: required foreign key to the "Department" table.
| Departments are virtually meaningless and change all the time!
| Every time you get a new vice president sitting in some
| operations chair, the first thing he does is change all the
| Departments around. You've got people in your Employee table
| whose department has changed 16 times, but they're the same
| person, aren't they? Oh, and they're not called "Departments"
| anymore, they're now "Divisions". Did you change your field
| name? No, you didn't. Of course you didn't. You have some
| Contractors in your Employee table, don't you? Some ex-
| employees that you need to keep around so they show up on that
| one report? Yeah, you do. Of course you do. Fuck ontology.
| 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.
| Doxin wrote:
| I figure it's the same sort of thing as yards vs yardage.
| When you're talking about yards you're talking about some
| specific amount, when you're talking yardage you's talking
| about some unspecified amount that gets measured in yards
| usually.
|
| When talking clothing you're talking about an abstract
| concept, when you're talking clothes you're generally
| talking about some fairly specific clothes. There's a lot
| of grey area here, e.g. a shop can either sell clothes or
| clothing, either works to my ear.
| 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]
| kristopolous wrote:
| The takeaway from the "military industrial complex" is instead of
| optimizing for military acumen, it's a system that optimizes for
| profit with the sheen of military acumen.
|
| So you get weapons that don't work designed for threats that
| don't exist. It puts the military in a worse place under the
| illusion that it is in a better place.
|
| Not saying anything new here, it's all over 60 years old. Nothing
| seems to have changed though
| selestify wrote:
| Events in Ukraine would suggest that even older weapons in the
| US arsenal do in fact work exceptionally well. US performance
| in Desert Storm and the battle of Khasam also suggests that the
| U.S. military does possess the acumen to deploy its weapons
| effectively.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Some niche counterpoint doesn't invalidate the systemic
| analysis by General Eisenhower.
|
| Just like finding a 100 year old smoker doesn't mean smoking
| doesn't cause cancer.
|
| Is this really not immediately obvious?
| daemoens wrote:
| Desert Storm was not niche in any shape or form. Iraq was
| the fourth most powerful military at the time and had the
| newest and greatest Soviet weapons. The expected casualties
| for the US were in the thousands, and no one thought the
| Iraqis would get steamrolled in 1991.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Wait wait, hold on
|
| Kuwait United States United Kingdom France Saudi Arabia
| Egypt Afghan mujahideen Argentina Australia Bahrain
| Bangladesh Belgium Canada Czechoslovakia Denmark Germany
| Greece Honduras Hungary Italy Japan Morocco Netherlands
| New Zealand Niger Norway Oman Pakistan Poland Portugal
| Qatar Senegal Sierra Leone Singapore South Korea Spain
| Sweden Syria Turkey United Arab Emirates
|
| V.
|
| Iraq
|
| And people placed their bets on Iraq? Using WW2 era T-55s
| and T-62s from the early 1960s?
|
| Alright!
| daemoens wrote:
| The US provided 700,000 of the 956,600 troops and had to
| bring them halfway around the world. Most of those
| countries were using weapons bought made by the US MIC.
| Also I never said we were expected to lose. People
| expected a long and costly fight that would take months
| and take thousands of lives. Less than 300 were killed
| and that includes all those other countries.
|
| Your point was that the MIC sacrificed our military
| acumen for profit, when they clearly haven't. I agree
| that we pay them too much, but the weapons themselves
| still perform better than any other.
| kristopolous wrote:
| No. The evidence is clearly insufficient. You didn't
| bring up Korea, Vietnam, the second Iraq war,
| Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Laos, Cambodia, etc or that
| Kuwait was a United Nations and not a US campaign.
|
| Instead you claimed some dubious members of the babbling
| class misjudged how long it would take, didn't take the
| context into consideration, misrepresented 1940s tanks as
| cutting edge weaponry, and then attributed military
| technology and prowess to a victory plagued by warcrimes
| like the highway of death.
|
| Killing surrendered troops and firebombing a retreating
| military under the flag of the United Nations will lead
| to the belligerent considering it a defeat. Under those
| conditions, you could probably achieve that with 19th
| century maxim guns.
|
| Sorry, that's nowhere near sufficient to show that the
| fancy weaponry on display justified the cost or was an
| important part of the victory.
| daemoens wrote:
| In every single one of those wars, the weapons were never
| the problem. Look up the massive casualty ratios in those
| wars. Every one of those wars were failed by the politics
| and the fact that we should never should have been there.
| The weapons and the MIC never caused the failure of those
| wars. All the war crimes and evil acts committed were
| done by people in the military, not the MIC.
|
| And what 1940s tanks? Both sides had modern tanks in the
| war.
| 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.
| metalspot wrote:
| > 4 billion years of evolution
|
| that is a pretty important part of the equation. what if the
| universe is the minimum viable machine for creating
| intelligence? if you think of the universe as computer and
| evolution as a machine learning algorithm then we already
| have an example of what size of a computer and how long it
| takes for ML to create AGI. it seems presumptuous to believe
| that humans will suddenly figure out a way to do the same
| thing a trillion times more efficiently.
