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Why do people think they can build anything worthy of the name "AI" by just fucking around with neural networks instead of by specifying exactly what sort of mo
by eli_gottlieb 11y ago
Why do people think they can build anything worthy of the name "AI" by just fucking around with neural networks instead of by specifying exactly what sort of models and exactly what sort of inference constitute "intelligence" in the first place?
It's like trying to build an airplane by studying hang-gliders instead of aerodynamics.
- azernik 11y agoBecause we're at such a basic level in our understanding of how intelligence works that these crude hang-glider models are our best way to learn the basics. AI researchers spent decades trying to formulate definitions and models purely theoretically, and it turned out those theories were not super useful in building out modeling real systems. The toy models are essential.
- jostmey 11y agoThe Wright brothers started off by building gliders before they built the first airplane. So why is this approach the wrong one?
- randcraw 11y agoRight. Then they built airplanes that don't flap their wings either. The success of fixed wing aircraft is not an ideal metaphor for the failures of AI research. Nor do the successes of neural nets herald the biomorphic approach, since they don't really resemble the brain very much.
- jryan49 11y agoBaby steps.
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- CmonDev 11y agoDidn't they try before the AI Winter happened?
- mojuba 11y agoI agree. I think the current state of AI can roughly be described as "we want to fly like birds" rather than "we want to fly". Aviation is a great example of how the formulation of a task makes a huge difference. We still can't build machines that would fly exactly like birds, but instead we have built machines that fly faster and carry a lot more weight.
- drzaiusapelord 11y agoBecause there's no known path to AI and articles like this are pretty much science fiction. Reminds me of that Georges Melies film about going to the moon in a cannon. We didn't have any ideas regarding rockets yet, so cannons it is. I suspect someone will get some level of mega-expert system/simulated intelligence going sooner than later. Maybe something that can handle the types of commands you could give a dog and it being able to use enough fuzzy logic to work basic things out like, "Get me a coke from the fridge and then get my slippers." That seems a lot more likely than suddenly birthing human-level AI from NN's. I think NN's will ultimately fail the same way planes work nothing like birds. Trying to copy a biological system very closely just doesn't make sense, at least most of the time.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 11y agoYou must hang around some pretty awesome dogs.
- Retric 11y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK4gMe5bx9Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK4gMe5bx9Y
- randcraw 11y ago"Get me a Coke..." was accomplished in 1972 by Terry Winograd's SHRDLU and many 3rd gen AI systems since. NNs will almost certainly succeed where expert systems failed, largely because we now understand that no single monolithic pattern matcher will suffice alone. Any cognitive engine must be composed of many components, each attuned to a different purpose and context. And now we better recognize the huge need for learning, both for initial skill acquisition and for lifelong thereafter. Minsky's "Society of Mind" is probably a better illustration of how AI will evolve (if not manifest), as well as how it must integrate with our myriad collective needs and personal lives.
- drzaiusapelord 11y agoSorry, I meant as a product. Why can't I buy a robot today that can handle "get me a coke" or "fill the dishwasher" or "mow the lawn."
- minthd 11y agoBecause the advancements in the field are interesting and wide ranging: neural networks doing vision, speech, natural language understanding, reasoning and general learning over data.
- jessriedel 11y ago> Why do people think they can build anything worthy of the name "AI" by just fucking around with neural networks Are attributing that position to the author? I don't think that's what he's saying at all (italics mine): > The frontier machine intelligence architecture [at] the moment uses deep neural nets.... Silicon brains of this kind...have recently surpassed human performance on a number of narrowly defined tasks...We are learning how to tune deep neural nets using large samples of training data, but the resulting structures are mysterious to us. The theoretical basis for this work is still primitive, and it remains largely an empirical black art.
- atom-morgan 11y ago> Why do people think they can build anything worthy of the name "AI" by just fucking around with neural networks instead of by specifying exactly what sort of models and exactly what sort of inference constitute "intelligence" in the first place? Doesn't this go back to the second paragraph of the article?
- rl3 11y agoEvolution, the process to which we owe our intelligence, is ultimately a dumb search process itself. It has no concept or understanding of what it creates, and yet, it still creates. Thus, I fail to see why some sort of fundamental understanding of intelligence is required in order to create it. On the contrary, it's not hard to imagine genetic algorithms combined with neural networks being used in a similar fashion, provided there's sufficient data and computing power available.
- AndrewKemendo 11y agoCause nobody knows how intelligence arises
- eli_gottlieb 11y agoprobmods.org