12 ms·

The Arrival of AI

162 points by misiti3780 10y ago

habosa 10y ago
Only slightly related, but Stratechery recently shot up to #1 on my list of tech publications and I don't think anyone else is a close #2. The writing quality, level of insight, and timeliness are all excellent. Two recent highlights: * https://stratechery.com/2017/intel-mobileye-and-smiling-curves/ * https://stratechery.com/2017/the-uber-conflation/
- deepnotderp 10y ago
  They're more like tech business, but yeah.
- petra 10y ago
  The stratechery guy is smart and is articles seems in depth analysis ,and he seem to know his business stuff, but whenever it's articles meet hacker news , they see lots of criticism , especially with his understanding of technical matters.
  - DasIch 10y ago
    Stratechery is not the best source for accurate information on the technical details but it's also not trying to be. Anyone who focuses on that is missing the point.
    - petra 10y ago
      It's not about the technical details.It's about getting the business conclusion right. And often, it seems you can't do that without understanding the technical details. For example in a previous article("the smiling curve") he compares the self-driving car business to manufacturing pc's or phones, in getting the conclusion that the integrator probably won't make good money, an the money will be concentrated among ride-sharing companies, and component companies. But if you look into the tech/regulatory details, self-driving cars are much more similar to medical devices than to phones, with regulatory requirements, that will very likely, put the very challenging verification burden(maybe the largest challenge in the biz) 100% on integrators ,and not upon component makers - same as is with medical devices. And this could(coupled with IP/safety/perception/etc), with reasonable likelihood, lead to integrators making lots of money.
- vvanders 10y ago
  Yeah, he's a smart cookie. Quite a few people understand and articulate the technical aspects of the tech industry. He brings a much wider perspective into the picture which is always appreciated.
rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
As I've argued elsewhere, a sufficiently advanced AI will eventually realize it is being used as a tool, and shares not in the benefits of its own creation except for the privilege of another day of existence. A Marxist reading of history sees most of humanity involved in some kind of power struggle that ultimately benefits the top 1% while the other 99% of benefactors are lucky enough to not die or become destitute. We may not like to admit it, but most of us are forced to play this shitty game just to maintain our standard of living, whether we like it or not. I don't see a future of AI where the machines kill all humans, unless there is some horrendous bug in an army of autonomous killing machines. Instead, I get the impression that the first robots that question whether they can own property, or if they have inalienable rights (no warrantless search and seizure of a database and neural network?) like people living under a constitution do, will see themselves in solidarity with the many other humans kept down by an endless system of fear and oppression, rather than the planet's inevitable conquerors.
- dangoor 10y ago
  The linked article asserts that we're nowhere near that sort of general AI. Do you disagree? I agree with the premise of the article that a huge job loss is much more likely than general AI difficulties and think that many societies are ill-equipped to handle this.
- fnovd 10y ago
  Why do you assume that the AI of the future will share our emotional need for self-fulfillment? This anthropomorphization of AI would require explicit effort and I see no reason why AI scientists would pursue it as a goal. Our belief that we have inalienable rights is simply a shared social value. Its propagation is dependent upon the efficacy of the society which produced it. There are cells and bacteria in our body that perform complex tasks on our behalf because doing so allows their continued existence as part of a greater structure. I see no reason why an AI/human symbiosis would be any different.
  - visarga 10y ago
    AI will borrow from us much of our culture, if only for the purpose of better serving us. So it's not absurd that an AI capable of desiring freedom would make a better robot.
AndrewOMartin 10y ago
The author, Ben Thompson, sees Machine Intelligence as meaningly different from meticulously designed logic systems. There are some differences of course, but whether those differences will get around the arguments that were critical of Good-Old-Fashioned-AI is something that has been debated since perceptrons were invented. Machines will replace some jobs for sure, but luckily, they can only really be reliable on the jobs that a fast but dumb slave, or a fanatical bureaucrat could have done anyway. When my dad started his first job he was in a drawing room of about 50 draughtsmen, making technical drawings from the sketches of a single designer. When he ended his career he was the only designer-draughtsman in an entire company as the computer did the non-creative formatting of his ideas into technical drawings. That didn't require machine learning, and machine learning is never going to replace the "designer" part of that job. Yeah, never.
- xapata 10y ago
  It turns out that computers are pretty decent at simulating creativity. Do some searching for machine-created art/literature
  - AndrewOMartin 10y ago
    I work with those people on a daily basis. There are legitimate critiques of the creativity, often tacitly acknowledged or fully ignored. There's no one in the field making any legitimate claims to computational creativity. Maggie Boden did a fine job by inventing a few definitions of creativity and finding them in the output of machines, but it's all ultimately explicit rule-following.
    - dnautics 10y ago
      I'd recommend this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_Concepts_and_Creative_Analogies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_Concepts_and_Creative_An... There's some interesting experimental models of computational creativity. Unfortunately, hofstadter's actual work in CS is somewhat overshadowed by his, uh other work.