| pixl97 wrote:
| > it seems presumptuous to believe that humans will
| suddenly figure out a way to do the same thing a trillion
| times more efficiently.
|
| Why?
|
| I think it might be confusion on your part on how
| incredibly inefficient evolution is. Many times you're
| performing random walks, or waiting for some random
| particle to break DNA just right, and then for that
| mutation to be in just the right place to survive.
| Evolution has no means of "oh shit, that would be an
| amazing speed up, I'll just copy that over" until you get
| into intelligence.
| krapp wrote:
| >it seems presumptuous to believe that humans will suddenly
| figure out a way to do the same thing a trillion times more
| efficiently.
|
| Nature isn't efficient. Humans create things many orders of
| magnitude more efficient than nature as a matter of course.
| The fact that it didn't take millions of years to develop
| even the primitive AI we have today is evidence enough, or
| to go from the Wright Brothers' flight to space travel. Or
| any number of examples from medicine, genetic engineering,
| material synthesis, etc.
|
| You could say that any human example also has to account
| for the entirety of human evolution, but that would be a
| bit of a red herring since even in that case the examples
| of humans being able to improve upon nature within
| _relatively_ less than geological spans of time are valid,
| and that case would apply to the development of AI as well.
| 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 :).
| pixl97 wrote:
| >aren't thrown off by contradictions the same way computers
| are
|
| We are not? Just look at any group of people that's bought
| into a cult and you can see people falling for
| contradictions left and right. Are they 'higher level'
| contradictions than what our machines currently fall for,
| yes, but the same premise applies to both.
|
| Unfortunately I believe you are falling into magical
| thinking here. "Because the human intelligence problem is
| hard I'm going to offload these difficult issues to address
| as magic and therefore cannot be solved or reproduced".
| 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.
|
| You can choose to engage with the content of the
| discussion or choose not to engage with it.
|
| "Everybody who disagrees with me is either a child or
| clinically depressed" isn't what I come to HN for.
| martin1975 wrote:
| Sorry to offend your sensibilities bud. This discussion
| thread is over.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Can't you just reply to his points?
| martin1975 wrote:
| I could. The next thing he will do is accuse me of
| solipsism. So I'm gonna stop right here and agree with
| him.
| 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??
| jononomo wrote:
| The problem with artificial intelligence is that it is not real
| intelligence.
| 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.
| roarcher wrote:
| > It's not clear why the DARPA robot didn't have thermal unless
| this is a really old story.
|
| Who says it didn't? A thermal camera doesn't mean your targets
| are conveniently highlighted for you and no further
| identification is needed. Humans aren't the only thing that can
| be slightly warmer than the background, and on a hot day they
| may be cooler or blend in. So it's probably best if your
| robot's target acquisition is a bit more sophisticated than
| "shoot all the hot things".
| 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.
| aaron695 wrote:
| [dead]
| jeffbee wrote:
| All but literally this technique from BotW
| https://youtu.be/rAqT9TA-04Y?t=98
| qwertyuiop_ wrote:
| _Marines are trained to improvise, adapt, and overcome all
| obstacles in all situations. They possess the willingness and the
| determination to fight and to keep fighting until victory is
| assured._
|
| https://www.marines.com/about-the-marine-corps/who-are-the-m...
|
| Looks like the Marines did what they are extremely good at.
| hammock wrote:
| This is a good thing. It could mean the autonomous killer robot
| is less likely to murder someone errantly
| 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.
| _448 wrote:
| We engineers tend to overlook simple things like these in our
| grand vision of the world. Yours truly is also at times guilty of
| getting blinded by these blinders.
|
| This reminds me of a joke that was floating around the internet
| few years ago. It goes something like this: The US and the USSR
| were in a space race and trying to put a person in space. To give
| the trainee astronauts a feeling of working without gravity the
| trainees were trained under water. But the US faced a challenge.
| There was no pen that would work under water for the trainees to
| use. The US spent millions of dollars on R&D and finally produced
| a pen that would work under water. It was a very proud moment for
| the engineers who developed the technology. After a few months,
| there was a world conference of space scientists and engineers
| where teams from both the US and the USSR were also present. So
| to get a sense of how the USSR team solved the challenge of
| helping trainees to take notes under water, the US team mention
| about their own invention and asked the USSR team how they solved
| the problem. The USSR team replied, We use pencils :)
| louwrentius wrote:
| The funny thing is that this story has gone round so much yet
| has been debunked. I can't remember which podcast it was but in
| the end you don't want conducting dust in space and the
| Russians eventually also bought the space pens.
|
| But I still like the point of the story.
| 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.
| abledon wrote:
| will there come a time when computers are strong enough to read
| in the images, then re-create a virtual game world from them,
| and then reverse-engineer from seeing feet poking out of the
| box, that a human must be inside. Right now Tesla cars can take
| in the images and decide turn left, turn right etc... but they
| don't reconstruct, say, a Unity-3D game world on the fly.
| 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.
