9 ms·

This stuff sounds funny now, and some of us grad students had a good laugh. But I am worried about the future of ML reporting. The "field" is growing fast and

This stuff sounds funny now, and some of us grad students had a good laugh. But I am worried about the future of ML reporting. The "field" is growing fast and I think we don't have nearly as many science communicators for AI/ML in particular and CS in general, as in other fields. I saw comments by lots of genuinely afraid laypeople who were producing platitudes to the effect that scientists don't have common sense, that we're "playing god"... etc. Also scary stuff things like the need to take action against evil scientists before it's too late. There are genuinely bad things that could come of such reporting. Like knee-jerk regulations being imposed on AI research due to irrational fears, or worse - scared and angry vigilantes going after researchers personally. It's not practical to educate everyone in ML, I wonder how we will solve this problem.

blowski 9y ago
Seems like the same problem as nuclear power, GM foods, and just about every other new but complex technology. People don't understand it, and we always fear what we don't understand.
- adityab 9y ago
  True, but none of those fields have the same kind of "end of humanity" connotations attached, in the general psyche. Clarifications by well-known researchers don't travel as far and wide as urgency-signaling clickbait...
  - lotyrin 9y ago
    Nuclear power generation and agricultural GMOs definitely do have their opponents that use end-of-the-world kinds of arguments, and the uninformed that accept those. Nuclear especially would be my go-to pristine example of this effect.
    - tgragnato 9y ago
      The nuclear has been demonized (in popular culture) due to the psyops of the Cold War. A backslash against nuclear power generation has always been expected. The use of GMOs has been demonized since corporations decided to patent them and sue farmers that owns naturally hybridized plantations. (see agricultural patent trolls) Abuse is what generates criticism and resistance to the use of new technology. Yes, the reasons you hear may not be wholly technically correct. Again, if the trust of internet users is abused, and those who browse are tracked and profiled and spyed on; then should we be surprised that there are publications like this? That's how you get stories about creepy AIs. And a "technically wrong" label doesn't help, preventing abuse is much more effective.
    - pjc50 9y ago
      Nuclear has the disadvantage that high-profile accidents actually happened, and the period where everyone in western Europe had to watch their food chain for bioaccumulative radionucletides tends to stick in the memory. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-17472698 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-17472698 Part of the problem was dealt with by export: https://www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/349-350/contaminated-foodstuffs-dumped-world-market https://www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/349-350/co...
  - coldtea 9y ago
    >True, but none of those fields have the same kind of "end of humanity" connotations attached, in the general psyche. Well, nuclear bombs have been associated with "Doomsday" / end of civilization ("Doomsday device") etc.
- CamperBob2 9y ago
  True, and it doesn't exactly help that respected people like Elon Musk are cranking up a lot of irrational FUD for reasons known only to themselves.
  - computerex 9y ago
    Lately, I think the attention is getting into Elon's head.. It's so unsettling because Elon was our lord and savior and now as if corrupted by his newly found fully grown hair, he has it seems given in to the media attention. Tesla, PayPal and SpaceX I can get behind. Hyperloop? AI neurolink thing? Wtf happened to you Elon?
  - joopxiv 9y ago
    I think it's quite strange that when respected and rational people like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking warn against dangers of AI, some people still dismiss it as irrational FUD. Did you consider they might have a point?
    - odabaxok 9y ago
      Can you please write what concerns do they have? I have tried to google Elon Musk's quotes about AI, but all I found was that he said, we should fear AI, because it is like summoning a demon... Does he have some thought-out points you refer to? ..because from all of his quotes it seems that he doesn't know how ai works.
      - joopxiv 9y ago
