6 ms·

A Roadmap Towards Machine Intelligence

59 points by vonnik 11y ago

tajen 11y ago
Outline: 1. Introduction 2. Desiderata for an intelligent machine 2.1 Ability to communicate 2.2 Ability to learn 3. A simulated ecosystem to educate communication-based intelligent machines 3.1 High-level description of the ecosystem (Agents, Interface channels, Reward, Incremental structure, Time off for exploration, Evaluation) 3.2 Examples from early stages of the simulation (Preliminaries and notation, The Learner learns to issue Environment commands, Associating language to actions, Learning to generalize, Understanding higher-level orders, Interactive communication, Algorithmic knowledge) 3.3 Interacting with the trained intelligent machine 4. Towards the development of intelligent machines 4.1 Types of learning 4.2 Long-term memory and compositional learning skills 4.3 Computational properties of intelligent machines 5. Related ideas 6. Conclusion I'm thinking the winner might not be the company who makes huge progress towards MI, it could be the one who provides the ecosystem. For example, in the trend of Siri-type chatbots, Slack is very well positioned to reap most of the benefits even without doing much research in AI, because they could get a commission on the platform usage.
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  If we successfully create actual machine intelligence, with the ability to learn and communicate, then the "winner" hardly matters; it only matters whether they programmed it correctly or not. Any scenario that has a "winner" means they didn't.
- cafebeen 11y ago
  If we manage to build truly intelligent machines, I'd hope it'd be used to enrich people's lives, that is, all humans be the winners
simonh 11y ago
I'm not quite sure why this made it to the front page. It's just a wish list of things they would like an AI to be able to do.
- hiddencost 11y ago
  They're some of the most prominent people in their field, and they are setting a major direction for Facebook ai research. So this is the Facebook road map. Also, because everyone is focused on ML, the move bank to people trying to solve AI is a big deal. Other major researchers are saying similar things
  - simonh 11y ago
    Ok, good explanation. Thanks.
karmacondon 11y ago
Lot of interesting ideas and research collected in one place. It looks like the high concept pitch for this is, "chatbot that can query the internet"
- mziel 11y ago
  So basically Siri?
grondilu 11y ago
Seems like the authors do not consider how safe such a system would be. Yet it seems to me that a machine whose main goals would be to learn things about the world so that it can communicate with humans and answer their questions, is possibly very dangerous. While reading the first section I kept thinking about this blog entry from Paul Tyma, "How Artificial Intelligence Will Really Kill Us All": http://paultyma.blogspot.fr/2015/10/how-artificial-intelligence-will-really.html http://paultyma.blogspot.fr/2015/10/how-artificial-intellige...
- morgante 11y ago
  Interesting entry, but I don't find it very credible. We already have superpowered weapons which make it possible for a few powerful individuals to obliterate the rest of humanity, yet thus far we've stayed alive.
  - grondilu 11y ago
    Recently Max Tegmark talked at the UN (1) about the potential danger of AI, and he asked what would have happened if making a nuclear bomb was as simple as say baking sand in a micro-wave. He argues that if that was the case most of us would probably be dead. I guess the point is that in these matters, the past is not always a good indicator of the future. 1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9N_Fsbngh8&t=1h55m31s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9N_Fsbngh8&t=1h55m31s
    - morgante 11y ago
      Interesting analogy, but I think it's rather debatable. We have no evidence that making a strong AI is as simple as baking sand in a microwave—in fact, we have quite a bit of evidence that it's actually extremely difficult. It's unlikely to think that such a powerful and challenging piece of software would have any wider distribution than nuclear weapons. I think this is affirmed by the fact that most state-of-the-art AI depends primarily on massive volumes of data rather than clever algorithms. Massive datasets are inherently concentrated in the hands of the few and powerful, so it seems unlikely that a rogue actor could acquire suitable data.
denniskane 11y ago
I will do everything in my power to ensure that corporate-backed, ivory-tower, anti-philosophical, techno-enthusiast academics do not figure out some kind of formula to dominate the world of human affairs with their so-called "super intelligent machines". I'm not saying that this specific research group falls under this umbrella, but they are all credited as being associated with Facebook AI research, so take it FWIW. I do believe that a certain Elon Musk would back me up here: "I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess like what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that. So we need to be very careful with the artificial intelligence. Increasingly scientists think there should be some regulatory oversight maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don't do something very foolish. With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it's like yeah he's sure he can control the demon. Didn't work out." The classes of algorithms that are meant to directly interact with people in a way that appears authentically human must obviously be highly regulated, and I certainly agree that these kinds of regulations should be on par with international nuclear oversight bodies. It is always important to give end users the option to figure out for themselves how the algorithms that they interact with actually function. In order to encourage this kind of thing, I have been working on an online, distributed operating system concept for the past several years, and one of the apps is a simple, "Hello World" kind of an AI that goes by the name, Bertie. I am working on making the underlying system code (which is mostly JavaScript) completely editable by end users. They will be able to test out their edits in an application window inside of the web page, and will be able to share their changes with each other over the distributed, web-based filesystem that I am actively developing. If you are running Chrome, you can try out the OS by going to https://nacl-pg.appspot.com/ https://nacl-pg.appspot.com/. To see the AI app, just click on the Applications folder, and then click on Bertie's face. Alternatively, if you are feeling lazy, just click on the following link and the Bertie app will automatically open: https://nacl-pg.appspot.com/desk?open=Bertie https://nacl-pg.appspot.com/desk?open=Bertie.
varelse 11y ago
"And bingo! I get to press the button again, woohoo!" Wonder what the other button does... On the bright side, they bucked the trend and cited Terry Winograd's research from the 1970s instead of pretending they made this idea all up by themselves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU

59 points by vonnik 11y ago

tajen 11y ago

Outline: 1. Introduction 2. Desiderata for an intelligent machine 2.1 Ability to communicate 2.2 Ability to learn 3. A simulated ecosystem to educate communication-based intelligent machines 3.1 High-level description of the ecosystem (Agents, Interface channels, Reward, Incremental structure, Time off for exploration, Evaluation) 3.2 Examples from early stages of the simulation (Preliminaries and notation, The Learner learns to issue Environment commands, Associating language to actions, Learning to generalize, Understanding higher-level orders, Interactive communication, Algorithmic knowledge) 3.3 Interacting with the trained intelligent machine 4. Towards the development of intelligent machines 4.1 Types of learning 4.2 Long-term memory and compositional learning skills 4.3 Computational properties of intelligent machines 5. Related ideas 6. Conclusion I'm thinking the winner might not be the company who makes huge progress towards MI, it could be the one who provides the ecosystem. For example, in the trend of Siri-type chatbots, Slack is very well positioned to reap most of the benefits even without doing much research in AI, because they could get a commission on the platform usage.

JoshTriplett 11y ago
If we successfully create actual machine intelligence, with the ability to learn and communicate, then the "winner" hardly matters; it only matters whether they programmed it correctly or not. Any scenario that has a "winner" means they didn't.
cafebeen 11y ago
If we manage to build truly intelligent machines, I'd hope it'd be used to enrich people's lives, that is, all humans be the winners

simonh 11y ago

I'm not quite sure why this made it to the front page. It's just a wish list of things they would like an AI to be able to do.

hiddencost 11y ago
They're some of the most prominent people in their field, and they are setting a major direction for Facebook ai research. So this is the Facebook road map. Also, because everyone is focused on ML, the move bank to people trying to solve AI is a big deal. Other major researchers are saying similar things
- simonh 11y ago
  Ok, good explanation. Thanks.

karmacondon 11y ago

Lot of interesting ideas and research collected in one place. It looks like the high concept pitch for this is, "chatbot that can query the internet"

mziel 11y ago
So basically Siri?

grondilu 11y ago

Seems like the authors do not consider how safe such a system would be. Yet it seems to me that a machine whose main goals would be to learn things about the world so that it can communicate with humans and answer their questions, is possibly very dangerous. While reading the first section I kept thinking about this blog entry from Paul Tyma, "How Artificial Intelligence Will Really Kill Us All": http://paultyma.blogspot.fr/2015/10/how-artificial-intelligence-will-really.html http://paultyma.blogspot.fr/2015/10/how-artificial-intellige...

morgante 11y ago
Interesting entry, but I don't find it very credible. We already have superpowered weapons which make it possible for a few powerful individuals to obliterate the rest of humanity, yet thus far we've stayed alive.
- grondilu 11y ago
  Recently Max Tegmark talked at the UN (1) about the potential danger of AI, and he asked what would have happened if making a nuclear bomb was as simple as say baking sand in a micro-wave. He argues that if that was the case most of us would probably be dead. I guess the point is that in these matters, the past is not always a good indicator of the future. 1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9N_Fsbngh8&t=1h55m31s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9N_Fsbngh8&t=1h55m31s
  - morgante 11y ago
    Interesting analogy, but I think it's rather debatable. We have no evidence that making a strong AI is as simple as baking sand in a microwave—in fact, we have quite a bit of evidence that it's actually extremely difficult. It's unlikely to think that such a powerful and challenging piece of software would have any wider distribution than nuclear weapons. I think this is affirmed by the fact that most state-of-the-art AI depends primarily on massive volumes of data rather than clever algorithms. Massive datasets are inherently concentrated in the hands of the few and powerful, so it seems unlikely that a rogue actor could acquire suitable data.

denniskane 11y ago

I will do everything in my power to ensure that corporate-backed, ivory-tower, anti-philosophical, techno-enthusiast academics do not figure out some kind of formula to dominate the world of human affairs with their so-called "super intelligent machines". I'm not saying that this specific research group falls under this umbrella, but they are all credited as being associated with Facebook AI research, so take it FWIW. I do believe that a certain Elon Musk would back me up here: "I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess like what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that. So we need to be very careful with the artificial intelligence. Increasingly scientists think there should be some regulatory oversight maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don't do something very foolish. With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it's like yeah he's sure he can control the demon. Didn't work out." The classes of algorithms that are meant to directly interact with people in a way that appears authentically human must obviously be highly regulated, and I certainly agree that these kinds of regulations should be on par with international nuclear oversight bodies. It is always important to give end users the option to figure out for themselves how the algorithms that they interact with actually function. In order to encourage this kind of thing, I have been working on an online, distributed operating system concept for the past several years, and one of the apps is a simple, "Hello World" kind of an AI that goes by the name, Bertie. I am working on making the underlying system code (which is mostly JavaScript) completely editable by end users. They will be able to test out their edits in an application window inside of the web page, and will be able to share their changes with each other over the distributed, web-based filesystem that I am actively developing. If you are running Chrome, you can try out the OS by going to https://nacl-pg.appspot.com/ https://nacl-pg.appspot.com/. To see the AI app, just click on the Applications folder, and then click on Bertie's face. Alternatively, if you are feeling lazy, just click on the following link and the Bertie app will automatically open: https://nacl-pg.appspot.com/desk?open=Bertie https://nacl-pg.appspot.com/desk?open=Bertie.

varelse 11y ago

"And bingo! I get to press the button again, woohoo!" Wonder what the other button does... On the bright side, they bucked the trend and cited Terry Winograd's research from the 1970s instead of pretending they made this idea all up by themselves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU