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I think Jaron knows what many engineers who have worked on AI know: That the external promise of AI is far more inflated than the capability of the actual techn

I think Jaron knows what many engineers who have worked on AI know: That the external promise of AI is far more inflated than the capability of the actual technology. It's simply that when the current technology gets just complicated enough for the above-average person to no longer understand, everyone starts assigning magical properties and expectations to it. This results in short term over-valuations, which inevitably lead to disappointment [1]. Jaron has observed this several times and rightly seems to be tired of repeating the same naive cycle. As I'm just now entering my second cycle and watching tech repeat itself again -- I'm beginning to understand his weariness. [1] https://hbr.org/2015/12/the-overvaluation-trap https://hbr.org/2015/12/the-overvaluation-trap

ryanmarsh 11y ago
Relevant: Clark's Third Law "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
api 11y ago
This drives a long cycle of AI booms and AI winters. Right now we seem to be in another boom. When the limits of deep learning and other new techniques become apparent, we'll be back in another AI winter.
- mcguire 11y ago
  My prediction: One or both of two problems will be the straw that breaks the "wait, this doesn't work as well as you've hyped it to" camel's back. 1. Explanation of why a particular decision was made. (I was incredibly happy to see the Toyota article this morning that mentioned this very subject.) 2. Flexibility in the face of change. (Or is there a better response to a model with declining effectiveness than "start over".)
blazespin 11y ago
Actually, it's not as inflated as you might imagine. For example, extend Deep Minds work on video games to a fully simulated 3D environment of a factory. Now, have Deep Mind learn to 'play the factory' to produce goods (starting off with the current process as the baseline). Suddenly, the potential gets pretty exciting. Assuming of course, the AI doesn't get control of the Factory by accident and does something terrible in the name of improving productivity.
- tsunamifury 11y ago
  You comment is already forecasting, overvaluing, and then presently justifying yourself using guesses based on a technology you likely don't fully understand.
- emcq 11y ago
  Reinforcement learning isn't magic pixie dust that suddenly solves AI. One thing we often do is assume for some compact subproblem that AI will offer massive optimizations relative to our current human baseline. However it often turns out that engineers have spent enough time to do a good enough job that the relative improvement is either not existant or small when focused on optimizing subcomponents of a system. With your video game reference there are some games that q learning does better than humans and others that does worse. For the factory floor I know data scientists and industrial engineers run optimizations to increase productivity and reduce costs. With their constraints it becomes hard or impossible for any algorithm to find a much more optimal solution especially when their problem is convex where the human generated solution is provably globally optimal.
0xdeadbeefbabe 11y ago
Yeah, we might as well quit calling it AI altogether. It's a terrible name. It really encourages pendulum swinging.
IanDrake 11y ago
The real question for me is: What is motivating otherwise very intelligent people to promote the idea that AI will take all our jobs and/or enslave us? Possible answers: 1) To prop up their investments in AI to get higher valuation. 2) To reach a political goal, such as basic income, which is often justified as necessary in a world where computers and robots take over the work force. 3) ?
- hyperbovine 11y ago
  A lot of intelligent people are promoting the idea that AI will take a lot of our jobs, for the simple reason that a lot our jobs do not require that much I. Whether it's driving a truck, plowing a field, or making food at a McEatery, a frighteningly large proportion of our economy consists of tasks which can be automated by technology coming online in the next decade or two.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Here's a big task that is a) not directly related to computers, and b) the coming wave of automation can't take away - maintenance. All those buildings, tracks, machines, etc. can't clean and fix themselves. We can't jump over everything with the standard market approach of making cheap disposable crap and replacing it wholesale when some component breaks. There's infrastructure. Like water mains, electrical conduits and cabling, etc. We need one more breakthrough before we can free people from jobs - self-maintaining machines. Which will probably involve self-healing materials. Imagine if you could simplify maintaining underground cables to just making sure there's enough nutrient-rich fluid around them. Then we could automate the production and delivery of such fluid, and we'd be done. The future without jobs is the future where our infrastructure heals itself, just like our bodies do.
    - sinxoveretothex 11y ago
      I don't have an analogical example in mind, but I think that often-times, what happens when a revolution gets past a hurdle like automation vs maintenance, is that the hurdle gets worked around. In this case, I think that, to a large extent, maintenance can be side-stepped by recycling and rebuilding. A bit like how the current world works: we can fix anything, but for most things, it's simpler to throw and buy a new one because the labour is more costly than the product itself. One example is asking a computer repair shop to fix your laptop screen (particularly so if said screen is touch-sensitive). In a world where energy is free (fully solar for example), this is awesome: oh, you just got a month old car but a better design just came out? No problem, you'll get the newest one when your turn comes. I doubt I'll see this kind of world (if it ever comes) in my lifetime, but it doesn't seem so far-fetched, I think.
Houshalter 11y ago
I understand how the technology works, and I still believe it's amazing and rapidly progressing. Certainly it isn't human level now, and it might take a decade or two to get there. But it's still an incredible advancement. AI has gotten way better than anyone expected in the last 5 years or so. Progress in many of these areas like image recognition was super slow and challenging. And all of a sudden computers are approaching human level performance with a relatively general algorithm. For decades robotics has been limited by AI tech. We didn't have the ability to do object recognition, control was really hard, teaching the robot to do things was nearly impossible, etc. Now those limitations are gone, and in the next 10 years it's likely there will be a huge explosion in robotics and automation. Regardless of the success of current developments, in the long term AI is still inevitable. I have no doubt we will eventually figure it out. I have no idea why people confuse long term predictions about something with short term ones. Someone saying "we will invent AI by the end of the century" is not saying that they it's definitely going to happen in 5 years and you should invest heavily now. Every time Bostrom and AI risk stuff comes up, there's a bunch of confused comments about how AI isn't that good currently, which misses the point entirely.
- muaddirac 11y ago
  One of the many good points that Lanier made was that there is not currently an inevitable, moore's-law-like progression that will take modern AI methods towards the "superintelligence" that is meant when AI is discussed as an existential threat. Coupling that with the fact that any AI will be limited by its human-defined interface leaves me pretty unconcerned about AI, even if we ever figure out what truly makes a conscious, intelligent being and determine how to replicate it fully in some other medium. That said, I appreciate Bostrom's work as a philosophical rather than practical matter.
  - jtolmar 11y ago
    Taking a best-fit line like Moore's law as a fundamental law of the universe is a classic mistake. Of course, there's no such thing as an inevitable progression of progress in AI research. Until we have AI software capable of contributing to AI research, of course.
marcosdumay 11y ago
People always overestimate technological progress at the short time, and underestimate it at the long time. (Somebody else said that, don't remember who.) On what time-frame are you make those claims?
- djhn 11y ago
  Applies to human behaviour as well - we overestimate how much we will achieve or change in the short run, and underestimate the same in the long run.
tim333 11y ago
Your link is about banks pretending the financial markets were OK before the 2008 crash which is really a different thing. Probably some people assign magical properties to AI but a lot of average people use things like Siri and Google Translate and have seen self driving cars on video and have a realistic idea of what they can and can't do.
ArkyBeagle 11y ago
I find the failures to be sufficiently spectacular that they're entertaining. But on a more serious note, as some of the higher-order techniques of applied mathematics become more and more popular and find expression in tools ordinary people can use, that's liable to change a lot of things. If we get better at characterizing systems and making model-controllers for them, this might just matter a lot.

