5 ms·

> These things are going to grow up very, very soon! We know that. It's scary. I'll believe it when I see it. Your post has just a bit too much futurologist s

by ythn 10y ago

> These things are going to grow up very, very soon! We know that. It's scary. I'll believe it when I see it. Your post has just a bit too much futurologist science fantasy wishful thinking in it.

monk_e_boy 10y ago
You sound like some of the kids I teach. All 17 - 18 year old kids have phones and check them at least every 5 minutes. I mentioned that it'll be weird when they are wearing some sort of augmented reality glasses and teachers won't be able to tell if students are concentrating or reading reddit. The kids all said "That'll never happen." as if technology is stuck where we are today. They were astounded when I told them that ten years ago, I never saw a phone in a classroom. So from my perspective we went from no phones, to big phones, to little dumb phones, to little connected computers... it's no stretch to think that soon they will be glasses mounted or project some sort of holograph into the eyeball. Version 2 of Microsoft HoloLens will be cool, v3 will be tiny, v4 will be mounted inside glasses for sure. The same with AI. A few years ago I couldn't talk to my computer. Today I do it all the time. Last week I had to remember passwords, today my computer recognises me and logs me in. AI is here and it's getting better and from my point of view it is getting better much faster.
- ythn 10y ago
  It's one thing to say "VR will be commonplace in 10 years" or "Self driving cars will be commonplace in 10 years". That, I can believe because we already have prototypes and I've messed with them and could imagine advancing them. It is quite another thing to claim that human adult level strong AI is coming "very very soon" and could happen overnight. The latter is just science fiction wishful thinking. I have no reason to believe we will ever have truly thinking, sentient computers, let alone "very very soon." Sure, our Siris and Alexas and whatnot will get better and better at responding to our queries how we want, but that's way different from an adult level human intelligence AI. Machine Learning has limits and will not yield conscious machines anytime soon, if ever.
  - naasking 10y ago
    > I have no reason to believe we will ever have truly thinking, sentient computers Unless you think human brains work on magical pixie dust, I'd say you have quite a few reasons.
    - ythn 10y ago
      I'm not even convinced that the human brain can be modeled in terms of a Turing machine. How does does the brain achieve free will - the ability to "decide" between two arbitrary, equally-weighted things? RNG? And yet, it doesn't "feel" random.
      - grzm 10y ago
        This presumes free will, which is itself contentious. I think it's clear we have the appearance of free will, but it's not clear that consciousness actually makes decisions rather than an emergent appearance of agency, claiming decisions as made for actions that are already in process. If you're going to make a claim about the feasibility of AI that relies on free will, you'll have to prove free will first.
      - naasking 10y ago
