8 ms·

Debunking myths about artificial intelligence

55 points by nikbackm 11y ago

numinary1 11y ago
The arrogance of the subtext that machine intelligence is nothing like human intelligence and therefore inherently inferior and nothing to be afraid of is more disturbing than the prospect of artificial intelligence gone awry as it reminds us how far awry natural intelligence goes routinely.
- argonaut 11y ago
  I find it equally arrogant to believe that humans will achieve strong AI any time in the near future.
  - cybertronic 11y ago
    The Manhattan project or the Apollo program were even more arrogant.
    - argonaut 11y ago
      So you're agreeing with me that the person I was replying to was wrong?
  - Rapzid 11y ago
    I'm not convinced we are any closer to creating human-level AI than we were before we invented computers..
    - soared 11y ago
      Why?
    - argonaut 11y ago
      We are closer, but we are still far, far away.
  - maaku 11y ago
    Okay. It was arrogant of Alexander the Great to think he could conquer Persia. It was arrogant of Kennedy/NASA to think they could go to the Moon within a decade. What's your point?
- TheLogothete 11y ago
  Machine intelligence is nothing like human intelligence and I thank the author for writing this article. It's a glorified calculator. An input-output program. It is not "intelligent". In fact, most research into artificial intelligence, in the sense that we think about in sci-fi is stopped. For more than decade, approaching on two. It is stopped because nobody got anywhere with it, despite lots of money and lots of people trying to get it off the ground. What is dubbed "artificial intelligence" nowadays is some statistical learning or other mathematical models which find optimal solutions. Its got nothing to do with intelligence. But it is easier to sell to executives.
  - maaku 11y ago
    The field of artificial general intelligence does exist. AI risk people for the most part aren't concerned over the latest machine learning buzz, but rather the potential of an AGI.
    - TheLogothete 11y ago
      Yes, that's what I was talking about. It does exist, in a much smaller form than in the 80s and 90s.
    - argonaut 11y ago
      There is no AGI research that actually produces anything that actually works. It's all about abstract concepts like value systems and the like, none of which is used for ML that produces real results.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Moshe_Silnorin 11y ago
The author hasn't taken the time to read the arguments for AI risk. First, citing Kurzweil as a proponent of AI risk is very odd. Kurzweil thinks AI is the bees knees and doesn't see much risk in it AFAICT. Second, neither Bostrom, MIRI, nor the Future of Life institute claim Moore's law will continue indefinitely or in any way endorse Kurzweil's work. As for his other comments on AI risk, here's what I wrote last year on a similar thread: Nobody is afraid of today's AI algorithms. But if we make machines that are smarter than us and have desires, they will influence the future to achieve their desires. If these desires conflict with our own, things will not end well for the dumber party. As we really have no idea what we, collectively, think of as a moral terminal goal, and less so how to formalize this, there is no reason to expect the first AIs to have goals that correspond to what we want. If AIs self-replicate in a competitive ecology, what would be selected for would be agents millions of times more intelligent than us who use their intellects only to make more copies of themselves - using all available resources including those we need to survive. I'd recommend this summary of the arguments: https://medium.com/@LyleCantor/russell-bostrom-and-the-risk-of-ai-45f69c9ee204#.shqn6fqa4 https://medium.com/@LyleCantor/russell-bostrom-and-the-risk-...
- SolaceQuantum 11y ago
  This also assumes an AI would have an inherent desire to propagate abd continue itself. There's no evidence of that, methinks.
  - maaku 11y ago
    That's a derivable sub-goal for just about any top-level goal. If you don't exist or you don't have sufficient power, you can't make sure your top-level goals get met and stay met.
    - varjag 11y ago
      That's not a superintelligence, or even human-level intelligence though. Superintelligence will read the Bostrom book or this thread and understand the arguments, or indeed predict the consequences of its actions even from very limited data. Now what kind of decision it would arrive to is a very open question. Point is, superintelligence is more than a really really big A* algorithm.
ziedaniel1 11y ago
It's understandable that many people see the disconnect between fears about strong AI and the much more limited capabilities of AI today, and think that the fears must be overblown. However, this article takes that gut reaction and uses it to justify labeling the views of many prominent philosophers and AI researchers as simply a "myth", without even beginning to address their arguments. I strongly recommend reading Superintelligence, by Nick Bostrom.
frooxie 11y ago
That article is so naive and misinformed that I was seriously wondering if it was a prank. I suppose it's a nice read if you want to see someone obliviously ramble about things entirely unrelated to the actual arguments for AI risk scenarios.
