7 ms·

How Far to AI Utopia?

51 points by nefitty 11y ago

d33 11y ago
Just curious, do we have ANY examples of AI actually improving our lives today that we couldn't write off as examples of privacy invasion (like Facebook's face detection)? I'm getting the impression that it's not the AI that we should expect the utopia to appear from - instead, I put a lot of hope in microeconomies created by services like Uber or Airbnb that drive prices down. If only those were free and decentralised...
- collyw 11y ago
  Would you class all the automatic settings on my camera as AI? I often try setting them manually, but the automatic ones almost always seem to come out better.
- adrianN 11y ago
  You'd be hard pressed to find a definition of AI that people can agree on that existing systems fit. I'd count the stuff Google does to bring me relevant search results AI. That improves my life a lot. Automatic sorting of letters by destination is also pretty useful, as are automatic quality checks in factories. If you count optimization as AI, there are many applications, for example in chip design, that improve your day-to-day life a lot.
  - monkmartinez 11y ago
    Your first sentence nails it; from AI is nothing short of the Borg to AI being smart factories that are XX% automated or Google searches... agreeing on the definition is problematic. Some thoughts: I think we have automated a great deal of our lives and automation is growing exponentially at present. Once we have achieved some critical breakover in automation, I believe we will start to see unification systems. These unification systems will bind the various forms of automation relegating human input to a bygone era. That is, the unification system will learn, optimize, and execute the "complete stack" of various industries... Think product distribution from factory to dock to end user. I don't think this type of automation is that far off. Is that "AI"? To me it is and I suspect most people outside of HN will call it something along those lines. When some kind of AI like Varuna in the novel _Influx_ by Daniel Suarez hits the streets people will not give one shit if you call it AI or God... they will be very, very afraid of it.
- dragonbonheur 11y ago
  Less industrial accidents. Not losing fingers to a hydraulic press is a big win for factory workers and even the dumbest machine intelligence.
- romaniv 11y ago
  I thinks that's a very good question. I can name countless cases of "semi-trivial" AI being used to improve people's lives. Tree/graph searches, linear regression and clustering algorithms are used all over the place: in science, engineering and medical field. However, when it comes to more sophisticated algorithms I am hard pressed to point out strongly positive use cases. I.e. something that actually make a positive impact for large groups of people, isn't a gimmick and does not involves massive privacy violations. Hm, I guess handwriting recognition is used by postal services. There are a lot of expert systems running behind the scenes in some industries (stuff that involves logistics, for example). Voice recognition helps disabled people to interact with computers. Machine translation can be useful at times. Although I've never been a situation when it made any significant difference in my life or in lives of anyone I know. Stuff like face detection in cameras or voice recognition in phones and cars seem cool, but nothing would really change if they weren't available. The most impactful uses of fancy AI that I know involves marketing and surveillance, and I don't consider either of those uses as a positive thing.
- maaku 11y ago
  Self-driving cars reducing people-death. Pharmacies not giving out the wrong medicine. Doctors diagnosing the right disease in the first place.
  - naveen99 11y ago
    Doctors are working with imperfect information. Nothing can diagnose perfectly all the time, not even strong AI.
- CapitalistCartr 11y ago
  We're far more likely to get utopia (or dystopia) from robotics/automation than AI. I suspect either outcome is equally likely.
- hiddencost 11y ago
  Google search? I prefer to not even talk about "AI" at all, the word doesn't really point to anything we can talk about in a grounded or meaningful way (I consider it a word used to get people in suits to write checks). Machine Learning and Operations Research touch pretty much every aspect of our lives, however. Whether it be supply chain optimization, factory design, materials science, etc. etc. etc.
delinka 11y ago
|---|* About this far. But seriously, we've had predictions of "strong AI in 5/10/20 years" for decades now. The best we'll be able to do in such a short timeframe is what we do now: study a problem, create a [complex] solution, code the solution in a programming language. "AI Utopia" will arrive some decades after we've figured out how to make a system that can learn and retain over the long-term. Much like a biological brain. Jeph Jacques' cartoon take on AI and sentient companions seems plausible: a big central AI grows and evolves and often spins off smaller AIs to be placed in androids. I don't know where the idea originated (it might be his?) but it's a very reasonable fiction for where we'd originate individuals in a high quantity. (*not to scale)
- herval 11y ago
  It's not like things advance linearly, though. Even the big minds in AI said it would take decades before an AI would beat a human at Go, for instance. Image recognition is another example that was "stuck" with relatively high error rates for many, many years, and suddenly got "solved". Our brains are just awful at predicting major breakthroughs...
awgneo 11y ago
"It’s not my view that AI is sufficient to realize utopia, though it may be necessary." Necessary when 93 out of 100 people on the planet currently lack a college education? I feel like the technical elite, in their submission to capitalism, are giving up on the prospects of humanity.
- sapphireblue 11y ago
