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Reads like an article written 5-10 years ago, not to mention it doesn't mention neural networks (by name) even once. Forget the singularity... the article doesn

Reads like an article written 5-10 years ago, not to mention it doesn't mention neural networks (by name) even once. Forget the singularity... the article doesn't mention the singularity except in the title. This is a "computers aren't special they can never be like us" article, based on an interview with a single person who seems more focused on robotics than neural network research. It doesn't prove anything about the future of AI to give anecdotal examples of computers failing at being intelligent (nobody has claimed that they are human-level at most things, yet), and then draw conclusions from that biased data. It's more like a half-interview half-essay of a discussion with an AI skeptic who doesn't bring up any of the modern (as of 2015 when the article was published) approaches to AI, and goes on irrelevant tangents like the uncanny valley (which has to do with HCI, not the singularity or AI creativity, which are the subjects of the article).

freyr 10y ago
In the last five years, AI/ML has gotten better at some things it was previously mediocre/good at, but what progress towards creativity or singularity has there been? None. DL is not an enabling technology for creativity.
- CuriouslyC 10y ago
  This is something it amazes me more people don't see. I've read a lot of the scientific literature on human creativity (there isn't much) and it is quite clear that we don't understand it at all. Additionally, there is a transformation that takes place in our brains from information to knowledge. Our understanding of this process is also pretty weak. Both of these problems are fundamental to the creation of true, autonomous AI.
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    Both of those problems might be something we need to solve, or it might emerge out of the complexity of a sufficiently advanced AI system. If the latter, we might not seeing coming for exactly the reasons you've outlined as making that emergence unlikely.
  - ghurtado 10y ago
    > Both of these problems are fundamental to the creation of true, autonomous AI. What makes you say that? I could see your statement being self-evidently true only if you meant "fundamental to the creation of an anthropomorphized AI." Of course, even that glosses over the fact that there are already strong indications within the AI community that the first general purpose AI will likely not "think" even remotely in the same fashion as humans do.
  - haliax 10y ago
    > I've read a lot of the scientific literature on human creativity (there isn't much) and it is quite clear that we don't understand it at all. I don't agree that this is true in any way that precludes the creation of "true, autonomous AI". We may not understand the specific mechanisms of how our brains give rise to creativity and the resulting "implementation artifacts", but the fundamental part of creativity (and I'd argue, the part that's relevant to AI) is the ability to efficiently search huge but structured hypothesis spaces and inductively learn new structure (very likely with some stochastic element involved). That is something that we not only have an understanding of, but have implemented, more than once. By way of examples: http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2006-04/john-koza-has-built-invention-machine http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2006-04/john-koza-has-... http://aliciapatterson.org/stories/eurisko-computer-mind-its-own http://aliciapatterson.org/stories/eurisko-computer-mind-its... https://psmag.com/triumph-of-the-cyborg-composer-620e5aead47e https://psmag.com/triumph-of-the-cyborg-composer-620e5aead47...
  - zby 10y ago
    We can create true, autonomous Intelligence, even though we don't understand how it really works. I predict that - we'll be able to create AI and train it just like we do with a human being.
- golfer 10y ago
  Does playing Go and beating world champions count? That seemed a creative endeavor to me.
  - DougWebb 10y ago
    I would say those are analytical, but not creative.
    - wolfgke 10y ago
      As soon as a computer becomes better than the human (either best or average one) in something which was considered as a sign of intelligence, immediately texts will be written why this is not a sign of intelligence and why intelligence is something completely different. This repeats many times. The same holds for creativity. I have rather the impression that lots of people who write this kind of papers rather want some computer program who is just like them - just a little bit more clever or creative (call it narcissism) instead of some computer program that is "intelligent" or "creative". These people don't understand that one shouldn't judge a fish by its inability to climb a tree.
      - DougWebb 10y ago
