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Ask HN: Will We Get Close to a General AI in 2017?
- onion2k 10y agoNo.
- baboun 10y agoLies.
- richardboegli 10y agoNo
- tener 10y agoCloser, but not close!
- MichaelMoser123 10y agoit has a tendency to be just 15 years away - the deadline keeps on moving though. I think that the main obstacle is language - language is terribly ambiguous, and its very difficult to deal with these ambiguities in a program. Hofstadter [1] says that the core of thinking are analogies and that many of the allusions in language can be thought of as analogies, however this does not seem to be the main focus of inquiry right now. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Surfaces-Essences-Analogy-Fuel-Thinking/dp/0465018475 https://www.amazon.com/Surfaces-Essences-Analogy-Fuel-Thinki... (my review & summary is here http://mosermichael.github.io/cstuff/all/blogg/2013/10/15/post-1.html http://mosermichael.github.io/cstuff/all/blogg/2013/10/15/po... )
- tener 10y agoIs it? Based on this post (and associated papers etc.) it looks like Google has very good grasp on this: https://research.googleblog.com/2016/09/a-neural-network-for-machine.html https://research.googleblog.com/2016/09/a-neural-network-for... I don't think that means they are close to General AI though.
- hacker_9 10y ago> language is terribly ambiguous I never get this argument. Sure, maybe it is from the point of the computer, but we humans use it just fine.
- freehunter 10y agoMuch of our comedy stems from how ambiguous our language is. How many petabytes on the Internet are wasted with comments correcting someone's use of language? How many hours are spent as kids in classrooms learning all of the context around our languages, and we still get it wrong often enough to be corrected on the Internet and made fun of in comedy TV shows. We're certainly not using it just fine, we're using it in spite of all its shortcomings. Do you know how often I'm driving while my wife is navigating and I ask "turn left here?" and she says "right"? Now, is she saying "correct, you should turn left" or is she saying "don't turn left, turn right"? Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read. –Groucho Marx I haven’t slept for ten days, because that would be too long. –Mitch Hedberg
- hacker_9 10y ago> Much of our comedy stems from how ambiguous our language is. Yes, but we laugh because we understand there is an ambiguity, not because we don't see it. > How many petabytes on the Internet are wasted with comments correcting someone's use of language? People are pedantic on the net, plus on the world wide web not everyone is going to be an English first speaker. Spoken conversations don't have people correcting your grammar every 5 seconds. > wife is navigating and I ask "turn left here?" and she says "right" Well in this case she is being deliberately ambiguous. So you either tell by her tone inflection, or rely on previous memory. And of course you have the ability to ask her. > Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read. –Groucho Marx > I haven’t slept for ten days, because that would be too long. –Mitch Hedberg Again, I see and understand the ambiguity. I'm not sitting here dumbfounded; I 'get' that they turned the words back on themselves to mean something else.
- AnimalMuppet 10y agoI'm quoting someone, and I don't remember who, so I can't give credit where due. But they said that we'll know we have real AI when we ask the computer "Do you think?" and it replies "That reminds me of a story..."
- spiderfarmer 10y agoDefine "General AI". An AI that can decide by itself which model it should use to make sense of any given dataset?
- arethuza 10y ago"Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the intelligence of a machine that could successfully perform any intellectual task that a human being can." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- lordnacho 10y agoThere's plenty of tasks that very few human beings can perform. And thus there's task sets that nobody can perform. What then?
- Quarrelsome 10y agoNo. Stop reading reddit.com/r/futurology or that _awful_ article by waitbutwhy. Sure its a possibility but we're still making baby steps and tiny tools, pastiches of intelligence as opposed to genuine intelligence or conscious. People who ask questions such as this often don't consider that it remains eminently possible that AGI is an impossibility for us to build. Also remember that anything an AI can do in the future a human + an AI can probably do better. Right now at least they're just tools we use and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
- sambe 10y agoWhat is the strongest argument for impossibility being a possibility?
- Quarrelsome 10y agomy point being that some people treat AGI as an inevitability and I think we're a fair way off a proof.
- arethuza 10y agoThere are arguments, notably in "The Emperors New Mind", that assert that consciousness must be based on quantum mechanics in some ill-defined way and therefore that "algorithmic" computers can't therefore be conscious. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Mind NB I didn't find this argument particularly strong, but it's a long time since I read it. The brain would have to be doing something spectacularly strange for it to be impossible for us to emulate in one way or another.
- sambe 10y agoOut of context it indeed sounds rather fuzzy and weak. It's not even intuitive to me that consciousness comes first. Maybe they are even independent. I should probably read the book though. More generally, I don't think invoking quantum effects is an especially strong argument for impossibility in the general case. We already use quantum effects to some extent and make progress on quantum computation. It may be evidence of greater difficulty, but not of impossibility. Unless there is a strong case for some particular quantum effect being unharness-able.