| tremon wrote:
| I would put it in terms of continuity of state rather than
| continuity of function: we use our current ML models to
| approximate the real world by assuming that state is
| irrelevant. However in reality, objects exist continuously
| and failure to capture ("understand") that fact breaks the
| model in unpredictable ways. For example, if you show a
| three-year old a movie of a marine crawling under a cardboard
| box, and when the marine is fully hidden ask where the marine
| is, you will likely get a correct answer. That is because
| real intelligence has a natural understanding of the
| continuity of state (of existence). AI has only just started
| to understand "object", but I doubt it has a correct grasp of
| "state", let alone understands time continuity.
| 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."
| smadge wrote:
| Is there actually a distinction here? A good machine would
| learn about boxes and object permanence.
| 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.
| lsy wrote:
| I think this is unnecessarily credulous about what is really
| going on with ChatGPT. It is not "applying the concepts of a
| poem" or checking meter and verse, it is generating text to
| fit a (admittedly very complicated) function that minimizes
| the statistical improbability of its appearance given the
| preceding text. One example is its use of rhyming words,
| despite having no concept of what words sound like, or what
| it is even like to hear a sound. It selects those words
| because when it has seen the word "poem" before in training
| data, it has often been followed by lines which happen to end
| in symbols that are commonly included in certain sets.
|
| Human cognition is leagues different from this, as our
| symbolic representations are grounded in the world we occupy.
| A word is a representation of an imaginable sound as well as
| a concept. And beyond this, human intelligence not only
| consists of pattern-matching and replication but pattern-
| breaking, theory of mind, and maybe most importantly a 1-1
| engagement with the world. What seems clear is that the robot
| was trained to recognize a certain pattern of pixels from a
| camera input, but neither the robot nor ChatGPT has any
| conception of what a "threat" entails, the stakes at hand, or
| the common-sense frame of reference to discern observed
| behaviors that are innocuous from those that are harmful.
| This allows a bunch of goofy grunts to easily best high-speed
| processors and fancy algorithms by identifying the gap
| between the model's symbolic representations and the actual
| world in which it's operating.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Also, it's not a very good poem. And it's definitions
| aren't entirely correct.
|
| Which is a huge problem, because you cannot trust anything
| ChatGPT produces. It's basically an automated Wikipedia
| with an Eliza N.0 front end. Garbage in gets you garbage
| out.
|
| We _project intelligence_ whenever something appears to use
| words in a certain way, because our own training sets
| suggest that 's a reliable implication.
|
| But it's an illusion, just as Eliza was. For the reasons
| you state.
|
| Eliza had no concept of anything much, and ChatGPT has no
| concept of meaning or correctness.
| ThomPete wrote:
| For now. This will change. And most humans do not write
| great poems either btw.
| 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.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| The core problem is we have no useful definition of
| "intelligence."
|
| Much of the scholarship around this is shockingly poor
| and confuses embodied self-awareness, abstraction and
| classification, accelerated learning, model building, and
| a not very clearly defined set of skills and behaviours
| that all functional humans have and are partially
| instinctive and partially cultural.
|
| There are also unstated expectations of technology
| ("fast, developing quickly, and always correct except
| when broken".)
| majormajor wrote:
| I tried that a few times, asking for "in the style of [band
| or musicians]" and the best I got was "generic gpt-speak"
| (for lack of a better term for it's "default" voice style)
| text that just included a quote from that artist...
| suggesting that it has a limited understanding of "in the
| style of" if it thinks a quote is sometimes a substitute, and
| is actually more of a very-comprehensive pattern-matching
| parrot after all. Even for Taylor Swift, where you'd think
| there's plenty of text to work from.
|
| This matches with other examples I've seen of people either
| getting "confidently wrong" answers or being able to convince
| it that _it 's_ out of date on something it isn't.
| 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).
| mcswell wrote:
| "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." This isn't
| about design, it's about what the system is able to _learn_.
| Humans were not designed to fly, but they can learn to fly
| planes (whether they 're inside the plane or not).
| mlindner wrote:
| The system wasn't designed to be able to learn either.
| spamtarget wrote:
| I think you are wrong. Your own real cognition and
| understanding based on all your experiences and memories, which
| is nothing else, but data in your head. I think consciousness
| is just an illusion of a hugely complex reaction machine what
| you are. You even use the word "extrapolate", which is
| basically a prediction based on data you already have.
| 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.
| mcswell wrote:
| Our cats understand cardboard boxes, and the concept of
| hiding in them. I don't know whether they do so
| instinctually, but as young kittens it didn't take them
| long.
| 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.
| josefx wrote:
| Can you point at these proposed architectures? If they
| are just around the corner there should be decent enough
| papers and prototypes by now, right?
| 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?
| tremon wrote:
| The goalposts were moved by marketing hype about a decade
| ago, when people started claiming that the then-new
| systems were "AI". Before that, the goalposts were always
| far away, at what we now call AGI because the term AI has
| been cheapened in order to sell stuff.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| No, AGI replaced AI for general intelligence before the
| current craze, AI was "cheapened" several AI hyoe cycles
| ago, for (among other things) rule-based expert systems.