        That may be, but it may also be that when computers become better than a human at something, that happened because we gained a greater understanding of how to make that happen, and that greater understanding is what leads us to stop considering it a sign of intelligence. Hero of Alexandria, who lived from 10AD to 70AD, is famous for his mechanical inventions. One that I recall was a mechanism that opened the doors to a temple when a fire was lit in a brazier outside. To the people of the time, who didn't understand mechanics, this was a sign of the gods and the everyday miracles they would perform. But to anyone who knew how it worked, it was a simple mechanism. A computer that plays a complex game, or creates art, or understands spoken queries and answers verbally, or identifies things in photos, or drives a car, seems like magic to most people. But to software developers who understand the algorithms behind those actions there's no magic, and no intelligence. It's just software. The promise, and claim, of AI boils down to this: that what's going on inside of our own heads is also just software. Maybe that's true, maybe it isn't. Even if it's true, there's no guarantee that equivalent software can be run on the artificial hardware we've produced. So yes, we keep raising the bar, but I think that's because we keep discovering that the bar was actually already higher than we thought it was.
- ThomPete 10y ago
  Human creativity is not some magical thing. Plenty of humans create things of absolutely no value to their surroundings while being creative. Creativity is much more likely a human way of understanding the ability to create new new things with some sort of a purpose or intent. But humans have limits to their ability to create things too. There are things that only machines can create and perform.
  - freyr 10y ago
    They can create things only in the sense that they receive a set of inputs and produce deterministic outputs according to a process explicitly specified by an prespecified algorithm. It's not "creative" in the conventional sense of the word, but perhaps humans do essentially the same thing in a much more advanced way.
    - ThomPete 10y ago
      Yeah I guess the point is that human creativity is expressed in some sort of skills/trade which are learnable whether it's playing an instrument, painting or writing a poem. The state of human creativity is the accumulation of hundreds of thousands of years of trial and error. It can be put into an evolutionary context and so in my belief, is accessible to computers who now can also learn.
ethanbond 10y ago
Every article claiming we're on the cusp of the singularity reads identically to those written 10-15 years ago too. This reads this way because computers haven't made large strides in any creative endeavor in the last 10-15 years. Why should that be a point against the argument?
- sambe 10y ago
  The majority of the discussion on the topic is not claiming we are on the cusp. It is claiming that it is a) a danger; b) likely to be fast if it happens. Almost maximally irrelevant to a claim that nothing significant has happened recently, so not a problem.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  I'm not sure that this argument is entirely sound, given how incredibly slowly humans move as a species to cope with anything new, and how quickly this particular kind of "new" would be likely to emerge. I don't know about you, but a few generations of ongoing discussion seems downright necessary to me, if we have a hope of not making some catastrophic mistakes.
- tim333 10y ago
  Computers can now take images and produce output in the style of major artists eg. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/picture-galleries/11848836/Computer-algorithm-creates-Instagram-like-filters-in-the-style-of-famous-artists.html?frame=3431718 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/picture-galleries/1184... You may say that's just an algorithm but it's way better than I can do personally. That was all figured out within the last decade. Also the computer art was produced by artificial neural networks, my attempts if I made some would be done by regular neural networks. Who's to say the computer stuff doesn't count as creative but mine does?
  - pavlov 10y ago
    Computers are way better than me at a lot of things: arithmetic, remembering things, surviving on a diet of plain electricity, just to mention a few... Transferring local patterns between images and playing Go have recently been shown to be a few more of those things. But how far will that generalize? Nobody knows.
cscurmudgeon 10y ago
Go back to 1950, you will still find arguments that we are a few years away from general purpose AI. The arguments have not really changed.
- tim333 10y ago
  Depends who's arguments you look at. The Kurzweil arguments have always been turing test 2029, singularity 2045. So say general purpose AI about 2030. So it was 80 years in the future in 1950, 14 years now and so on for other dates. It depends a bit on the definitions you use but around then.
  - cscurmudgeon 10y ago
    I prefer not listening to techno astrologers, and Kurweil is one. By and large the more one contributes to AI, the less one is an techno astrologer. Kurweil's contribution to AI pales in comparison to the likes of Norvig etc.
kaffeemitsahne 10y ago
Though sometimes nicely written, nautil.us articles basically always disappoint in terms of actual substance. Not sure why they're on the frontpage of HN so often.
- Bakary 10y ago
  The presentation of the page and the aesthetics has a lot to do with it.
- Bakary 10y ago
  The presentation of the page and the aesthetics has a lot to do with it.
- throwaway2048 10y ago
  That same statement is a common complaint about HN.
soufron 10y ago
Actually, he does talk about modern approaches to AI. He just says, they don't change shit. You know when neural networks were invented? In 1943.

