13 ms·

The Great A.I. Awakening

166 points by m15i 10y ago

aaron-lebo 10y ago
The use of Hemingway as an example is unfortunate. Something less literary would be a better example maybe?: Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude. Near the top of the west there is a dry and frozen dead body of leopard. No one has ever explained what leopard wanted at that altitude. One of those is pretty stilted and not much better than lot of machine translations. The uncanny valley of being good enough but not optimal is probably something that's going to plague AI for a long time. Google’s decision to reorganize itself around A.I. was the first major manifestation of what has become an industrywide machine-learning delirium. Over the past four years, six companies in particular — Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and the Chinese firm Baidu — have touched off an arms race for A.I. talent, particularly within universities. Corporate promises of resources and freedom have thinned out top academic departments. It has become widely known in Silicon Valley that Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, personally oversees, with phone calls and video-chat blandishments, his company’s overtures to the most desirable graduate students. Starting salaries of seven figures are not unheard-of. Attendance at the field’s most important academic conference has nearly quadrupled. What is at stake is not just one more piecemeal innovation but control over what very well could represent an entirely new computational platform: pervasive, ambient artificial intelligence. That's...worrying. Given all of these companies lack of respect for privacy and consumers, it should trouble us that one of them may end up with such a world-changing innovation. Throw enough money into one place, stick a bunch of PhDs in a building, and eventually you'll get something. It's just numbers. Bodies + money. What's inspiring about that? Does the prospect of Mark Zuckerberg having control over AI for the next five decades trouble you? Even more remarkable is he'd do it on the back of having made a marginally better social networking site in PHP in 2004 and spreading it via the best social network in the world - Ivy League universities. And now those same universities are being raided for talent by these companies... Is this how we should be picking winners? The distinct lack of diversity and their past stances and actions are troubling. This seems to be mostly a hype piece without any regard for practical effects. If these same companies can't anticipate or mitigate the impact of issues like fake news until after an election, what makes you think they understand the consequences and impact of something much more complex? And even if they do anticipate it, how do they hold back the pressures of shareholders?
- gordon_freeman 10y ago
  I just hope that we do see multiple such platforms of AI prevailing in the long term. Fragmentation in AI platform would ensure flexibility and bit of privacy protection on consumer side and eventually these competitors can keep each other in check. for example, Amazon echo vs Google home. If Google starts being very creepy in terms of accessing my data to serve me ads, I would just switch to Echo or some other platform. At least I can live in that kind of world.
  - jacobush 10y ago
    Starts being... ? 1999 called
- melvinmt 10y ago
  > Starting salaries of seven figures are not unheard-of Seven figures? For grad students?
  - smcl 10y ago
    That is a quote from the article, not a claim by the commenter
  - randcraw 10y ago
    Ruputedly, Andrej Karpathy and perhaps others recently saw offers of that size (presumably including incentives and options). But the claim has become an pop meme, so who knows.
- dri_ft 10y ago
  I found it weird that the article claims that the lack of the definite article is the only sign that makes the machine-translated version of the Hemingway worse. OK, that's the only clinching evidence, but it's easy to spot how it's a lot more stilted in other respects, too. It's still impressive, mind, and a big improvement over the previous translation, but not perfect like the article wants to imply.
earthly10x 10y ago
A lot of AI is about vector space these days. https://www.kaggle.com/c/word2vec-nlp-tutorial/forums/t/12349/word2vec-is-based-on-an-approach-from-lawrence-berkeley-national-lab https://www.kaggle.com/c/word2vec-nlp-tutorial/forums/t/1234... "That interim also saw dedicated attempts on the part of Google’s competitors to catch up. (As Le told me about his close collaboration with Tomas Mikolov, he kept repeating Mikolov’s name over and over, in an incantatory way that sounded poignant." "Just as the chip-design process was nearly complete, Le and two colleagues finally demonstrated that neural networks might be configured to handle the structure of language. He drew upon an idea, called “word embeddings,” that had been around for more than 10 years. When you summarize images, you can divine a picture of what each stage of the summary looks like — an edge, a circle, etc. When you summarize language in a similar way, you essentially produce multidimensional maps of the distances, based on common usage, between one word and every single other word in the language. The machine is not “analyzing” the data the way that we might, with linguistic rules that identify some of them as nouns and others as verbs. Instead, it is shifting and twisting and warping the words around in the map. In two dimensions, you cannot make this map useful. You want, for example, “cat” to be in the rough vicinity of “dog,” but you also want “cat” to be near “tail” and near “supercilious” and near “meme,” because you want to try to capture all of the different relationships — both strong and weak — that the word “cat” has to other words. It can be related to all these other words simultaneously only if it is related to each of them in a different dimension. You can’t easily make a 160,000-dimensional map, but it turns out you can represent a language pretty well in a mere thousand or so dimensions — in other words, a universe in which each word is designated by a list of a thousand numbers. Le gave me a good-natured hard time for my continual requests for a mental picture of these maps. “Gideon,” he would say, with the blunt regular demurral of Bartleby, “I do not generally like trying to visualize thousand-dimensional vectors in three-dimensional space.”
