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I don't get why that's frustrating, without image and speech recognition AI isn't possible. -- How intelligent could people be without sensory perception? Helle

I don't get why that's frustrating, without image and speech recognition AI isn't possible. -- How intelligent could people be without sensory perception? Hellen Keller is the exception, take away the ability for humans to process sound, and images as a species and we wouldn't be nearly as advanced as we are today even if we still had the same brain structure and mental capacity. Ray Kurzweil understood this and is why he paved the way for some of the first speech / image recognition platforms like ocr/fax/etc... To me speech/image recognition is a precursor/adjunct of AI. You can have the former without the latter, but the latter will never be realized without those.

Retric 10y ago
The touring test shows AI has little to do with image or speech recognition. An AI that operates in a purely virtual environment would still be revolutionary.
- gingerrr 10y ago
  The Turing test doesn't test for intelligence, simply human-like communication. Things like lying, typing errors, or reaction to insult aren't indicators of an artificial intelligence, but are requirements for passing the Turing test. One of the biggest criticisms of the Turing test is, because it's a behavioral or functional test, there is no way to ensure that the computer is actually thinking intelligently at all, rather than following a very-well-articulated rules engine.
  - wbl 10y ago
    This is also true for pwople. How do you know humans are thinking and not following lots of social rules they learn thanks to special neural hardware for learning social interaction? Think about the intelligence conveyed in ritualized greetings.
    - JumpCrisscross 10y ago
      You are recapitulating Descartes. Consciousness appears to be immeasurable. You can only know that you are conscious. It is polite to give others the benefit of doubt.
      - pharrington 10y ago
        The commenter said nothing about consciousness. He simply said that just being able to hold a conversation is not a particularly useful measure of intelligence. The broader form of that is that we don't even know if humans in general are intelligent.
      - Scarblac 10y ago
        You can know that you are conscious, but how do you know you are intelligent?
  - ghurtado 10y ago
    I can think of no better test of whether some specific being is intelligent than fooling another human into thinking they are. Can you think of a better one? > because it's a behavioral or functional test What else would you test for in an AI other than its output and behavior? Conversely: how would you test a human for intelligence other than through its output and behavior?
    - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
      Surely that depends upon the human? An infant would do a terrible job. An institutionalized vegetable would fail to provide meaningful information. A not-very-bright cousin of mine has been heard responding to robo-calls. Would his opinion do? I think 'intelligence' is ambiguous, but many parts of it can be measured to some degree. Lets give the AI the SAT test perhaps? Or a test of hypothetical arguments. Or ask it how it would tell if you were an intelligent being yourself. Anything that's even a little bit 'meta' would confound most 'AIs'. We can tell if an AI is functional in some environment or responds well to social queues by interacting with it. But not much else. Not how 'intelligent' it is for instance.
      - ghurtado 10y ago
        > Anything that's even a little bit 'meta' would confound most 'AIs'. This is precisely why the Turing Test is so tricky for machines. Knowing the parameters, any regular human could test even the most advanced present-day AI and reveal it as a machine with very little effort and only a few questions. > We can tell if an AI is functional in some environment or responds well to social queues by interacting with it. But not much else. Not how 'intelligent' it is for instance. The Turing Test does not intend to determine level of intelligence (it's not an IQ test). It is intended to determine whether the intelligence you're interacting with is advanced enough to fool you into thinking they are of human nature. It is not a test of degree of intelligence, but rather of its nature. Human / not human are the only two possible outcomes.
      - Retric 10y ago
        A test that confuses a human for a machine is not a problem. False negatives don't remove value from this test.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - Retric 10y ago
    It directly tests for intelligence, you confuse false negatives with false positives. An intelligent person that fails the test because they don't know a common language is fine. Note: Medical tests generate both false positives and false negatives, they are still useful.