| Which is why games have had "AI" long before the set of
| techniques at the center of the current AI hype cycle
| were developed.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Perhaps the goalposts were always in the wrong place.
|
| AI researchers tend to use their own definitions of
| intelligence - playing chess/go, having conversations
| about trivia that require no true emotional insight,
| "making" "art", writing code, driving.
|
| What if those are all peripheral side effects and not at
| all necessary to human AGI?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| My seatbelt is even dumber. I still use it.
|
| The usefulness of tech should be decided empirically, not by
| clever well phrased analogies.
| frontfor wrote:
| No one is arguing AI isn't useful. So your analogy failed
| completely.
| thearn4 wrote:
| Interestingly, ChatGPT seems capable of predicting this
| approach:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/okzZz7D
| partiallypro wrote:
| I don't know your exact question, but I am betting this is
| just a rephrasing of a post that exist elsewhere that it has
| crawled. I don't think it saw it so much as it has seen this
| list before and was able to pull it up in a reword it.
| yreg wrote:
| Nah, GPT is capable of halucinating stuff like this. Also
| seeing something once in the training data is afaik not
| enough for it to be able to reproduce/rephrase that thing.
| richk449 wrote:
| > I don't know your exact question, but I am betting this
| is just a rephrasing of a post that exist elsewhere ...
|
| What percentage of HN posts (by humans) does this statement
| apply to?
| 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.
| mcswell wrote:
| You missed the point. ChatGPT trained on a gazillion
| words to "learn" a language. Children learn their
| language from a tiny fraction of that. Streamed visual,
| smell, touch etc. don't help learn the grammars of
| (spoken) languages.
| sdiupIGPWEfh wrote:
| That has me wondering now.
|
| It's absolutely true that children learn (and even
| generate) language grammar from a ridiculously small
| number of samples compared to LLMs.
|
| But could the availability of a world model, in the form
| of other sensory inputs, contribute to that capacity?
| Younger children who haven't fully mastered correct
| grammar are still able to communicate more sensibly than
| earlier LLMs, whereas the earlier LLMs tend toward more
| grammatically correct gibberish. What if the missing
| secret sauce to better LLM training is figuring out how
| to wire, say, image recognition into the training
| process?
| sdiupIGPWEfh wrote:
| It amuses me that this would be not unlike teaching an
| LLM with picture books.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| > visual, smell, touch etc. don't help learn the grammars
| of (spoken) languages.
|
| Of course they do! These are literally the things
| children learn to associate language with. "Ouch!" is
| what is said when you feel pain.
|
| An ML model can learn to associate the word "ouch" with
| the words "pain" and "feel", but it doesn't actually know
| what pain _is,_ because it doesn 't _feel._
| Maursault wrote:
| > and other data from 5 senses.
|
| It only makes your point stronger, but there are way
| more[1] than 5 human senses, not counting senses we don't
| have that, say, dolphins or other animals do. I can only
| name a few others, such as proprioception, direction,
| balance, and weight discrimination, but there are too
| many to keep track of them all.
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/1964/03/15/archives/we-have-
| more-tha...
| 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.
| wizofaus wrote:
| I'd argue that is the fundamental difference though -
| brains that were able to make good guesses about what was
| going on in the environment with very limited information
| are the ones whose owners reproduced successfully etc.
| And it's not unreasonable to note that the information
| available to the brains of our forebears is therefore in
| a rather indirect but still significant way "encoded"
| into our brains (at birth). Do LLMs have an element of
| that at all in their programming? Do they need more, and
| if so, how could it be best created?
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| Last Christmas one of my nephews was gifted a noisy baby
| toy. I don't know what are his goals and constraints, but
| he's still training with it. Must have learned a lot by
| now.
| VMG wrote:
| You can run the numbers with HD video and audio with high
| words-per-minute and you'd probably still be orders of
| magnitude below the model sizes
| 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.
| majormajor wrote:
| Need to make those robots as harmless as children when they
| do that learning too. ;)
|
| "Whoops, that killed a few too many people, but now I've
| learned better!" - some machine-learning-using car,
| probably
| afpx wrote:
| ChatGPT says that all it needs are separate components trained
| on every modality. It says it has enough fidelity using Human
| language to use that as a starting point to develop a more
| efficient connection between the components. Once it has that,
| and appropriate sensors and mobility, it can develop context.
| And, after that, new knowledge.
|
| But, we all know ChatGPT is full of shit.