- JumpCrisscross 10y ago
  Language is something we intuitively understand. To get weak AI's potential, consider how many less-intuitive problems might be similarly addressable.
  - 10y ago
apsec112 10y ago
Sundar seems very confused here. The idea that we should invent AGI to make "personal digital assistants" is like Hogwarts students inventing time machines so they can take two classes at once. I mean, yes, it would technically enable you to do that, but it doesn't matter because at that point you have way, way bigger problems. If a fleet of alien spaceships arrived in the sky over Manhattan tomorrow, our first reaction would not be "oh, now the aliens can be our personal digital assistants!" (or, for that matter, "they might take our jobs!"). Yet the invention of general AI would be even more powerful than that. It would be like enabling any programmer in the world to summon a personal fleet of alien spaceships, on command, from a planet of their choosing anywhere in the universe. "Digital assistants" would be the absolute last thing anyone had on their mind.
- zer0gravity 10y ago
  The tricky part is to prevent AGI from developing goals of its own. You want it omnipresent and allknowing but dormant, and only react to inputs from the user. But such thing cannot be tamed. As the AGI is democratized, it's bound to happen that someone somewhere will make it evolve goals. The future of the human kind will be decided in a great measure by what kind of goals such an AGI will set first.
  - drabiega 10y ago
    I'm pretty sure you can't get to AGI in the first place without it being to develop it's own goals. Even if you want a straight question answering machine, it's going to have to be able to form it's own sub-goals in order for it to be able to answer your question. Otherwise it's just following a mechanistic process of question answering and a normal computer we have now can do that.
- BeingIncubated 10y ago
  By the time AGI is developed, it would be able to improve itself/build improvements, causing the runway effect that leads to superintelligence. The idea of making "personal digital assistants" is humans thinking they can tame a god to be a servant. Taming a superintelligence would be like a dog taming human civilization, and perhaps the gap between man and ASI is larger than the gap between dog and man.
KKKKkkkk1 10y ago
When your barber starts talking about strong AI reaching self awareness, sell sell sell.
- randcraw 10y ago
  At that point, unfortunately, money will have no value.
aedron 10y ago
And the pattern of overselling A.I. continues. What we have accomplished in this generation is pretty good pattern recognition. Nice, but limited in its usefulness to obvious applications, like translation and image and audio classification. Go and Chess games are rule-constrained enough to be reducible to patterns, so it works for them too, giving a false impression of 'general AI'. What's worse is that this approach seems to be a dead end, in the sense that it is only useful for pattern recognition, which can substitute for decision making only for extremely simple processes (absent a quantum leap in a range of technologies), and even then those kinds of applications are notoriously difficult to develop and maintain. I look forward to the enormous benefits we will get from machine learning, as we are already seeing, but again, overselling it won't do us any good.
- ythn 10y ago
  People like believing in science fiction. If it makes them feel better, let them.
  - vanderZwan 10y ago
    The problem is when faulty beliefs lead to faulty expectations, or worse: faulty policies.
    - posterboy 10y ago
      Well, can't hurt to raise some awareness long before it's actually problematic. Basically it means to trust any program just as far as trust in the programmer would allow. A bug is a bug, AI or not.
- ryanackley 10y ago
  Yup, in general, people predicting the imminent end of civilization from sentient A.I. lack technical understanding of how current A.I. works. Yes, it may put you out of a job one day but it won't actively seek to destroy the human race.
  - 10y ago
delegate 10y ago
Honest question - have you read this entire article ? ... I'm sure it's written by a smart and talented journalist - but it's just too long. I cannot possibly allocate so much of my time to read a single news article! I know it's kind of my problem, but I'm sure lots of others are just like me - it's just the nature of our tech-provoked ADD. I skimmed through it all right, but I didn't get too much out of that. If I need to go deep, I grab a book! Good journalism doesn't get through, because it asks too much attention of its (busy) readers. A TLDR version of good articles is a must. That's a good problem for AI isn't it ? For the moment, though - I'm sure the authors themselves could make a nice summary readable in maybe 3-5 minutes.
