5 ms·

Exactly. Constrained (most games) AI singularity is near, because chess was just the start.

studentrob 11y ago
You're reaching. Constrained AI singularity isn't a thing. It's singularity or it isn't. AI is definitely getting better, but it is all application specific. AI is not at the point of setting its own goals or fixing all of its errors. We still need humans for that.
- loup-vaillant 11y ago
  Bah, replace "singularity" with "superhuman", and we're set. We have superhuman arithmeticians since the dawn of computing, superhuman chess players since Deep Blue or so, superhuman Go players and superhuman drivers are not too far off… Superhuman programmer with intelligence explosion capabilities… yeah, that's a whole 'nother game.
  - studentrob 11y ago
    What's an intelligence explosion? Intelligence dissemination or deletion? EDIT: Nevermind, just looked it up and found this was a real thing. I thought you were joking.
    - astrofinch 11y ago
      It sounds less weird if you think: "AI has automated some jobs, and eventually it may automate away most of them, in the same way (pending AlphaGo victory) it's now automated winning at most board games... So what happens if the job of programmer gets automated away?" (I'm convinced that programmers will take the AI-automating-all-the-jobs idea more seriously once it's their own jobs that are on the line) There are a few ways I can think of to object to this line of reasoning: 1) You could argue that programming will be a job that never gets automated away. But this seems unlikely--previous intellectual tasks (Chess, Jeopardy, Go) were thought to be "essentially human", and once they were solved by computers, got redefined as not "essentially human" (and therefore not AI). My opinion: In the same way we originally thought tool use made humans unique, then realized that other animals use tools too, we'll eventually learn that there's no fundamental uniqueness to human cognition. It'll be matter & algorithms all the way down. Of course, the algorithms could be really darn complicated. But the fact the Deepmind team won at both Go and Atari using the same approach suggests the existence of important general-purpose algorithms that are within the reach of human software engineers. 2) You could argue that programming will be automated away but in a sense that isn't meaningful (e.g. you need an expensive server farm to replace a relatively cheap human programmer). This is certainly possible. But in the same way calculators do arithmetic much faster & better than humans do, there's the possibility that automated computer programmers will program much faster & better than humans. (Honestly humans suck so hard at programming https://twitter.com/bramcohen/status/51714087842877440 https://twitter.com/bramcohen/status/51714087842877440 that I think this one will happen.) And all the jobs that we've automated 'til now have been automated in this "meaningful" sense. Neither of these objections hold much water IMO, which is why I take the intelligence explosion scenario described by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom seriously: http://www.amazon.com/Superintelligence-Dangers-Strategies-Nick-Bostrom/dp/0199678111/ http://www.amazon.com/Superintelligence-Dangers-Strategies-N...
      - studentrob 11y ago
        > (I'm convinced that programmers will take the AI-automating-all-the-jobs idea more seriously once it's their own jobs that are on the line) I assure you we do not. We would all love to be the one to create such a program. But don't worry it isn't happening anytime soon in the form of singularity. Just like other people in other jobs, we sometimes come up with more efficient ways of doing things than our bosses thought possible, and then we have some extra free time to do what we like.
        astrofinch 11y ago
        "But don't worry it isn't happening anytime soon in the form of singularity." Probably not soon. Worth noting that the Go victory happened a decade or two before it was predicted to though. (To clarify, I was not trying to establish that any intelligence explosion is on the immediate horizon. Rather, I was trying to establish that it's a pretty sensible concept when you think about it, and has a solid chance of happening at some point.) >Just like other people in other jobs, we sometimes come up with more efficient ways of doing things than our bosses thought possible, and then we have some extra free time to do what we like. Yes, I'm a programmer (UC Berkeley computer science)... I know. But don't listen to me. Listen to Stuart Russell: https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~russell/research/future/ https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~russell/research/future/
        studentrob 11y ago
