6 ms·

Really interesting to think about the skills necessary just to play a modern open-world game such as Skyrim successfully. NLP to understand dialogue and action

• CardenB 11y ago
  I think the main argument (regarding fears of AI) is that, by the time you've solved the aforementioned problems, it's too late. AI can learn so quickly that we won't be able to anticipate it properly.
  • daveguy 11y ago
    There will be a wide gradient of AIs between "dumb as worm" and "play skyrim" just like there will be a gradient between "play skyrim" and "omg super ai". Exponential from "dumb as a worm" is "dumb as two worms working together" and we haven't even gotten to "dumb as a worm" level yet. People should be a lot more concerned with whether or not their job rises to the level of "dumb as a worm".
    • aluhut 11y ago
      > People should be a lot more concerned with whether or not their job rises to the level of "dumb as a worm". They are but there are pills to fix the outcome of that.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• mathgeek 11y ago
  > When you think about the difficulties of such a loosely defined problem, it's hard to buy into the real-world fears of AI. My belief is that one day, in the not too distant future, we'll be saying that it's hard to believe we ever considered such things difficult for AI. Consider that an AI can literally keep "reloading the last save file" indefinitely and simply try different commands until it finds one that advances the game successfully. A little bit of guided learning to confirm that its doing well, and suddenly you've got an AI that plays Skyrim.
  • tinalumfoil 11y ago
    > Consider that an AI can literally keep "reloading the last save file" indefinitely and simply try different commands until it finds one that advances the game successfully. A little bit of guided learning to confirm that its doing well, and suddenly you've got an AI that plays Skyrim. And if you give a monkey a typewriter he will eventually write the complete works of shakespeare and if you play the powerball enough you'll eventually hit a $1.5 Billion dollar jackpot but there are easier ways to read Shakespeare and more profitable ways to get a billion dollars. What makes humans (specifically their brains and the brains of other species) so powerful is it doesn't need hundreds at attempts at playing pacman or Skyrim before it wins. There are definitely applications where it's not unreasonable to expect an AI to have the correct answer to most possibilities at its disposable (handwriting detection, for instance) but the most useful applications will be if/when AI can solve problems that rarely have similar inputs (global economics, for instance).
    • yabun 11y ago
      The core difference with AI is that it is adaptable. Sure, flailing around and happening to do something useful isn't clever, but if we can reinforce useful behaviours something more closely resembling intelligence can emerge.
    • deciplex 11y ago
      > What makes humans (specifically their brains and the brains of other species) so powerful is it doesn't need hundreds at attempts at playing pacman or Skyrim before it wins. The average human is terrible at playing Skyrim, Pac-Man, and video games in general. Someone who has never even looked at a computer will have a hard time playing Skyrim or any other video game without many hours of practice. And, most video games draw upon stuff that humans already know, like moving around in a physical world, and a concept of self, which gives them a huge advantage over AI right from the start.
      • Swizec 11y ago
        You could even say that one of humans' super powers is forgetting just how much practice went into learning something. I've been walking for 28 years and I still trip sometimes. That's almost 31,000 hours of practice, if we assume an average of just 3 hours of basic movement per day. Even going to the bathroom counts. And when it comes to image/object recognition, I've had 163,000+ hours of practice. And I still see stuff I don't recognize plenty of times. Hell, optical illusions still fuck me up. Now just imagine what an AI could do with that much practice/data.
• chongli 11y ago
  It's way more complex even than that. That all takes for granted that an AI would even know what an object is, let alone other life-forms (in game). An AI that starts from scratch doesn't get access to the vast wealth of human life experience as a baseline context for understanding a game. Without all that, what is it working with? A whole lot of nonsensical visual and audio data.
• jodrellblank 11y ago
  Those aren't the skills necessary to play a modern open-world game such as Skyrim successfully, those are the skills necessary for a human to play, for fun, without cheating. Another way to play "successfully" is to edit memory locations and spoof protocol packets, set inventory=full, score=MAX_SCORE and level position= $LAST_LEVEL and declare yourself the winner. Unless and until we can encode 'play by our rules, uphold our values' into an AI - they won't. A real-world fear is that we build AI without encoding 'care about human life, self-determination, bodily integrity, freedom of thought and movement, environmental surroundings, etc.' into it right from the start.
  • soared 11y ago
    I understand you're saying that an AI wouldn't limit itself to following the rules (even if arbitrary), but then it isn't really "playing." So yeah, I agree that the fear is an AI won't "play" the game of life, because it might not abide by our seemingly arbitrary rules. What about a rule that says "follow the rules."
  • p1mrx 11y ago
    A game-playing AI could trivially be restricted to the same inputs as a human: send button events, but don't write directly to memory. If it actually figured out how to execute arbitrary code via button presses (humans have done this in Super Mario World), then we should patch the bug and restart the experiment. Of course, an AI gaining control over the real world is a different matter, because in that case it may be too late to restart the experiment.