6 ms·

Is Old Man Minsky the only one who still thinks that machines should do AI instead of machine learning? He certainly seemed to believe that in 2007. Who is stil

by jordigh 11y ago

Is Old Man Minsky the only one who still thinks that machines should do AI instead of machine learning? He certainly seemed to believe that in 2007. Who is still on his side? http://snarkmarket.com/blog/snarkives/societyculture/old_man_minsky/ http://snarkmarket.com/blog/snarkives/societyculture/old_man...

westoncb 11y ago
There are still others working on artificial general intelligence, but it's definitely more marginal, and half the time I find someone doing something interesting it's some work to figure out whether they are crazy or brilliant :) E.g. Ben Goertzel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Goertzel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Goertzel
- MichaelGG 11y ago
  http://www.goertzel.org/benzine/WakingUpFromTheEconomyOfDreams.htm http://www.goertzel.org/benzine/WakingUpFromTheEconomyOfDrea... It's hard to tell. But the thing that seemed most concerning was that at one point, they suffer some big setback and change things around. Except he's pleased that a large amount of code is still useful, doing maintenance work. I have no real basis, but my instinct says that if dealing with e.g. socket code is even remotely a concern at all, you're probably not actually solving real AI problems. Actually, the bigger thing is that it's just highly improbable they were so close to creating AI and for lack of a few dozen megabucks they aren't able to do so. It's such a tiny amount of money to supposedly bring on the singularity. Especially when you see he was selling a Market Predictor product. It's like those scams where they're going to take your money and buy gold in the Caribbean and bring it back so ya get 2x back. If you actually had market predicting software, I dunno, you could ... put your own money in? Even more recently, Peter Thiel was funding MIRI right? So if anyone close thought this was actually in reach and just needed a bit more Java code to be written, it seems rather probable they'd be able to find _some_ funding. Shit, if you really believed it'd bring about a positive GAI then you'd probably work on it in the open, find some way of completing it over a decade or two (barring severe procrastination and motivational issues). None of this adds up. I'm not sure what he was doing at SIAI/MIRI, but I've no real clue wtf they actually do anyways. Edit: http://wp.goertzel.org/important-research-avenues-on-my-mind/ http://wp.goertzel.org/important-research-avenues-on-my-mind... OK so, "important research" avenue. Apart from making AGI so we can have robots (wtf?). And growing brains in a vat. We should apparently just use Google's "databases of text" to dev a search engine that "really understands stuff". As if Google hasn't though of this "avenue". Oh, and cold fusion and femtotech. I think my estimate of this guy actually making AI has dropped significantly. "Avenues of research" eh? You'd have better luck reading the Player's Handbook and picking your top 8 favourite spells you wish were real.
pomber 11y ago
Chomsky http://www.tor.com/2011/06/21/norvig-vs-chomsky-and-the-fight-for-the-future-of-ai/ http://www.tor.com/2011/06/21/norvig-vs-chomsky-and-the-figh... http://norvig.com/chomsky.html http://norvig.com/chomsky.html
sp332 11y ago
Machine-learning is a kind of AI, right? Assuming you mean human-style general intelligence, it's more interesting to me since it helps us understand ourselves, and we have a working model to work from.
- jordigh 11y ago
  No, ML is basically stats when you have lots of computing power. Classical AI tackled very different kinds of problems. There used to be a "war" of ideas between connectionists (which kind of turned into ML when neural networks no longer tried to be remotely biological) and computationalists, which is where Minsky would probably be closer to. He wants us to understand how minds work in order to model them better. With ML you don't really try to understand. You throw a dumb and simple-minded algorithm at lots of data and get back good results. You don't try to model all of the complexities of an intelligent problem. So, no, I would not say ML is a kind of AI.
- abhgh 11y ago
