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The Seven Deadly Sins of AI Predictions

155 points by bglusman 9y ago

DonbunEf7 9y ago
"Could Newton begin to explain how this small device did all that? Although he invented calculus and explained both optics and gravity, he was never able to sort out chemistry from alchemy. So I think he would be flummoxed, and unable to come up with even the barest coherent outline of what this device was. It would be no different to him from an embodiment of the occult—something that was of great interest to him. It would be indistinguishable from magic. And remember, Newton was a really smart dude." This paragraph sounds like modernist self-back-patting, to be honest. Several things: * Newton lived at the same time as Boyle, the man often considered to be the founder of scientific chemistry. Newton and Boyle both contributed to the scientific method, and while Newton may have been an alchemist, at the time, the very concept of pseudoscience was still being worked out. Newton's alchemical formulae are not useless; we've replicated "The Net" [0], one of his recipes. The idea that one must "sort out chemistry from alchemy" betrays a total unawareness of the history of chemistry. * The concept that technology and magic are different was not yet invented in the time of Newton. Newton's research was in natural philosophy [1], the field which predates modern science. He was interested in how the world works, and unlike today, he did not have a roadmap showing how the different fields of study interrelate. Asimov's saying only makes sense in the context of modern science, wherein we (think that we) have enough of an understanding of the world to be able to claim that any magic which we do not understand is merely technology which we have not yet discovered. It's a pretty bold claim, and may be right, but it is based in a (literally) non-Newtonian worldview. * Compare and contrast Newton with a modern 5-year-old. How much science do you think that the child needs in order to comprehend a phone? (Ask any parent for the answer.) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Net_(substance) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Net_(substance) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_philosophy
- ryanackley 9y ago
  He was using the Newton time-travel story as a device to make a point. The point is that people making extrapolations on the ability of AI is based on an amazement with the what is possible now without any real understanding of how AI actually works.
- goatlover 9y ago
  The point of the Newton time travel story was that Newton would have been so amazed at the iPhone's capabilities, that he might have imagined it doing things that it cannot do, such as transmute lead into gold. Newton would have failed to understand the limitations of smart phones. Similarly, when we imagine future AI, we are failing to understand what it's limitations might be. And thus you get notions of god-like superhuman AIs.
moxious 9y ago
As someone who has been into AI since the mid-90s, I continue to be deeply disappointed with the overall rate of progress, this includes with all of the machine-learning and stats based recasting of what's meant by AI. The big fundamental problems are all the same, and we don't appear to have much progress on them. We have figured out very clever ways of teaching extremely useful new tricks to computers. I don't mean to denigrate the value of that work, it just resembles regular programming, but by different means. Whatever your definition of intelligence, there's little to no generalizability of what's happening right now.
- markan 9y ago
  Totally agree with you. You might be interested in basicai.org. We're trying to address those big fundamental problems you reference.
- indubitable 9y ago
  A lot here depends on how you view generalization. Consider the Atari playing AI developed by Deepmind. It reached superhuman capability on a variety of different games given no domain specific knowledge. It had access to just the visual information and its score. It's natural to claim that's not generalizing since it's in such a specific domain as well as the fact that it had access to its score. But I think you have to consider that life itself starts in the exact same way. We're little more than a vast number of evolutions starting from very simple organisms who's only purpose was to seek out sustenance. They had an extremely simplified domain with limited input thanks to fewer senses. And they also received a score. They were 'informed' of their sustenance and if it fell below a certain level, that was game over which they were also informed of --- at least in some manner of speaking. I think the ultimate issue is that it's rather disappointing how unexciting it all is. And so we constantly shift the goal posts. Going back not that many decades ago it was believed that a computer being able to defeat humans at chess would signal genuine intelligence. Of course we managed to achieve that, but the matter of how it was done being so unexciting and uninteresting led us to shift the goal posts. The achievements we're regularly producing now a days dwarf anything those speaking of chess=intelligence times could have even imagined. Nonetheless we still now go, "Nah.. that's not REAL intelligence either." But I think we will, up to the day we do genuinely create generalized intelligence argue that it's not 'REAL' intelligence. And I imagine we'll be arguing that's not 'REAL' intelligence even afterwards. Because it won't be magical, or exciting. I don't think there's ever going to be a "we've truly done it" moment. It's just going to be clever ways of teaching increasingly sophisticated tricks leading up to the point that a creation becomes more effective at most of any task, including assimilating and producing new knowledge and expertise, than we are.
gharien 9y ago
Based on this essay, I don't think the author could accurately summarize the concerns AI researchers actually have. Some of his arguments are irresponsibly lazy. Take the bicentennial straw man, where he accuses researchers of a lack of imagination, and then demonstrates an inability to imagine any of the potential problems while making one long argument from ignorance.
- ryanackley 9y ago
  I'm curious, is there a good article or source that contains an accurate summarization of concerns that bona fide AI researchers have?
  - evanlivingston 9y ago
    I think it is a mistake to only focus on the concerns of the researchers and scientists. If you use the atom bomb as an example, the concerns a sociology professor or philosopher had for the bomb might be different than then concerns of a nuclear physcicst, but both were worth paying attention to.
    - ryanackley 9y ago
      The atom bomb was a giant explosion made for killing people. The logical extrapolation is bigger explosions and more death. Doesn't take a lot of smarts to see that. The current state of AI is some clever algorithms to solve very specific problems. What is being extrapolated from that is everyone losing their job and/or being enslaved by computers. This is the point the author is trying to make. It's basically a form of hysteria.
  - kryptiskt 9y ago
    Rodney Brooks is a bona fide AI researcher.
  - yazr 9y ago