        I think the AI concerns have been summarised below in this thread: A) We're striving to make strong AI. B) It seems plausible that as computing and AI research continues, we'll get to strong AI eventually given that brains are "just" extremely complex computers. C) We do not know what strong AI will be able to do or how it will act, if it exceeds human intelligence. The concern is not with the current state of the art, but what could happen in the future if we continue improving AI without seriously considering some safeguards against making a system that at some point becomes clever enough to start making itself even smarter. I won't claim I'm an AI expert, but I think people like Musk and Hawkins deserve (based on their accomplishments) to be taken serious when they express concerns. I very much doubt that everyone in this thread dismissing their comments as irrational fear mongering have enough knowledge on the topic to do so.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >Seems like the same problem as nuclear power, GM foods, and just about every other new but complex technology. People don't understand it, and we always fear what we don't understand. Well, it's also that people who do understand it, can also be severely worried about scientists not understanding it and playing fast and loose for profit. Medicine/biology can not even put out a decent non-conflicting dietary advice that holds its position for more than 10 years, but they are allowed to assemble genes they half-understand and put them out in an ecosystem whose interactions and complex interplays they understand 10% and just see what happens...
  - blowski 9y ago
    Agreed. Even if ignorant people think it's a bad idea, doesn't mean it's a good idea. But perhaps they're wrong about _why_ it's a bad idea.
nxsynonym 9y ago
Unfortunately non-sensationalist news doesn't sell. The layperson is guided by fear and is quick to trust any headline that comes across their newsfeed. AI (and not Machine Learning to an extent) have a bad association with far-fetched sci-fi plots and worst case scenarios. Maybe the best solution would be to re-brand AI/ML as something more abstract.
- adityab 9y ago
  I loved how in Arrival, they build a statistical model to map between concepts in the two languages, ostensibly via a joint embedding space. They don't elaborate on it in the movie, but I could totally see such ideas being explained with style (and tense background music) in future sci-fi films about AI. Make it as banal as possible.
- ahartman00 9y ago
  I've been thinking Big Statistics would be a more accurate description, and doesn't sound scary.
  - dullgiulio 9y ago
    The problem is not AI, in fact. It's harvesting of personal and private data. Technology just makes gathering and analisys easier.
mathperson 9y ago
you laughed? I put my head through a wall... It seems like AI is the new stem cell in terms of public attitudes towards the research. It isn't just lay people. Elon Musk seems to have no idea what a neural net actually is and he is funding a private AI lab!
- backpropaganda 9y ago
  "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" In Elon's case, it's brand/profit/investments instead of salary.
- aoeusnth1 9y ago
  Elon is certainly not worried about the insect-level neural networks we have now. Have you read or engaged with the arguments in Superintelligence? Elon has. Your limited knowledge of the arguments behind AI-risk is more pathetic than the uninformed lay-person's enthusiasm or irrational fear, because you pretend to know what you're talking about.
  - svalorzen 9y ago
    What limited knowledge? Just because some people like to play pretend with their sci-fi fantasies of AI omnipotence and omniscience with no energetical nor temporal limitations doesn't mean that researchers that actually work with the concepts at hand must engage with such crazy arguments.
bduerst 9y ago
We saw the same layman rhetoric with GMO crops in the late 90's to early 00's. Slippery-slope nightmare scenarios, accusations of playing god, corporate greed run unchecked, etc. It seems to be a recurrent theme for new technology. Typically, reasonable people don't buy into most of these scare tactics, even if the tactics are being used as clickbait.
- shadykiller 9y ago
  We've always played with nature without understanding the repercussions. Some turned out good and some bad. So the best strategy is to have a kill switch. Unfortunately GMO has turned out to be a bad experiment(widespread usage of glyphosates) which has badly affected our environment and health and we are nowhere close to killing it. https://gmo-awareness.com/resources/glyphosate/ https://gmo-awareness.com/resources/glyphosate/
  - tonmoy 9y ago
    Do you have any better resources to claim that "GMO has turned out to be a bad experiment"? Not only does "gmo-awareness.com" not create any confidence for me, but the points in the link are about a chemical substance and not really an impact of the GMO seeds directly. Moreover, all the points listed seem to be common for most chemical pesticides or herbicides if not used in moderation
    - Mediterraneo10 9y ago