- ghgr 10y ago
  I hear you. I guess long form journalism has its place, but for me it's in the library next to the novels. When reading news I want to go straight to the point. In fact, I'd pay for an API that returns an array of news, and for each one the Five Ws (and 1H) [1] in a machine readable format, at most two sentences long. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ws
- ilarum 10y ago
  There are services like http://smmry.com/about http://smmry.com/about which offer an API. Some sub-reddits I frequent already have bots that auto invoke this API and post the TLDR as a comment on every original post, and it seems to work acceptably well.
- zalq 10y ago
  Hi, I can recommend using the Chrome extension 'Reedy' which allows you to blast through this at 800-1200 words/minute. You can start slower and gradually increase the speed, but once you get the hang of it, an article like this takes no more than what an ordinary article would have taken to read normally.
  - golergka 10y ago
    If your bottleneck in reading text is in scanning words from the screen, then you either don't reflect on what you read or you're reading boring things.
torpfactory 10y ago
It occurs to me that the thing that will probably limit advancements in AGI will be the availability of data to feed these systems. If you believe that Moore's law is only on life support and not totally dead, there will be more processing power to harness in the future. The number of researchers and investment are clearly growing very quickly. The models used can endlessly be improved. But on the other hand there are so many things that even today just aren't captured as digital data. I work as a mechanical engineer and there are many nuances to mechanical design that appear nowhere in print (or youtube video, or blog post for that matter). Learning these things takes a complex combination of of sight touch and intuitive leap. Even unsupervised learning requires some input to feed the net. I just don't see where it will come from. Anyone think I'm way out of line here?
- gallerdude 10y ago
  I think part of it is we're feeding in really small subsets of existing data. Someday we'll be able to feed in 4K 60FPS video, and it'll be able to learn patterns from that. Right now we can only access a subset of the existing data.
- joggery 10y ago
  I think you're mistaken about this. Once the philosophical and technical breakthroughs are made that allow us to build an AGI then it will get all the data it needs from its environment. It would be 'unsupervised' in the sense that human children are i.e. no pre-processing of data required but it would still need parenting.
- drabiega 10y ago
  It almost doesn't matter how smart the AGI is on it's own, if it can't participate in our social conversation and get it's information from the same sources humans do it's going to be stone dumb in practice. An individual human is far less intelligent than we generally give ourselves credit for: if it can't stand on the shoulders of our giants then it doesn't matter if it's ten times as tall as us individually.
verdex_blarg 10y ago
-Sees random article about AI- "Hey, I'm interested in AI maybe this is worth some investigation" -Sees that it's from nytimes- "Uh oh"
- isof4ult 10y ago
  Could you elaborate on this?
thinkMOAR 10y ago
“When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, he saw a missed call from Jeff Dean.” Google brain requires a patch. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/jun/17/humanities.internationaleducationnews https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/jun/17/humanities.int...
azinman2 10y ago
It'd be really great if people could stop using the term AI by itself when they mean weak AI, or really machine learning. Its ultimately very misleading -- the only "awakening" that's happened is neural nets are popular again and getting good results. If strong AI gets solved... well then that's really when the machine will have awakened!
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tehchromic 10y ago
The author gets it close to right when he talks about Google Maps as a form of AI, and the notion of raising the bar. What's missing in this article as well as most reporting on AI is the differentiation between artificial intelligence and artificial consciousness, otherwise known as individuality or self awareness. To me there's a whole smoke and mirrors phenomenon going on in the AI topic, especially the idea of "emerging AI", and the supposed potential danger that poses, and it's tied to the tendency we have as humans to anthropomorphize inanimate objects, and to believe in supernatural effects. That tendency allows the idea of artificial self awareness to always float behind the scenes in these conversations, and let's normal reporting on AI be magically conflated with a different topic. It's important to realize that AI is nowhere near self awareness, or conscious, or "awake" and won't be no matter how far the field and implementation goes. No matter how many Turing Test they pass, intelligent machines will be no more conscious or self-aware than the Mechanical Turk! That's because solving the problem of self-awareness, or consciousness is a different engineering challenge than solving problems of AI. Consciousness is a more complicated, and specialized a thing. Were we to build an artificial self-awarene machine we would not expect it to pass a Turing Test. Instead we might expect different things of it and ask different questions to determine if it is self aware: can it adapt and survive without human help, ie can it trap and store energy and reproduce itself, and what purpose does it find for itself is what objective does it pursue ... These are things machines are capable of as well, but as I said: it's a different engineering challenge than producing information that is organized to be sensible to human mind, which is the AI challenge, and the Turing Test. That isn't to say machine learning isn't potentially dangerous, on the scale of atomic weapons or greater, especially in conjunction with automation, however the idea of an artificially emergent consciousness wth intelligence greater than our own is hogwash: we would do better to pay attention to our own emergent lack-of-intelligence systems and worry about them taking over first.
- webmaven 10y ago
  You've shifted the goalposts and erected strawmen so many times in this brief passage, I hardly know where to start... > No matter how many Turing Test they pass, intelligent machines will be no more conscious or self-aware than the Mechanical Turk! I see. Well, this is just a rephrasing of the "Chinese Room" discussed in the article. Taken to it's logical conclusion, I am certainly self aware, but the rest of you are all just acting out complex behaviors encoded in chemical and electrical gradients, successfully mimicking consciousness. I think that if any entity exhibits the behaviors associated with conscious thought, it would well behoove us to treat such entities as conscious, or we may very well find ourselves holding the short end of that particular stick sooner than we'd like. > That's because solving the problem of self-awareness, or consciousness is a different engineering challenge than solving problems of AI. Consciousness is a more complicated, and specialized a thing. Since there is no doubt that ML/AI has a long way to go toward AGI, and along the way we can expect the discipline to evolve considerably in many unexpected directions, this assertion of yours is close to tautological. > Were we to build an artificial self-awarene machine we would not expect it to pass a Turing Test. Why not? > Instead we might expect different things of it and ask different questions to determine if it is self aware: can it adapt and survive without human help, So, anyone severely ill to the point that they cannot do without assistance is not conscious and self aware? > ie can it trap and store energy and reproduce itself, So, a single-celled organism is conscious? > and what purpose does it find for itself is what objective does it pursue ... Ah, this seems a relevant criteria, but keep in mind that humans can be subjected to operant conditioning ("brainwashing") to impose external goals, not to mention that humans actually require a couple of decades of such conditioning (albeit rather more gradual and haphazard) before being considered competent members of society, but we don't consider humans to be less conscious or less self-aware on either side of that particular divide. > it's a different engineering challenge than producing information that is organized to be sensible to human mind, which is the AI challenge, and the Turing Test. Given that people have to be specially educated to produce information that is organized to be sensible to a computer, I don't see why an AGI, whatever it's capabilities "out of the box", so to speak, shouldn't be expected to be capable of learning to be sensible to humans.
raphar 10y ago
Lost in tranlation: I not quite comfortable on how the Borges quote was translated. To show the difference, the new TRANSLATE version, translates again to spanish as: Tu no eres lo que escribes, eres lo que has leido. A bit different from Borges original phrase meaning. A sentence with a closer meaning (but a bad translation) would be: One's way of being is not (caused) for what you have write, but for what you have read. >Grinning, Pichai read aloud an awkward English version of the sentence that had been rendered by the old Translate system: “One is not what is for what he writes, but for what he has read.” >To the right of that was a new A.I.-rendered version: “You are not what you write, but what you have read.” edit: formating
perseusprime11 10y ago
I will believe tbis the day I stop getting spam emails in my inbox.
strnbrg 10y ago
That round-trip translation the article starts with is way way better than anything I've ever obtained from Google Translate. Let's use it to translate what I just wrote, into Spanish: "Ese viaje de ida y vuelta el artículo comienza con es mucho mejor que cualquier cosa que he obtenido de Google Translate." That's readable but the "el articulo comienza con" is bush league — a clear sign Google is translating word for word. No one would ever mistake this translation for real Spanish. If we translate back to English, the result is better than the Spanish! "That trip back and forth the article starts with is much better than anything I've gotten from Google Translate." So, amusingly, a weakness on one-way translation — the word-for-word method — becomes a strength on round trip translations. (Not that round trip translations are going to be useful to anyone.) I did Spanish so that a lot of people here would understand. But now let's do Hebrew. I get תרגום הלוך ושוב כי המאמר מתחיל עם הדרך דרך טוב יותר מכל דבר שאי פעם שיתקבל מ- Google Translate. That's beyond merely bad, it's pretty unintelligible as Hebrew. (In fact the only way a Hebrew speaker would make any sense of it is if he knew English and tried translating word for word back to English.) And indeed, once again the round trip translation is better, though the original meaning is pretty much lost: "Translating back and forth that article begins with a way better way than anything I've ever received from Google Translate."