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| _ChatGPT says that all it needs are separate components
| trained on every modality._
|
| Yes, all you have to do is train it using multiple examples
| of every possible situation and combinations thereof ---
| which is practically impossible.
| 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.
| xeromal wrote:
| I think the biggest problem with AI driving is that while
| there are plenty of dumb human drivers there are also plenty
| of average drivers and plenty of skilled drivers.
|
| For the most part, if Tesla FSD does a dumb thing in a very
| specific edge case, ALL teslas do a dumb thing in a very
| specific edge case and that's what humans don't appreciate.
|
| A bug can render everyone's car dumb in a single instance.
| 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.)
| danenania wrote:
| This is not necessarily true on an individual level
| though. Driving skills, judgment, risk-taking,
| alcoholism, etc. are nowhere close to evenly distributed.
|
| It's likely we'll go through a period where autonomous
| vehicles can reduce the overall number of accidents,
| injuries, and fatalities if widely adopted, but will
| still increase someone's personal risk vs. driving
| manually if they're a better than average driver.
| hgomersall wrote:
| But we don't live by a purely utilitarian principle of
| ethics. "I'm sorry Mrs Jones, I know your son had an
| expectation of crossing that pedestrian crossing in full
| daylight in a residential area without being mown down by
| a machine learning algorithm gone awry, but please rest
| assured that overall fewer people are dying as a result
| of humans not making the common set of different mistakes
| they used to make".
|
| All sorts of other factors are relevant to the ethics:
| who took the decision to drive; who's benefiting from the
| drive happening; is there a reasonable expectation of
| safety.
| ajross wrote:
| Yeah yeah, I get it. Moral philosophy is full of gray
| areas.
|
| I don't see how that remotely supports "AI cannot be
| allowed to make mistakes some humans would not", which
| was your _decidedly absolutist_ position above.
|
| How about: "We should allow autonomy in most cases,
| though perhaps regulate it carefully to better measure
| its performance against manually-directed systems"
| 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.
| jhugo wrote:
| I don't agree with this. Driving is, taken at its
| fundamentals, a dangerous activity; we are taking heavy
| machinery, accelerating it until it has considerable
| kinetic energy, and maneuvering it through a complex and
| constantly changing environment, often in situations
| where a single mistake will kill or seriously harm
| ourselves or other humans.
|
| The fact that a very large number of humans do this every
| day without causing any injury demonstrates that humans
| are very good at this task. The fact that deaths still
| occur simply shows that they could still be better.
| mcswell wrote:
| Agreed. I sometimes marvel as I'm driving on the freeway
| with other cars going 70, or maybe even more so when I'm
| driving 45 on a two lane highway, at how easy it would be
| to hit someone, and how comparatively seldom it happens.
| refurb wrote:
| You're looking at the wrong metric.
|
| 1.33 deaths per 100,000,000 vehicle miles travelled.
|
| That's amazingly good considering most people, if they
| drive at all, travel about 0.5% of that distance in their
| lifetime.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate
| _in...
| 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.
| pyth0 wrote:
| Now compare that >1 million deaths per year to the total
| number of people driving per year around the world... it
| looks like we're doing a pretty solid job.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| A human is exactly the same. The difference is, once an AI is
| trained you can make copies.
|
| My kid literally just got mad at me that I assumed that he knew
| how to out more paper in the printer. He's 17 and printed tons
| of reports for school. Turns out he's never had to change the
| printer paper.
|
| People know about hiding in cardboard boxes because we all hid
| in cardboard boxes when we were kids. Not because we
| genetically inherited some knowledge.
| exodust wrote:
| Your kid's printer dilemma isn't the same. For starters, he
| knew it ran out of paper - he identified the problem. The AI
| robot might conclude the printer is broken. It would give up
| without anxiety, declaring "I have no data about this
| printer".
|
| Your kid got angry, which is fuel for human scrutiny and
| problem solving. If you weren't there to guide him, he would
| have tried different approaches and most likely worked it
| out.
|
| For you to say your kid is exactly the same as data-driven AI
| is perplexing to me. Humans don't need to have hidden in a
| box themselves to understand "hiding in things for the
| purposes of play". Whether it's a box, or special one of a
| kind plastic tub, humans don't need training about hiding in
| plastic tubs. AI needs to be told that plastic tubs might be
| something people hide in.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| The distinction is that, currently, AI has training phase
| and execution phase, while a human is doing both all the
| time. I don't think the distinction is meaningful now, and
| certainly won't be when these two phases are combined.
|
| You are just a neural net. You are not special.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| We inherently know that cardboard boxes don't move on their
| own. In fact any unusual inanimate object that is moving in
| an irregular fashion will automatically draw attention in our
| brains. These are instincts that even mice have.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| >We inherently know that cardboard boxes don't move on
| their own.
|
| No. We don't. We learn that. We learn that boxes belong in
| the class "doesn't move on its own". In fact, later when
| you encounter cars, you relearn that these boxes do move on
| their own. We have to teach kids "don't run out between the
| non-moving boxes because a moving one might hit you". We
| learn when things seem out of place because we've learned
| what their place is.
| exodust wrote:
| Yep, and humans will make good guesses about the likely
| cause of the moving box. These guesses will factor in other
| variables such as the context of where this event is taking
| place. We might be in a children's play room, so the likely
| activity here is play, or the box is likely part of the
| included play equipment found in large quantities in the
| room, etc.
|
| "AI" is not very intelligent if it needs separate training
| specifically about boxes used potentially for games and
| play. If AI were truly AI, it would figure that out on its
| own.