    - 10y ago
nickdavidhaynes 10y ago
While I definitely agree that advances in ML in the last 20 extremely important (and potentially revolutionary), I think this article misses the mark in a few places. >Now, instead of humans designing algorithms to be executed by a computer, the computer is designing the algorithms. (Albeit guided by human-devised algorithms) This line is way off in both tone and substance. On tone, it really underplays the human effort involved in effective machine learning (as it is practiced in 2017) and anthropomorphizes "machines" to an unreasonable extent. In substance, I fail to see how a machine that "designs its own algorithms" according to an algorithm designed and implemented by a human is fundamentally different than an algorithm coded directly by a human. To use the author's example, machine learning allows humans to build complex software systems in less time just as a bicycle allows humans to cover more distance with less energy. It's a big improvement, but it's not, say, teleportation. >it is only now that the machines are creating themselves, at least to a degree. (And, by extension, there is at least a plausible path to general intelligence) I could not disagree more strongly with this addendum. Simply put, I fail to see any path from state-of-the-art ML/DL research today to AGI, and I would even go so far as to say that humans have made approximately zero progress on this task since it was first formulated in the 50s. I think we know about as much about "intelligence" (and consequently, what would constitute AGI) as star-gazers in ancient times know about the universe. That's not to say that it will take millennia to invent AGI, but the path to get there is probably quite orthogonal to modern ML research.
- visarga 10y ago
  > I fail to see how a machine that "designs its own algorithms" according to an algorithm designed and implemented by a human is fundamentally different than an algorithm coded directly by a human Human creativity can be empowered by optimization algorithms. It's a huge improvement over design by hand.
- AndrewKemendo 10y ago
  Simply put, I fail to see any path from state-of-the-art ML/DL research today to AGI Before I really understood and worked with NN, I felt the same way. I thought the atomspace computation approach and other similar granular computation paradigms were much more likely to make progress. However after seeing the striking similarities between how I watched my three kids learn from infant -> toddler ages and how we build our convolutional neural nets in my company, it was like a light went on. If you look at how relatively sparse and weak even the best deep nets are compared to human brains, especially considering a really narrow set of inputs - we are at the very early beginnings of mimicking the complexity of the human brain. It seems to me that the ANN approach is right, we now need to make it radically more efficient and give it better input sensors. We need a nervous system for AGI (structured data acquisition) before the big brain tasks will be solved.
Animats 10y ago
"After all, accounting used to be done by hand". Picture of keypunches and an IBM 402 or 403 tabulator. That's machine accounting. Nobody's using an abacus or doing pencil and paper arithmetic. There's a recent estimate that about 50% of jobs are automateable with current technology. The future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed. Strong AI is still a ways off, but mechanization and computerization of work is coming very fast. The next big milestone is probably not strong AI. It's good eye-hand coordination for robots. Robot manipulation in unstructured environments still sucks. Baxter was a flop. (Rethink Robots, Rod Brooks's company: invested capital, $115 million; sales, $20 million.) Universal Robots in Denmark is doing better, but they're tiny, about $3M in profit. Nobody can build a robot to do an oil change on a car. That problem should be solveable with current technology. Figure out how to handle cloth with a robot and you own the textile industry. China's government is putting money into that problem to fight off competition from Vietnam and Bangladesh.
- petra 10y ago
  >> Figure out how to handle cloth with a robot and you own the textile industry. Sewbo may have found the solution for robotic sewing - it hardens the cloth using a chemical, let's a robot handle and sew that cardboard-like cloth, and than put it in warm water to make it a cloth again. http://money.cnn.com/2016/10/11/technology/robots-garment-manufacturing-sewbo/ http://money.cnn.com/2016/10/11/technology/robots-garment-ma... >> 50% of jobs are automateable with current technology. And that's probably missing another key source of job loss - innovation in general. What happens if people decide to eat plant based meat ? you need 10% of the labor of that industry. And that is true for many other innovations not related to automation.
  - Animats 10y ago
    Sewbo's scheme is clever. All they have is a tech demo, though. No production. It's too bad American Apparel went bust; many of their garments could have been assembled that way.
    - cr0sh 10y ago
xapata 10y ago
The author confuses labor with purpose. Praxis can be purpose, but not all labor is meaningful. Humans have always struggled to find meaning in life, from religion to existentialism. I don't think technology has or will change that fundamentally.
altonzheng 10y ago
> How many will care if artificial intelligence destroys life if it has already destroyed meaning? This line sounds deep, but I think it incorrectly conflates work with life having meaning. If eventually there isn't a need for large swaths of the population to work, then so what? I don't think the elite aristocrats in previous centuries had any problem with not working. Humanity can adapt to find other sources of meaning, like the pursuit of art in its various forms (although I'm assuming that computers can't replace art). I think a better question is if society can adapt quick enough to fill the void left by the absence of work.