      > The points in the link are about a chemical substance and not really an impact of the GMO seeds directly. The whole point of Roundup-ready varieties is that you can douse the plants in Roundup and they will still grow well. Sure, there may be other GMO varieties that come without problems, but these particular GMO seeds are inherently linked with glyphosates.
    - Spooky23 9y ago
      Remember that you have GMO + herbicide + patents. GMO by itself is a step beyond plant breeding that's been done for millennia. It's ok in my eyes until its combined with the other two things.
eli_gottlieb 9y ago
Just wait until some hypster finds out about the link between machine learning and data compression, then starts referring to zip files as "AI language" all over the place.
mcrad 9y ago
Perhaps it's the ML students who are the laypeople. In my experience, it's not the scientists but the politicians, bankers, and project managers who ultimately will do the damage. AI in an industrial context with real market forces - that's normal. AI sponsored by a consumer products or media giant like Facebook - tryna play god, that's true.
schoen 9y ago
> or worse - scared and angry vigilantes going after researchers personally. The Unabomber did target people connected to computer science and IT, including trying to kill people based on his perception of their research vision and agenda. For example, in his letter to his victim David Gelernter, a prominent computer scientist, he complained about "the way techno-nerds like you are changing the world" and cited Gelernter's ideas from Mirror Worlds (a book about technologies that might currently be called VR, AR, and simulation). http://www.punkcommunity.com/unapack/press/outside/gvmm68e/letter1.html http://www.punkcommunity.com/unapack/press/outside/gvmm68e/l...
joemi 9y ago
What are the counter arguments that should be put forward to those worried about AI? I don't know much/anything about AI/ML research at all, so I don't even know where to begin allaying fears.
- ahartman00 9y ago
  Note, I am a novice, so please correct me, but... TL;DR; it is very limited in what it can do, the accuracy is sometimes/(often?) not near 100%, it is an old field, meaning the progress has not all been in the past decade[1], and there is a lot of hype. I have noticed that various techniques are only good at very specific tasks. CNNs are good at image recognition, RNNs are good for language/grammar, etc. Of course, it can only recognize images it has been trained on. There are some impressive applications of these specific tasks. For example, with image recognition that can recognize road signs, pedestrians, etc., you could build a rudimentary self driving car. But it would be wrong to think that anything is possible. IIUC, we have been taking some basic building blocks and constructing systems from them. Cool, but it doesn't mean general AI is right around the corner. Even then, good can mean 80% accuracy. I can't think of the paper right now, but I read one where they improved the handling of negation in different parts of the sentences for sentiment analysis. They improved the state of the art from ~80% to 86%, IIRC. They were excited, and I know that science/research is built on incremental progress. But that's going from 1/5 wrong to 3/20. Take a look at the generated images from image generation pictures. Impressive, but a skilled photoshopper can do much better, based on what i have seen. And some papers are over hyped[2]. I hope I haven't been too hard on anyone's hard work, I'm just trying to ease fears here. Also, as mentioned in [1], it is a fairly old field, relative to computer standards of course. For example, backpropagation was a huge breakthrough, but that happened in the 80's. There have been recent breakthroughs, notably deep learning. But it would be just wrong to think that everything you are seeing is the result of the past 10 years. (Which is what I thought until a few months ago :S) Like other science research, it would also be wrong to assume it will continue linearly. In fact, there have been multiple AI winters[1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intellig... 2. https://medium.com/@yoav.goldberg/an-adversarial-review-of-adversarial-generation-of-natural-language-409ac3378bd7 https://medium.com/@yoav.goldberg/an-adversarial-review-of-a...
EGreg 9y ago
I wonder how long until AI chats up women online better than 99% of guys.
- pvdebbe 9y ago
  Now you said it! How long until someone writes an AI to speed up Tinder discussions so that you can just wait for confirmed physical dates to go to. While ubering to the cafe, you can read a summary the AI prepared for you, with some tips and tricks.
  - dTal 9y ago
    Already done: https://medium.com/the-mission/looking-for-the-one-how-i-went-on-150-dates-in-4-months-bf43a095516c https://medium.com/the-mission/looking-for-the-one-how-i-wen...
