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Finally a realistic view of where “artificial intelligence” currently stands. I wish I knew where guys like Elon Musk are seeing this other artificial intellige

Finally a realistic view of where “artificial intelligence” currently stands. I wish I knew where guys like Elon Musk are seeing this other artificial intelligence I’m just not seeing. The current AI we have is just fancy linear regression.

pesenti 9y ago
Sorry but that's a ridiculous statement. It's like saying all the cloud technology we have today is not much more than having VMs. Yes, AI is hyped, but it made some very unexpected progress over the past 5 years (e.g., solving facial recognition). More than many experts expected.
- mbrumlow 9y ago
  Can you please define this term "cloud technology"? I always thought it was a marketing term for "the internet", which then would be just a bunch of servers, vms, and containers; all of which we have had for over 20 years.
  - derekp7 9y ago
    "cloud technology" is "servers, VMs, containers" that is also SER (Somebody Else's Responsibility). Hence the term "cloud", as that was always used in network diagrams to refer to network connection infrastructure that wasn't yours.
  - votepaunchy 9y ago
    What is novel about "the internet"? We've been sending data over telegraph wires for nearly 200 years. The Internet is just someone else's cable.
    - mbrumlow 9y ago
      That was my point, you just went back further in history than I did :p
      - freehunter 9y ago
        Then your point is wrong. What's so novel about CPUs? We've had sand since the Earth was first formed! I swear the tech industry has more luddites than the Amish.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
        hyperbovine 9y ago
        The Amish are not luddites.
        freehunter 9y ago
        They are not capital-L official Luddites, but they could be classified as colloquial lowercase-L luddites.
    - gue5t 9y ago
      Packet switching and distributed routing protocols.
    - Florin_Andrei 9y ago
      It's turtles all the way down to the Big Bang.
    - warent 9y ago
      Since when are cables such a unique idea? The telegraph is nothing more than a large number of fancy carrier pigeons as a service, which we've had since the 12th century at least.
- gue5t 9y ago
  "It's like saying all the cloud technology we have today is not much more than having VMs." No shit? Unless you mean that it's ignoring the "distributed systems" part of the cloud, which is mostly a shitshow. The provisioning/configuration-management stacks are all complete wrecks, stacking hacks atop ad-hoc container schemes atop a poorly-design OS. A real distributed OS would be so much simpler and more robust. Calling it AI is very misleading when there has been minimal progress toward actual reasoning (the closest I've seen being some LSTM work on answering simple queries about scenarios based on prose descriptions of them). It's ML, as in "learning a function", not as in "general-purpose learning like an intelligent agent does".
  - pesenti 9y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
  - jononor 9y ago
    Got any links to info about distributed OSes?
psyc 9y ago
The current AI seems to be pretty good at pattern recognition. There’s plenty of active research in higher-level “cognition” like decision theories and semantics, so I don’t think it’s crazy to believe good results will emerge there in the next few decades.
- mljoe 9y ago
  Sure, there is no other way for computer science to go. AI always been the last and most important frontier. There may be more AI winters, there may be more AI summers. Ultimately people will continue working on this problem until it is solved or computer science goes away.
- nzonbi 9y ago
  >There’s plenty of active research in higher-level “cognition” like decision theories and semantics, so I don’t think it’s crazy to believe good results will emerge there in the next few decades. Interesting. Can someone elaborate about this?
  - psyc 9y ago
    I would start by looking at what these people are researching: http://cocosci.mit.edu/people http://cocosci.mit.edu/people https://web.stanford.edu/group/mbc/research.html https://web.stanford.edu/group/mbc/research.html
sgt101 9y ago
Nope. Linear regression will not reconstruct images, nor will it create and generate new images that have not existed previously from databases of images. Nor will it translate colloquial Chinese into colloquial English, nor will it deconstruct a question into a set of queries and generate an answer. The issue isn't the availability of fantastic algorithmics, it's the availability of people who can see them and apply them to real applications.
- hyperbovine 9y ago
  In fact linear regression could be used to do all of those things, most of them poorly but some of them pretty well (see dictionary learning). If you believe otherwise then you fundamentally misunderstand how neural networks work.
  - sgt101 9y ago
    Ohhh - so the multilayer perceptron xor thing is all wrong? I can use bricks to build a boat, if you think I can't then you don't understand floating.
    - fasquoika 9y ago
      >I can use bricks to build a boat, if you think I can't then you don't understand floating. Is this supposed to be sarcastic? Because it's absolutely true...
      - Magnap 9y ago
        I think the point is that you can build a boat out of bricks, and you can build neural networks out of linear regression. But that doesn't make modern AI "just fancy linear regression" the same way modern boats aren't "just fancy bricks".
yters 9y ago
All AI is just objective minimization. AI cannot solve the halting problem or perform Solomonoff induction.
- Xcelerate 9y ago
  > AI cannot [...] perform Solomonoff induction. Well it's clearly got to approximate it somehow, else humans wouldn't currently be making decently accurate predictions about the future.
  - yters 9y ago
    You're making an assumption that is not necessarily true.
- fjsolwmv 9y ago
  Neither can human AI solve the Halting Problem. It's proven unsolvable.
  - colorint 9y ago
    It's proven unsolvable for computers (i.e., Turing machines). Whether that makes it impossible for humans to solve (as a matter of course, or as a matter of Turing's proof) depends on whether you believe that we are isomorphic to computers. Which, to be fair, is exactly the belief that underwrites artificial intelligence. But then Turing's proof involves a program that inspects the halting oracle you're using, which isn't well-posed for humans evaluating halting.
johansch 9y ago
Are you thinking Elon's concern is about what we have today? Duh. Today's AI methods are great at pattern recognition (weak AI). The real risk is obviously a strong, generic AI. We don't know how to to get there, but we kinda do know that we will, so now is the time to think about risks. I really don't get why this is controversial or hard to understand. (My most cynical thought is that it's just about people doing weak AI feeling bothered and trying to kill the conversation out of short term strategical reasons because they know that many people are bound to mix up the concepts of weak and strong AIs, particularly since they are often selling their weak pattern matching AI systems as something quite a lot more.)
- visarga 9y ago
  To make an analogy, it's like starting the discussion on plane based terrorism and the need for TSA the next week after the Wright brothers had their first flight. If that happened, it would have stalled progress in aviation. Andrew Ng said he isn't worried about overpopulation on Mars, either. The real risk now is not AI taking over, it's humans using AI to abuse other humans. I trust the emerging AGI to do what's right more than humans. We can't even distribute enough food for all, and many of us get killed or abused at the hands of our leaders. We can be easily bullshited in elections, and as a result we managed to put Trump in charge. That's not very intelligent for a self declared intelligent species. We are our worst enemies, AGI will probably balance human society.
  - edanm 9y ago
    Some terrorism might have indeed been prevented if some of the security measures had been put in place earlier. E.g. locked cabin doors. I could make a similar argument like yours, "that's like worrying about nuclear safety programs just because we started building nuclear weapons". Not that I'm saying it's worth it, mind you. It's a tradeoff between money/time/progress vs. safety. It's totally valid to decide that it isn't worth the tradeoff to stifle the industry right now. The main difference though between the potential dangers of AI, vs. terrorism, IMO, is that the potential danger is much much larger with AI (as it was with nuclear weapons).
GCU-Empiricist 9y ago
The current computers we have are just fancy compound gate machines.