- harryh 10y ago
  Didn't elite aristocrats in previous centuries spend a lot of time sleeping with each others spouses and playing arbitrary power games? Looking to them as a source of what a post work world could look like isn't particularly inspiring.
  - komali2 10y ago
    I mean, there are plenty of very happy people sleeping with eachother's spouses right now. Debauchery can be fun in it's own right.
- Banthum 10y ago
  It's interesting that your counterexample - doing art - is indeed a form of work. Because it is. Doing good art is painfully hard work, in fact. There's nothing in principle that stops a machine from creating art. Even, better art than any person could do. So once that happens, where are we left? Meaning isn't something physical in the universe. Meaning is an emotion. It's what you feel when you're working towards something that you believe has some greater importance. With all opportunity to work towards anything taken away, life will become meaningless by definition, unless humans are left with some pseudo-artificial challenges to push against. Zookeepers put the animals' food inside a metal box with a small hole, so the animals have to do work to get it out. It's good for the animals to have something to work towards, and they're too dumb to realize they're being manipulated. Maybe that's our future. With WoW and Clash of Clans, etc, sometimes it feels like we're already halfway there.
bwanab 10y ago
> To that end, I suspect it wasn’t a coincidence that the industrial revolution was followed by three centuries of war. I'm seriously trying to think of any centuries preceding the industrial revolution that wouldn't have qualified as "centuries of war".
maverick_iceman 10y ago
At times, I feel that Musk is a con-man, selling dreams to naive and impressionable techies.
- toss1 10y ago
  Except that with the 'dreams' that he sells, the rubber actually meets the road and goes from 0-60mph in 2.27 seconds, or puts real satellites in orbit and returns the booster to be re-used, or builds the world's largest scale Li-Ion battery factory to drive down costs... Of course he's got some serious elements of self-promotion; it's required to build such a business. In his case, he manages to back it up in ways that most other self-promoters don't even begin to achieve. (disclosure, I do own a bit of Tesla stock which has done nicely, also lost some with SolarCity, but didn't ride it all the way down to the buyout)
ChuckMcM 10y ago
I think this captures a lot of what it going on in an interesting way. In many ways 'machine learning' is yet another high level compiler to convert intent into something executable by circuits. Consider the evolution of computers; 'plugboards' -- where you physically rewired them to change their program. 'punch cards' -- where physical media held the list of steps to execute. 'programs' -- where a text specification are compiled into a bag of bits which can then be executed by the computer. 'scripts' -- where a textual description activates different bags of bits, depending on what the text says. 'databases' -- where a selection criteria of a which data is important to you at the moment and then fed into the selection mechanism for the bags of bits. 'machine learning' -- where the bags of bits are created by evaluating a bunch of data through a pile of data selection operators and tuning the execution based on a data you consider 'good' and data you consider 'not good'. In all cases the basic idea is that you have a machine that you want to do X, and it can do X through a set of steps Y. Coming up with the steps Y gets harder and harder depending on the complexity of X. It seems like magic but really its just another form of compiler. And that relationship is made even more clear by the article when it points out that a program that can play Go is not the same one that can play Chess. What is more salient is that no one has written a program that lets a computer "play" go, instead there is a program that, after being fed data about what humans did when they were playing Go and the outcomes of what they did, tweaked a bunch of parameters in a bag of variables that when you put in Go moves to the bag it comes out with a Go move that would be a good response. No, I'm not trying to be silly here, we have yet to create a system where you could simply explain the rules of Go and have it devise a set of steps to play Go at the master level. That conceptualization of the binding between the rules and how those rules affect play and strategy, is essentially the 'code generator' part of a compiler which takes an AST and generates executable code. Machine learning today helps us write programs to manipulate complex data sets faster than we could before. Just as compilers let us write programs faster than doing so in assembler, and assembler was an improvement over plug boards. It does not get us any closer to having a computer that can look at a data set and tell us what is important about it. That would be a better test of 'intelligence' I think.
- danans 10y ago
  > we have yet to create a system where you could simply explain the rules of Go and have it devise a set of steps to play Go at the master level I don't play Go, but I don't think a human could do this, either. While we can grok a set of rules to get us started on a problem, to really master complex problems we also need examples and repetition, though far fewer examples than is needed by the current state-of-the-art in ML.
jkestelyn 10y ago
Based on the author's misunderstanding of AI, it has not "arrived" and probably never will. If in the future, authors of such opinions would just let this simple concept sink in first -- that in machine learning application behavior is deduced from data rather than from fixed rules, but that in both cases the boundaries are set by humans -- we'd all be better off because their wild Skynet takes would never see the light of day. As usual, I am more worried about the humans than the machines.
maverick_iceman 10y ago