- taneq 9y ago
  Now there's a research project for ya. Maybe someone at Tinder is working on it right now with their massive dataset of pickup lines.
EGreg 9y ago
Ummm you know something is serious when the actual scientists and researchers are clamoring for regulation out of fear. http://io9.gizmodo.com/prominent-scientists-sign-letter-of-warning-about-ai-ri-1679487924 http://io9.gizmodo.com/prominent-scientists-sign-letter-of-w...
- setzer22 9y ago
  There are serious concerns any reasonable person should have about AI, like: - Should we let a complex statistical test determine whether I am capable for a certain job? And also unreasonable concerns like: - Will machines rebel against their human overlords by abusing their power and end up enslaving the human race? Regulations should be established so AI is used in an ethical way whenever its outcome will be used to affect the lifes of people. We should stop assuming that all concerns about AI are in the latter group.
jacquesm 9y ago
> I saw comments by lots of genuinely afraid laypeople who were producing platitudes to the effect that scientists don't have common sense, that we're "playing god"... We have the same here on HN, see some of the comments in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14877920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14877920 The fear mongering is reaching pretty high levels.
jo78p 9y ago
We don't have too. The sewing machine was invented a hundred years ago and it's inventors factory was burnt down and he was chased out of town. But everyone eventually came around. Fast. Same goes for anything else. Dumb people will do dumb things. Our professional reactor class will react for their upvotes/likes/retweets and viewcounts. But progress doesn't give a shit as the sewing machine tells us.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
throw2016 9y ago
These stories are usually pushed out to the media. Ideally AI researchers and startups would communicate more accurately about their current capabilities and how far away they are from anything resembling intelligence or sentience but it's easy to give in to excitement and speculate about possibilities and scenarios that are far away. That could help but the media is diverse and you can stop the media misreporting, and AI is not the only affected area, as much as you can prevent hype. The idea of AI has been the stuff of science fiction for decades so there is always some latent interest. Add to that some heavily promoted film or TV show that touches on these topics and the media frenzy and scare mongering hits peak again.
arjo1 9y ago
Perhaps a good layman type explanation would be that nueral networks are essentially curve fitting on steroids. (Hopefully at some point people have done curve fitting in school and remember drawing lines of best fit). Therefore the term AI is essentially a misnomer. I would even go as far as to emphasize that nueral networks are boring mathematical equations which do not actually mimic the inner workings of our brains.
- shiftpgdn 9y ago
  I have a bachelor's degree and have no idea what curve fitting is.
  - schoen 9y ago
    You might have seen it called "regression" (also "interpolation" and "extrapolation"), but not everyone has necessarily been exposed to this.
    - backpropaganda 9y ago
      New favorite alternative term for deep learning: "nonlinear interpolation"
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      Related, I used to jokingly explain mean-square-error approximation like this: there is this geometrical theorem, that you can drive a line through any three points on a plane, as long as the line is thick enough. So mean-square-error approximation is basically minimizing the thickness of that line :).
- schoen 9y ago
  Some recent HN discussion about neural networks vs. neurons: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14790673 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14790673
- red75prime 9y ago
  > do not actually mimic the inner workings of our brains. Maybe they actually do. http://www.nature.com/articles/srep27755 http://www.nature.com/articles/srep27755
truthexposer 9y ago
I think this lack of understanding of computer technology by the media has been revealed time and time again, especially in cybersecurity. 10 years ago with Anonymous, and now perhaps with the Russians.
coldtea 9y ago
>I saw comments by lots of genuinely afraid laypeople who were producing platitudes to the effect that scientists don't have common sense, that we're "playing god"... etc. Also scary stuff things like the need to take action against evil scientists before it's too late. Laypeople? Maybe not on this incident, but on general AI progress, that's echoed by Musk, Kurzweil, Hawkings, et al.

