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I'm encouraged that so much fruitful work has come out of this one trick. If you can use the same basic framework for image labeling, playing Go, and translatin

I'm encouraged that so much fruitful work has come out of this one trick. If you can use the same basic framework for image labeling, playing Go, and translating natural languages, I'd say it's a powerful tool with broad applications. I think that there's a kernel of insight to "A real intelligence doesn’t break when you slightly change the problem." But human perception and intelligence are pretty brittle. The methodological and institutional innovations that have developed human understanding of nature beyond the ad-hoc are very recent in recorded history, and just an eye-blink ago in our biological history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

emodendroket 9y ago
I feel like people have a harder time accepting these kinds of flaws if they differ wildly from mistakes a human would make.
- philipkglass 9y ago
  I agree: humans generally don't tolerate mistakes from machines if the mistakes are not similar to those that humans would make. And people generally don't recognize their own intellectual shortcomings in comparison to others (other human cultures, other non-human animals, machines) as long as those shortcomings are common within one's peer group. It's unremarkable to be unable to memorize long passages in a literate culture, but it's an intellectual impairment to have a hard time distinguishing similar symbols like U and V. In an oral culture the relative importance of memory and visual symbol disambiguation are reversed.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    It's not totally illogical; it presents real problems. Let's say you wanted to offload content filtering to an AI and have it get rid of sexually explicit or graphically violent images. In this case an AI-based filter that could be fooled by adversarial input much more easily than a human.
QAPereo 9y ago
Of course, we're the product of an evolutionary history which results in such human "failure modes" being rare. If staring at a zebra made you hallucinate, you'd be unlikely to be the most successful member of your species, nor would your offspring thrive. So while we only tend to run into our obvious failing whens we do the unusual, computers fail at what we consider mundane.
- mikeash 9y ago
  The other day I was walking out of my closet, turned, and nearly jumped out of my skin because some clothes hanging from the door briefly looked like a large man standing right next to me. I'm not sure that our failings only happen under unusual circumstances, but rather maybe we're just used to them and don't think about it much.
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    That's no failing, that's working as intended. It's far more beneficial for us (and more importantly, our successful ancestors) to be extremely wary of potential threats at the level of near-reflex. It's also important not to waste a bunch of energy running from phantoms. So you did something no computer today could; you had an instinctive reaction, which was then moderated by increasingly higher levels of reasoning. I'm guessing the whole process of panic->resolution took less than a few seconds. That's no failure mode.
    - mikeash 9y ago
      Just because it evolved to a point that balances the tradeoffs doesn’t make it somehow not a failure. Humans can be fooled into seeing things completely different from what’s there, just like ANNs.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- eru 9y ago
  Of course, our failure modes would be unusual to computers. Eg our short term memory is severely limited and imprecise.
bhntr3 9y ago
Is life riding a one trick pony?! (Evolution) The title is just clickbait. Finding the simplest formula or equation for a process or phenomenon is the goal of a lot of scientists. Backprop may not be that simplest equation. But actually finding that "one weird trick" to intelligence will in no way be a bad thing when it happens.
- dmix 9y ago
  > Evolution More like vibrating strings?
- droidist2 9y ago
  All of life seems to be riding the carbon hype train.
mannykannot 9y ago
Human perception and intelligence are by no means infallible, but neither are they anywhere near being as brittle as current AI. The thing about illusions is that we generally know that we are being subject to an illusion, and we also usually have the depth of understanding to know when we don't understand something about what we are seeing or think we have heard, and we have the depth of understanding to think of actions we can take to resolve the issue. As for cognitive biases, has any AI even come close enough to be comparable on that issue? For that matter, has any AI come close to understanding the concept of an optical illusion? I am also encouraged by recent progress, but there is nothing to be gained in playing down the distance to go.
- aroman 9y ago
  > The thing about illusions is that we generally know that we are being subject to an illusion. Citation needed? I did my undergrad in cognitive science, and while my knowledge of illusions is very limited, I never came across anything to suggest that we have an innate awareness of when our perceptual system is being tricked.
  - hyperbovine 9y ago
    Wait, isn't that completely obvious? As a kid I used to seek them out precisely for the thrill of feeling my brain being tricked. Nobody needs to be told why MC Escher drawings are fun to look at.
  - mannykannot 9y ago
    Frankly, when I first saw your post, I thought I was being trolled, especially as the phrase 'citation needed' is over-used, frequently in an attempt to avoid the burden of proof. For a citation, there's hyperbovine's reply. On reflection, however, I think your post raises a reasonable question. Firstly, whether it is innate, learned or some combination, all are equally valid here. In general, we cannot know if we are being deceived by our senses, and if you follow this line of argument to its end, you reach solipsism. With regard to the illusions of the sort presented in the linked article, they seem to fall into three types. There are the ones where we are immediately aware of being subject to an illusion; this is especially true in the cases where there is apparent motion. There are some where we do not notice unless we investigate further or have our attention brought to it, such as those involving apparent differences in brightness or color. Then there are those that actually depend on us noticing that there is an illusion - Necker cubes, for example. In real life, when faced with an ambiguous input from our senses, we are often aware the fact because of the dissonance with our general understanding of the world, and we are usually able to take actions specifically designed to resolve the ambiguity. In contrast, AI can be very confident about the most ridiculous conclusions. So we don't infallibly know when we are being tricked, but even in the cases where we are, further investigation often reveals that what is going on. In contrast, has any AI ever demonstrated any understanding of the concept of an illusion? The fact that we can sometimes be tricked by illusions for a while does not imply that AI has reached parity with humans in this regard, or that the fragility of image recognition is not an issue.