| rileymat2 wrote:
| We also make bad guesses, for instance seeing faces in
| the dark.
| afro88 wrote:
| All the failures to detect humans will be used as training data
| to fine tune the model.
|
| Just like a toddler might be confused when they first see a box
| with legs walking towards it. Or mistake a hand puppet for a
| real living creature when they first see it. I've seen this
| first hand with my son (the latter).
|
| AI tooling is already capable of identifying whatever it's
| trained to. The DARPA team just hadn't trained it with varied
| enough data when that particular exercise occurred.
| hoppla wrote:
| In a not too distant future, "those killer bots really has it
| for cardboard boxes"
| edrxty wrote:
| >failures to detect humans
|
| That's a weird way to spell "murders"
| birdyrooster wrote:
| It would be murder if we weren't required by human progress
| to embrace fully autonomous vehicles as soon as possible.
| Take it up with whatever god inspires these sociopaths.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| Murder requires intent. Killing by accident is
| manslaughter.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| That's not learning, that's just brute forcing every possible
| answer and trying to memorise them all.
| willbudd wrote:
| Not really. Depends entirely on how general-purpose
| (abstract) the learned concept is.
|
| For example, detecting the possible presence of a cavity
| inside an object X, and whether that cavity is large enough
| to hide another object Y. Learning generic geospatial
| properties like that can greatly improve a whole swath of
| downstream prediction tasks (i.e., in a transfer learning
| sense).
| mcswell wrote:
| That's exactly the problem: the learned "concept" is not
| general purpose at all. It's (from what we can tell) a
| bunch of special cases. While the AI may learn as special
| cases cavities inside carboard boxes and barrels and
| foxholes, let's say, it still has no general concept of a
| cavity, nor does it have a concept of "X is large enough
| to hide Y". This is what children learn (or maybe
| innately know), but which AIs apparently do not.
| willbudd wrote:
| > It still has no general concept of a cavity, nor does
| it have a concept of "X is large enough to hide Y". This
| is what children learn (or maybe innately know), but
| which AIs apparently do not.
|
| I take it you don't have any hands-on knowledge of the
| field. Because I've created systems that detect exactly
| such properties. Either directly, through their
| mathematical constructs (sometimes literally via a single
| OpenCV function call), or through deep classifier
| networks. It's not exactly rocket science.
| rileymat2 wrote:
| > A child can recognize that someone is hiding under a box even
| if they have never actually seen anyone do it before.
|
| A child of what age? Children that have not yet developed
| object permanent will fail to understand some things still
| exist when unseen.
|
| Human intelligence is trained for years; with two humans making
| corrections and prompting fir development. I am curious if
| there is any Machinelearning projects that have been training
| for this length pf time.
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| With no real training, a child will start exploring and
| learning about the world on his own. This is the first roots
| of "intelligence".
|
| How long do you think it would take to teach an AI to do
| this?
| jononomo wrote:
| I'd say we're approximately 400 years away from teaching AI
| to do this.
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| The next problem will be the cost/expense of maintaining
| and operating an inorganic AI with even a rudimentary
| hint of "intelligence".
|
| Personally, I think it would probably be easier, cheaper
| and more practical to just grow synthetic humans in a lab
| --- i.e. _Bladerunner_. "Intelligent" right out of the
| box and already physically adapted to a humanistic world.
| rileymat2 wrote:
| It would be interesting to see how much exploring a child
| without adult guidance does, being a parent there is a lot
| of leading to exploration that is quite a bit of effort.
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| I know a kid who recently learned to defeat a new child
| safety lock without adult guidance. AI *might* learn to
| do the same --- after training on several thousand videos
| showing the exact process.
| mikewarot wrote:
| I LOVED playing peek-a-boo with my child at that age!
| kerpotgh wrote:
| [dead]
| 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.
| somishere wrote:
| I guess there's more to intelligence than just thinking outside
| the box ...
| bell-cot wrote:
| [flagged]
| burbankio wrote:
| I like "AI is anything that doesn't work yet".
| anticensor wrote:
| Or, _absent_ intelligence.
| PM_me_your_math wrote:
| Devil dogs later discover you can blast DARPA robot into many
| pieces using the Mk 153.
| mjevans wrote:
| Wrong training prompt / question. Instead of 'detect a human' the
| robot should have been trained to detect any unexpected movement
| or changes in situation.
| raydiatian wrote:
| The final word in tactical espionage.
| chimen wrote:
| The AI is not defeated though, it is being trained.
| 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.
| nemo44x wrote:
| "What was that noise?!.....Oh it's just a box" lol because
| boxes making noise is normal.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| "HQ! HQ! The box is moving! Permission to shoot the box!"
|
| "This is HQ. Report back to base for psychiatric evaluation."
|
| https://youtu.be/FR0etgdZf3U
| sekai wrote:
| Kojima predicted this
| doyouevensunbro wrote:
| Kojima is a prophet, hallowed be his name.
| sceadu wrote:
| Easiest way to predict the future is to invent it :)
| 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
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| you can install an extension on desktop to do the same
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| lifehack obtained!