ryanmarsh 11y ago

Relevant: Clark's Third Law "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

api 11y ago

This drives a long cycle of AI booms and AI winters. Right now we seem to be in another boom. When the limits of deep learning and other new techniques become apparent, we'll be back in another AI winter.

mcguire 11y ago
My prediction: One or both of two problems will be the straw that breaks the "wait, this doesn't work as well as you've hyped it to" camel's back. 1. Explanation of why a particular decision was made. (I was incredibly happy to see the Toyota article this morning that mentioned this very subject.) 2. Flexibility in the face of change. (Or is there a better response to a model with declining effectiveness than "start over".)

blazespin 11y ago

Actually, it's not as inflated as you might imagine. For example, extend Deep Minds work on video games to a fully simulated 3D environment of a factory. Now, have Deep Mind learn to 'play the factory' to produce goods (starting off with the current process as the baseline). Suddenly, the potential gets pretty exciting. Assuming of course, the AI doesn't get control of the Factory by accident and does something terrible in the name of improving productivity.

tsunamifury 11y ago
You comment is already forecasting, overvaluing, and then presently justifying yourself using guesses based on a technology you likely don't fully understand.
emcq 11y ago
Reinforcement learning isn't magic pixie dust that suddenly solves AI. One thing we often do is assume for some compact subproblem that AI will offer massive optimizations relative to our current human baseline. However it often turns out that engineers have spent enough time to do a good enough job that the relative improvement is either not existant or small when focused on optimizing subcomponents of a system. With your video game reference there are some games that q learning does better than humans and others that does worse. For the factory floor I know data scientists and industrial engineers run optimizations to increase productivity and reduce costs. With their constraints it becomes hard or impossible for any algorithm to find a much more optimal solution especially when their problem is convex where the human generated solution is provably globally optimal.

0xdeadbeefbabe 11y ago

Yeah, we might as well quit calling it AI altogether. It's a terrible name. It really encourages pendulum swinging.