pesenti 9y ago

Sorry but that's a ridiculous statement. It's like saying all the cloud technology we have today is not much more than having VMs. Yes, AI is hyped, but it made some very unexpected progress over the past 5 years (e.g., solving facial recognition). More than many experts expected.

mbrumlow 9y ago
Can you please define this term "cloud technology"? I always thought it was a marketing term for "the internet", which then would be just a bunch of servers, vms, and containers; all of which we have had for over 20 years.
- derekp7 9y ago
  "cloud technology" is "servers, VMs, containers" that is also SER (Somebody Else's Responsibility). Hence the term "cloud", as that was always used in network diagrams to refer to network connection infrastructure that wasn't yours.
- votepaunchy 9y ago
  What is novel about "the internet"? We've been sending data over telegraph wires for nearly 200 years. The Internet is just someone else's cable.
  - mbrumlow 9y ago
    That was my point, you just went back further in history than I did :p
    - freehunter 9y ago
      Then your point is wrong. What's so novel about CPUs? We've had sand since the Earth was first formed! I swear the tech industry has more luddites than the Amish.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - hyperbovine 9y ago
        The Amish are not luddites.
        freehunter 9y ago
        They are not capital-L official Luddites, but they could be classified as colloquial lowercase-L luddites.
  - gue5t 9y ago
    Packet switching and distributed routing protocols.
  - Florin_Andrei 9y ago
    It's turtles all the way down to the Big Bang.
  - warent 9y ago
    Since when are cables such a unique idea? The telegraph is nothing more than a large number of fancy carrier pigeons as a service, which we've had since the 12th century at least.
gue5t 9y ago
"It's like saying all the cloud technology we have today is not much more than having VMs." No shit? Unless you mean that it's ignoring the "distributed systems" part of the cloud, which is mostly a shitshow. The provisioning/configuration-management stacks are all complete wrecks, stacking hacks atop ad-hoc container schemes atop a poorly-design OS. A real distributed OS would be so much simpler and more robust. Calling it AI is very misleading when there has been minimal progress toward actual reasoning (the closest I've seen being some LSTM work on answering simple queries about scenarios based on prose descriptions of them). It's ML, as in "learning a function", not as in "general-purpose learning like an intelligent agent does".
- pesenti 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
- jononor 9y ago
  Got any links to info about distributed OSes?

