4 ms·

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

by 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.

by freyr 10y ago

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.