tambourine_man 11y ago
Very weak article. It prepends several statements with “myth:” and does very little to debunk them. Example: AI won't spin out of control because Moore’s laws is nearing its end. First, is it really? Just because we can't move electrons reliably much faster through much smaller sizes? What's stopping new materials, spintronics, photonics and what have you to take us to the next decades? I've been hearing the end to Moore’s laws is “coming real soon” since I was a kid. Lots of clever explanations guaranteeing there was no way we could move past 200nm or so due to physical size of the wavelength used in lithography. And yet here we are using crazy stuff like phase shifting masks and interference patterns routinely. Second, the brain seems to be a very slow and massively parallel machine, so maybe transistors are plenty small and fast already, we just need to ditch the Von Neumann architecture. Third, we only need a single strong AI to emerge for it to be a problem. I don't see the clouds from these megacorps getting smaller any day. I don't really know what I'm talking about, of course, but it takes stronger arguments than because quantum tunnelling and the speed of light to make this case.
- Qwertious 11y ago
  The fundamental driver behind Moore's Law is shrinking the circuits. The problem is that the circuits are made up of atoms that deliver electrons, and electrical circuits fundamentally cannot go smaller than a single atom, because electricity is movement of electrons between atoms. We could, in theory, use other technology (some sort of photon-based computer?) to get smaller (and therefore faster) computers, but that wouldn't have the Moore's law mechanism.
  - sawwit 11y ago
    Though, aren't there also plenty of other mechanisms that affect it? For example increasing speed of manufacturing procedures and improving knowledge about how to design complex systems. The end seems to be extremely dense blocks or spheres of highly optimized computation substrate, where each atom sits very precisely at the right place. But the state of the art is merely a few layers of crude photo-lithography. Imagine nanobots being programmed to move atoms around to assemble 3D circuits at the 10nm scale. I think this is where we are heading, and this will likely grant a couple of decades of continuing exponential progress. And by then our computation power will be insane. An equivalent of the simplest human brain models will likely fit into pea.
abdias 11y ago
Found this a little ironic, in a funny way - the article was written in association with IBM. Funny enough, the movie 2001 which the article images are from, is hinting to IBM but in an obscured way. For example, the name HAL is IBM shifted one char to the left and you can even see IBM logo on some machines in the movie. Besides from that I think unless IBM knows the future and all unknowns, we cannot really be sure what will come out of AI. Which is why we should be very careful with it.
- rbanffy 11y ago
  This article was co-written by Watson. Quite honestly, I wouldn't worry myself about the risks of a superhuman autonomous self-improving AI. Everything is going extremely well.
  - abdias 11y ago
    ^ famous last words.. :)
- CM30 11y ago
  No, the point about HAL 9000 being named after IBM isn't true: http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/faq/index.html#slot7 http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/faq/index.html#slot7 The video game company HAL Laboratory (maker of the Kirby series)... they did name their company so each letter was one before IBM: http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2012/11/iwata_explains_where_the_name_hal_laboratory_came_from http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2012/11/iwata_explains_wher...
  - abdias 11y ago
    Thanks, I stand corrected. It was a fun theory though and it will probably not go away anytime soon. Kubrick himself claimed HAL stood for "heuristic and algorithmic" according to this article: http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/01/07/hal_9000_ibm_theory_stanley_kubrick_letters_shed_new_light_on_old_debate.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/01/07/hal_9000_ibm_...
Fricken 11y ago
Jabbering and laughably geriatric Rupert Goodwin groans 'Get off my lawn!'; spilling his senility swill all over the singularitarian sycophants. A stalwart moore's law mooter masterminds against the myths of demon-summoning Musk the martian overpopulator and makes mockery of Hawking the Ad-hock Spock-talker. A luddite weasel word windbag from linearland soothsays naysayers with another numbingly nominal caveat-riddled AI narrow now and forever 'nuffsaid. An obstinate bunghole spelunker debunks from his spooge-buttered AI winter dunce bunker. From unsupervised pulpit comes a sump-pumping ass-pastor's anti-diluvian Deepmind denuding diatribe defusing the delinquent debut of an indocile data detonation.
- mrSugar 11y ago
  Ok, we are still safe. As parent demonstrates, machines still can't even compose coherent text. Nice try, robot slave!
arisAlexis 11y ago
The only argument about strong AI not being a threat in this article is that it is difficult to make computers fast enough.