  Yes it is AI. You could quickly go through the Table of Contents in the classic Russell and Norvig "AI: A Modern Approach book" to see what is considered as AI. To be classified as AI, the mode of learning (statistical or not) is not as important as the notion of what an intelligent "agent" is supposed to do. There are quite a few definitions/statements of this notion here. One of them (again from the book) is that AI must "act humanly" - which Kurzweil is described as: "The art of creating machines that perform functions that require intelligence when performed by people". Note that the behavior of the AI is stressed, not how it produces this behavior. Machine Learning falls under this categorization of AI (Section 1.1 in the 3rd edition of the book).
cscurmudgeon 11y ago
Just visit any mainstream AI conference like IJCAI. You will see many things in AI out of reach of current ML. ML is just one track. http://ijcai-15.org http://ijcai-15.org Also, even in things like question-answering, pure ML is not the state-of-the-art. E.g., IBM Watson had a bunch of different algorithms. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/tocresult.jsp?reload=true&isnumber=6177717 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/tocresult.jsp?reload=true&isn... We will eventually get there with a pure learning system, but not yet. Till then, we need less FUD. :)
- jordigh 11y ago
  It seems everyone took my comment to hint that Minsky was wrong. I did not mean to indicate that. I wanted to know who was still doing non-ML intelligent machine stuff, since ML is all I ever hear about in HN.
  - cscurmudgeon 11y ago
    Ah sorry my bad too:) HN is an echo chamber when it comes to certain topics. IJCAI, AI magazine, AGI conferences etc would be the best place to look at scientific cutting edging work on intelligent machines that includes non-ML work. The research reported in these places is not always flashy like what the HN crowd loves, but represents unsolved problems being solved in a variety of ways. The Berkley course on AI on EdX is also a good option to understand what is happening in the field. A lot of $$ goes into non ML stuff. Don't get me wrong ML is important, but right now, is not the only game in town. Would be nice to have pure learning machines, but we are quite far from that (despite all the hype and genuine exciting developments in recent years).
    - dang 11y ago
      > HN is an echo chamber when it comes to certain topics. There's a way to change that: educate the community by submitting meaningful stories on new topics. Those are the best submissions and we're always on the lookout for them.
  - unhammer 11y ago
ode 11y ago
You can disagree without calling him names.
- Gibbon1 11y ago
  You can register disagreement without reflexively down voting like this is stack overflow.
  - Gibbon1 11y ago
    You guys are really really predictable.
    - dredmorbius 11y ago
      "Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - Gibbon1 11y ago
        I apologies, downvoted comments are usually interesting so I never ignore them, but my because my eyesight is slowly failing I find the greyed out comments very hard to read.
        dang 11y ago
        > I find the greyed out comments very hard to read. We recently changed it so that if you click on a comment's timestamp to go to its page, it won't be greyed out anymore. Still an extra hop, but easier than it used to be. (And thanks for responding so politely to dredmorbius' reminding you about the guideline.)
        dredmorbius 11y ago
        Thank you. So long as you're considering styling changes: http://stylebot.me/styles/2945 http://stylebot.me/styles/2945
reitzensteinm 11y ago
That the fashionable opinion has turned against his beliefs so quickly shouldn't be used as evidence he's wrong. If anything, it shows that the jury is still very much out.
- jordigh 11y ago
  Huh, I don't think he's wrong. I just wonder who is still working on AI as AI.
  - tunesmith 11y ago
    Douglas Hofstadter is a clear example. Here's a 2013 article about him: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man-who-would-teach-machines-to-think/309529/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man-...
    - nickpsecurity 11y ago
      I appreciate the article. That was an interesting read. Might have to look at that book at some point.
jordigh 11y ago
Huh, so many downvotes. Because I called him "Old Man Minsky"? That's a term of endearment. http://donbot.com/DesignBot/Bibliography/Bib02MinskyDiscoverInterview.html http://donbot.com/DesignBot/Bibliography/Bib02MinskyDiscover... https://books.google.ca/books?id=tNZLF8gtx-EC&pg=PA82&lpg=PA82&dq=%22old+man+minsky%22&source=bl&ots=hC0zk-fZtw&sig=VdeXCprXSqAnS7Kn7SBmbWb2W1c&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CEwQ6AEwC2oVChMIzNr1h_CuxwIVV52ICh24LgL2#v=onepage&q=%22old%20man%20minsky%22&f=false https://books.google.ca/books?id=tNZLF8gtx-EC&pg=PA82&lpg=PA...

by jordigh 11y ago

westoncb 11y ago

There are still others working on artificial general intelligence, but it's definitely more marginal, and half the time I find someone doing something interesting it's some work to figure out whether they are crazy or brilliant :) E.g. Ben Goertzel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Goertzel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Goertzel

MichaelGG 11y ago
http://www.goertzel.org/benzine/WakingUpFromTheEconomyOfDreams.htm http://www.goertzel.org/benzine/WakingUpFromTheEconomyOfDrea... It's hard to tell. But the thing that seemed most concerning was that at one point, they suffer some big setback and change things around. Except he's pleased that a large amount of code is still useful, doing maintenance work. I have no real basis, but my instinct says that if dealing with e.g. socket code is even remotely a concern at all, you're probably not actually solving real AI problems. Actually, the bigger thing is that it's just highly improbable they were so close to creating AI and for lack of a few dozen megabucks they aren't able to do so. It's such a tiny amount of money to supposedly bring on the singularity. Especially when you see he was selling a Market Predictor product. It's like those scams where they're going to take your money and buy gold in the Caribbean and bring it back so ya get 2x back. If you actually had market predicting software, I dunno, you could ... put your own money in? Even more recently, Peter Thiel was funding MIRI right? So if anyone close thought this was actually in reach and just needed a bit more Java code to be written, it seems rather probable they'd be able to find _some_ funding. Shit, if you really believed it'd bring about a positive GAI then you'd probably work on it in the open, find some way of completing it over a decade or two (barring severe procrastination and motivational issues). None of this adds up. I'm not sure what he was doing at SIAI/MIRI, but I've no real clue wtf they actually do anyways. Edit: http://wp.goertzel.org/important-research-avenues-on-my-mind/ http://wp.goertzel.org/important-research-avenues-on-my-mind... OK so, "important research" avenue. Apart from making AGI so we can have robots (wtf?). And growing brains in a vat. We should apparently just use Google's "databases of text" to dev a search engine that "really understands stuff". As if Google hasn't though of this "avenue". Oh, and cold fusion and femtotech. I think my estimate of this guy actually making AI has dropped significantly. "Avenues of research" eh? You'd have better luck reading the Player's Handbook and picking your top 8 favourite spells you wish were real.

pomber 11y ago

Chomsky http://www.tor.com/2011/06/21/norvig-vs-chomsky-and-the-fight-for-the-future-of-ai/ http://www.tor.com/2011/06/21/norvig-vs-chomsky-and-the-figh... http://norvig.com/chomsky.html http://norvig.com/chomsky.html

sp332 11y ago

Machine-learning is a kind of AI, right? Assuming you mean human-style general intelligence, it's more interesting to me since it helps us understand ourselves, and we have a working model to work from.

jordigh 11y ago
No, ML is basically stats when you have lots of computing power. Classical AI tackled very different kinds of problems. There used to be a "war" of ideas between connectionists (which kind of turned into ML when neural networks no longer tried to be remotely biological) and computationalists, which is where Minsky would probably be closer to. He wants us to understand how minds work in order to model them better. With ML you don't really try to understand. You throw a dumb and simple-minded algorithm at lots of data and get back good results. You don't try to model all of the complexities of an intelligent problem. So, no, I would not say ML is a kind of AI.
abhgh 11y ago
Yes it is AI. You could quickly go through the Table of Contents in the classic Russell and Norvig "AI: A Modern Approach book" to see what is considered as AI. To be classified as AI, the mode of learning (statistical or not) is not as important as the notion of what an intelligent "agent" is supposed to do. There are quite a few definitions/statements of this notion here. One of them (again from the book) is that AI must "act humanly" - which Kurzweil is described as: "The art of creating machines that perform functions that require intelligence when performed by people". Note that the behavior of the AI is stressed, not how it produces this behavior. Machine Learning falls under this categorization of AI (Section 1.1 in the 3rd edition of the book).