- edgarvm 10y agoBetter automation != General AI
- Mister_Y 10y agoYou're right, and less scary :D Better automation done in a right way can solve huge human problems
- sharemywin 10y agoI'd argue "minion level AI" >> General AI.
- ArkyBeagle 10y agoNo. That which can be done is no longer considered AI.
- baboun 10y agoLies.
- shpx 10y agoIf anyone who thinks yes wants to bet $1000 I'll do 1:10 odds. https://longbets.org https://longbets.org
- natch 10y agoFor 2017? From the site: "minimum bet period is two years"
- shpx 10y agoI'll extend my bet to 2018. I'd extend it much more because the real odds of AGI are closer to 1:100, but any longer time scale would be a bad return on my money.
- enraged_camel 10y agoI always thought betting money (especially with a site like long bets) was about holding people accountable to their claims, rather than the expectation of actual return. :)
- natch 10y agoI think it's more about bragging and joining an exclusive club (example: I have this opinion, and I have a pile of money sitting around that I can dedicate to promoting it amongst a small group of other people I want to impress). The stated purpose of holding people accountable, I have never bought. People who are really working on the ideas discussed (as opposed to just talking about them and positioning themselves as "futurists") are accountable in a much more profound way, in that they build their entire lives around working toward some goal, with all the risk and opportunity cost that entails. The long bets participants are just playing around, not real players. They may have a little skin in the game, but it's faux skin.
- natch 10y agoI wouldn't use that site. It would make you look like a blowhard. YMMV though... you might not care.
- hacker_9 10y agoIf you read the research, there is lots of incremental progress being made. Mainly with pixels - classifying them into objects, matching object locations to text, attempting to predict future pixel values etc. But this stuff is very 'surface level', not even close to the way our brains effortlessly interpret light - classify objects, detect depth, account for lighting, complete objects we can't see, invoke feeling of the material we are looking at, invoke past memories, detect threats, and so on - every single millisecond. This doesn't even begin to get into the core of AGI, which is the 'thinking' component. Given this amazing mass of data, how do we then make the machine work towards it's goals? Is this just a neural network? Is it a billion neural networks? Too many variables to tell. And even then, if every action it takes is a reaction to the environment, does it then not have freewill? Do we have freewill? Is 'consciousness' somehow the key to freewill? But anyway if you listen to Musk or Hawking, doomsday AI is just round the corner.
- dasboth 10y agoThere is research directly addressing "transfer learning" where the goal is to have more general learning agents. I don't know how advanced it is, but it's certainly not advanced enough to become anything close to an AGI by 2018. Ultimately I think there are far more pressing issues in AI around ethics, bias, or security. It's great that there are philosophers who can sit around and worry about a possible distant future (and I think as thought exercises they're fascinating), but it's not what most people in the field should be concerned with.
- Buttons840 10y agoWill Google release an AI that can play StarCraft on the same level as humans in 2017? General AI will have to wait until after that.
- ragebol 10y agoNo. This [0] is 4-5 years old and I don't think much progress has been made in getting a computer to classify that image as 'funny' and explain why. And if/when it could, I doubt we'd call it intelligent. And this is just computer vision, not mentioning other branches of AI. [0] http://karpathy.github.io/2012/10/22/state-of-computer-vision/ http://karpathy.github.io/2012/10/22/state-of-computer-visio...
- dasboth 10y agoIf you could encode enough information about the image and have a good training/test set, an AI's ability to determine something as funny probably wouldn't be bad. Anyway, as a subjective concept you might not accept another human's explanation about why something is/isn't funny. This isn't a simple classification problem though, probably suited to something like reinforcement learning.
- freehunter 10y agoHell, I know a lot of humans who wouldn't understand why that's funny. And some of them have 4-year college degrees. Many responses in this thread are along the lines of "computers will never be as smart as Carl Sagan", ignoring that most intelligence on this planet could never dream of being half as smart as the genius we're using to define AI. Let's start by getting a computer as smart as a border collie, one of the more intelligent dogs. Saying a computer isn't smart because it can't laugh at a highly complex visual joke is entirely the wrong way to define AI, and it's no surprise we haven't achieved it. It took humans millions of years to get this smart, and we've only been working on AI for a very, very small amount of time.