blowski 9y ago

Seems like the same problem as nuclear power, GM foods, and just about every other new but complex technology. People don't understand it, and we always fear what we don't understand.

adityab 9y ago
True, but none of those fields have the same kind of "end of humanity" connotations attached, in the general psyche. Clarifications by well-known researchers don't travel as far and wide as urgency-signaling clickbait...
- lotyrin 9y ago
  Nuclear power generation and agricultural GMOs definitely do have their opponents that use end-of-the-world kinds of arguments, and the uninformed that accept those. Nuclear especially would be my go-to pristine example of this effect.
  - tgragnato 9y ago
    The nuclear has been demonized (in popular culture) due to the psyops of the Cold War. A backslash against nuclear power generation has always been expected. The use of GMOs has been demonized since corporations decided to patent them and sue farmers that owns naturally hybridized plantations. (see agricultural patent trolls) Abuse is what generates criticism and resistance to the use of new technology. Yes, the reasons you hear may not be wholly technically correct. Again, if the trust of internet users is abused, and those who browse are tracked and profiled and spyed on; then should we be surprised that there are publications like this? That's how you get stories about creepy AIs. And a "technically wrong" label doesn't help, preventing abuse is much more effective.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    Nuclear has the disadvantage that high-profile accidents actually happened, and the period where everyone in western Europe had to watch their food chain for bioaccumulative radionucletides tends to stick in the memory. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-17472698 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-17472698 Part of the problem was dealt with by export: https://www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/349-350/contaminated-foodstuffs-dumped-world-market https://www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/349-350/co...
- coldtea 9y ago
  >True, but none of those fields have the same kind of "end of humanity" connotations attached, in the general psyche. Well, nuclear bombs have been associated with "Doomsday" / end of civilization ("Doomsday device") etc.
CamperBob2 9y ago
True, and it doesn't exactly help that respected people like Elon Musk are cranking up a lot of irrational FUD for reasons known only to themselves.
- computerex 9y ago
  Lately, I think the attention is getting into Elon's head.. It's so unsettling because Elon was our lord and savior and now as if corrupted by his newly found fully grown hair, he has it seems given in to the media attention. Tesla, PayPal and SpaceX I can get behind. Hyperloop? AI neurolink thing? Wtf happened to you Elon?
- joopxiv 9y ago
  I think it's quite strange that when respected and rational people like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking warn against dangers of AI, some people still dismiss it as irrational FUD. Did you consider they might have a point?
  - odabaxok 9y ago
    Can you please write what concerns do they have? I have tried to google Elon Musk's quotes about AI, but all I found was that he said, we should fear AI, because it is like summoning a demon... Does he have some thought-out points you refer to? ..because from all of his quotes it seems that he doesn't know how ai works.
    - joopxiv 9y ago
      I think the AI concerns have been summarised below in this thread: A) We're striving to make strong AI. B) It seems plausible that as computing and AI research continues, we'll get to strong AI eventually given that brains are "just" extremely complex computers. C) We do not know what strong AI will be able to do or how it will act, if it exceeds human intelligence. The concern is not with the current state of the art, but what could happen in the future if we continue improving AI without seriously considering some safeguards against making a system that at some point becomes clever enough to start making itself even smarter. I won't claim I'm an AI expert, but I think people like Musk and Hawkins deserve (based on their accomplishments) to be taken serious when they express concerns. I very much doubt that everyone in this thread dismissing their comments as irrational fear mongering have enough knowledge on the topic to do so.
coldtea 9y ago
>Seems like the same problem as nuclear power, GM foods, and just about every other new but complex technology. People don't understand it, and we always fear what we don't understand. Well, it's also that people who do understand it, can also be severely worried about scientists not understanding it and playing fast and loose for profit. Medicine/biology can not even put out a decent non-conflicting dietary advice that holds its position for more than 10 years, but they are allowed to assemble genes they half-understand and put them out in an ecosystem whose interactions and complex interplays they understand 10% and just see what happens...
- blowski 9y ago
  Agreed. Even if ignorant people think it's a bad idea, doesn't mean it's a good idea. But perhaps they're wrong about _why_ it's a bad idea.

nxsynonym 9y ago

Unfortunately non-sensationalist news doesn't sell. The layperson is guided by fear and is quick to trust any headline that comes across their newsfeed. AI (and not Machine Learning to an extent) have a bad association with far-fetched sci-fi plots and worst case scenarios. Maybe the best solution would be to re-brand AI/ML as something more abstract.

adityab 9y ago
I loved how in Arrival, they build a statistical model to map between concepts in the two languages, ostensibly via a joint embedding space. They don't elaborate on it in the movie, but I could totally see such ideas being explained with style (and tense background music) in future sci-fi films about AI. Make it as banal as possible.
ahartman00 9y ago
I've been thinking Big Statistics would be a more accurate description, and doesn't sound scary.
- dullgiulio 9y ago
  The problem is not AI, in fact. It's harvesting of personal and private data. Technology just makes gathering and analisys easier.

mathperson 9y ago

you laughed? I put my head through a wall... It seems like AI is the new stem cell in terms of public attitudes towards the research. It isn't just lay people. Elon Musk seems to have no idea what a neural net actually is and he is funding a private AI lab!

backpropaganda 9y ago
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" In Elon's case, it's brand/profit/investments instead of salary.
aoeusnth1 9y ago
Elon is certainly not worried about the insect-level neural networks we have now. Have you read or engaged with the arguments in Superintelligence? Elon has. Your limited knowledge of the arguments behind AI-risk is more pathetic than the uninformed lay-person's enthusiasm or irrational fear, because you pretend to know what you're talking about.
- svalorzen 9y ago
  What limited knowledge? Just because some people like to play pretend with their sci-fi fantasies of AI omnipotence and omniscience with no energetical nor temporal limitations doesn't mean that researchers that actually work with the concepts at hand must engage with such crazy arguments.

bduerst 9y ago

We saw the same layman rhetoric with GMO crops in the late 90's to early 00's. Slippery-slope nightmare scenarios, accusations of playing god, corporate greed run unchecked, etc. It seems to be a recurrent theme for new technology. Typically, reasonable people don't buy into most of these scare tactics, even if the tactics are being used as clickbait.