166 points by m15i 10y ago

The use of Hemingway as an example is unfortunate. Something less literary would be a better example maybe?: Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude. Near the top of the west there is a dry and frozen dead body of leopard. No one has ever explained what leopard wanted at that altitude. One of those is pretty stilted and not much better than lot of machine translations. The uncanny valley of being good enough but not optimal is probably something that's going to plague AI for a long time. Google’s decision to reorganize itself around A.I. was the first major manifestation of what has become an industrywide machine-learning delirium. Over the past four years, six companies in particular — Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and the Chinese firm Baidu — have touched off an arms race for A.I. talent, particularly within universities. Corporate promises of resources and freedom have thinned out top academic departments. It has become widely known in Silicon Valley that Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, personally oversees, with phone calls and video-chat blandishments, his company’s overtures to the most desirable graduate students. Starting salaries of seven figures are not unheard-of. Attendance at the field’s most important academic conference has nearly quadrupled. What is at stake is not just one more piecemeal innovation but control over what very well could represent an entirely new computational platform: pervasive, ambient artificial intelligence. That's...worrying. Given all of these companies lack of respect for privacy and consumers, it should trouble us that one of them may end up with such a world-changing innovation. Throw enough money into one place, stick a bunch of PhDs in a building, and eventually you'll get something. It's just numbers. Bodies + money. What's inspiring about that? Does the prospect of Mark Zuckerberg having control over AI for the next five decades trouble you? Even more remarkable is he'd do it on the back of having made a marginally better social networking site in PHP in 2004 and spreading it via the best social network in the world - Ivy League universities. And now those same universities are being raided for talent by these companies... Is this how we should be picking winners? The distinct lack of diversity and their past stances and actions are troubling. This seems to be mostly a hype piece without any regard for practical effects. If these same companies can't anticipate or mitigate the impact of issues like fake news until after an election, what makes you think they understand the consequences and impact of something much more complex? And even if they do anticipate it, how do they hold back the pressures of shareholders?

gordon_freeman 10y ago
I just hope that we do see multiple such platforms of AI prevailing in the long term. Fragmentation in AI platform would ensure flexibility and bit of privacy protection on consumer side and eventually these competitors can keep each other in check. for example, Amazon echo vs Google home. If Google starts being very creepy in terms of accessing my data to serve me ads, I would just switch to Echo or some other platform. At least I can live in that kind of world.
- jacobush 10y ago
  Starts being... ? 1999 called
melvinmt 10y ago
> Starting salaries of seven figures are not unheard-of Seven figures? For grad students?
- smcl 10y ago
  That is a quote from the article, not a claim by the commenter
- randcraw 10y ago
  Ruputedly, Andrej Karpathy and perhaps others recently saw offers of that size (presumably including incentives and options). But the claim has become an pop meme, so who knows.
dri_ft 10y ago
I found it weird that the article claims that the lack of the definite article is the only sign that makes the machine-translated version of the Hemingway worse. OK, that's the only clinching evidence, but it's easy to spot how it's a lot more stilted in other respects, too. It's still impressive, mind, and a big improvement over the previous translation, but not perfect like the article wants to imply.

earthly10x 10y ago

A lot of AI is about vector space these days. https://www.kaggle.com/c/word2vec-nlp-tutorial/forums/t/12349/word2vec-is-based-on-an-approach-from-lawrence-berkeley-national-lab https://www.kaggle.com/c/word2vec-nlp-tutorial/forums/t/1234... "That interim also saw dedicated attempts on the part of Google’s competitors to catch up. (As Le told me about his close collaboration with Tomas Mikolov, he kept repeating Mikolov’s name over and over, in an incantatory way that sounded poignant." "Just as the chip-design process was nearly complete, Le and two colleagues finally demonstrated that neural networks might be configured to handle the structure of language. He drew upon an idea, called “word embeddings,” that had been around for more than 10 years. When you summarize images, you can divine a picture of what each stage of the summary looks like — an edge, a circle, etc. When you summarize language in a similar way, you essentially produce multidimensional maps of the distances, based on common usage, between one word and every single other word in the language. The machine is not “analyzing” the data the way that we might, with linguistic rules that identify some of them as nouns and others as verbs. Instead, it is shifting and twisting and warping the words around in the map. In two dimensions, you cannot make this map useful. You want, for example, “cat” to be in the rough vicinity of “dog,” but you also want “cat” to be near “tail” and near “supercilious” and near “meme,” because you want to try to capture all of the different relationships — both strong and weak — that the word “cat” has to other words. It can be related to all these other words simultaneously only if it is related to each of them in a different dimension. You can’t easily make a 160,000-dimensional map, but it turns out you can represent a language pretty well in a mere thousand or so dimensions — in other words, a universe in which each word is designated by a list of a thousand numbers. Le gave me a good-natured hard time for my continual requests for a mental picture of these maps. “Gideon,” he would say, with the blunt regular demurral of Bartleby, “I do not generally like trying to visualize thousand-dimensional vectors in three-dimensional space.”