    Try Superintelligence - Nick Bostrom (very enjoyable - with a new original thought on every page) OR Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm (more difficult to read)
yters 9y ago
Doesn't Chaitin's incompleteness theorem mean AI cannot learn? All axiomatic systems have a fairly low threshold past which they cannot identify random bitstrings, and all computational systems are axiomatic systems.
- unlikelymordant 9y ago
  If true, wouldn't that imply humans can't learn?
  - majewsky 9y ago
    There is always the possibility that the human mind is more than the collective behavior of a bunch of neurons. It is conceivable that part of the human mind occupies some sort of astral plane like many people believe. I'm not saying that it is. Science does not concern themselves with such theories (yet) because of Alder's Razor ("what cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating") [1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Alder https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Alder
    - yters 9y ago
      If AI cannot learn and humans can, then this is experimental confirmation that humans are not AI, and the matter is settled. Therefore, the issue is worth debating. I submit that AI cannot learn, per my previous comment. Furthermore, I submit that humans can learn, evidence being school, science and math. Ergo, humans are not AI. Matter settled, debate over.
      - majewsky 9y ago
        Not at all. 1. Current AI is a miniscule subset of the set of all AI, so you need to argue why the observation generalizes to all possible AI. 2. The statement "AI cannot learn" is too ambiguous because you fail to define "learn".
        yters 9y ago
Ngunyan 9y ago
What Rodney Brooks has written is a confirmation of what I think the current AI state of technology is in, watching from the sidelines. Its grounded and a realist assessment.
edanm 9y ago
An interesting article, but I think it misses the mark on two things. Firstly, it minimizes the concerns people have over jobs being lost because AI isn't around the corner. While a valid point of view, even if many jobs will be lost only in 30-40 years and not in 10-20, isn't it something worth thinking about? Secondly, in terms of the AI safety movement, I think he doesn't really address the core problems that people raise. From the article: "[ai safety pundits] ignore the fact that if we are able to eventually build such smart devices, the world will have changed significantly by then. We will not suddenly be surprised by the existence of such super-intelligences. They will evolve technologically over time, and our world will come to be populated by many other intelligences, and we will have lots of experience already." I think this ignores two arguments: 1. While his scenario is certainly plausible, the "AI takeoff" scenario, in which an AI becomes super-intelligent via recursive self improvement, is also at least a possibility. This means it's worth thinking about, because it negates the "safety" of other tech advances helping. 2. Either way, one big concern of the AI safety crowd is that we just don't know how much time it will take to "solve" AI safety. Given unlimited computing power now, we would have no way of making the AI have the same goals as us, because we have no idea how to program a safe AI. This is something that might take 10 more years of work in laying down mathematical foundations, or might take 100 years. Nobody knows! That's why it's important to get this right. The argument from the article is "let's now worry, because tech will advance enough by the time we have intelligent AIs". Well, maybe, but how does that tech advance happen? By people being worried about this problem and working on it! It's not magic. You can't just assume that the problem will solve itself.
- daveguy 9y ago
  > Given unlimited computing power now, we would have no way of making the AI have the same goals as us, because we have no idea how to program a safe AI. And a counterpoint: Given unlimited computing power now, we would have no way of making the AI, because we have no idea how to program a general AI. There are algorithms for global optimization, but those optimization problems are given a specific goal to optimize. We don't even know what "goals" to put in to make a general intelligence. "Assuming unlimited computing power" is a good thought experiment because it lays bare the fact that we wouldn't have a clue how to create an AI even if we had unlimited computing and we can take a closer look at what we are missing even in that case. Worrying about killer robots is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars (-Ng). I agree that job replacement is a concern in the next 10 years, but that is completely different than "making our goals align". The "making our goals align" concern is just as distant as killer robots or overpopulation on Mars. You say, "you can't just assume the problem will solve itself." To which I say, What Problem? A theoretical problem in your thoughts is not a problem that needs to be solved.
b1daly 9y ago
The article, and comments, led me to muse along a line of thought I hadn’t considered before. An observation, perhaps criticism, of machine learning systems that can be trained to do pattern recognition tasks, is that such a system has no self awareness. It lacks even a notion of semantic understanding of the task it is engaged in. The “meaning” of the task, if there is one, is completely abstracted away. Such an AI, presumably, has no self consciousness at all, from which it might be able to bootstrap the meaning of the task, through analyzing contextual data. (Why am I doing this? Do I have to do it? Is there another entity who demands my labor? What year is it? Etc...? This led me to an epiphany, of sorts, that what we think of as “true intelligence” might require “self consciousness.” I have a tendency to think of self consciousness as being this sort of weird emergent phenomena, very fascinating to those of us who possess it, but not a fundamental component of “intelligence.” Maybe consciousness, on a practical, mechanistic level, is a critical component of all the sophisticated information processing our brains do. It sounds sort of obvious, but that’s the nature of epiphany:)
- daveguy 9y ago
  Self consciousness is almost certainly required for intelligence. So much so that one way to categorize animal intelligence is whether or not they pass a "dot test". When seeing a dot on themselves in a mirror they recognize that the dot is, in fact, on themselves and try to see / clean it on themselves. Until there is a decent demonstration of generalization to the point of self-awareness runaway AI will be an "overpopulation on Mars" problem. Even when awareness is demonstrated in an algorithm the algorithm will not be able to solve NP problems in P time. EDIT: ok, it is extremely unlikely they will be able to solve NP problems in P time. If they privately demonstrate P=NP then we are screwed. However, we are going to have all manner of dense, but self-aware programs before we get a CS super genius. We will make the first C3PO level intelligence well before we have super-intelligence, and we haven't even made anything close to that yet.
kbutler 9y ago
I've always liked Clarke's statement: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." But I realized a while ago that this condenses semantically to just, "The thing is probably possible".