  I don't have a college degree (that doesn't mean I don't have lots of technical experience though, including some machine learning at amateur level) and I'm not from the 1st world, but I disagree with you on that matter. I don't see how education will help us reach a truly utopian future. It looks like the developed world has pretty much hit the ceiling of what's possible for society controlled by (educated) humans. While I find 1st world an overall nice place, it is in no way an utopia: the day-to-day experience for average person isn't that good neither long- nor short- term. If that's the best we can do with education, we should probably take another path instead of repeating the same mistakes done by the developed world It looks like the main problem of modern world is complexity. The infrastructure (physical, social, IT) has become too complex for mere humans to control. Humans are slow, learn slowly, have limited attention spans, limited capability of understanding complex nonlinear systems (e.g. markets, social dynamics). IMHO the world is currently in the state of severe deficit of attention. There is too much problems on all levels, yet humanity as a whole has only so much attention to apply to these problems, so only the absolutely critical issues are solved (e.g. 2008 financial crisis or flint water scandal) while everything else is neglected until it becomes critical. Machine Intelligence (both Machine Learning and more general AIs, e.g. agents based on unsupervised+reinforcement learning) could give intelligent attention to every big and tiny problem there is: in politics, society, infrastructure, healthcare, etc. on Instead of having to deal with a constant stream of crises AI systems could prevent them from occurring before the catastrophical event took place, just like with preventive medicine. That and automated manufacturing & distribution could give way to a really pleasant life experience. Of course it sounds too easy to be true. Looks like the biggest obstacle to realizing this variant of utopian future is politics. Human primate is naturally hierarchical, and these instincts influence our society & way of life profoundly. Modern society looks like a pyramid with wealthy & powerful on the top, a docile (but shrinking) middle class in the middle and controlled poor at the base. The people on top and in the middle are quite well off, and they are afraid of losing power (even to machines, even if there will be a mathematical proof that everyone will be better off after we delegate decision making to AI agents). It looks to me that from the perspective of the rich & powerful there really is no need in automation/AI: why do they need robots when they are used to hiring poor people to serve them? Why do they need automation when with the power of money they can order thousands of people to manufacture any product/experience for them? That's the status quo that will have to be disrupted to have AI/robot-based automated utopia for everyone, IMHO.
Houshalter 11y ago
There are two different types of discussions that happen about AI. They are very different but often confused for each other. The first is the very near future, 10-20 years or so. Machine learning is rapidly advancing and we are getting all kinds of cool toys. Automating things that previously weren't automatable. 90% of jobs probably could be automated soon, and there will be huge societal consequences. That's what this article is about, mostly. The second is far more interesting. Strong AI. The distant future of 30 years, and maybe sooner. I think it's very likely this will happen in our lifetime, though obviously it's impossible to know for sure. This isn't just replacing a few jobs with machines. This is replacing all humans with machines. When we get AIs that are just as smart as humans. And eventually far smarter than humans. AIs which are so far beyond us that we look like chimps. We would not be able to compete with the AIs. They would be able to get whatever they want. Humans would no longer be in control. It's very, very important that we make sure the AIs we build want what we want. Then we can get a utopia so advanced we can't even imagine it. But if we get it wrong we will just be replaced or destroyed. And we haven't the slightest idea how to do this, or even if it's possible. Creating an AI which wants to do what it's human creator wants it to do is a remarkably hard problem. Especially if that AI is much more intelligent than it's human creator. This is the so called "control problem".
- jahnu 11y ago
  > The second is far more interesting. Strong AI. The distant future of 30 years, and maybe sooner. I think it's very likely this will happen in our lifetime Why? I'd genuinely like to know. I've yet to read anything to convince me this is true.
  - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
    Pro: We see things like chess and go. We see more areas that we thought computers could never tackle being solved. So we seem to be getting closer. Con: We don't actually understand what intelligence is, except by human example. We don't actually have any idea of how far we have to go to create something similar.
  - maaku 11y ago
pron 11y ago
I find that many discussions of AI suffer from a basic confusion of intelligence with the more general notion of computation, which results in a severe overestimation of the power of intelligence and underestimation of the power of non-intelligent computation. General intelligence -- at least as we currently understand it to be -- is no more than a particular algorithm or a class of algorithms, and therefore: 1. Overestimation of intelligence: Computational complexity theory -- in particular the time/space hierarchy theorems, which, IMO, are the most important theorems in all of computer science (and are basically generalizations of the halting theorem) -- tells us that problems form an infinite hierarchy of difficulty, and that some problems require a certain amount of computational resources regardless of the algorithm used. In particular, we know of plenty of very important problems (e.g. NP-complete, or PSPACE-complete) for which intelligence does not seem to help at all, and those problems are faced in many real-world scenarios. Worse, we know that for many of these problems, there can be no efficient approximate solution employing any algorithm. Artificial intelligence, therefore, cannot possibly form an effective way to solve these very real problems. 2. Underestimation of non-intelligent computation: It is unclear that the "general intelligence algorithms" are the best use of computational resources. Humans (and mammals) are far from being the most successful species on Earth by almost any measure of success (we are neither the most plentiful numerically, in biomass, or even in the most capable of shaping the planet). It is therefore a mistake to believe that the "intelligence algorithms" pose either the most severe threat or the most powerful "problem solving" approach. Artificial intelligence seems to be particularly useful when interacting with other intelligent beings (i.e. humans). For example, there has recently been some success in employing an "intelligent" algorithm for winning the game of Go. However, it is known that the "Go problem" is EXPTIME-complete, and therefore the intelligent algorithm can only be successful when playing against other players who employ a similar algorithm (namely, humans). It is by no means a general solution to the "Go problem". As "disease" is not a human problem, and pathogens employ computation in a very different way than intelligent beings, it is hard to believe that AI would be able to eradicate disease etc., etc..