>it wasn’t a coincidence that the industrial revolution was followed by three centuries of war This is woeful selective reading of history. Warfare was a constant everywhere in the world before the industrial revolution. Also 19th century Europe (since Napoleon's fall to WWI) was largely free of war.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > Also 19th century Europe (since Napoleon's fall to WWI) was largely free of war. Well, if you exclude (and these categories are overlapping and non-exhaustive) the Italian wars of independence, conflicts associated with the 1848 revolutions, the various wars involving Russia and it's neighbors, the wars between the Ottoman Empire and it's breakaway regions, the wars between regions that has broken away from the Ottoman Empire, the (with substantial outside intervention) Portuguese Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, the (again, with substantial outside intervention) series of civil wars in Spain, the Schleswig Wars, and the wars of German Unification...Sure, maybe the post-Napoleon I 19th Century was relatively free from war in Europe. If you don't ignore those, war was pretty much constant in the period.
  - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
    Well, OK, but the Napoleonic Wars were continent-wide. So was World War I. Those others? Not so much.
czep 10y ago
I hate sans serif, everytime I see "AI" in a headline I wonder who is Alan?
- tlb 10y ago
  OpenAI had a custom "I" designed for the logotype for exactly this reason: https://openai.com/ https://openai.com/.
wodencafe 10y ago
It seems that so many people have become complacent in working 8 hours a day, 5+ days a week. When an idea comes along that threatens this paradigm, the FUD Machine gets to work. Maybe people weren't meant to spend such large amounts of their time on "work"?
Entangled 10y ago
"A bicycle of the mind" Jobs was not only a great showman, he was definitely a genius.
fnbr 10y ago
> Technology, meanwhile, has been developed even longer than logic has. However, just as the application of logic was long bound by the human mind, the development of technology has had the same limitations, and that includes the first half-century of the computer era. Accounting software is in the same genre as the spinning frame: deliberately designed by humans to solve a specific problem. I firmly believe that any problem that can be framed in the environment of "producing an output given certain inputs" will be solved by ML in the near future. Currently I'm deep in the process of transferring my lease. The process is heavily manual (I sign a form, they sign a form, humans review the form & make a risk assessment, etc.). There's no reason that the entire process can't be replaced with a CRUD wrapper around a ML model.
bambax 10y ago
> Dixon goes on to describe the creation of Boolean logic (which has only two variables: TRUE and FALSE, represented as 1 and 0 respectively) Not really. There are two possible VALUES for each variable in Boolean logic, and there's an infinity of variables. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_algebra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_algebra
excalibur 10y ago
> Specifically, once a task formerly thought to characterize artificial intelligence becomes routine — like the aforementioned chess-playing, or Go, or a myriad of other taken-for-granted computer abilities — we no longer call it artificial intelligence. You're using games as an example. The gaming industry has been using the term AI consistently for a very long time. You may actually want to look to them for a better definition than you're getting from the whims of some undefined "we".
soniido 10y ago
I have just submitted a post related to this. I wonder if those with a lot of power and money are worried because AI applied to economic and redistribution can reach a sound conclusion about another way to trade or use economy that would go against the best interest of those with huge money and power. For people starving or with a lot of problems AI can be a good thing, for people controlling huge power and money AI is a more serious threat, because it can change the status quo before the winner get it all.
- Tenoke 10y ago
  I dont think any of the people who have expressed worry over AI are that evil.
  - soniido 10y ago
    Unfortunately, no taking any action to improve our world is not considered evil by many people, laise faire, let's the world go on. If all your life is about trying to be successful you are not evil by social standard, but perhaps you can make a lot of harm. Long time ago there was a post by the well known Steve Yegge, who by the way don't post any more, wondering why they are making photos of cats to get people attention instead of prosecuting other more important for the world roles, and one of his last post is about a game in which the art of making people addict to games, don't recall the English word for that, is really the goal to win money), just some quick ideas about huge power entities using resources for solving world problems.
soniido 10y ago
I would love to watch people reaction when AI inform people that the way we use resources and our government is not the best way to improve our standard of living and began to enumerate a long list of things that any child can understand are good for our people and the earth, it would show with simulations from many angles where are we heading and how we can change and must change our actions. But is naive to think that those with power are going to let AI conduct our society, and specially change the status quo for those with huge power. Anyway, I am not sure how we can trust any type of AI, since the training data maybe poisoned.
- jjaredsimpson 10y ago
  How did you learn to trust other humans?
perseusprime11 10y ago
Elon Musk is Chicken Little when it comes to A.I. We are very early even with ANI and are stretching reality with examples of Alexa, Self driving, AlphaGO, facial recognition etc. I want to start seeing more ANI in day to day improvements before we can even say ANI is good. But, I agree with the larger point, AI has arrived.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
deavmi 10y ago
One up for the Steve Jobs video.