| brikwerk wrote:
| Changing the "shorts" portion of the URL to "v" also
| works too.
|
| Ex: https://www.youtube.com/v/Ec_zFYCnjJc
| 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.)
| stirfish wrote:
| Same, I deleted my save and restarted the game to go non-
| lethal after my first encounter with The Sorrow
| bityard wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Hold up just a sec, do you make a living in organized crime
| or something?
| xeromal wrote:
| He means he's a pacificist in video games.
| jstarfish wrote:
| It's more than that. It changed my outlook in reality
| too.
|
| The experience forced me consider the implications of
| taking _any_ life-- whether it be in aggression, self-
| defense or even for sustenance. Others may try to kill
| me, but I can do better than responding in kind.
|
| As a result, I refuse to own a gun and reduced my meat
| consumption. I have a rat infestation but won't deploy
| poison or traps that will maim them (losing battle, but
| still working on it). Etc.
| jstarfish wrote:
| Heh. Quite the opposite.
|
| No, I was alluding to my previous Rambo playstyle of
| gunning down enemy soldiers even when I didn't need to.
|
| But it carries into reality...a spider crosses your desk;
| most people would kill it. Rats? We poison them, their
| families and the parent consumer on the food chain.
| Thieves? Shoot on sight. Annoying CoD player? SWAT them.
| Murder as a means of problem solving is all so
| _unnecessary_.
|
| We all have a body count. Most of us go through life
| never having to face it.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| The more enemies you kill in MGS3, the more disturbing a
| certain boss fight gets.
| 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 :)
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Hilariously enough, Kojima is enough of a technothriller
| fabulist that DARPA is explicitly part of that franchise's
| lore - too bad they didn't live up to his depiction.
|
| https://metalgear.fandom.com/wiki/Research_and_development_a.
| ..
| 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
| stirfish wrote:
| I just learned you can use the different boxes to fast
| travel on the conveyor belts in Big Shell
| 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.
| bschwindHN wrote:
| Your mention of "Extreme" reminded me there's a "European
| Extreme" difficulty level, I only made it halfway through
| MGS3 on that (attempting no kills at the same time)
|
| The only strategy that somewhat worked for me was perfect
| accuracy tranquilizer shots, to knock them out instantly.
| That's probably the hardest game mode I've ever played.
| airstrike wrote:
| > That's probably the hardest game mode I've ever played.
|
| Halo 2 on Legendary difficulty was ludicrously hard too
| xeromal wrote:
| Those old vidmaster challenges. woof
| epolanski wrote:
| Oh, the tons of hours spent lying immobile in grass in
| that game attempting the same..
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Spending hours crawling around in grass only to get
| spotted, and then there's this guy:
|
| https://youtu.be/t4e7ibdS7xU
| thelopa wrote:
| Oh the tons of hours waiting for menus to load to swap
| your camouflage pattern after crawling onto slightly
| different terrain...
| thelopa wrote:
| I also completed MGS3 on euro extreme, and was about an
| hour from the end of MGS2 on euro extreme (the action
| sequence right before the MG Ray fight). I was playing
| the PC port, and let me tell you: aiming the automatic
| weapons without pressure sensitive buttons is nearly
| impossible. I gave up eventually and decided that my
| prior run on Extreme had earned me enough gamer cred.
| Finishing euro extreme wasn't worth it.
|
| On the other hand, I loved MGS3 on euro extreme! It
| really required mastering every trick in the game. Every
| little advantage you could squeeze into a boss fight was
| essential. Escape from Groznygrad was hell, though. By
| far the single hardest part of the game.
| skhr0680 wrote:
| There's even a scene where Snake tries "hiding" in a box
| and you can find and shoot him
| 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.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Just put a poster of a saluting soldier on the box.
| That'll fool them.
| skhr0680 wrote:
| I remember MGS2 having different kinds of cardboard boxes
| for exactly the reason you said
| doubled112 wrote:
| All it takes is one guard to say "that's how it's always
| been" and nobody will ever ask questions again.
| rossjudson wrote:
| Let's keep in mind it's a military robot, so it'll just be
| shooting boxes on the next iteration. After that it'll be
| houseplants and suspiciously large cats.
| tabtab wrote:
| Soldier A: "Oh no, we're boxed in!"
|
| Soldier B: "Relax, it's a good thing."