emodendroket 9y ago

I feel like people have a harder time accepting these kinds of flaws if they differ wildly from mistakes a human would make.

philipkglass 9y ago
I agree: humans generally don't tolerate mistakes from machines if the mistakes are not similar to those that humans would make. And people generally don't recognize their own intellectual shortcomings in comparison to others (other human cultures, other non-human animals, machines) as long as those shortcomings are common within one's peer group. It's unremarkable to be unable to memorize long passages in a literate culture, but it's an intellectual impairment to have a hard time distinguishing similar symbols like U and V. In an oral culture the relative importance of memory and visual symbol disambiguation are reversed.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  It's not totally illogical; it presents real problems. Let's say you wanted to offload content filtering to an AI and have it get rid of sexually explicit or graphically violent images. In this case an AI-based filter that could be fooled by adversarial input much more easily than a human.

QAPereo 9y ago

Of course, we're the product of an evolutionary history which results in such human "failure modes" being rare. If staring at a zebra made you hallucinate, you'd be unlikely to be the most successful member of your species, nor would your offspring thrive. So while we only tend to run into our obvious failing whens we do the unusual, computers fail at what we consider mundane.

mikeash 9y ago
The other day I was walking out of my closet, turned, and nearly jumped out of my skin because some clothes hanging from the door briefly looked like a large man standing right next to me. I'm not sure that our failings only happen under unusual circumstances, but rather maybe we're just used to them and don't think about it much.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  That's no failing, that's working as intended. It's far more beneficial for us (and more importantly, our successful ancestors) to be extremely wary of potential threats at the level of near-reflex. It's also important not to waste a bunch of energy running from phantoms. So you did something no computer today could; you had an instinctive reaction, which was then moderated by increasingly higher levels of reasoning. I'm guessing the whole process of panic->resolution took less than a few seconds. That's no failure mode.
  - mikeash 9y ago
    Just because it evolved to a point that balances the tradeoffs doesn’t make it somehow not a failure. Humans can be fooled into seeing things completely different from what’s there, just like ANNs.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
eru 9y ago
Of course, our failure modes would be unusual to computers. Eg our short term memory is severely limited and imprecise.

bhntr3 9y ago

Is life riding a one trick pony?! (Evolution) The title is just clickbait. Finding the simplest formula or equation for a process or phenomenon is the goal of a lot of scientists. Backprop may not be that simplest equation. But actually finding that "one weird trick" to intelligence will in no way be a bad thing when it happens.

dmix 9y ago
> Evolution More like vibrating strings?
droidist2 9y ago
All of life seems to be riding the carbon hype train.

mannykannot 9y ago

Human perception and intelligence are by no means infallible, but neither are they anywhere near being as brittle as current AI. The thing about illusions is that we generally know that we are being subject to an illusion, and we also usually have the depth of understanding to know when we don't understand something about what we are seeing or think we have heard, and we have the depth of understanding to think of actions we can take to resolve the issue. As for cognitive biases, has any AI even come close enough to be comparable on that issue? For that matter, has any AI come close to understanding the concept of an optical illusion? I am also encouraged by recent progress, but there is nothing to be gained in playing down the distance to go.

aroman 9y ago
> The thing about illusions is that we generally know that we are being subject to an illusion. Citation needed? I did my undergrad in cognitive science, and while my knowledge of illusions is very limited, I never came across anything to suggest that we have an innate awareness of when our perceptual system is being tricked.
- hyperbovine 9y ago
  Wait, isn't that completely obvious? As a kid I used to seek them out precisely for the thrill of feeling my brain being tricked. Nobody needs to be told why MC Escher drawings are fun to look at.
- mannykannot 9y ago
  Frankly, when I first saw your post, I thought I was being trolled, especially as the phrase 'citation needed' is over-used, frequently in an attempt to avoid the burden of proof. For a citation, there's hyperbovine's reply. On reflection, however, I think your post raises a reasonable question. Firstly, whether it is innate, learned or some combination, all are equally valid here. In general, we cannot know if we are being deceived by our senses, and if you follow this line of argument to its end, you reach solipsism. With regard to the illusions of the sort presented in the linked article, they seem to fall into three types. There are the ones where we are immediately aware of being subject to an illusion; this is especially true in the cases where there is apparent motion. There are some where we do not notice unless we investigate further or have our attention brought to it, such as those involving apparent differences in brightness or color. Then there are those that actually depend on us noticing that there is an illusion - Necker cubes, for example. In real life, when faced with an ambiguous input from our senses, we are often aware the fact because of the dissonance with our general understanding of the world, and we are usually able to take actions specifically designed to resolve the ambiguity. In contrast, AI can be very confident about the most ridiculous conclusions. So we don't infallibly know when we are being tricked, but even in the cases where we are, further investigation often reveals that what is going on. In contrast, has any AI ever demonstrated any understanding of the concept of an illusion? The fact that we can sometimes be tricked by illusions for a while does not imply that AI has reached parity with humans in this regard, or that the fragility of image recognition is not an issue.