JumpCrisscross 10y ago
Language is something we intuitively understand. To get weak AI's potential, consider how many less-intuitive problems might be similarly addressable.
- 10y ago

apsec112 10y ago

Sundar seems very confused here. The idea that we should invent AGI to make "personal digital assistants" is like Hogwarts students inventing time machines so they can take two classes at once. I mean, yes, it would technically enable you to do that, but it doesn't matter because at that point you have way, way bigger problems. If a fleet of alien spaceships arrived in the sky over Manhattan tomorrow, our first reaction would not be "oh, now the aliens can be our personal digital assistants!" (or, for that matter, "they might take our jobs!"). Yet the invention of general AI would be even more powerful than that. It would be like enabling any programmer in the world to summon a personal fleet of alien spaceships, on command, from a planet of their choosing anywhere in the universe. "Digital assistants" would be the absolute last thing anyone had on their mind.

zer0gravity 10y ago
The tricky part is to prevent AGI from developing goals of its own. You want it omnipresent and allknowing but dormant, and only react to inputs from the user. But such thing cannot be tamed. As the AGI is democratized, it's bound to happen that someone somewhere will make it evolve goals. The future of the human kind will be decided in a great measure by what kind of goals such an AGI will set first.
- drabiega 10y ago
  I'm pretty sure you can't get to AGI in the first place without it being to develop it's own goals. Even if you want a straight question answering machine, it's going to have to be able to form it's own sub-goals in order for it to be able to answer your question. Otherwise it's just following a mechanistic process of question answering and a normal computer we have now can do that.
BeingIncubated 10y ago
By the time AGI is developed, it would be able to improve itself/build improvements, causing the runway effect that leads to superintelligence. The idea of making "personal digital assistants" is humans thinking they can tame a god to be a servant. Taming a superintelligence would be like a dog taming human civilization, and perhaps the gap between man and ASI is larger than the gap between dog and man.

KKKKkkkk1 10y ago

When your barber starts talking about strong AI reaching self awareness, sell sell sell.

randcraw 10y ago
At that point, unfortunately, money will have no value.

aedron 10y ago

And the pattern of overselling A.I. continues. What we have accomplished in this generation is pretty good pattern recognition. Nice, but limited in its usefulness to obvious applications, like translation and image and audio classification. Go and Chess games are rule-constrained enough to be reducible to patterns, so it works for them too, giving a false impression of 'general AI'. What's worse is that this approach seems to be a dead end, in the sense that it is only useful for pattern recognition, which can substitute for decision making only for extremely simple processes (absent a quantum leap in a range of technologies), and even then those kinds of applications are notoriously difficult to develop and maintain. I look forward to the enormous benefits we will get from machine learning, as we are already seeing, but again, overselling it won't do us any good.

ythn 10y ago
People like believing in science fiction. If it makes them feel better, let them.
- vanderZwan 10y ago
  The problem is when faulty beliefs lead to faulty expectations, or worse: faulty policies.
  - posterboy 10y ago
    Well, can't hurt to raise some awareness long before it's actually problematic. Basically it means to trust any program just as far as trust in the programmer would allow. A bug is a bug, AI or not.
ryanackley 10y ago
Yup, in general, people predicting the imminent end of civilization from sentient A.I. lack technical understanding of how current A.I. works. Yes, it may put you out of a job one day but it won't actively seek to destroy the human race.
- 10y ago

delegate 10y ago

Honest question - have you read this entire article ? ... I'm sure it's written by a smart and talented journalist - but it's just too long. I cannot possibly allocate so much of my time to read a single news article! I know it's kind of my problem, but I'm sure lots of others are just like me - it's just the nature of our tech-provoked ADD. I skimmed through it all right, but I didn't get too much out of that. If I need to go deep, I grab a book! Good journalism doesn't get through, because it asks too much attention of its (busy) readers. A TLDR version of good articles is a must. That's a good problem for AI isn't it ? For the moment, though - I'm sure the authors themselves could make a nice summary readable in maybe 3-5 minutes.