        > (To clarify, I was not trying to establish that any intelligence explosion is on the immediate horizon. Rather, I was trying to establish that it's a pretty sensible concept when you think about it, and has a solid chance of happening at some point.) Well first you were saying programmers may hesitate to create an AI singularity because it may cost them their job. I said we would love to but probably won't anytime soon. Now you're saying that it's likely that it will happen some day. I'm not sure these points follow a single train of thought.
        astrofinch 11y ago
  - brlewis 11y ago
    You ignored the "setting its own goals" part, which we haven't even started on yet. Humans define the arithmetic problems. Humans define what it means to win at chess and Go. Humans choose a specific destination to drive to.
    - loup-vaillant 11y ago
      Once humans have defined and programmed what do to, the machine happily does it much better than any human could (depending on the domain). One day we'll be tempted to write a more serious, more complex "game", with real world consequences. For those, we'd better specify our goals precisely, lest we face unforeseen unfortunate consequences —there will be reasons why the machine does it better, ranging from faster computation, exquisite motor control, or a total lack of ethics —assuming ethics wasn't part of the programming. Next thing you know, you need to solve the Friendly AI problem.
- sp332 11y ago
  A singularity is a point where things are advancing so fast on different fronts it's impossible to make predictions about how fast things are going or where the next advance will come from. I think we're about there with "constrained AI", because everyone was looking at Facebook's bot which was playing with a four-stone handicap when Google skipped straight to champion-beating.
  - studentrob 11y ago
    That is not the general understanding of singularity... The technological singularity is a hypothetical event in which artificial general intelligence (constituting, for example, intelligent computers, computer networks, or robots) would be capable of recursive self-improvement (progressively redesigning itself), or of autonomously building ever smarter and more powerful machines than itself, up to the point of a runaway effect—an intelligence explosion[1][2]—that yields an intelligence surpassing all current human control or understanding - Wikipedia
- sdgsfsfgfg 11y ago
  Well actually this neural network style of machine learning is not all that application specific. You create a general architecture and throw lots of data at it, could be go, could be recognising pictures. You will need different general architectures, but the point is that this is a fundamentally different approach to the old school chess algos.
  - studentrob 11y ago
    Yeah I get that. I studied and have worked in machine learning. Neural networks are more general than previous approaches but they still need to be customized by humans for different applications. And none of these programs are going off and learning how to play other games on their own. They need to be led.
    - pixl97 11y ago
      >They need to be led. We should rejoice in that fact. We are woefully unprepared for true learning programs as a species. Let us hope that between now and the time we do manage to create one that we mature to the point where we don't create these thinking entities for malicious purposes.
      - studentrob 11y ago
        > Let us hope that between now and the time we do manage to create one that we mature to the point where we don't create these thinking entities for malicious purposes That's a long way off and we'll face a lot of other problems before then. For instance, fear mongering of a looming AI. We're better off focusing on teaching kids computer science and allowing them to see for themselves how theoretical and unscary true AI remains.
        pixl97 11y ago
        >That's a long way off People, up until very recently said that computers being able to beat people at Go were a long way off too.
loup-vaillant 11y ago
I hear there's still lots of work to be done for real time strategy computer games such as Starcraft (and even those rely on a great deal of easy to compute mechanical skills). How much time it will take however, I cannot begin to guess.
- Retric 11y ago
  That's mostly the case of little research not a hard problem.
- goldenkey 11y ago
  80% of StarCraft is the APM - actions per minute. Strategy may exist but its nothing a computer can't replicate with human-coded heuristics. If a computer doesn't have to worry about a limit on APM, I'm sure it would obliterate any human starcraft player.
  - ktRolster 11y ago
    I regularly beat players with 2-3 times my APM. I always wonder what they are doing with all their clicks.
    - goldenkey 11y ago
      I'm just saying, that the APM of the best players is also in the top %. It's a prerequisite that already culls people that might be better tacticitioners.
1024core 11y ago
> because chess was just the start. I don't believe that Deep Blue's victory in Chess has any similarity to AlphaGo's wins. DB was just brute-forcing its way through 100s of millions of positions. AlphaGo is using some learned strategy behind its moves.

