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What would be an example of substantial progress/major breakthrough in AI?

by p1esk 9y ago

pron 9y ago
In terms of practice, I would say a program that displays the learning and reasoning abilities of some advanced invertebrates (say wasps or spiders). But we don't know how far away from AI that would put us. Once we achieve that, are we 5 years away from human-level intelligence or 50? We simply do not know. In terms of theory, a breakthrough would be a better understanding of what intelligence is on one hand, and how "unorganized systems", to use Turing's terminology, evolve sophisticated algorithms. At some stage, Turing believed that as a precursor to intelligence, we should study simpler biological phenomena, and turned to so-called "artificial life". There hasn't been too much progress on that front, as well, but the work done by Stuart Kauffman [1] since the late sixties seems like moving in the right direction, albeit very slowly. Don't get me wrong: I'm not an AI skeptic. I believe that we will achieve it one day. I just think it is very irresponsible for machine learning researchers to hint we're getting close, when, in fact, they have no idea whether we are or we aren't. To be more specific, we don't know whether deep learning, i.e. deep neural networks trained through a variant of backpropagation is the approach that would one day lead us to AI. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Kauffman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Kauffman
- p1esk 9y ago
  Thanks. Do you follow Numenta's work? They published several papers recently (e.g. [1]) [1] https://numenta.com/papers/a-theory-of-how-columns-in-the-neocortex-enable-learning-the-structure-of-the-world/ https://numenta.com/papers/a-theory-of-how-columns-in-the-ne...
  - pron 9y ago
    I find it very hard to judge papers by Numenta, because they make it very hard to separate science from marketing; their entire marketing moto is "we're better because we're more like the actual brain" (their HTM networks), rather than "because we perform drastically better". So claims to better biological accuracy (a controversial direction since the birth of AI) are pretty much their raison d'etre. So they say they're writing about theory in this paper, but I see mostly observations, so it's theory more in the sense of a hypothesis rather than what is meant by "theory" in math or physics. But I am really not qualified to judge this paper's importance.
    - p1esk 9y ago
      they make it very hard to separate science from marketing Isn't this true for pretty much any science done ever? It only becomes a problem when marketing is good, and science is not. so it's theory more in the sense of a hypothesis rather than what is meant by "theory" in math or physics Again, isn't it true for pretty much any neuroscience research? How would you judge a neuroscience paper importance? Also, going back to your earlier answer: what would convince you that a program displays the learning and reasoning abilities of some advanced invertebrates?
      - pron 9y ago
        > Isn't this true for pretty much any science done ever? Maybe, but when it comes to a commercial entity I'm more suspicious. > How would you judge a neuroscience paper importance? I wouldn't; I'd let a neuroscientist judge. It's just that I believe most of us would hear of a major breakthrough in neuroscience. > what would convince you that a program displays the learning and reasoning abilities of some advanced invertebrates? It's hard to say precisely (largely because we don't know what intelligence is, let alone have a good quantitative measure for it), but if you read about insect behavior it's very clear that we're nowhere near that (just as it's clear people are more intelligent than spiders even though there are probably mental tasks that spiders can perform better/faster than humans). So ask me again when the question becomes harder to answer :)

What would be an example of substantial progress/major breakthrough in AI?

by p1esk 9y ago

What would be an example of substantial progress/major breakthrough in AI?

pron 9y ago

In terms of practice, I would say a program that displays the learning and reasoning abilities of some advanced invertebrates (say wasps or spiders). But we don't know how far away from AI that would put us. Once we achieve that, are we 5 years away from human-level intelligence or 50? We simply do not know. In terms of theory, a breakthrough would be a better understanding of what intelligence is on one hand, and how "unorganized systems", to use Turing's terminology, evolve sophisticated algorithms. At some stage, Turing believed that as a precursor to intelligence, we should study simpler biological phenomena, and turned to so-called "artificial life". There hasn't been too much progress on that front, as well, but the work done by Stuart Kauffman [1] since the late sixties seems like moving in the right direction, albeit very slowly. Don't get me wrong: I'm not an AI skeptic. I believe that we will achieve it one day. I just think it is very irresponsible for machine learning researchers to hint we're getting close, when, in fact, they have no idea whether we are or we aren't. To be more specific, we don't know whether deep learning, i.e. deep neural networks trained through a variant of backpropagation is the approach that would one day lead us to AI. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Kauffman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Kauffman

p1esk 9y ago
Thanks. Do you follow Numenta's work? They published several papers recently (e.g. [1]) [1] https://numenta.com/papers/a-theory-of-how-columns-in-the-neocortex-enable-learning-the-structure-of-the-world/ https://numenta.com/papers/a-theory-of-how-columns-in-the-ne...
- pron 9y ago
  I find it very hard to judge papers by Numenta, because they make it very hard to separate science from marketing; their entire marketing moto is "we're better because we're more like the actual brain" (their HTM networks), rather than "because we perform drastically better". So claims to better biological accuracy (a controversial direction since the birth of AI) are pretty much their raison d'etre. So they say they're writing about theory in this paper, but I see mostly observations, so it's theory more in the sense of a hypothesis rather than what is meant by "theory" in math or physics. But I am really not qualified to judge this paper's importance.
  - p1esk 9y ago
    they make it very hard to separate science from marketing Isn't this true for pretty much any science done ever? It only becomes a problem when marketing is good, and science is not. so it's theory more in the sense of a hypothesis rather than what is meant by "theory" in math or physics Again, isn't it true for pretty much any neuroscience research? How would you judge a neuroscience paper importance? Also, going back to your earlier answer: what would convince you that a program displays the learning and reasoning abilities of some advanced invertebrates?
    - pron 9y ago
      > Isn't this true for pretty much any science done ever? Maybe, but when it comes to a commercial entity I'm more suspicious. > How would you judge a neuroscience paper importance? I wouldn't; I'd let a neuroscientist judge. It's just that I believe most of us would hear of a major breakthrough in neuroscience. > what would convince you that a program displays the learning and reasoning abilities of some advanced invertebrates? It's hard to say precisely (largely because we don't know what intelligence is, let alone have a good quantitative measure for it), but if you read about insect behavior it's very clear that we're nowhere near that (just as it's clear people are more intelligent than spiders even though there are probably mental tasks that spiders can perform better/faster than humans). So ask me again when the question becomes harder to answer :)