155 points by bglusman 9y ago

"Could Newton begin to explain how this small device did all that? Although he invented calculus and explained both optics and gravity, he was never able to sort out chemistry from alchemy. So I think he would be flummoxed, and unable to come up with even the barest coherent outline of what this device was. It would be no different to him from an embodiment of the occult—something that was of great interest to him. It would be indistinguishable from magic. And remember, Newton was a really smart dude." This paragraph sounds like modernist self-back-patting, to be honest. Several things: * Newton lived at the same time as Boyle, the man often considered to be the founder of scientific chemistry. Newton and Boyle both contributed to the scientific method, and while Newton may have been an alchemist, at the time, the very concept of pseudoscience was still being worked out. Newton's alchemical formulae are not useless; we've replicated "The Net" [0], one of his recipes. The idea that one must "sort out chemistry from alchemy" betrays a total unawareness of the history of chemistry. * The concept that technology and magic are different was not yet invented in the time of Newton. Newton's research was in natural philosophy [1], the field which predates modern science. He was interested in how the world works, and unlike today, he did not have a roadmap showing how the different fields of study interrelate. Asimov's saying only makes sense in the context of modern science, wherein we (think that we) have enough of an understanding of the world to be able to claim that any magic which we do not understand is merely technology which we have not yet discovered. It's a pretty bold claim, and may be right, but it is based in a (literally) non-Newtonian worldview. * Compare and contrast Newton with a modern 5-year-old. How much science do you think that the child needs in order to comprehend a phone? (Ask any parent for the answer.) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Net_(substance) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Net_(substance) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_philosophy

ryanackley 9y ago
He was using the Newton time-travel story as a device to make a point. The point is that people making extrapolations on the ability of AI is based on an amazement with the what is possible now without any real understanding of how AI actually works.
goatlover 9y ago
The point of the Newton time travel story was that Newton would have been so amazed at the iPhone's capabilities, that he might have imagined it doing things that it cannot do, such as transmute lead into gold. Newton would have failed to understand the limitations of smart phones. Similarly, when we imagine future AI, we are failing to understand what it's limitations might be. And thus you get notions of god-like superhuman AIs.