51 points by nefitty 11y ago

d33 11y ago

Just curious, do we have ANY examples of AI actually improving our lives today that we couldn't write off as examples of privacy invasion (like Facebook's face detection)? I'm getting the impression that it's not the AI that we should expect the utopia to appear from - instead, I put a lot of hope in microeconomies created by services like Uber or Airbnb that drive prices down. If only those were free and decentralised...

collyw 11y ago
Would you class all the automatic settings on my camera as AI? I often try setting them manually, but the automatic ones almost always seem to come out better.
adrianN 11y ago
You'd be hard pressed to find a definition of AI that people can agree on that existing systems fit. I'd count the stuff Google does to bring me relevant search results AI. That improves my life a lot. Automatic sorting of letters by destination is also pretty useful, as are automatic quality checks in factories. If you count optimization as AI, there are many applications, for example in chip design, that improve your day-to-day life a lot.
- monkmartinez 11y ago
  Your first sentence nails it; from AI is nothing short of the Borg to AI being smart factories that are XX% automated or Google searches... agreeing on the definition is problematic. Some thoughts: I think we have automated a great deal of our lives and automation is growing exponentially at present. Once we have achieved some critical breakover in automation, I believe we will start to see unification systems. These unification systems will bind the various forms of automation relegating human input to a bygone era. That is, the unification system will learn, optimize, and execute the "complete stack" of various industries... Think product distribution from factory to dock to end user. I don't think this type of automation is that far off. Is that "AI"? To me it is and I suspect most people outside of HN will call it something along those lines. When some kind of AI like Varuna in the novel _Influx_ by Daniel Suarez hits the streets people will not give one shit if you call it AI or God... they will be very, very afraid of it.
dragonbonheur 11y ago
Less industrial accidents. Not losing fingers to a hydraulic press is a big win for factory workers and even the dumbest machine intelligence.
romaniv 11y ago
I thinks that's a very good question. I can name countless cases of "semi-trivial" AI being used to improve people's lives. Tree/graph searches, linear regression and clustering algorithms are used all over the place: in science, engineering and medical field. However, when it comes to more sophisticated algorithms I am hard pressed to point out strongly positive use cases. I.e. something that actually make a positive impact for large groups of people, isn't a gimmick and does not involves massive privacy violations. Hm, I guess handwriting recognition is used by postal services. There are a lot of expert systems running behind the scenes in some industries (stuff that involves logistics, for example). Voice recognition helps disabled people to interact with computers. Machine translation can be useful at times. Although I've never been a situation when it made any significant difference in my life or in lives of anyone I know. Stuff like face detection in cameras or voice recognition in phones and cars seem cool, but nothing would really change if they weren't available. The most impactful uses of fancy AI that I know involves marketing and surveillance, and I don't consider either of those uses as a positive thing.
maaku 11y ago
Self-driving cars reducing people-death. Pharmacies not giving out the wrong medicine. Doctors diagnosing the right disease in the first place.
- naveen99 11y ago
  Doctors are working with imperfect information. Nothing can diagnose perfectly all the time, not even strong AI.
CapitalistCartr 11y ago
We're far more likely to get utopia (or dystopia) from robotics/automation than AI. I suspect either outcome is equally likely.
hiddencost 11y ago
Google search? I prefer to not even talk about "AI" at all, the word doesn't really point to anything we can talk about in a grounded or meaningful way (I consider it a word used to get people in suits to write checks). Machine Learning and Operations Research touch pretty much every aspect of our lives, however. Whether it be supply chain optimization, factory design, materials science, etc. etc. etc.