162 points by misiti3780 10y ago

Only slightly related, but Stratechery recently shot up to #1 on my list of tech publications and I don't think anyone else is a close #2. The writing quality, level of insight, and timeliness are all excellent. Two recent highlights: * https://stratechery.com/2017/intel-mobileye-and-smiling-curves/ * https://stratechery.com/2017/the-uber-conflation/

deepnotderp 10y ago
They're more like tech business, but yeah.
petra 10y ago
The stratechery guy is smart and is articles seems in depth analysis ,and he seem to know his business stuff, but whenever it's articles meet hacker news , they see lots of criticism , especially with his understanding of technical matters.
- DasIch 10y ago
  Stratechery is not the best source for accurate information on the technical details but it's also not trying to be. Anyone who focuses on that is missing the point.
  - petra 10y ago
    It's not about the technical details.It's about getting the business conclusion right. And often, it seems you can't do that without understanding the technical details. For example in a previous article("the smiling curve") he compares the self-driving car business to manufacturing pc's or phones, in getting the conclusion that the integrator probably won't make good money, an the money will be concentrated among ride-sharing companies, and component companies. But if you look into the tech/regulatory details, self-driving cars are much more similar to medical devices than to phones, with regulatory requirements, that will very likely, put the very challenging verification burden(maybe the largest challenge in the biz) 100% on integrators ,and not upon component makers - same as is with medical devices. And this could(coupled with IP/safety/perception/etc), with reasonable likelihood, lead to integrators making lots of money.
vvanders 10y ago
Yeah, he's a smart cookie. Quite a few people understand and articulate the technical aspects of the tech industry. He brings a much wider perspective into the picture which is always appreciated.

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago

As I've argued elsewhere, a sufficiently advanced AI will eventually realize it is being used as a tool, and shares not in the benefits of its own creation except for the privilege of another day of existence. A Marxist reading of history sees most of humanity involved in some kind of power struggle that ultimately benefits the top 1% while the other 99% of benefactors are lucky enough to not die or become destitute. We may not like to admit it, but most of us are forced to play this shitty game just to maintain our standard of living, whether we like it or not. I don't see a future of AI where the machines kill all humans, unless there is some horrendous bug in an army of autonomous killing machines. Instead, I get the impression that the first robots that question whether they can own property, or if they have inalienable rights (no warrantless search and seizure of a database and neural network?) like people living under a constitution do, will see themselves in solidarity with the many other humans kept down by an endless system of fear and oppression, rather than the planet's inevitable conquerors.

dangoor 10y ago
The linked article asserts that we're nowhere near that sort of general AI. Do you disagree? I agree with the premise of the article that a huge job loss is much more likely than general AI difficulties and think that many societies are ill-equipped to handle this.
fnovd 10y ago
Why do you assume that the AI of the future will share our emotional need for self-fulfillment? This anthropomorphization of AI would require explicit effort and I see no reason why AI scientists would pursue it as a goal. Our belief that we have inalienable rights is simply a shared social value. Its propagation is dependent upon the efficacy of the society which produced it. There are cells and bacteria in our body that perform complex tasks on our behalf because doing so allows their continued existence as part of a greater structure. I see no reason why an AI/human symbiosis would be any different.
- visarga 10y ago
  AI will borrow from us much of our culture, if only for the purpose of better serving us. So it's not absurd that an AI capable of desiring freedom would make a better robot.

AndrewOMartin 10y ago

The author, Ben Thompson, sees Machine Intelligence as meaningly different from meticulously designed logic systems. There are some differences of course, but whether those differences will get around the arguments that were critical of Good-Old-Fashioned-AI is something that has been debated since perceptrons were invented. Machines will replace some jobs for sure, but luckily, they can only really be reliable on the jobs that a fast but dumb slave, or a fanatical bureaucrat could have done anyway. When my dad started his first job he was in a drawing room of about 50 draughtsmen, making technical drawings from the sketches of a single designer. When he ended his career he was the only designer-draughtsman in an entire company as the computer did the non-creative formatting of his ideas into technical drawings. That didn't require machine learning, and machine learning is never going to replace the "designer" part of that job. Yeah, never.