    - gingerrr 10y ago
      I don't understand what your example here about common language rebuts - that's something that would be solved for in the premise of the test, or it's not a fair test. Is your argument that that person is still intelligent even if they've failed the test? Because that's the entirety of my point - the Turing test does not return a measure of intelligence, but of communicability. Or is your point that if such a person fails it doesn't invalidate the test's measurement of intelligence? In a world where the test is implemented correctly, meaning where things like cross-language barriers are accounted for, failing to pass means failing to convince another person that you can communicate like a human would. If you fail, the only way you can consider that a "false negative" would be if you concede that the test is not a sufficient measure of intelligence but of ability to communicate - that's what makes it a FALSE negative.
      - Retric 10y ago
        No, the point is false negatives don't invalidate a test. It requires both intelligence and communication abilities. Cost and accuracy are obvious trade-offs, but sometimes you are willing to trade say cost and false positives to avoid false negatives say, a mass screening for HIV in a blood sample. In that case you need a cheap test and while a false positive has minimal cost a false negative could be deadly. Highering is the opposite case. Micdonalds want's a cheap test (interview + background) and as long they get enough acceptable low level candidate from their pool that's enough. As such the turing test can fit the second example. A hypothetical AI could hold a huge range of real jobs even if limited to purely text based communications. PS: Let's flip it. A super intelligent AI in a box that can't communicate in any form. Without IO it's indistinguishable from a space heater.
        10y ago
duaneb 10y ago
Perhaps because "true AI" is an illusion. There is always a better term that has meaning. And yet people like Ray Kurzweil toss the term around as if it does have meaning. What's the point unless you define it? You might as well reference anti gravity or teleportation.
- nix0n 10y ago
  It's something to work towards, always on the horizon. Kurzweil was a great inventor once but he's a prophet now and he needs to speak prophetically, not scientifically.
grzm 10y ago
Lots of good questions about what I mean by AI. I agree my statement wasn't very precise. And to be honest, that's a reflection of me not having a precise definition of what it is, exactly. However, I do think there's a distinction between speech/image recognition and what's commonly understood as AI, with speech and image recognition being sensory input systems, and AI in a more colloquial sense, such as learning and problem solving on at approximately human level. My statement was imprecise, and given I was expressing frustration at imprecision, my bad :) Thanks for the feedback! Gives me more to think about.
ant512 10y ago
On the other hand, if you had true AI first, you'd just say "here's an input device; figure out how to parse the data."
ghurtado 10y ago
> I don't get why that's frustrating, without image and speech recognition AI isn't possible Wait, what? The most commonly known (and perhaps oldest) AI test in no way requires either image nor speech recognition. Millions of blind and deaf human beings would like to disagree with your claim that they are not intelligent or sentient beings. Seriously, what is the basis of this claim?
- gremlinsinc 10y ago
  I'm not saying one can't be smart/intelligent without being able to see/hear, I'm saying if you take away all senses from ALL human beings there won't be any way to communicate at all, or know that others exist, and to learn from them. Learning is what makes intelligence possible--and the passing of information through generations. Hellen Keller fought extremely hard to overcome her sensory issues, but she had a good teacher, who presumably had someone else help them or guide them some. -- But to organically learn to speak when nobody can hear you, or to read when you can't even feel the braile, etc..would be nearly impossible.
  - nercht12 10y ago
    > Learning is what makes intelligence possible Intelligence (at least in this case) is being able to take data and draw conclusions from it, but you just can't see such potential when you don't have input. Is a computer not a calculator when there's no software installed? No. It's still a calculator, but it just doesn't have inputs. One day, we may be able to give sight to the blind, but for now, considering such people without ANY learning capacity as "unintelligent" is still wrong.