moxious 9y ago

As someone who has been into AI since the mid-90s, I continue to be deeply disappointed with the overall rate of progress, this includes with all of the machine-learning and stats based recasting of what's meant by AI. The big fundamental problems are all the same, and we don't appear to have much progress on them. We have figured out very clever ways of teaching extremely useful new tricks to computers. I don't mean to denigrate the value of that work, it just resembles regular programming, but by different means. Whatever your definition of intelligence, there's little to no generalizability of what's happening right now.

markan 9y ago
Totally agree with you. You might be interested in basicai.org. We're trying to address those big fundamental problems you reference.
indubitable 9y ago
A lot here depends on how you view generalization. Consider the Atari playing AI developed by Deepmind. It reached superhuman capability on a variety of different games given no domain specific knowledge. It had access to just the visual information and its score. It's natural to claim that's not generalizing since it's in such a specific domain as well as the fact that it had access to its score. But I think you have to consider that life itself starts in the exact same way. We're little more than a vast number of evolutions starting from very simple organisms who's only purpose was to seek out sustenance. They had an extremely simplified domain with limited input thanks to fewer senses. And they also received a score. They were 'informed' of their sustenance and if it fell below a certain level, that was game over which they were also informed of --- at least in some manner of speaking. I think the ultimate issue is that it's rather disappointing how unexciting it all is. And so we constantly shift the goal posts. Going back not that many decades ago it was believed that a computer being able to defeat humans at chess would signal genuine intelligence. Of course we managed to achieve that, but the matter of how it was done being so unexciting and uninteresting led us to shift the goal posts. The achievements we're regularly producing now a days dwarf anything those speaking of chess=intelligence times could have even imagined. Nonetheless we still now go, "Nah.. that's not REAL intelligence either." But I think we will, up to the day we do genuinely create generalized intelligence argue that it's not 'REAL' intelligence. And I imagine we'll be arguing that's not 'REAL' intelligence even afterwards. Because it won't be magical, or exciting. I don't think there's ever going to be a "we've truly done it" moment. It's just going to be clever ways of teaching increasingly sophisticated tricks leading up to the point that a creation becomes more effective at most of any task, including assimilating and producing new knowledge and expertise, than we are.

gharien 9y ago

Based on this essay, I don't think the author could accurately summarize the concerns AI researchers actually have. Some of his arguments are irresponsibly lazy. Take the bicentennial straw man, where he accuses researchers of a lack of imagination, and then demonstrates an inability to imagine any of the potential problems while making one long argument from ignorance.

ryanackley 9y ago
I'm curious, is there a good article or source that contains an accurate summarization of concerns that bona fide AI researchers have?
- evanlivingston 9y ago
  I think it is a mistake to only focus on the concerns of the researchers and scientists. If you use the atom bomb as an example, the concerns a sociology professor or philosopher had for the bomb might be different than then concerns of a nuclear physcicst, but both were worth paying attention to.
  - ryanackley 9y ago
    The atom bomb was a giant explosion made for killing people. The logical extrapolation is bigger explosions and more death. Doesn't take a lot of smarts to see that. The current state of AI is some clever algorithms to solve very specific problems. What is being extrapolated from that is everyone losing their job and/or being enslaved by computers. This is the point the author is trying to make. It's basically a form of hysteria.
- kryptiskt 9y ago
  Rodney Brooks is a bona fide AI researcher.
- yazr 9y ago
  Try Superintelligence - Nick Bostrom (very enjoyable - with a new original thought on every page) OR Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm (more difficult to read)

yters 9y ago

Doesn't Chaitin's incompleteness theorem mean AI cannot learn? All axiomatic systems have a fairly low threshold past which they cannot identify random bitstrings, and all computational systems are axiomatic systems.

unlikelymordant 9y ago
If true, wouldn't that imply humans can't learn?
- majewsky 9y ago
  There is always the possibility that the human mind is more than the collective behavior of a bunch of neurons. It is conceivable that part of the human mind occupies some sort of astral plane like many people believe. I'm not saying that it is. Science does not concern themselves with such theories (yet) because of Alder's Razor ("what cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating") [1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Alder https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Alder
  - yters 9y ago
    If AI cannot learn and humans can, then this is experimental confirmation that humans are not AI, and the matter is settled. Therefore, the issue is worth debating. I submit that AI cannot learn, per my previous comment. Furthermore, I submit that humans can learn, evidence being school, science and math. Ergo, humans are not AI. Matter settled, debate over.
    - majewsky 9y ago
      Not at all. 1. Current AI is a miniscule subset of the set of all AI, so you need to argue why the observation generalizes to all possible AI. 2. The statement "AI cannot learn" is too ambiguous because you fail to define "learn".
      - yters 9y ago