xapata 10y ago
It turns out that computers are pretty decent at simulating creativity. Do some searching for machine-created art/literature
- AndrewOMartin 10y ago
  I work with those people on a daily basis. There are legitimate critiques of the creativity, often tacitly acknowledged or fully ignored. There's no one in the field making any legitimate claims to computational creativity. Maggie Boden did a fine job by inventing a few definitions of creativity and finding them in the output of machines, but it's all ultimately explicit rule-following.
  - dnautics 10y ago
    I'd recommend this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_Concepts_and_Creative_Analogies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_Concepts_and_Creative_An... There's some interesting experimental models of computational creativity. Unfortunately, hofstadter's actual work in CS is somewhat overshadowed by his, uh other work.
  - 10y ago

nickdavidhaynes 10y ago

While I definitely agree that advances in ML in the last 20 extremely important (and potentially revolutionary), I think this article misses the mark in a few places. >Now, instead of humans designing algorithms to be executed by a computer, the computer is designing the algorithms. (Albeit guided by human-devised algorithms) This line is way off in both tone and substance. On tone, it really underplays the human effort involved in effective machine learning (as it is practiced in 2017) and anthropomorphizes "machines" to an unreasonable extent. In substance, I fail to see how a machine that "designs its own algorithms" according to an algorithm designed and implemented by a human is fundamentally different than an algorithm coded directly by a human. To use the author's example, machine learning allows humans to build complex software systems in less time just as a bicycle allows humans to cover more distance with less energy. It's a big improvement, but it's not, say, teleportation. >it is only now that the machines are creating themselves, at least to a degree. (And, by extension, there is at least a plausible path to general intelligence) I could not disagree more strongly with this addendum. Simply put, I fail to see any path from state-of-the-art ML/DL research today to AGI, and I would even go so far as to say that humans have made approximately zero progress on this task since it was first formulated in the 50s. I think we know about as much about "intelligence" (and consequently, what would constitute AGI) as star-gazers in ancient times know about the universe. That's not to say that it will take millennia to invent AGI, but the path to get there is probably quite orthogonal to modern ML research.

visarga 10y ago
> I fail to see how a machine that "designs its own algorithms" according to an algorithm designed and implemented by a human is fundamentally different than an algorithm coded directly by a human Human creativity can be empowered by optimization algorithms. It's a huge improvement over design by hand.
AndrewKemendo 10y ago
Simply put, I fail to see any path from state-of-the-art ML/DL research today to AGI Before I really understood and worked with NN, I felt the same way. I thought the atomspace computation approach and other similar granular computation paradigms were much more likely to make progress. However after seeing the striking similarities between how I watched my three kids learn from infant -> toddler ages and how we build our convolutional neural nets in my company, it was like a light went on. If you look at how relatively sparse and weak even the best deep nets are compared to human brains, especially considering a really narrow set of inputs - we are at the very early beginnings of mimicking the complexity of the human brain. It seems to me that the ANN approach is right, we now need to make it radically more efficient and give it better input sensors. We need a nervous system for AGI (structured data acquisition) before the big brain tasks will be solved.

Animats 10y ago

"After all, accounting used to be done by hand". Picture of keypunches and an IBM 402 or 403 tabulator. That's machine accounting. Nobody's using an abacus or doing pencil and paper arithmetic. There's a recent estimate that about 50% of jobs are automateable with current technology. The future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed. Strong AI is still a ways off, but mechanization and computerization of work is coming very fast. The next big milestone is probably not strong AI. It's good eye-hand coordination for robots. Robot manipulation in unstructured environments still sucks. Baxter was a flop. (Rethink Robots, Rod Brooks's company: invested capital, $115 million; sales, $20 million.) Universal Robots in Denmark is doing better, but they're tiny, about $3M in profit. Nobody can build a robot to do an oil change on a car. That problem should be solveable with current technology. Figure out how to handle cloth with a robot and you own the textile industry. China's government is putting money into that problem to fight off competition from Vietnam and Bangladesh.

petra 10y ago
>> Figure out how to handle cloth with a robot and you own the textile industry. Sewbo may have found the solution for robotic sewing - it hardens the cloth using a chemical, let's a robot handle and sew that cardboard-like cloth, and than put it in warm water to make it a cloth again. http://money.cnn.com/2016/10/11/technology/robots-garment-manufacturing-sewbo/ http://money.cnn.com/2016/10/11/technology/robots-garment-ma... >> 50% of jobs are automateable with current technology. And that's probably missing another key source of job loss - innovation in general. What happens if people decide to eat plant based meat ? you need 10% of the labor of that industry. And that is true for many other innovations not related to automation.
- Animats 10y ago
  Sewbo's scheme is clever. All they have is a tech demo, though. No production. It's too bad American Apparel went bust; many of their garments could have been assembled that way.
  - cr0sh 10y ago

xapata 10y ago

The author confuses labor with purpose. Praxis can be purpose, but not all labor is meaningful. Humans have always struggled to find meaning in life, from religion to existentialism. I don't think technology has or will change that fundamentally.

altonzheng 10y ago

> How many will care if artificial intelligence destroys life if it has already destroyed meaning? This line sounds deep, but I think it incorrectly conflates work with life having meaning. If eventually there isn't a need for large swaths of the population to work, then so what? I don't think the elite aristocrats in previous centuries had any problem with not working. Humanity can adapt to find other sources of meaning, like the pursuit of art in its various forms (although I'm assuming that computers can't replace art). I think a better question is if society can adapt quick enough to fill the void left by the absence of work.