IanDrake 11y ago

The real question for me is: What is motivating otherwise very intelligent people to promote the idea that AI will take all our jobs and/or enslave us? Possible answers: 1) To prop up their investments in AI to get higher valuation. 2) To reach a political goal, such as basic income, which is often justified as necessary in a world where computers and robots take over the work force. 3) ?

hyperbovine 11y ago
A lot of intelligent people are promoting the idea that AI will take a lot of our jobs, for the simple reason that a lot our jobs do not require that much I. Whether it's driving a truck, plowing a field, or making food at a McEatery, a frighteningly large proportion of our economy consists of tasks which can be automated by technology coming online in the next decade or two.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Here's a big task that is a) not directly related to computers, and b) the coming wave of automation can't take away - maintenance. All those buildings, tracks, machines, etc. can't clean and fix themselves. We can't jump over everything with the standard market approach of making cheap disposable crap and replacing it wholesale when some component breaks. There's infrastructure. Like water mains, electrical conduits and cabling, etc. We need one more breakthrough before we can free people from jobs - self-maintaining machines. Which will probably involve self-healing materials. Imagine if you could simplify maintaining underground cables to just making sure there's enough nutrient-rich fluid around them. Then we could automate the production and delivery of such fluid, and we'd be done. The future without jobs is the future where our infrastructure heals itself, just like our bodies do.
  - sinxoveretothex 11y ago
    I don't have an analogical example in mind, but I think that often-times, what happens when a revolution gets past a hurdle like automation vs maintenance, is that the hurdle gets worked around. In this case, I think that, to a large extent, maintenance can be side-stepped by recycling and rebuilding. A bit like how the current world works: we can fix anything, but for most things, it's simpler to throw and buy a new one because the labour is more costly than the product itself. One example is asking a computer repair shop to fix your laptop screen (particularly so if said screen is touch-sensitive). In a world where energy is free (fully solar for example), this is awesome: oh, you just got a month old car but a better design just came out? No problem, you'll get the newest one when your turn comes. I doubt I'll see this kind of world (if it ever comes) in my lifetime, but it doesn't seem so far-fetched, I think.

Houshalter 11y ago

I understand how the technology works, and I still believe it's amazing and rapidly progressing. Certainly it isn't human level now, and it might take a decade or two to get there. But it's still an incredible advancement. AI has gotten way better than anyone expected in the last 5 years or so. Progress in many of these areas like image recognition was super slow and challenging. And all of a sudden computers are approaching human level performance with a relatively general algorithm. For decades robotics has been limited by AI tech. We didn't have the ability to do object recognition, control was really hard, teaching the robot to do things was nearly impossible, etc. Now those limitations are gone, and in the next 10 years it's likely there will be a huge explosion in robotics and automation. Regardless of the success of current developments, in the long term AI is still inevitable. I have no doubt we will eventually figure it out. I have no idea why people confuse long term predictions about something with short term ones. Someone saying "we will invent AI by the end of the century" is not saying that they it's definitely going to happen in 5 years and you should invest heavily now. Every time Bostrom and AI risk stuff comes up, there's a bunch of confused comments about how AI isn't that good currently, which misses the point entirely.

muaddirac 11y ago
One of the many good points that Lanier made was that there is not currently an inevitable, moore's-law-like progression that will take modern AI methods towards the "superintelligence" that is meant when AI is discussed as an existential threat. Coupling that with the fact that any AI will be limited by its human-defined interface leaves me pretty unconcerned about AI, even if we ever figure out what truly makes a conscious, intelligent being and determine how to replicate it fully in some other medium. That said, I appreciate Bostrom's work as a philosophical rather than practical matter.
- jtolmar 11y ago
  Taking a best-fit line like Moore's law as a fundamental law of the universe is a classic mistake. Of course, there's no such thing as an inevitable progression of progress in AI research. Until we have AI software capable of contributing to AI research, of course.

marcosdumay 11y ago

People always overestimate technological progress at the short time, and underestimate it at the long time. (Somebody else said that, don't remember who.) On what time-frame are you make those claims?

djhn 11y ago
Applies to human behaviour as well - we overestimate how much we will achieve or change in the short run, and underestimate the same in the long run.

tim333 11y ago

Your link is about banks pretending the financial markets were OK before the 2008 crash which is really a different thing. Probably some people assign magical properties to AI but a lot of average people use things like Siri and Google Translate and have seen self driving cars on video and have a realistic idea of what they can and can't do.

ArkyBeagle 11y ago

I find the failures to be sufficiently spectacular that they're entertaining. But on a more serious note, as some of the higher-order techniques of applied mathematics become more and more popular and find expression in tools ordinary people can use, that's liable to change a lot of things. If we get better at characterizing systems and making model-controllers for them, this might just matter a lot.