You're reaching. Constrained AI singularity isn't a thing. It's singularity or it isn't. AI is definitely getting better, but it is all application specific. AI is not at the point of setting its own goals or fixing all of its errors. We still need humans for that.

loup-vaillant 11y ago
Bah, replace "singularity" with "superhuman", and we're set. We have superhuman arithmeticians since the dawn of computing, superhuman chess players since Deep Blue or so, superhuman Go players and superhuman drivers are not too far off… Superhuman programmer with intelligence explosion capabilities… yeah, that's a whole 'nother game.
- studentrob 11y ago
  What's an intelligence explosion? Intelligence dissemination or deletion? EDIT: Nevermind, just looked it up and found this was a real thing. I thought you were joking.
  - astrofinch 11y ago
    It sounds less weird if you think: "AI has automated some jobs, and eventually it may automate away most of them, in the same way (pending AlphaGo victory) it's now automated winning at most board games... So what happens if the job of programmer gets automated away?" (I'm convinced that programmers will take the AI-automating-all-the-jobs idea more seriously once it's their own jobs that are on the line) There are a few ways I can think of to object to this line of reasoning: 1) You could argue that programming will be a job that never gets automated away. But this seems unlikely--previous intellectual tasks (Chess, Jeopardy, Go) were thought to be "essentially human", and once they were solved by computers, got redefined as not "essentially human" (and therefore not AI). My opinion: In the same way we originally thought tool use made humans unique, then realized that other animals use tools too, we'll eventually learn that there's no fundamental uniqueness to human cognition. It'll be matter & algorithms all the way down. Of course, the algorithms could be really darn complicated. But the fact the Deepmind team won at both Go and Atari using the same approach suggests the existence of important general-purpose algorithms that are within the reach of human software engineers. 2) You could argue that programming will be automated away but in a sense that isn't meaningful (e.g. you need an expensive server farm to replace a relatively cheap human programmer). This is certainly possible. But in the same way calculators do arithmetic much faster & better than humans do, there's the possibility that automated computer programmers will program much faster & better than humans. (Honestly humans suck so hard at programming https://twitter.com/bramcohen/status/51714087842877440 https://twitter.com/bramcohen/status/51714087842877440 that I think this one will happen.) And all the jobs that we've automated 'til now have been automated in this "meaningful" sense. Neither of these objections hold much water IMO, which is why I take the intelligence explosion scenario described by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom seriously: http://www.amazon.com/Superintelligence-Dangers-Strategies-Nick-Bostrom/dp/0199678111/ http://www.amazon.com/Superintelligence-Dangers-Strategies-N...
    - studentrob 11y ago
      > (I'm convinced that programmers will take the AI-automating-all-the-jobs idea more seriously once it's their own jobs that are on the line) I assure you we do not. We would all love to be the one to create such a program. But don't worry it isn't happening anytime soon in the form of singularity. Just like other people in other jobs, we sometimes come up with more efficient ways of doing things than our bosses thought possible, and then we have some extra free time to do what we like.
      - astrofinch 11y ago
        "But don't worry it isn't happening anytime soon in the form of singularity." Probably not soon. Worth noting that the Go victory happened a decade or two before it was predicted to though. (To clarify, I was not trying to establish that any intelligence explosion is on the immediate horizon. Rather, I was trying to establish that it's a pretty sensible concept when you think about it, and has a solid chance of happening at some point.) >Just like other people in other jobs, we sometimes come up with more efficient ways of doing things than our bosses thought possible, and then we have some extra free time to do what we like. Yes, I'm a programmer (UC Berkeley computer science)... I know. But don't listen to me. Listen to Stuart Russell: https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~russell/research/future/ https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~russell/research/future/
        studentrob 11y ago
        > (To clarify, I was not trying to establish that any intelligence explosion is on the immediate horizon. Rather, I was trying to establish that it's a pretty sensible concept when you think about it, and has a solid chance of happening at some point.) Well first you were saying programmers may hesitate to create an AI singularity because it may cost them their job. I said we would love to but probably won't anytime soon. Now you're saying that it's likely that it will happen some day. I'm not sure these points follow a single train of thought.
        astrofinch 11y ago
- brlewis 11y ago
  You ignored the "setting its own goals" part, which we haven't even started on yet. Humans define the arithmetic problems. Humans define what it means to win at chess and Go. Humans choose a specific destination to drive to.
  - loup-vaillant 11y ago
    Once humans have defined and programmed what do to, the machine happily does it much better than any human could (depending on the domain). One day we'll be tempted to write a more serious, more complex "game", with real world consequences. For those, we'd better specify our goals precisely, lest we face unforeseen unfortunate consequences —there will be reasons why the machine does it better, ranging from faster computation, exquisite motor control, or a total lack of ethics —assuming ethics wasn't part of the programming. Next thing you know, you need to solve the Friendly AI problem.
sp332 11y ago
A singularity is a point where things are advancing so fast on different fronts it's impossible to make predictions about how fast things are going or where the next advance will come from. I think we're about there with "constrained AI", because everyone was looking at Facebook's bot which was playing with a four-stone handicap when Google skipped straight to champion-beating.
- studentrob 11y ago
  That is not the general understanding of singularity... The technological singularity is a hypothetical event in which artificial general intelligence (constituting, for example, intelligent computers, computer networks, or robots) would be capable of recursive self-improvement (progressively redesigning itself), or of autonomously building ever smarter and more powerful machines than itself, up to the point of a runaway effect—an intelligence explosion[1][2]—that yields an intelligence surpassing all current human control or understanding - Wikipedia
sdgsfsfgfg 11y ago
Well actually this neural network style of machine learning is not all that application specific. You create a general architecture and throw lots of data at it, could be go, could be recognising pictures. You will need different general architectures, but the point is that this is a fundamentally different approach to the old school chess algos.
- studentrob 11y ago
  Yeah I get that. I studied and have worked in machine learning. Neural networks are more general than previous approaches but they still need to be customized by humans for different applications. And none of these programs are going off and learning how to play other games on their own. They need to be led.
  - pixl97 11y ago
    >They need to be led. We should rejoice in that fact. We are woefully unprepared for true learning programs as a species. Let us hope that between now and the time we do manage to create one that we mature to the point where we don't create these thinking entities for malicious purposes.
    - studentrob 11y ago
      > Let us hope that between now and the time we do manage to create one that we mature to the point where we don't create these thinking entities for malicious purposes That's a long way off and we'll face a lot of other problems before then. For instance, fear mongering of a looming AI. We're better off focusing on teaching kids computer science and allowing them to see for themselves how theoretical and unscary true AI remains.
      - pixl97 11y ago
        >That's a long way off People, up until very recently said that computers being able to beat people at Go were a long way off too.

loup-vaillant 11y ago

I hear there's still lots of work to be done for real time strategy computer games such as Starcraft (and even those rely on a great deal of easy to compute mechanical skills). How much time it will take however, I cannot begin to guess.

Retric 11y ago
That's mostly the case of little research not a hard problem.
goldenkey 11y ago
80% of StarCraft is the APM - actions per minute. Strategy may exist but its nothing a computer can't replicate with human-coded heuristics. If a computer doesn't have to worry about a limit on APM, I'm sure it would obliterate any human starcraft player.
- ktRolster 11y ago
  I regularly beat players with 2-3 times my APM. I always wonder what they are doing with all their clicks.
  - goldenkey 11y ago
    I'm just saying, that the APM of the best players is also in the top %. It's a prerequisite that already culls people that might be better tacticitioners.

1024core 11y ago

> because chess was just the start. I don't believe that Deep Blue's victory in Chess has any similarity to AlphaGo's wins. DB was just brute-forcing its way through 100s of millions of positions. AlphaGo is using some learned strategy behind its moves.