shadykiller 9y ago
We've always played with nature without understanding the repercussions. Some turned out good and some bad. So the best strategy is to have a kill switch. Unfortunately GMO has turned out to be a bad experiment(widespread usage of glyphosates) which has badly affected our environment and health and we are nowhere close to killing it. https://gmo-awareness.com/resources/glyphosate/ https://gmo-awareness.com/resources/glyphosate/
- tonmoy 9y ago
  Do you have any better resources to claim that "GMO has turned out to be a bad experiment"? Not only does "gmo-awareness.com" not create any confidence for me, but the points in the link are about a chemical substance and not really an impact of the GMO seeds directly. Moreover, all the points listed seem to be common for most chemical pesticides or herbicides if not used in moderation
  - Mediterraneo10 9y ago
    > The points in the link are about a chemical substance and not really an impact of the GMO seeds directly. The whole point of Roundup-ready varieties is that you can douse the plants in Roundup and they will still grow well. Sure, there may be other GMO varieties that come without problems, but these particular GMO seeds are inherently linked with glyphosates.
  - Spooky23 9y ago
    Remember that you have GMO + herbicide + patents. GMO by itself is a step beyond plant breeding that's been done for millennia. It's ok in my eyes until its combined with the other two things.

eli_gottlieb 9y ago

Just wait until some hypster finds out about the link between machine learning and data compression, then starts referring to zip files as "AI language" all over the place.

mcrad 9y ago

Perhaps it's the ML students who are the laypeople. In my experience, it's not the scientists but the politicians, bankers, and project managers who ultimately will do the damage. AI in an industrial context with real market forces - that's normal. AI sponsored by a consumer products or media giant like Facebook - tryna play god, that's true.

schoen 9y ago

> or worse - scared and angry vigilantes going after researchers personally. The Unabomber did target people connected to computer science and IT, including trying to kill people based on his perception of their research vision and agenda. For example, in his letter to his victim David Gelernter, a prominent computer scientist, he complained about "the way techno-nerds like you are changing the world" and cited Gelernter's ideas from Mirror Worlds (a book about technologies that might currently be called VR, AR, and simulation). http://www.punkcommunity.com/unapack/press/outside/gvmm68e/letter1.html http://www.punkcommunity.com/unapack/press/outside/gvmm68e/l...

joemi 9y ago

What are the counter arguments that should be put forward to those worried about AI? I don't know much/anything about AI/ML research at all, so I don't even know where to begin allaying fears.

ahartman00 9y ago
Note, I am a novice, so please correct me, but... TL;DR; it is very limited in what it can do, the accuracy is sometimes/(often?) not near 100%, it is an old field, meaning the progress has not all been in the past decade[1], and there is a lot of hype. I have noticed that various techniques are only good at very specific tasks. CNNs are good at image recognition, RNNs are good for language/grammar, etc. Of course, it can only recognize images it has been trained on. There are some impressive applications of these specific tasks. For example, with image recognition that can recognize road signs, pedestrians, etc., you could build a rudimentary self driving car. But it would be wrong to think that anything is possible. IIUC, we have been taking some basic building blocks and constructing systems from them. Cool, but it doesn't mean general AI is right around the corner. Even then, good can mean 80% accuracy. I can't think of the paper right now, but I read one where they improved the handling of negation in different parts of the sentences for sentiment analysis. They improved the state of the art from ~80% to 86%, IIRC. They were excited, and I know that science/research is built on incremental progress. But that's going from 1/5 wrong to 3/20. Take a look at the generated images from image generation pictures. Impressive, but a skilled photoshopper can do much better, based on what i have seen. And some papers are over hyped[2]. I hope I haven't been too hard on anyone's hard work, I'm just trying to ease fears here. Also, as mentioned in [1], it is a fairly old field, relative to computer standards of course. For example, backpropagation was a huge breakthrough, but that happened in the 80's. There have been recent breakthroughs, notably deep learning. But it would be just wrong to think that everything you are seeing is the result of the past 10 years. (Which is what I thought until a few months ago :S) Like other science research, it would also be wrong to assume it will continue linearly. In fact, there have been multiple AI winters[1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intellig... 2. https://medium.com/@yoav.goldberg/an-adversarial-review-of-adversarial-generation-of-natural-language-409ac3378bd7 https://medium.com/@yoav.goldberg/an-adversarial-review-of-a...