55 points by nikbackm 11y ago

The arrogance of the subtext that machine intelligence is nothing like human intelligence and therefore inherently inferior and nothing to be afraid of is more disturbing than the prospect of artificial intelligence gone awry as it reminds us how far awry natural intelligence goes routinely.

argonaut 11y ago
I find it equally arrogant to believe that humans will achieve strong AI any time in the near future.
- cybertronic 11y ago
  The Manhattan project or the Apollo program were even more arrogant.
  - argonaut 11y ago
    So you're agreeing with me that the person I was replying to was wrong?
- Rapzid 11y ago
  I'm not convinced we are any closer to creating human-level AI than we were before we invented computers..
  - soared 11y ago
    Why?
  - argonaut 11y ago
    We are closer, but we are still far, far away.
- maaku 11y ago
  Okay. It was arrogant of Alexander the Great to think he could conquer Persia. It was arrogant of Kennedy/NASA to think they could go to the Moon within a decade. What's your point?
TheLogothete 11y ago
Machine intelligence is nothing like human intelligence and I thank the author for writing this article. It's a glorified calculator. An input-output program. It is not "intelligent". In fact, most research into artificial intelligence, in the sense that we think about in sci-fi is stopped. For more than decade, approaching on two. It is stopped because nobody got anywhere with it, despite lots of money and lots of people trying to get it off the ground. What is dubbed "artificial intelligence" nowadays is some statistical learning or other mathematical models which find optimal solutions. Its got nothing to do with intelligence. But it is easier to sell to executives.
- maaku 11y ago
  The field of artificial general intelligence does exist. AI risk people for the most part aren't concerned over the latest machine learning buzz, but rather the potential of an AGI.
  - TheLogothete 11y ago
    Yes, that's what I was talking about. It does exist, in a much smaller form than in the 80s and 90s.
  - argonaut 11y ago
    There is no AGI research that actually produces anything that actually works. It's all about abstract concepts like value systems and the like, none of which is used for ML that produces real results.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Moshe_Silnorin 11y ago

The author hasn't taken the time to read the arguments for AI risk. First, citing Kurzweil as a proponent of AI risk is very odd. Kurzweil thinks AI is the bees knees and doesn't see much risk in it AFAICT. Second, neither Bostrom, MIRI, nor the Future of Life institute claim Moore's law will continue indefinitely or in any way endorse Kurzweil's work. As for his other comments on AI risk, here's what I wrote last year on a similar thread: Nobody is afraid of today's AI algorithms. But if we make machines that are smarter than us and have desires, they will influence the future to achieve their desires. If these desires conflict with our own, things will not end well for the dumber party. As we really have no idea what we, collectively, think of as a moral terminal goal, and less so how to formalize this, there is no reason to expect the first AIs to have goals that correspond to what we want. If AIs self-replicate in a competitive ecology, what would be selected for would be agents millions of times more intelligent than us who use their intellects only to make more copies of themselves - using all available resources including those we need to survive. I'd recommend this summary of the arguments: https://medium.com/@LyleCantor/russell-bostrom-and-the-risk-of-ai-45f69c9ee204#.shqn6fqa4 https://medium.com/@LyleCantor/russell-bostrom-and-the-risk-...

SolaceQuantum 11y ago
This also assumes an AI would have an inherent desire to propagate abd continue itself. There's no evidence of that, methinks.
- maaku 11y ago
  That's a derivable sub-goal for just about any top-level goal. If you don't exist or you don't have sufficient power, you can't make sure your top-level goals get met and stay met.
  - varjag 11y ago
    That's not a superintelligence, or even human-level intelligence though. Superintelligence will read the Bostrom book or this thread and understand the arguments, or indeed predict the consequences of its actions even from very limited data. Now what kind of decision it would arrive to is a very open question. Point is, superintelligence is more than a really really big A* algorithm.

ziedaniel1 11y ago

It's understandable that many people see the disconnect between fears about strong AI and the much more limited capabilities of AI today, and think that the fears must be overblown. However, this article takes that gut reaction and uses it to justify labeling the views of many prominent philosophers and AI researchers as simply a "myth", without even beginning to address their arguments. I strongly recommend reading Superintelligence, by Nick Bostrom.

frooxie 11y ago

That article is so naive and misinformed that I was seriously wondering if it was a prank. I suppose it's a nice read if you want to see someone obliviously ramble about things entirely unrelated to the actual arguments for AI risk scenarios.