delinka 11y ago

|---|* About this far. But seriously, we've had predictions of "strong AI in 5/10/20 years" for decades now. The best we'll be able to do in such a short timeframe is what we do now: study a problem, create a [complex] solution, code the solution in a programming language. "AI Utopia" will arrive some decades after we've figured out how to make a system that can learn and retain over the long-term. Much like a biological brain. Jeph Jacques' cartoon take on AI and sentient companions seems plausible: a big central AI grows and evolves and often spins off smaller AIs to be placed in androids. I don't know where the idea originated (it might be his?) but it's a very reasonable fiction for where we'd originate individuals in a high quantity. (*not to scale)

herval 11y ago
It's not like things advance linearly, though. Even the big minds in AI said it would take decades before an AI would beat a human at Go, for instance. Image recognition is another example that was "stuck" with relatively high error rates for many, many years, and suddenly got "solved". Our brains are just awful at predicting major breakthroughs...

awgneo 11y ago

"It’s not my view that AI is sufficient to realize utopia, though it may be necessary." Necessary when 93 out of 100 people on the planet currently lack a college education? I feel like the technical elite, in their submission to capitalism, are giving up on the prospects of humanity.

sapphireblue 11y ago
I don't have a college degree (that doesn't mean I don't have lots of technical experience though, including some machine learning at amateur level) and I'm not from the 1st world, but I disagree with you on that matter. I don't see how education will help us reach a truly utopian future. It looks like the developed world has pretty much hit the ceiling of what's possible for society controlled by (educated) humans. While I find 1st world an overall nice place, it is in no way an utopia: the day-to-day experience for average person isn't that good neither long- nor short- term. If that's the best we can do with education, we should probably take another path instead of repeating the same mistakes done by the developed world It looks like the main problem of modern world is complexity. The infrastructure (physical, social, IT) has become too complex for mere humans to control. Humans are slow, learn slowly, have limited attention spans, limited capability of understanding complex nonlinear systems (e.g. markets, social dynamics). IMHO the world is currently in the state of severe deficit of attention. There is too much problems on all levels, yet humanity as a whole has only so much attention to apply to these problems, so only the absolutely critical issues are solved (e.g. 2008 financial crisis or flint water scandal) while everything else is neglected until it becomes critical. Machine Intelligence (both Machine Learning and more general AIs, e.g. agents based on unsupervised+reinforcement learning) could give intelligent attention to every big and tiny problem there is: in politics, society, infrastructure, healthcare, etc. on Instead of having to deal with a constant stream of crises AI systems could prevent them from occurring before the catastrophical event took place, just like with preventive medicine. That and automated manufacturing & distribution could give way to a really pleasant life experience. Of course it sounds too easy to be true. Looks like the biggest obstacle to realizing this variant of utopian future is politics. Human primate is naturally hierarchical, and these instincts influence our society & way of life profoundly. Modern society looks like a pyramid with wealthy & powerful on the top, a docile (but shrinking) middle class in the middle and controlled poor at the base. The people on top and in the middle are quite well off, and they are afraid of losing power (even to machines, even if there will be a mathematical proof that everyone will be better off after we delegate decision making to AI agents). It looks to me that from the perspective of the rich & powerful there really is no need in automation/AI: why do they need robots when they are used to hiring poor people to serve them? Why do they need automation when with the power of money they can order thousands of people to manufacture any product/experience for them? That's the status quo that will have to be disrupted to have AI/robot-based automated utopia for everyone, IMHO.