- jdimov11 10y agoThe term AGI suffers from a greatly exacerbated version of the same problem that AI suffers. The problem, mind you, has NOTHING to do with science or technology - it is purely a naming problem. The term "Artificial Intelligence" is a contradiction - intelligence can NOT be artificial. Intelligence is the ability of a being to get what it wants. It is always organic, as it originates in desire. Just stop calling it "Artificial Intelligence" and enjoy the wonderful progress that we are making towards getting our machines to help us achieve what we want. (To be clear, I'm not saying stop calling it "artificial". I'm saying stop calling it "intelligence", because it is not, and never will be. Using the word "intelligence" in the context of machine automation sets entirely unreasonable expectations and inhibits progress. )
- agd 10y agoYou seem to be contradicting several well known dictionaries with your definition of intelligence. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/intelligence https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/intelligence http://www.dictionary.com/browse/intelligence http://www.dictionary.com/browse/intelligence https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/intelligence https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/intelligence
- jdimov11 10y agoAll of these definitions are rather lousy and not particularly useful (except possibly for 1.b in Webster, but it needs clarification)
- freehunter 10y agoYeah, it's all the dictionaries that are wrong... surely you must be right.
- jdimov11 10y agoRight.. How dare I question your sacred Anglo-Saxon dictionaries, which are the authoritative source of All Truth. Anathema.
- simonh 10y agoWe don't even have a general outline of a theoretical approach to designing a general purpose intelligence, let alone implementing one. Until we do, any speculation about a time horizon for implementation is a pure guess. How are those guesses working out so far? 1960s Herbert Simmons predicts "Machines will be capable, within 20 years, of doing any work a man can do." 1993 - Vernor Vinge predicts super-intelligent AIs 'within 30 years'. 2011 ray Kurzweil predicts the singularity (enabled by super-intelligent AIs) will occur by 2045, 34 years after the prediction was made. So the distance into the future before we achieve strong AI and hence the singularity is, according to it's most optimistic proponents, receding by more than 1 year per year. I am not in any way denying the achievability of strong AI. I do believe it will happen. I just don't think we currently have any idea how or when. If pushed to it, I'd say probably more than another 100 years from now but I don't know how much more.
- singularity2001 10y agoYou should become famous for that law. Eat that, Kurzweil. You found exponential laws. We found a neglinear counterlaw ;)
- pps43 10y agoThe key point is self-learning, or ability of AI to build AI that's better, if only a little. This is different from, say, AlphaGo playing against itself to train its neural network - we want AI 1.0 to write AI 2.0, not just tweak some coefficients in 1.0. At the moment all automatically generated code is less complex than source code of code generator itself. There can be more of it in terms of lines of code, but it's usually pretty repetitive.
- rl3 10y agoNo, I don't think so. We'll inch closer, but I doubt we're anywhere near AGI on the path of software and algorithms running on traditional networked computing architectures. That isn't to say the resources don't exist to create AGI. It's possible they were available a long time ago. If you were to ask some omnipotent future superintelligence for a way humans could have bootstrapped AGI in the year 2005 using the available technology of the day, it could probably come up with an answer. Maybe even further back than that, or maybe even present day wouldn't suffice—who knows. Trying to emulate biological architectures on silicon can be grossly inefficient, and may actually be harder from a design perspective. It is the attempt to formalize and adapt something created by an optimization process that spanned millions of years, a process that had zero regard for how easy its creation would be to understand or otherwise reverse engineer. At the same time, algorithms vastly more efficient than the human brain's remain a possibility. They need not include the large amounts of evolutionary baggage that humans have. Approaching AGI as a raw optimization problem may yield better results. However, not formally specifying or understanding the underlying mechanisms is a massive safety issue in the long run. By the same token, ditching silicon entirely may be a vastly quicker path. Throwing ethics out the window and experimenting with large quantities of lab-grown neural tissue might be one way. Creating a synthetic biological computing substrate another. It's not hard to imagine something like copying human neural tissue's design, but using materials capable of latencies an order of magnitude lower, or significantly higher degrees of interconnectivity. Looking at the problem from the perspective of strictly space, it's funny to think that we're unable to recreate the functionality of some tissue contained within a space that's less than one cubic foot-even though we have seemingly endless acres of computing power to do it with—that's excluding the brains of the thousands of scientists and engineers working on AI. Even if you stacked up just the microprocessors in question, they would occupy a cubic volume far, far greater than a single human brain—each containing billions of transistors, and each operating at latencies far lower than the brain. Despite all this, the human brain requires far lower amounts of energy. The reason we don't have AGI yet is that it simply takes a lot of time and effort to invent, regardless if it's ultimately possible with today's technology. Of course, as other commenters have suggested, ruling out the possibility that the human brain somehow has seemingly magical quantum properties that render its recreation an impossibility (on silicon at least) may be unwise.
- skilesare 10y agoYes. Depends on what you mean by close though.
- AnimalMuppet 10y agoWell, however close we get, you can define "close" to be "that close", and say that, yes, we did in fact get close in 2017. I'm not sure that's useful, however.
- AnimalMuppet 10y agoMy own personal pet theory (guaranteed right or your money back): We won't have AGI until we have something that can dream. Will we get close in 2017? No. Not if my pet theory is right, and not if it's wrong.