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| People read stories like this and think "haha, robots are stupid"
| when they should be thinking "they're identifying the robot's
| weaknesses so they can fix them."
| perfobotto wrote:
| Snaaaake
| 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.
| varajelle wrote:
| It's like predicting that flying will never be a mode of
| transportation while laughing about Wright brothers's planes
| crashing
| esjeon wrote:
| I also have never been able to count the number of people who
| make obviously invalid optimistic prediction without
| understanding the tech nor the limitation of the current
| paradigm. They don't see the tech itself, but only see the
| recent developments (ignoring the decades of progress) and
| concludes it is a fast moving field. It all sounds like what
| bitcoin people used to say.
|
| This whole debate is another FOMO shitshow. People just don't
| want to "miss" any big things, so they just bet on a random
| side rather than actually learning how things work. Anything
| past this point is like watching a football game, as what
| matters is who's winning. Nothing about the tech itself
| matters. A big facepalm I should make.
| ben_w wrote:
| It's very easy to be wrong as an optimist as well as a
| pessimist. Back in 2009 I was expecting by 2019 to be able to
| buy a car in a dealership that didn't have a steering wheel
| because the self-driving AI would just be that good.
|
| Closest we got to that is Waymo taxis in just a few cities.
|
| It's good! So is Tesla's thing! Just, both are much much less
| than I was expecting.
| 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.
| joexner wrote:
| They didn't try very hard to train this system. It wasn't even a
| prototype.
|
| - In the excerpt, Scharre describes a week during which DARPA
| calibrated its robot's human recognition algorithm alongside a
| group of US Marines. The Marines and a team of DARPA engineers
| spent six days walking around the robot, training it to identify
| the moving human form. On the seventh day, the engineers placed
| the robot at the center of a traffic circle and devised a little
| game: The Marines had to approach the robot from a distance and
| touch the robot without being detected.
| 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.
| nix23 wrote:
| Next DARPA-robot defeats Marines by being the cardboard box.
| 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.
| Too wrote:
| As humiliating this is for the ai. Nobody would have the balls to
| pull this off in a real battlefield outside of training. Because
| you never know if you found the perfect camouflage or if you are
| a sitting duck walking straight into a trap.
| 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.
| ben_w wrote:
| I heard the same about caesarean ("none of woman born")
| becoming a human woman and a male hobbit ("No man can kill
| me!").
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| I don't know if that's true, but I _want_ it to be true,
| because the very same thing pissed me off when I read
| Macbeth in high school.
| gwern wrote:
| I am suspicious of this story, however plausible it seems.
|
| The source is given as a book; the Economist writer Shashank
| Joshi explicitly says that they describe the 'same story' in
| their article ("(I touched on the same story here:
| https://economist.com/technology-
| quarterly/2022/01/27/decept...)"). However, if you look at the
| book excerpt
| (https://twitter.com/shashj/status/1615716082588815363), it's
| _totally different_ from the supposed same story (crawl or
| somersault? cited to Benjamin, or Phil? did the Marine cover his
| face, or did he cover everything _but_ his face? all undetected,
| or not the first?).
|
| Why should you believe either one after comparing them...? When
| you have spent much time tracing urban legends, especially in AI
| where standards for these 'stupid AI stories' are so low that
| people will happily tell stories with no source ever
| (https://gwern.net/Tanks) or take an AI deliberately designed to
| make a particular mistake & erase that context to peddle their
| error story (eg https://hackernoon.com/dogs-wolves-data-science-
| and-why-mach...), this sort of sloppiness with stories should
| make you wary.
| 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.
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| The quantum entanglement of our brains with the world
| around us.
| burnished wrote:
| I am having a hard time understanding what this is
| supposed to mean, can you be more explicit about the
| cause/effect here?
| atonse wrote:
| Totally.
|
| But it seems like all these ML models are great at image
| recognition but not behavior recognition.
|
| What's the state of the art with that currently?
| burnished wrote:
| Last I knew "absolute, complete garbage"
| woodson wrote:
| Part of the problem is that the confidence for "cardboard
| box" was probably quite high. It's hard to properly
| calibrate confidence (speaking from experience, speech
| recognition is often confidently wrong).
| [deleted]
| 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.
| dilippkumar wrote:
| Unfortunately, this will not work for autonomous driving
| systems that have a front facing radar or lidar.
|
| Afaik, this covers everybody except Tesla.
|
| Looney Tunes attacks on Teslas might become a real subreddit
| one day.
| ghiculescu wrote:
| Why wouldn't it work for those systems?
| dilippkumar wrote:
| Presumably, a plywood wall painted to look like a road to a
| camera will still look like a wall to the radar/lidar.
| 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.
| pugworthy wrote:
| True. So if they are smart enough to fool AI, they will just
| remove the mid span, and have convenient weight bearing beams
| nearby that they put in place when they need to cross. Or if
| it's two lane, only fake out one side because the AI will be
| too clever for its own good and stay in its own lane. Or put
| up a sign saying "Bridge out, take temporary bridge" (which
| is fake).
|
| The point is, you just need to fool the vision enough to get
| it to attempt the task. Play to its gullibility and trust in
| the camera.
| robswc wrote:
| Yep. Destroying an autonomous fleet would be easy with a
| couple million $ and a missile... but it could also be done
| for nearly $0 with some intuition (and depending on how
| easy they are to fool)
| aftbit wrote:
| That sounds way harder. You'd first need to lift a giant pile
| of metal to a cartoonishly high height, then somehow time it
| to drop on yourself when the cars are near.
| coding123 wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhOc1vyDhjA
| euroderf wrote:
| This is where I wonder what the status of Cyc is, and whether it
| and LLMs can ever live happily together.
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