ghgr 10y ago
I hear you. I guess long form journalism has its place, but for me it's in the library next to the novels. When reading news I want to go straight to the point. In fact, I'd pay for an API that returns an array of news, and for each one the Five Ws (and 1H) [1] in a machine readable format, at most two sentences long. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ws
ilarum 10y ago
There are services like http://smmry.com/about http://smmry.com/about which offer an API. Some sub-reddits I frequent already have bots that auto invoke this API and post the TLDR as a comment on every original post, and it seems to work acceptably well.
zalq 10y ago
Hi, I can recommend using the Chrome extension 'Reedy' which allows you to blast through this at 800-1200 words/minute. You can start slower and gradually increase the speed, but once you get the hang of it, an article like this takes no more than what an ordinary article would have taken to read normally.
- golergka 10y ago
  If your bottleneck in reading text is in scanning words from the screen, then you either don't reflect on what you read or you're reading boring things.

torpfactory 10y ago

It occurs to me that the thing that will probably limit advancements in AGI will be the availability of data to feed these systems. If you believe that Moore's law is only on life support and not totally dead, there will be more processing power to harness in the future. The number of researchers and investment are clearly growing very quickly. The models used can endlessly be improved. But on the other hand there are so many things that even today just aren't captured as digital data. I work as a mechanical engineer and there are many nuances to mechanical design that appear nowhere in print (or youtube video, or blog post for that matter). Learning these things takes a complex combination of of sight touch and intuitive leap. Even unsupervised learning requires some input to feed the net. I just don't see where it will come from. Anyone think I'm way out of line here?

gallerdude 10y ago
I think part of it is we're feeding in really small subsets of existing data. Someday we'll be able to feed in 4K 60FPS video, and it'll be able to learn patterns from that. Right now we can only access a subset of the existing data.
joggery 10y ago
I think you're mistaken about this. Once the philosophical and technical breakthroughs are made that allow us to build an AGI then it will get all the data it needs from its environment. It would be 'unsupervised' in the sense that human children are i.e. no pre-processing of data required but it would still need parenting.
drabiega 10y ago
It almost doesn't matter how smart the AGI is on it's own, if it can't participate in our social conversation and get it's information from the same sources humans do it's going to be stone dumb in practice. An individual human is far less intelligent than we generally give ourselves credit for: if it can't stand on the shoulders of our giants then it doesn't matter if it's ten times as tall as us individually.

verdex_blarg 10y ago

-Sees random article about AI- "Hey, I'm interested in AI maybe this is worth some investigation" -Sees that it's from nytimes- "Uh oh"

isof4ult 10y ago
Could you elaborate on this?

thinkMOAR 10y ago

“When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, he saw a missed call from Jeff Dean.” Google brain requires a patch. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/jun/17/humanities.internationaleducationnews https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/jun/17/humanities.int...

azinman2 10y ago

It'd be really great if people could stop using the term AI by itself when they mean weak AI, or really machine learning. Its ultimately very misleading -- the only "awakening" that's happened is neural nets are popular again and getting good results. If strong AI gets solved... well then that's really when the machine will have awakened!

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tehchromic 10y ago

The author gets it close to right when he talks about Google Maps as a form of AI, and the notion of raising the bar. What's missing in this article as well as most reporting on AI is the differentiation between artificial intelligence and artificial consciousness, otherwise known as individuality or self awareness. To me there's a whole smoke and mirrors phenomenon going on in the AI topic, especially the idea of "emerging AI", and the supposed potential danger that poses, and it's tied to the tendency we have as humans to anthropomorphize inanimate objects, and to believe in supernatural effects. That tendency allows the idea of artificial self awareness to always float behind the scenes in these conversations, and let's normal reporting on AI be magically conflated with a different topic. It's important to realize that AI is nowhere near self awareness, or conscious, or "awake" and won't be no matter how far the field and implementation goes. No matter how many Turing Test they pass, intelligent machines will be no more conscious or self-aware than the Mechanical Turk! That's because solving the problem of self-awareness, or consciousness is a different engineering challenge than solving problems of AI. Consciousness is a more complicated, and specialized a thing. Were we to build an artificial self-awarene machine we would not expect it to pass a Turing Test. Instead we might expect different things of it and ask different questions to determine if it is self aware: can it adapt and survive without human help, ie can it trap and store energy and reproduce itself, and what purpose does it find for itself is what objective does it pursue ... These are things machines are capable of as well, but as I said: it's a different engineering challenge than producing information that is organized to be sensible to human mind, which is the AI challenge, and the Turing Test. That isn't to say machine learning isn't potentially dangerous, on the scale of atomic weapons or greater, especially in conjunction with automation, however the idea of an artificially emergent consciousness wth intelligence greater than our own is hogwash: we would do better to pay attention to our own emergent lack-of-intelligence systems and worry about them taking over first.