Houshalter 11y ago

There are two different types of discussions that happen about AI. They are very different but often confused for each other. The first is the very near future, 10-20 years or so. Machine learning is rapidly advancing and we are getting all kinds of cool toys. Automating things that previously weren't automatable. 90% of jobs probably could be automated soon, and there will be huge societal consequences. That's what this article is about, mostly. The second is far more interesting. Strong AI. The distant future of 30 years, and maybe sooner. I think it's very likely this will happen in our lifetime, though obviously it's impossible to know for sure. This isn't just replacing a few jobs with machines. This is replacing all humans with machines. When we get AIs that are just as smart as humans. And eventually far smarter than humans. AIs which are so far beyond us that we look like chimps. We would not be able to compete with the AIs. They would be able to get whatever they want. Humans would no longer be in control. It's very, very important that we make sure the AIs we build want what we want. Then we can get a utopia so advanced we can't even imagine it. But if we get it wrong we will just be replaced or destroyed. And we haven't the slightest idea how to do this, or even if it's possible. Creating an AI which wants to do what it's human creator wants it to do is a remarkably hard problem. Especially if that AI is much more intelligent than it's human creator. This is the so called "control problem".

jahnu 11y ago
> The second is far more interesting. Strong AI. The distant future of 30 years, and maybe sooner. I think it's very likely this will happen in our lifetime Why? I'd genuinely like to know. I've yet to read anything to convince me this is true.
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago
  Pro: We see things like chess and go. We see more areas that we thought computers could never tackle being solved. So we seem to be getting closer. Con: We don't actually understand what intelligence is, except by human example. We don't actually have any idea of how far we have to go to create something similar.
- maaku 11y ago

pron 11y ago

I find that many discussions of AI suffer from a basic confusion of intelligence with the more general notion of computation, which results in a severe overestimation of the power of intelligence and underestimation of the power of non-intelligent computation. General intelligence -- at least as we currently understand it to be -- is no more than a particular algorithm or a class of algorithms, and therefore: 1. Overestimation of intelligence: Computational complexity theory -- in particular the time/space hierarchy theorems, which, IMO, are the most important theorems in all of computer science (and are basically generalizations of the halting theorem) -- tells us that problems form an infinite hierarchy of difficulty, and that some problems require a certain amount of computational resources regardless of the algorithm used. In particular, we know of plenty of very important problems (e.g. NP-complete, or PSPACE-complete) for which intelligence does not seem to help at all, and those problems are faced in many real-world scenarios. Worse, we know that for many of these problems, there can be no efficient approximate solution employing any algorithm. Artificial intelligence, therefore, cannot possibly form an effective way to solve these very real problems. 2. Underestimation of non-intelligent computation: It is unclear that the "general intelligence algorithms" are the best use of computational resources. Humans (and mammals) are far from being the most successful species on Earth by almost any measure of success (we are neither the most plentiful numerically, in biomass, or even in the most capable of shaping the planet). It is therefore a mistake to believe that the "intelligence algorithms" pose either the most severe threat or the most powerful "problem solving" approach. Artificial intelligence seems to be particularly useful when interacting with other intelligent beings (i.e. humans). For example, there has recently been some success in employing an "intelligent" algorithm for winning the game of Go. However, it is known that the "Go problem" is EXPTIME-complete, and therefore the intelligent algorithm can only be successful when playing against other players who employ a similar algorithm (namely, humans). It is by no means a general solution to the "Go problem". As "disease" is not a human problem, and pathogens employ computation in a very different way than intelligent beings, it is hard to believe that AI would be able to eradicate disease etc., etc..