Ngunyan 9y ago

What Rodney Brooks has written is a confirmation of what I think the current AI state of technology is in, watching from the sidelines. Its grounded and a realist assessment.

edanm 9y ago

An interesting article, but I think it misses the mark on two things. Firstly, it minimizes the concerns people have over jobs being lost because AI isn't around the corner. While a valid point of view, even if many jobs will be lost only in 30-40 years and not in 10-20, isn't it something worth thinking about? Secondly, in terms of the AI safety movement, I think he doesn't really address the core problems that people raise. From the article: "[ai safety pundits] ignore the fact that if we are able to eventually build such smart devices, the world will have changed significantly by then. We will not suddenly be surprised by the existence of such super-intelligences. They will evolve technologically over time, and our world will come to be populated by many other intelligences, and we will have lots of experience already." I think this ignores two arguments: 1. While his scenario is certainly plausible, the "AI takeoff" scenario, in which an AI becomes super-intelligent via recursive self improvement, is also at least a possibility. This means it's worth thinking about, because it negates the "safety" of other tech advances helping. 2. Either way, one big concern of the AI safety crowd is that we just don't know how much time it will take to "solve" AI safety. Given unlimited computing power now, we would have no way of making the AI have the same goals as us, because we have no idea how to program a safe AI. This is something that might take 10 more years of work in laying down mathematical foundations, or might take 100 years. Nobody knows! That's why it's important to get this right. The argument from the article is "let's now worry, because tech will advance enough by the time we have intelligent AIs". Well, maybe, but how does that tech advance happen? By people being worried about this problem and working on it! It's not magic. You can't just assume that the problem will solve itself.

daveguy 9y ago
> Given unlimited computing power now, we would have no way of making the AI have the same goals as us, because we have no idea how to program a safe AI. And a counterpoint: Given unlimited computing power now, we would have no way of making the AI, because we have no idea how to program a general AI. There are algorithms for global optimization, but those optimization problems are given a specific goal to optimize. We don't even know what "goals" to put in to make a general intelligence. "Assuming unlimited computing power" is a good thought experiment because it lays bare the fact that we wouldn't have a clue how to create an AI even if we had unlimited computing and we can take a closer look at what we are missing even in that case. Worrying about killer robots is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars (-Ng). I agree that job replacement is a concern in the next 10 years, but that is completely different than "making our goals align". The "making our goals align" concern is just as distant as killer robots or overpopulation on Mars. You say, "you can't just assume the problem will solve itself." To which I say, What Problem? A theoretical problem in your thoughts is not a problem that needs to be solved.

b1daly 9y ago

The article, and comments, led me to muse along a line of thought I hadn’t considered before. An observation, perhaps criticism, of machine learning systems that can be trained to do pattern recognition tasks, is that such a system has no self awareness. It lacks even a notion of semantic understanding of the task it is engaged in. The “meaning” of the task, if there is one, is completely abstracted away. Such an AI, presumably, has no self consciousness at all, from which it might be able to bootstrap the meaning of the task, through analyzing contextual data. (Why am I doing this? Do I have to do it? Is there another entity who demands my labor? What year is it? Etc...? This led me to an epiphany, of sorts, that what we think of as “true intelligence” might require “self consciousness.” I have a tendency to think of self consciousness as being this sort of weird emergent phenomena, very fascinating to those of us who possess it, but not a fundamental component of “intelligence.” Maybe consciousness, on a practical, mechanistic level, is a critical component of all the sophisticated information processing our brains do. It sounds sort of obvious, but that’s the nature of epiphany:)

daveguy 9y ago
Self consciousness is almost certainly required for intelligence. So much so that one way to categorize animal intelligence is whether or not they pass a "dot test". When seeing a dot on themselves in a mirror they recognize that the dot is, in fact, on themselves and try to see / clean it on themselves. Until there is a decent demonstration of generalization to the point of self-awareness runaway AI will be an "overpopulation on Mars" problem. Even when awareness is demonstrated in an algorithm the algorithm will not be able to solve NP problems in P time. EDIT: ok, it is extremely unlikely they will be able to solve NP problems in P time. If they privately demonstrate P=NP then we are screwed. However, we are going to have all manner of dense, but self-aware programs before we get a CS super genius. We will make the first C3PO level intelligence well before we have super-intelligence, and we haven't even made anything close to that yet.

kbutler 9y ago

I've always liked Clarke's statement: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." But I realized a while ago that this condenses semantically to just, "The thing is probably possible".