webmaven 10y ago
You've shifted the goalposts and erected strawmen so many times in this brief passage, I hardly know where to start... > No matter how many Turing Test they pass, intelligent machines will be no more conscious or self-aware than the Mechanical Turk! I see. Well, this is just a rephrasing of the "Chinese Room" discussed in the article. Taken to it's logical conclusion, I am certainly self aware, but the rest of you are all just acting out complex behaviors encoded in chemical and electrical gradients, successfully mimicking consciousness. I think that if any entity exhibits the behaviors associated with conscious thought, it would well behoove us to treat such entities as conscious, or we may very well find ourselves holding the short end of that particular stick sooner than we'd like. > That's because solving the problem of self-awareness, or consciousness is a different engineering challenge than solving problems of AI. Consciousness is a more complicated, and specialized a thing. Since there is no doubt that ML/AI has a long way to go toward AGI, and along the way we can expect the discipline to evolve considerably in many unexpected directions, this assertion of yours is close to tautological. > Were we to build an artificial self-awarene machine we would not expect it to pass a Turing Test. Why not? > Instead we might expect different things of it and ask different questions to determine if it is self aware: can it adapt and survive without human help, So, anyone severely ill to the point that they cannot do without assistance is not conscious and self aware? > ie can it trap and store energy and reproduce itself, So, a single-celled organism is conscious? > and what purpose does it find for itself is what objective does it pursue ... Ah, this seems a relevant criteria, but keep in mind that humans can be subjected to operant conditioning ("brainwashing") to impose external goals, not to mention that humans actually require a couple of decades of such conditioning (albeit rather more gradual and haphazard) before being considered competent members of society, but we don't consider humans to be less conscious or less self-aware on either side of that particular divide. > it's a different engineering challenge than producing information that is organized to be sensible to human mind, which is the AI challenge, and the Turing Test. Given that people have to be specially educated to produce information that is organized to be sensible to a computer, I don't see why an AGI, whatever it's capabilities "out of the box", so to speak, shouldn't be expected to be capable of learning to be sensible to humans.

raphar 10y ago

Lost in tranlation: I not quite comfortable on how the Borges quote was translated. To show the difference, the new TRANSLATE version, translates again to spanish as: Tu no eres lo que escribes, eres lo que has leido. A bit different from Borges original phrase meaning. A sentence with a closer meaning (but a bad translation) would be: One's way of being is not (caused) for what you have write, but for what you have read. >Grinning, Pichai read aloud an awkward English version of the sentence that had been rendered by the old Translate system: “One is not what is for what he writes, but for what he has read.” >To the right of that was a new A.I.-rendered version: “You are not what you write, but what you have read.” edit: formating

perseusprime11 10y ago

I will believe tbis the day I stop getting spam emails in my inbox.

strnbrg 10y ago

That round-trip translation the article starts with is way way better than anything I've ever obtained from Google Translate. Let's use it to translate what I just wrote, into Spanish: "Ese viaje de ida y vuelta el artículo comienza con es mucho mejor que cualquier cosa que he obtenido de Google Translate." That's readable but the "el articulo comienza con" is bush league — a clear sign Google is translating word for word. No one would ever mistake this translation for real Spanish. If we translate back to English, the result is better than the Spanish! "That trip back and forth the article starts with is much better than anything I've gotten from Google Translate." So, amusingly, a weakness on one-way translation — the word-for-word method — becomes a strength on round trip translations. (Not that round trip translations are going to be useful to anyone.) I did Spanish so that a lot of people here would understand. But now let's do Hebrew. I get תרגום הלוך ושוב כי המאמר מתחיל עם הדרך דרך טוב יותר מכל דבר שאי פעם שיתקבל מ- Google Translate. That's beyond merely bad, it's pretty unintelligible as Hebrew. (In fact the only way a Hebrew speaker would make any sense of it is if he knew English and tried translating word for word back to English.) And indeed, once again the round trip translation is better, though the original meaning is pretty much lost: "Translating back and forth that article begins with a way better way than anything I've ever received from Google Translate."