tambourine_man 11y ago

Very weak article. It prepends several statements with “myth:” and does very little to debunk them. Example: AI won't spin out of control because Moore’s laws is nearing its end. First, is it really? Just because we can't move electrons reliably much faster through much smaller sizes? What's stopping new materials, spintronics, photonics and what have you to take us to the next decades? I've been hearing the end to Moore’s laws is “coming real soon” since I was a kid. Lots of clever explanations guaranteeing there was no way we could move past 200nm or so due to physical size of the wavelength used in lithography. And yet here we are using crazy stuff like phase shifting masks and interference patterns routinely. Second, the brain seems to be a very slow and massively parallel machine, so maybe transistors are plenty small and fast already, we just need to ditch the Von Neumann architecture. Third, we only need a single strong AI to emerge for it to be a problem. I don't see the clouds from these megacorps getting smaller any day. I don't really know what I'm talking about, of course, but it takes stronger arguments than because quantum tunnelling and the speed of light to make this case.

Qwertious 11y ago
The fundamental driver behind Moore's Law is shrinking the circuits. The problem is that the circuits are made up of atoms that deliver electrons, and electrical circuits fundamentally cannot go smaller than a single atom, because electricity is movement of electrons between atoms. We could, in theory, use other technology (some sort of photon-based computer?) to get smaller (and therefore faster) computers, but that wouldn't have the Moore's law mechanism.
- sawwit 11y ago
  Though, aren't there also plenty of other mechanisms that affect it? For example increasing speed of manufacturing procedures and improving knowledge about how to design complex systems. The end seems to be extremely dense blocks or spheres of highly optimized computation substrate, where each atom sits very precisely at the right place. But the state of the art is merely a few layers of crude photo-lithography. Imagine nanobots being programmed to move atoms around to assemble 3D circuits at the 10nm scale. I think this is where we are heading, and this will likely grant a couple of decades of continuing exponential progress. And by then our computation power will be insane. An equivalent of the simplest human brain models will likely fit into pea.

abdias 11y ago

Found this a little ironic, in a funny way - the article was written in association with IBM. Funny enough, the movie 2001 which the article images are from, is hinting to IBM but in an obscured way. For example, the name HAL is IBM shifted one char to the left and you can even see IBM logo on some machines in the movie. Besides from that I think unless IBM knows the future and all unknowns, we cannot really be sure what will come out of AI. Which is why we should be very careful with it.

rbanffy 11y ago
This article was co-written by Watson. Quite honestly, I wouldn't worry myself about the risks of a superhuman autonomous self-improving AI. Everything is going extremely well.
- abdias 11y ago
  ^ famous last words.. :)
CM30 11y ago
No, the point about HAL 9000 being named after IBM isn't true: http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/faq/index.html#slot7 http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/faq/index.html#slot7 The video game company HAL Laboratory (maker of the Kirby series)... they did name their company so each letter was one before IBM: http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2012/11/iwata_explains_where_the_name_hal_laboratory_came_from http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2012/11/iwata_explains_wher...
- abdias 11y ago
  Thanks, I stand corrected. It was a fun theory though and it will probably not go away anytime soon. Kubrick himself claimed HAL stood for "heuristic and algorithmic" according to this article: http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/01/07/hal_9000_ibm_theory_stanley_kubrick_letters_shed_new_light_on_old_debate.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/01/07/hal_9000_ibm_...

Fricken 11y ago

Jabbering and laughably geriatric Rupert Goodwin groans 'Get off my lawn!'; spilling his senility swill all over the singularitarian sycophants. A stalwart moore's law mooter masterminds against the myths of demon-summoning Musk the martian overpopulator and makes mockery of Hawking the Ad-hock Spock-talker. A luddite weasel word windbag from linearland soothsays naysayers with another numbingly nominal caveat-riddled AI narrow now and forever 'nuffsaid. An obstinate bunghole spelunker debunks from his spooge-buttered AI winter dunce bunker. From unsupervised pulpit comes a sump-pumping ass-pastor's anti-diluvian Deepmind denuding diatribe defusing the delinquent debut of an indocile data detonation.

mrSugar 11y ago
Ok, we are still safe. As parent demonstrates, machines still can't even compose coherent text. Nice try, robot slave!

arisAlexis 11y ago

The only argument about strong AI not being a threat in this article is that it is difficult to make computers fast enough.