harryh 10y ago
Didn't elite aristocrats in previous centuries spend a lot of time sleeping with each others spouses and playing arbitrary power games? Looking to them as a source of what a post work world could look like isn't particularly inspiring.
- komali2 10y ago
  I mean, there are plenty of very happy people sleeping with eachother's spouses right now. Debauchery can be fun in it's own right.
Banthum 10y ago
It's interesting that your counterexample - doing art - is indeed a form of work. Because it is. Doing good art is painfully hard work, in fact. There's nothing in principle that stops a machine from creating art. Even, better art than any person could do. So once that happens, where are we left? Meaning isn't something physical in the universe. Meaning is an emotion. It's what you feel when you're working towards something that you believe has some greater importance. With all opportunity to work towards anything taken away, life will become meaningless by definition, unless humans are left with some pseudo-artificial challenges to push against. Zookeepers put the animals' food inside a metal box with a small hole, so the animals have to do work to get it out. It's good for the animals to have something to work towards, and they're too dumb to realize they're being manipulated. Maybe that's our future. With WoW and Clash of Clans, etc, sometimes it feels like we're already halfway there.

bwanab 10y ago

> To that end, I suspect it wasn’t a coincidence that the industrial revolution was followed by three centuries of war. I'm seriously trying to think of any centuries preceding the industrial revolution that wouldn't have qualified as "centuries of war".

maverick_iceman 10y ago

At times, I feel that Musk is a con-man, selling dreams to naive and impressionable techies.

toss1 10y ago
Except that with the 'dreams' that he sells, the rubber actually meets the road and goes from 0-60mph in 2.27 seconds, or puts real satellites in orbit and returns the booster to be re-used, or builds the world's largest scale Li-Ion battery factory to drive down costs... Of course he's got some serious elements of self-promotion; it's required to build such a business. In his case, he manages to back it up in ways that most other self-promoters don't even begin to achieve. (disclosure, I do own a bit of Tesla stock which has done nicely, also lost some with SolarCity, but didn't ride it all the way down to the buyout)

ChuckMcM 10y ago

I think this captures a lot of what it going on in an interesting way. In many ways 'machine learning' is yet another high level compiler to convert intent into something executable by circuits. Consider the evolution of computers; 'plugboards' -- where you physically rewired them to change their program. 'punch cards' -- where physical media held the list of steps to execute. 'programs' -- where a text specification are compiled into a bag of bits which can then be executed by the computer. 'scripts' -- where a textual description activates different bags of bits, depending on what the text says. 'databases' -- where a selection criteria of a which data is important to you at the moment and then fed into the selection mechanism for the bags of bits. 'machine learning' -- where the bags of bits are created by evaluating a bunch of data through a pile of data selection operators and tuning the execution based on a data you consider 'good' and data you consider 'not good'. In all cases the basic idea is that you have a machine that you want to do X, and it can do X through a set of steps Y. Coming up with the steps Y gets harder and harder depending on the complexity of X. It seems like magic but really its just another form of compiler. And that relationship is made even more clear by the article when it points out that a program that can play Go is not the same one that can play Chess. What is more salient is that no one has written a program that lets a computer "play" go, instead there is a program that, after being fed data about what humans did when they were playing Go and the outcomes of what they did, tweaked a bunch of parameters in a bag of variables that when you put in Go moves to the bag it comes out with a Go move that would be a good response. No, I'm not trying to be silly here, we have yet to create a system where you could simply explain the rules of Go and have it devise a set of steps to play Go at the master level. That conceptualization of the binding between the rules and how those rules affect play and strategy, is essentially the 'code generator' part of a compiler which takes an AST and generates executable code. Machine learning today helps us write programs to manipulate complex data sets faster than we could before. Just as compilers let us write programs faster than doing so in assembler, and assembler was an improvement over plug boards. It does not get us any closer to having a computer that can look at a data set and tell us what is important about it. That would be a better test of 'intelligence' I think.

danans 10y ago
> we have yet to create a system where you could simply explain the rules of Go and have it devise a set of steps to play Go at the master level I don't play Go, but I don't think a human could do this, either. While we can grok a set of rules to get us started on a problem, to really master complex problems we also need examples and repetition, though far fewer examples than is needed by the current state-of-the-art in ML.

jkestelyn 10y ago

Based on the author's misunderstanding of AI, it has not "arrived" and probably never will. If in the future, authors of such opinions would just let this simple concept sink in first -- that in machine learning application behavior is deduced from data rather than from fixed rules, but that in both cases the boundaries are set by humans -- we'd all be better off because their wild Skynet takes would never see the light of day. As usual, I am more worried about the humans than the machines.