        Firstly, free will isn't what you think it is. A random choice might seem "free" but it's not "willed" in any meaningful sense. So let's leave aside the free will question because that term is pretty much undefined at this point. What your post sort of hints is what's known as the hard problem of consciousness. I recommend reading the Wikipedia pages on it and qualia if you're interested. Suffice it to say, given our current understanding of physics, we are no better than finite state automata (see the Bekenstein Bound). The only escape from this inevitability is if we collectively decide that the hard problem of consciousness is irreducible, and then something like panpsychism becomes preferable. This is unlikely though, and we've been through this once before in the debate over how living matter differs from non-living matter. Must there be some "secret sauce" added to non-living matter to bring it to life? This was the proposal of vitalism, but eventually biology came to prominence and all of those who insisted living matter had to be different just died off and we were left once again with a reducible, mechanistic understanding of living matter. So it will be with consciousness (see [1] for an example of how this might work). [1] http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00500/full http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00...
logicallee 10y ago
Of course, I have no way of knowing how soon "very soon" is. However, although my post may have wishful thinking in it, I think if you investigate the reality of the cells that contribute to human thinking, you will come to the conclusion that it is impossible that this or some similar system should not be modelled in computers within the next hundred years. You can look at the processing involved yourself. Just remember that the whole is the sum of the parts, and the parts are doing slow, biological things - it's not silicon etchings that work at practically the speed of light. Neural signals propagate at something like 100 meters per second at the fastest[1] - light propagates at 299 792 458 meters per second and if you look at our 4 Ghz CPU's you will see that in a clock cycle light just goes about 10 cm.[2] Light goes fast enough to make a million trips across a server room in the time it takes neurons to fire. While staggeringly complex, the fact is, our server rooms are doing more. This is like heavier-than-air flight. Let's say the fuels and engines are there - but we don't know how to assemble them. When we see neural nets produce results that are similar to what young children produce, this is amazing. I cannot overemphasize that at any moment we can have a breakthrough. We have so much more computational power than required: 3 pounds! 20 watts! 86 billion neurons with 7000 connections! And at speeds of 300 herz. The training time for a human brain to get to intelligence even close to adulthood is, let's say, 12 to 14 years even in the most precocious. We're looking at the output of neural nets that receive perhaps months of training. This stuff is happening right now. It's absolutely astounding and there is no limit to what can be unlocked overnight. Any server farm at Amazon or Google has the hardware today to go through 10 years of human brain training in about 10 months, and then end up with a network that thinks ten times the speed of human thought. It's there, today. Three pounds. Twenty watts. Three pounds. Twenty watts. Three pounds. Twenty watts. It's not miraculous. It's happening. [1] http://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/21790/how-long-does-a-signal-from-the-brain-take-to-reach-the-limbs http://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/21790/how-long-do... [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=c+%2F+4+hgz https://www.google.com/search?q=c+%2F+4+hgz
- ythn 10y ago
  > This is like heavier-than-air flight. Yes, this is like heavier-than-air flight. It would be like if we didn't really understand how flight works so we are just imitating birds by gluing feathers to cardboard wings, flapping them, and hoping flight just sort of happens. In a similar way, we don't really understand how the human brain works, so we are just imitating neurons and hoping sentience will just sort of happen.