freyr 10y ago

In the last five years, AI/ML has gotten better at some things it was previously mediocre/good at, but what progress towards creativity or singularity has there been? None. DL is not an enabling technology for creativity.

CuriouslyC 10y ago
This is something it amazes me more people don't see. I've read a lot of the scientific literature on human creativity (there isn't much) and it is quite clear that we don't understand it at all. Additionally, there is a transformation that takes place in our brains from information to knowledge. Our understanding of this process is also pretty weak. Both of these problems are fundamental to the creation of true, autonomous AI.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  Both of those problems might be something we need to solve, or it might emerge out of the complexity of a sufficiently advanced AI system. If the latter, we might not seeing coming for exactly the reasons you've outlined as making that emergence unlikely.
- ghurtado 10y ago
  > Both of these problems are fundamental to the creation of true, autonomous AI. What makes you say that? I could see your statement being self-evidently true only if you meant "fundamental to the creation of an anthropomorphized AI." Of course, even that glosses over the fact that there are already strong indications within the AI community that the first general purpose AI will likely not "think" even remotely in the same fashion as humans do.
- haliax 10y ago
  > I've read a lot of the scientific literature on human creativity (there isn't much) and it is quite clear that we don't understand it at all. I don't agree that this is true in any way that precludes the creation of "true, autonomous AI". We may not understand the specific mechanisms of how our brains give rise to creativity and the resulting "implementation artifacts", but the fundamental part of creativity (and I'd argue, the part that's relevant to AI) is the ability to efficiently search huge but structured hypothesis spaces and inductively learn new structure (very likely with some stochastic element involved). That is something that we not only have an understanding of, but have implemented, more than once. By way of examples: http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2006-04/john-koza-has-built-invention-machine http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2006-04/john-koza-has-... http://aliciapatterson.org/stories/eurisko-computer-mind-its-own http://aliciapatterson.org/stories/eurisko-computer-mind-its... https://psmag.com/triumph-of-the-cyborg-composer-620e5aead47e https://psmag.com/triumph-of-the-cyborg-composer-620e5aead47...
- zby 10y ago
  We can create true, autonomous Intelligence, even though we don't understand how it really works. I predict that - we'll be able to create AI and train it just like we do with a human being.
golfer 10y ago
Does playing Go and beating world champions count? That seemed a creative endeavor to me.
- DougWebb 10y ago
  I would say those are analytical, but not creative.
  - wolfgke 10y ago
    As soon as a computer becomes better than the human (either best or average one) in something which was considered as a sign of intelligence, immediately texts will be written why this is not a sign of intelligence and why intelligence is something completely different. This repeats many times. The same holds for creativity. I have rather the impression that lots of people who write this kind of papers rather want some computer program who is just like them - just a little bit more clever or creative (call it narcissism) instead of some computer program that is "intelligent" or "creative". These people don't understand that one shouldn't judge a fish by its inability to climb a tree.
    - DougWebb 10y ago
      That may be, but it may also be that when computers become better than a human at something, that happened because we gained a greater understanding of how to make that happen, and that greater understanding is what leads us to stop considering it a sign of intelligence. Hero of Alexandria, who lived from 10AD to 70AD, is famous for his mechanical inventions. One that I recall was a mechanism that opened the doors to a temple when a fire was lit in a brazier outside. To the people of the time, who didn't understand mechanics, this was a sign of the gods and the everyday miracles they would perform. But to anyone who knew how it worked, it was a simple mechanism. A computer that plays a complex game, or creates art, or understands spoken queries and answers verbally, or identifies things in photos, or drives a car, seems like magic to most people. But to software developers who understand the algorithms behind those actions there's no magic, and no intelligence. It's just software. The promise, and claim, of AI boils down to this: that what's going on inside of our own heads is also just software. Maybe that's true, maybe it isn't. Even if it's true, there's no guarantee that equivalent software can be run on the artificial hardware we've produced. So yes, we keep raising the bar, but I think that's because we keep discovering that the bar was actually already higher than we thought it was.
ThomPete 10y ago
Human creativity is not some magical thing. Plenty of humans create things of absolutely no value to their surroundings while being creative. Creativity is much more likely a human way of understanding the ability to create new new things with some sort of a purpose or intent. But humans have limits to their ability to create things too. There are things that only machines can create and perform.
- freyr 10y ago
  They can create things only in the sense that they receive a set of inputs and produce deterministic outputs according to a process explicitly specified by an prespecified algorithm. It's not "creative" in the conventional sense of the word, but perhaps humans do essentially the same thing in a much more advanced way.
  - ThomPete 10y ago
    Yeah I guess the point is that human creativity is expressed in some sort of skills/trade which are learnable whether it's playing an instrument, painting or writing a poem. The state of human creativity is the accumulation of hundreds of thousands of years of trial and error. It can be put into an evolutionary context and so in my belief, is accessible to computers who now can also learn.