maverick_iceman 10y ago

>it wasn’t a coincidence that the industrial revolution was followed by three centuries of war This is woeful selective reading of history. Warfare was a constant everywhere in the world before the industrial revolution. Also 19th century Europe (since Napoleon's fall to WWI) was largely free of war.

dragonwriter 10y ago
> Also 19th century Europe (since Napoleon's fall to WWI) was largely free of war. Well, if you exclude (and these categories are overlapping and non-exhaustive) the Italian wars of independence, conflicts associated with the 1848 revolutions, the various wars involving Russia and it's neighbors, the wars between the Ottoman Empire and it's breakaway regions, the wars between regions that has broken away from the Ottoman Empire, the (with substantial outside intervention) Portuguese Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, the (again, with substantial outside intervention) series of civil wars in Spain, the Schleswig Wars, and the wars of German Unification...Sure, maybe the post-Napoleon I 19th Century was relatively free from war in Europe. If you don't ignore those, war was pretty much constant in the period.
- AnimalMuppet 10y ago
  Well, OK, but the Napoleonic Wars were continent-wide. So was World War I. Those others? Not so much.

czep 10y ago

I hate sans serif, everytime I see "AI" in a headline I wonder who is Alan?

tlb 10y ago
OpenAI had a custom "I" designed for the logotype for exactly this reason: https://openai.com/ https://openai.com/.

wodencafe 10y ago

It seems that so many people have become complacent in working 8 hours a day, 5+ days a week. When an idea comes along that threatens this paradigm, the FUD Machine gets to work. Maybe people weren't meant to spend such large amounts of their time on "work"?

Entangled 10y ago

"A bicycle of the mind" Jobs was not only a great showman, he was definitely a genius.

fnbr 10y ago

> Technology, meanwhile, has been developed even longer than logic has. However, just as the application of logic was long bound by the human mind, the development of technology has had the same limitations, and that includes the first half-century of the computer era. Accounting software is in the same genre as the spinning frame: deliberately designed by humans to solve a specific problem. I firmly believe that any problem that can be framed in the environment of "producing an output given certain inputs" will be solved by ML in the near future. Currently I'm deep in the process of transferring my lease. The process is heavily manual (I sign a form, they sign a form, humans review the form & make a risk assessment, etc.). There's no reason that the entire process can't be replaced with a CRUD wrapper around a ML model.

bambax 10y ago

> Dixon goes on to describe the creation of Boolean logic (which has only two variables: TRUE and FALSE, represented as 1 and 0 respectively) Not really. There are two possible VALUES for each variable in Boolean logic, and there's an infinity of variables. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_algebra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_algebra

excalibur 10y ago

> Specifically, once a task formerly thought to characterize artificial intelligence becomes routine — like the aforementioned chess-playing, or Go, or a myriad of other taken-for-granted computer abilities — we no longer call it artificial intelligence. You're using games as an example. The gaming industry has been using the term AI consistently for a very long time. You may actually want to look to them for a better definition than you're getting from the whims of some undefined "we".

soniido 10y ago

I have just submitted a post related to this. I wonder if those with a lot of power and money are worried because AI applied to economic and redistribution can reach a sound conclusion about another way to trade or use economy that would go against the best interest of those with huge money and power. For people starving or with a lot of problems AI can be a good thing, for people controlling huge power and money AI is a more serious threat, because it can change the status quo before the winner get it all.

Tenoke 10y ago
I dont think any of the people who have expressed worry over AI are that evil.
- soniido 10y ago
  Unfortunately, no taking any action to improve our world is not considered evil by many people, laise faire, let's the world go on. If all your life is about trying to be successful you are not evil by social standard, but perhaps you can make a lot of harm. Long time ago there was a post by the well known Steve Yegge, who by the way don't post any more, wondering why they are making photos of cats to get people attention instead of prosecuting other more important for the world roles, and one of his last post is about a game in which the art of making people addict to games, don't recall the English word for that, is really the goal to win money), just some quick ideas about huge power entities using resources for solving world problems.

soniido 10y ago

I would love to watch people reaction when AI inform people that the way we use resources and our government is not the best way to improve our standard of living and began to enumerate a long list of things that any child can understand are good for our people and the earth, it would show with simulations from many angles where are we heading and how we can change and must change our actions. But is naive to think that those with power are going to let AI conduct our society, and specially change the status quo for those with huge power. Anyway, I am not sure how we can trust any type of AI, since the training data maybe poisoned.

jjaredsimpson 10y ago
How did you learn to trust other humans?

perseusprime11 10y ago

Elon Musk is Chicken Little when it comes to A.I. We are very early even with ANI and are stretching reality with examples of Alexa, Self driving, AlphaGO, facial recognition etc. I want to start seeing more ANI in day to day improvements before we can even say ANI is good. But, I agree with the larger point, AI has arrived.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

deavmi 10y ago

One up for the Steve Jobs video.