psyc 9y ago

The current AI seems to be pretty good at pattern recognition. There’s plenty of active research in higher-level “cognition” like decision theories and semantics, so I don’t think it’s crazy to believe good results will emerge there in the next few decades.

mljoe 9y ago
Sure, there is no other way for computer science to go. AI always been the last and most important frontier. There may be more AI winters, there may be more AI summers. Ultimately people will continue working on this problem until it is solved or computer science goes away.
nzonbi 9y ago
>There’s plenty of active research in higher-level “cognition” like decision theories and semantics, so I don’t think it’s crazy to believe good results will emerge there in the next few decades. Interesting. Can someone elaborate about this?
- psyc 9y ago
  I would start by looking at what these people are researching: http://cocosci.mit.edu/people http://cocosci.mit.edu/people https://web.stanford.edu/group/mbc/research.html https://web.stanford.edu/group/mbc/research.html

sgt101 9y ago

Nope. Linear regression will not reconstruct images, nor will it create and generate new images that have not existed previously from databases of images. Nor will it translate colloquial Chinese into colloquial English, nor will it deconstruct a question into a set of queries and generate an answer. The issue isn't the availability of fantastic algorithmics, it's the availability of people who can see them and apply them to real applications.

hyperbovine 9y ago
In fact linear regression could be used to do all of those things, most of them poorly but some of them pretty well (see dictionary learning). If you believe otherwise then you fundamentally misunderstand how neural networks work.
- sgt101 9y ago
  Ohhh - so the multilayer perceptron xor thing is all wrong? I can use bricks to build a boat, if you think I can't then you don't understand floating.
  - fasquoika 9y ago
    >I can use bricks to build a boat, if you think I can't then you don't understand floating. Is this supposed to be sarcastic? Because it's absolutely true...
    - Magnap 9y ago
      I think the point is that you can build a boat out of bricks, and you can build neural networks out of linear regression. But that doesn't make modern AI "just fancy linear regression" the same way modern boats aren't "just fancy bricks".

yters 9y ago

All AI is just objective minimization. AI cannot solve the halting problem or perform Solomonoff induction.

Xcelerate 9y ago
> AI cannot [...] perform Solomonoff induction. Well it's clearly got to approximate it somehow, else humans wouldn't currently be making decently accurate predictions about the future.
- yters 9y ago
  You're making an assumption that is not necessarily true.
fjsolwmv 9y ago
Neither can human AI solve the Halting Problem. It's proven unsolvable.
- colorint 9y ago
  It's proven unsolvable for computers (i.e., Turing machines). Whether that makes it impossible for humans to solve (as a matter of course, or as a matter of Turing's proof) depends on whether you believe that we are isomorphic to computers. Which, to be fair, is exactly the belief that underwrites artificial intelligence. But then Turing's proof involves a program that inspects the halting oracle you're using, which isn't well-posed for humans evaluating halting.

johansch 9y ago

Are you thinking Elon's concern is about what we have today? Duh. Today's AI methods are great at pattern recognition (weak AI). The real risk is obviously a strong, generic AI. We don't know how to to get there, but we kinda do know that we will, so now is the time to think about risks. I really don't get why this is controversial or hard to understand. (My most cynical thought is that it's just about people doing weak AI feeling bothered and trying to kill the conversation out of short term strategical reasons because they know that many people are bound to mix up the concepts of weak and strong AIs, particularly since they are often selling their weak pattern matching AI systems as something quite a lot more.)

visarga 9y ago
To make an analogy, it's like starting the discussion on plane based terrorism and the need for TSA the next week after the Wright brothers had their first flight. If that happened, it would have stalled progress in aviation. Andrew Ng said he isn't worried about overpopulation on Mars, either. The real risk now is not AI taking over, it's humans using AI to abuse other humans. I trust the emerging AGI to do what's right more than humans. We can't even distribute enough food for all, and many of us get killed or abused at the hands of our leaders. We can be easily bullshited in elections, and as a result we managed to put Trump in charge. That's not very intelligent for a self declared intelligent species. We are our worst enemies, AGI will probably balance human society.
- edanm 9y ago
  Some terrorism might have indeed been prevented if some of the security measures had been put in place earlier. E.g. locked cabin doors. I could make a similar argument like yours, "that's like worrying about nuclear safety programs just because we started building nuclear weapons". Not that I'm saying it's worth it, mind you. It's a tradeoff between money/time/progress vs. safety. It's totally valid to decide that it isn't worth the tradeoff to stifle the industry right now. The main difference though between the potential dangers of AI, vs. terrorism, IMO, is that the potential danger is much much larger with AI (as it was with nuclear weapons).

GCU-Empiricist 9y ago

The current computers we have are just fancy compound gate machines.