cscurmudgeon 11y ago

Just visit any mainstream AI conference like IJCAI. You will see many things in AI out of reach of current ML. ML is just one track. http://ijcai-15.org http://ijcai-15.org Also, even in things like question-answering, pure ML is not the state-of-the-art. E.g., IBM Watson had a bunch of different algorithms. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/tocresult.jsp?reload=true&isnumber=6177717 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/tocresult.jsp?reload=true&isn... We will eventually get there with a pure learning system, but not yet. Till then, we need less FUD. :)

jordigh 11y ago
It seems everyone took my comment to hint that Minsky was wrong. I did not mean to indicate that. I wanted to know who was still doing non-ML intelligent machine stuff, since ML is all I ever hear about in HN.
- cscurmudgeon 11y ago
  Ah sorry my bad too:) HN is an echo chamber when it comes to certain topics. IJCAI, AI magazine, AGI conferences etc would be the best place to look at scientific cutting edging work on intelligent machines that includes non-ML work. The research reported in these places is not always flashy like what the HN crowd loves, but represents unsolved problems being solved in a variety of ways. The Berkley course on AI on EdX is also a good option to understand what is happening in the field. A lot of $$ goes into non ML stuff. Don't get me wrong ML is important, but right now, is not the only game in town. Would be nice to have pure learning machines, but we are quite far from that (despite all the hype and genuine exciting developments in recent years).
  - dang 11y ago
    > HN is an echo chamber when it comes to certain topics. There's a way to change that: educate the community by submitting meaningful stories on new topics. Those are the best submissions and we're always on the lookout for them.
- unhammer 11y ago

ode 11y ago

You can disagree without calling him names.

Gibbon1 11y ago
You can register disagreement without reflexively down voting like this is stack overflow.
- Gibbon1 11y ago
  You guys are really really predictable.
  - dredmorbius 11y ago
    "Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - Gibbon1 11y ago
      I apologies, downvoted comments are usually interesting so I never ignore them, but my because my eyesight is slowly failing I find the greyed out comments very hard to read.
      - dang 11y ago
        > I find the greyed out comments very hard to read. We recently changed it so that if you click on a comment's timestamp to go to its page, it won't be greyed out anymore. Still an extra hop, but easier than it used to be. (And thanks for responding so politely to dredmorbius' reminding you about the guideline.)
        dredmorbius 11y ago
        Thank you. So long as you're considering styling changes: http://stylebot.me/styles/2945 http://stylebot.me/styles/2945

reitzensteinm 11y ago

That the fashionable opinion has turned against his beliefs so quickly shouldn't be used as evidence he's wrong. If anything, it shows that the jury is still very much out.

jordigh 11y ago
Huh, I don't think he's wrong. I just wonder who is still working on AI as AI.
- tunesmith 11y ago
  Douglas Hofstadter is a clear example. Here's a 2013 article about him: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man-who-would-teach-machines-to-think/309529/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man-...
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    I appreciate the article. That was an interesting read. Might have to look at that book at some point.

jordigh 11y ago

Huh, so many downvotes. Because I called him "Old Man Minsky"? That's a term of endearment. http://donbot.com/DesignBot/Bibliography/Bib02MinskyDiscoverInterview.html http://donbot.com/DesignBot/Bibliography/Bib02MinskyDiscover... https://books.google.ca/books?id=tNZLF8gtx-EC&pg=PA82&lpg=PA82&dq=%22old+man+minsky%22&source=bl&ots=hC0zk-fZtw&sig=VdeXCprXSqAnS7Kn7SBmbWb2W1c&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CEwQ6AEwC2oVChMIzNr1h_CuxwIVV52ICh24LgL2#v=onepage&q=%22old%20man%20minsky%22&f=false https://books.google.ca/books?id=tNZLF8gtx-EC&pg=PA82&lpg=PA...