Retric 10y ago

The touring test shows AI has little to do with image or speech recognition. An AI that operates in a purely virtual environment would still be revolutionary.

gingerrr 10y ago
The Turing test doesn't test for intelligence, simply human-like communication. Things like lying, typing errors, or reaction to insult aren't indicators of an artificial intelligence, but are requirements for passing the Turing test. One of the biggest criticisms of the Turing test is, because it's a behavioral or functional test, there is no way to ensure that the computer is actually thinking intelligently at all, rather than following a very-well-articulated rules engine.
- wbl 10y ago
  This is also true for pwople. How do you know humans are thinking and not following lots of social rules they learn thanks to special neural hardware for learning social interaction? Think about the intelligence conveyed in ritualized greetings.
  - JumpCrisscross 10y ago
    You are recapitulating Descartes. Consciousness appears to be immeasurable. You can only know that you are conscious. It is polite to give others the benefit of doubt.
    - pharrington 10y ago
      The commenter said nothing about consciousness. He simply said that just being able to hold a conversation is not a particularly useful measure of intelligence. The broader form of that is that we don't even know if humans in general are intelligent.
    - Scarblac 10y ago
      You can know that you are conscious, but how do you know you are intelligent?
- ghurtado 10y ago
  I can think of no better test of whether some specific being is intelligent than fooling another human into thinking they are. Can you think of a better one? > because it's a behavioral or functional test What else would you test for in an AI other than its output and behavior? Conversely: how would you test a human for intelligence other than through its output and behavior?
  - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
    Surely that depends upon the human? An infant would do a terrible job. An institutionalized vegetable would fail to provide meaningful information. A not-very-bright cousin of mine has been heard responding to robo-calls. Would his opinion do? I think 'intelligence' is ambiguous, but many parts of it can be measured to some degree. Lets give the AI the SAT test perhaps? Or a test of hypothetical arguments. Or ask it how it would tell if you were an intelligent being yourself. Anything that's even a little bit 'meta' would confound most 'AIs'. We can tell if an AI is functional in some environment or responds well to social queues by interacting with it. But not much else. Not how 'intelligent' it is for instance.
    - ghurtado 10y ago
      > Anything that's even a little bit 'meta' would confound most 'AIs'. This is precisely why the Turing Test is so tricky for machines. Knowing the parameters, any regular human could test even the most advanced present-day AI and reveal it as a machine with very little effort and only a few questions. > We can tell if an AI is functional in some environment or responds well to social queues by interacting with it. But not much else. Not how 'intelligent' it is for instance. The Turing Test does not intend to determine level of intelligence (it's not an IQ test). It is intended to determine whether the intelligence you're interacting with is advanced enough to fool you into thinking they are of human nature. It is not a test of degree of intelligence, but rather of its nature. Human / not human are the only two possible outcomes.
    - Retric 10y ago
      A test that confuses a human for a machine is not a problem. False negatives don't remove value from this test.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Retric 10y ago
  It directly tests for intelligence, you confuse false negatives with false positives. An intelligent person that fails the test because they don't know a common language is fine. Note: Medical tests generate both false positives and false negatives, they are still useful.
  - gingerrr 10y ago
    I don't understand what your example here about common language rebuts - that's something that would be solved for in the premise of the test, or it's not a fair test. Is your argument that that person is still intelligent even if they've failed the test? Because that's the entirety of my point - the Turing test does not return a measure of intelligence, but of communicability. Or is your point that if such a person fails it doesn't invalidate the test's measurement of intelligence? In a world where the test is implemented correctly, meaning where things like cross-language barriers are accounted for, failing to pass means failing to convince another person that you can communicate like a human would. If you fail, the only way you can consider that a "false negative" would be if you concede that the test is not a sufficient measure of intelligence but of ability to communicate - that's what makes it a FALSE negative.
    - Retric 10y ago
      No, the point is false negatives don't invalidate a test. It requires both intelligence and communication abilities. Cost and accuracy are obvious trade-offs, but sometimes you are willing to trade say cost and false positives to avoid false negatives say, a mass screening for HIV in a blood sample. In that case you need a cheap test and while a false positive has minimal cost a false negative could be deadly. Highering is the opposite case. Micdonalds want's a cheap test (interview + background) and as long they get enough acceptable low level candidate from their pool that's enough. As such the turing test can fit the second example. A hypothetical AI could hold a huge range of real jobs even if limited to purely text based communications. PS: Let's flip it. A super intelligent AI in a box that can't communicate in any form. Without IO it's indistinguishable from a space heater.
      - 10y ago

duaneb 10y ago

Perhaps because "true AI" is an illusion. There is always a better term that has meaning. And yet people like Ray Kurzweil toss the term around as if it does have meaning. What's the point unless you define it? You might as well reference anti gravity or teleportation.

nix0n 10y ago
It's something to work towards, always on the horizon. Kurzweil was a great inventor once but he's a prophet now and he needs to speak prophetically, not scientifically.

grzm 10y ago

Lots of good questions about what I mean by AI. I agree my statement wasn't very precise. And to be honest, that's a reflection of me not having a precise definition of what it is, exactly. However, I do think there's a distinction between speech/image recognition and what's commonly understood as AI, with speech and image recognition being sensory input systems, and AI in a more colloquial sense, such as learning and problem solving on at approximately human level. My statement was imprecise, and given I was expressing frustration at imprecision, my bad :) Thanks for the feedback! Gives me more to think about.

ant512 10y ago

On the other hand, if you had true AI first, you'd just say "here's an input device; figure out how to parse the data."

ghurtado 10y ago

> I don't get why that's frustrating, without image and speech recognition AI isn't possible Wait, what? The most commonly known (and perhaps oldest) AI test in no way requires either image nor speech recognition. Millions of blind and deaf human beings would like to disagree with your claim that they are not intelligent or sentient beings. Seriously, what is the basis of this claim?

gremlinsinc 10y ago
I'm not saying one can't be smart/intelligent without being able to see/hear, I'm saying if you take away all senses from ALL human beings there won't be any way to communicate at all, or know that others exist, and to learn from them. Learning is what makes intelligence possible--and the passing of information through generations. Hellen Keller fought extremely hard to overcome her sensory issues, but she had a good teacher, who presumably had someone else help them or guide them some. -- But to organically learn to speak when nobody can hear you, or to read when you can't even feel the braile, etc..would be nearly impossible.
- nercht12 10y ago
  > Learning is what makes intelligence possible Intelligence (at least in this case) is being able to take data and draw conclusions from it, but you just can't see such potential when you don't have input. Is a computer not a calculator when there's no software installed? No. It's still a calculator, but it just doesn't have inputs. One day, we may be able to give sight to the blind, but for now, considering such people without ANY learning capacity as "unintelligent" is still wrong.