ethanbond 10y ago

Every article claiming we're on the cusp of the singularity reads identically to those written 10-15 years ago too. This reads this way because computers haven't made large strides in any creative endeavor in the last 10-15 years. Why should that be a point against the argument?

sambe 10y ago
The majority of the discussion on the topic is not claiming we are on the cusp. It is claiming that it is a) a danger; b) likely to be fast if it happens. Almost maximally irrelevant to a claim that nothing significant has happened recently, so not a problem.
M_Grey 10y ago
I'm not sure that this argument is entirely sound, given how incredibly slowly humans move as a species to cope with anything new, and how quickly this particular kind of "new" would be likely to emerge. I don't know about you, but a few generations of ongoing discussion seems downright necessary to me, if we have a hope of not making some catastrophic mistakes.
tim333 10y ago
Computers can now take images and produce output in the style of major artists eg. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/picture-galleries/11848836/Computer-algorithm-creates-Instagram-like-filters-in-the-style-of-famous-artists.html?frame=3431718 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/picture-galleries/1184... You may say that's just an algorithm but it's way better than I can do personally. That was all figured out within the last decade. Also the computer art was produced by artificial neural networks, my attempts if I made some would be done by regular neural networks. Who's to say the computer stuff doesn't count as creative but mine does?
- pavlov 10y ago
  Computers are way better than me at a lot of things: arithmetic, remembering things, surviving on a diet of plain electricity, just to mention a few... Transferring local patterns between images and playing Go have recently been shown to be a few more of those things. But how far will that generalize? Nobody knows.

cscurmudgeon 10y ago

Go back to 1950, you will still find arguments that we are a few years away from general purpose AI. The arguments have not really changed.

tim333 10y ago
Depends who's arguments you look at. The Kurzweil arguments have always been turing test 2029, singularity 2045. So say general purpose AI about 2030. So it was 80 years in the future in 1950, 14 years now and so on for other dates. It depends a bit on the definitions you use but around then.
- cscurmudgeon 10y ago
  I prefer not listening to techno astrologers, and Kurweil is one. By and large the more one contributes to AI, the less one is an techno astrologer. Kurweil's contribution to AI pales in comparison to the likes of Norvig etc.

kaffeemitsahne 10y ago

Though sometimes nicely written, nautil.us articles basically always disappoint in terms of actual substance. Not sure why they're on the frontpage of HN so often.

Bakary 10y ago
The presentation of the page and the aesthetics has a lot to do with it.
Bakary 10y ago
The presentation of the page and the aesthetics has a lot to do with it.
throwaway2048 10y ago
That same statement is a common complaint about HN.

soufron 10y ago

Actually, he does talk about modern approaches to AI. He just says, they don't change shit. You know when neural networks were invented? In 1943.