EGreg 9y ago

I wonder how long until AI chats up women online better than 99% of guys.

pvdebbe 9y ago
Now you said it! How long until someone writes an AI to speed up Tinder discussions so that you can just wait for confirmed physical dates to go to. While ubering to the cafe, you can read a summary the AI prepared for you, with some tips and tricks.
- dTal 9y ago
  Already done: https://medium.com/the-mission/looking-for-the-one-how-i-went-on-150-dates-in-4-months-bf43a095516c https://medium.com/the-mission/looking-for-the-one-how-i-wen...
taneq 9y ago
Now there's a research project for ya. Maybe someone at Tinder is working on it right now with their massive dataset of pickup lines.

EGreg 9y ago

Ummm you know something is serious when the actual scientists and researchers are clamoring for regulation out of fear. http://io9.gizmodo.com/prominent-scientists-sign-letter-of-warning-about-ai-ri-1679487924 http://io9.gizmodo.com/prominent-scientists-sign-letter-of-w...

setzer22 9y ago
There are serious concerns any reasonable person should have about AI, like: - Should we let a complex statistical test determine whether I am capable for a certain job? And also unreasonable concerns like: - Will machines rebel against their human overlords by abusing their power and end up enslaving the human race? Regulations should be established so AI is used in an ethical way whenever its outcome will be used to affect the lifes of people. We should stop assuming that all concerns about AI are in the latter group.

jacquesm 9y ago

> I saw comments by lots of genuinely afraid laypeople who were producing platitudes to the effect that scientists don't have common sense, that we're "playing god"... We have the same here on HN, see some of the comments in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14877920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14877920 The fear mongering is reaching pretty high levels.

jo78p 9y ago

We don't have too. The sewing machine was invented a hundred years ago and it's inventors factory was burnt down and he was chased out of town. But everyone eventually came around. Fast. Same goes for anything else. Dumb people will do dumb things. Our professional reactor class will react for their upvotes/likes/retweets and viewcounts. But progress doesn't give a shit as the sewing machine tells us.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

throw2016 9y ago

These stories are usually pushed out to the media. Ideally AI researchers and startups would communicate more accurately about their current capabilities and how far away they are from anything resembling intelligence or sentience but it's easy to give in to excitement and speculate about possibilities and scenarios that are far away. That could help but the media is diverse and you can stop the media misreporting, and AI is not the only affected area, as much as you can prevent hype. The idea of AI has been the stuff of science fiction for decades so there is always some latent interest. Add to that some heavily promoted film or TV show that touches on these topics and the media frenzy and scare mongering hits peak again.

arjo1 9y ago

Perhaps a good layman type explanation would be that nueral networks are essentially curve fitting on steroids. (Hopefully at some point people have done curve fitting in school and remember drawing lines of best fit). Therefore the term AI is essentially a misnomer. I would even go as far as to emphasize that nueral networks are boring mathematical equations which do not actually mimic the inner workings of our brains.

shiftpgdn 9y ago
I have a bachelor's degree and have no idea what curve fitting is.
- schoen 9y ago
  You might have seen it called "regression" (also "interpolation" and "extrapolation"), but not everyone has necessarily been exposed to this.
  - backpropaganda 9y ago
    New favorite alternative term for deep learning: "nonlinear interpolation"
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Related, I used to jokingly explain mean-square-error approximation like this: there is this geometrical theorem, that you can drive a line through any three points on a plane, as long as the line is thick enough. So mean-square-error approximation is basically minimizing the thickness of that line :).
schoen 9y ago
Some recent HN discussion about neural networks vs. neurons: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14790673 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14790673
red75prime 9y ago
> do not actually mimic the inner workings of our brains. Maybe they actually do. http://www.nature.com/articles/srep27755 http://www.nature.com/articles/srep27755

truthexposer 9y ago

I think this lack of understanding of computer technology by the media has been revealed time and time again, especially in cybersecurity. 10 years ago with Anonymous, and now perhaps with the Russians.

coldtea 9y ago

>I saw comments by lots of genuinely afraid laypeople who were producing platitudes to the effect that scientists don't have common sense, that we're "playing god"... etc. Also scary stuff things like the need to take action against evil scientists before it's too late. Laypeople? Maybe not on this incident, but on general AI progress, that's echoed by Musk, Kurzweil, Hawkings, et al.