by ythn 10y ago

> These things are going to grow up very, very soon! We know that. It's scary. I'll believe it when I see it. Your post has just a bit too much futurologist science fantasy wishful thinking in it.

monk_e_boy 10y ago

You sound like some of the kids I teach. All 17 - 18 year old kids have phones and check them at least every 5 minutes. I mentioned that it'll be weird when they are wearing some sort of augmented reality glasses and teachers won't be able to tell if students are concentrating or reading reddit. The kids all said "That'll never happen." as if technology is stuck where we are today. They were astounded when I told them that ten years ago, I never saw a phone in a classroom. So from my perspective we went from no phones, to big phones, to little dumb phones, to little connected computers... it's no stretch to think that soon they will be glasses mounted or project some sort of holograph into the eyeball. Version 2 of Microsoft HoloLens will be cool, v3 will be tiny, v4 will be mounted inside glasses for sure. The same with AI. A few years ago I couldn't talk to my computer. Today I do it all the time. Last week I had to remember passwords, today my computer recognises me and logs me in. AI is here and it's getting better and from my point of view it is getting better much faster.

ythn 10y ago
It's one thing to say "VR will be commonplace in 10 years" or "Self driving cars will be commonplace in 10 years". That, I can believe because we already have prototypes and I've messed with them and could imagine advancing them. It is quite another thing to claim that human adult level strong AI is coming "very very soon" and could happen overnight. The latter is just science fiction wishful thinking. I have no reason to believe we will ever have truly thinking, sentient computers, let alone "very very soon." Sure, our Siris and Alexas and whatnot will get better and better at responding to our queries how we want, but that's way different from an adult level human intelligence AI. Machine Learning has limits and will not yield conscious machines anytime soon, if ever.
- naasking 10y ago
  > I have no reason to believe we will ever have truly thinking, sentient computers Unless you think human brains work on magical pixie dust, I'd say you have quite a few reasons.
  - ythn 10y ago
    I'm not even convinced that the human brain can be modeled in terms of a Turing machine. How does does the brain achieve free will - the ability to "decide" between two arbitrary, equally-weighted things? RNG? And yet, it doesn't "feel" random.
    - grzm 10y ago
      This presumes free will, which is itself contentious. I think it's clear we have the appearance of free will, but it's not clear that consciousness actually makes decisions rather than an emergent appearance of agency, claiming decisions as made for actions that are already in process. If you're going to make a claim about the feasibility of AI that relies on free will, you'll have to prove free will first.
    - naasking 10y ago
      Firstly, free will isn't what you think it is. A random choice might seem "free" but it's not "willed" in any meaningful sense. So let's leave aside the free will question because that term is pretty much undefined at this point. What your post sort of hints is what's known as the hard problem of consciousness. I recommend reading the Wikipedia pages on it and qualia if you're interested. Suffice it to say, given our current understanding of physics, we are no better than finite state automata (see the Bekenstein Bound). The only escape from this inevitability is if we collectively decide that the hard problem of consciousness is irreducible, and then something like panpsychism becomes preferable. This is unlikely though, and we've been through this once before in the debate over how living matter differs from non-living matter. Must there be some "secret sauce" added to non-living matter to bring it to life? This was the proposal of vitalism, but eventually biology came to prominence and all of those who insisted living matter had to be different just died off and we were left once again with a reducible, mechanistic understanding of living matter. So it will be with consciousness (see [1] for an example of how this might work). [1] http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00500/full http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00...

logicallee 10y ago

Of course, I have no way of knowing how soon "very soon" is. However, although my post may have wishful thinking in it, I think if you investigate the reality of the cells that contribute to human thinking, you will come to the conclusion that it is impossible that this or some similar system should not be modelled in computers within the next hundred years. You can look at the processing involved yourself. Just remember that the whole is the sum of the parts, and the parts are doing slow, biological things - it's not silicon etchings that work at practically the speed of light. Neural signals propagate at something like 100 meters per second at the fastest[1] - light propagates at 299 792 458 meters per second and if you look at our 4 Ghz CPU's you will see that in a clock cycle light just goes about 10 cm.[2] Light goes fast enough to make a million trips across a server room in the time it takes neurons to fire. While staggeringly complex, the fact is, our server rooms are doing more. This is like heavier-than-air flight. Let's say the fuels and engines are there - but we don't know how to assemble them. When we see neural nets produce results that are similar to what young children produce, this is amazing. I cannot overemphasize that at any moment we can have a breakthrough. We have so much more computational power than required: 3 pounds! 20 watts! 86 billion neurons with 7000 connections! And at speeds of 300 herz. The training time for a human brain to get to intelligence even close to adulthood is, let's say, 12 to 14 years even in the most precocious. We're looking at the output of neural nets that receive perhaps months of training. This stuff is happening right now. It's absolutely astounding and there is no limit to what can be unlocked overnight. Any server farm at Amazon or Google has the hardware today to go through 10 years of human brain training in about 10 months, and then end up with a network that thinks ten times the speed of human thought. It's there, today. Three pounds. Twenty watts. Three pounds. Twenty watts. Three pounds. Twenty watts. It's not miraculous. It's happening. [1] http://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/21790/how-long-does-a-signal-from-the-brain-take-to-reach-the-limbs http://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/21790/how-long-do... [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=c+%2F+4+hgz https://www.google.com/search?q=c+%2F+4+hgz

ythn 10y ago
> This is like heavier-than-air flight. Yes, this is like heavier-than-air flight. It would be like if we didn't really understand how flight works so we are just imitating birds by gluing feathers to cardboard wings, flapping them, and hoping flight just sort of happens. In a similar way, we don't really understand how the human brain works, so we are just imitating neurons and hoping sentience will just sort of happen.