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The main problem with “AI revolution” today is that 95% of things that practitioners tell you it can do are just nowhere close to sufficient accuracy under the

The main problem with “AI revolution” today is that 95% of things that practitioners tell you it can do are just nowhere close to sufficient accuracy under the range of conditions they’d need to work in in the real world. Easily more than a half of them don’t even work at all outside a demo with hand picked examples. And nobody seems to care. This narrows down the scope of applicability to a tiny sliver where you can tolerate high error rates, and even there it’s a hard slog to get anything done, and AI is relegated to the role of the “cherry on top”, rather than baked into the pie. There are a few areas where performance is good enough to be practically useful. One of those (facial recognition and tracking) is currently causing a “revolution” in China. I’m just not sure it’s the kind of revolution we want.

8bitsrule 8y ago
It has to evolve, not revolve. Like cars did (and they're still -far- from perfect). Our remarkable bodies weren't designed by engineers, they survive now because, earlier, so many didn't. Are we smarter than evolution, because we like to think we are? Time will tell.
- throwaway84742 8y ago
  Cars (assuming you mean level 5 autonomous ones) are another one of those things which we won’t really be getting for at least 20 more years. 90% of the problem is solved, the remaining 10% are exponentially harder, so no one has a foggiest clue how to solve them, let alone solve economically enough to make the cars viable on the market.
  - ergothus 8y ago
    I grew up hearing "we will eventually get computers that can play chess, but go is exponentially more complicated." People wee talking a century. I don't know that cars will happen soon(5-10 years), but I wouldn't want to bet one way or the other past that. We don't need perfection, we just need to equal humans, and humans are actually pretty bad, we are just used to it.
    - throwaway84742 8y ago
      Humans are _amazing_ because they are able to correct the deficiencies of their perception with high level cognition augmented with memory of past experience. Machines can’t do cognition, and they can’t effectively use past experience either, to say nothing of doing a combination of those two things. Current “AI” is basically function approximation and nothing else. And humans do everything they do in a 20W power envelope.
      - finebalance 8y ago
        "they can’t effectively use past experience either" While I'm unsure whether the on board computer of your autonomous car will be able to leverage past experience, I thought it was a forgone conclusion that the telemetry from all the cars on the road will be used to iteratively improve the core model. Which would then be dispersed as an os upgrade, effectively teaching your individual unit from the past experience from all the units on the road so far.
        throwaway84742 8y ago
        But it’s not memory. Currently you just show your neural net a million examples of a thing and it derives a function which, given an example input, minimizes the output error. That’s it. It’s not like “last time I caught a ball in a similar situation I moved like this, so let me start with that and correct based on visuals, audio, proprioception, and cognition”, all within 20 milliseconds, before you even fully understand you’re about to catch a ball. That’s not to mention that you also maintain the illusion of a continuous and static visual field, without even noticing, in stereo.
        Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
        > last time I caught a ball in a similar situation I moved like this, so let me start with that and correct based on visuals, audio, proprioception, and cognition There are types of neural networks (and other algorithms) that work literally like that. Just because a simple deep perceptron does not work like that does not mean no network does. This one is just off the top of my head, it's quite recent but the memory part is based on old prior work. https://medium.com/applied-data-science/how-to-build-your-own-world-model-using-python-and-keras-64fb388ba459 https://medium.com/applied-data-science/how-to-build-your-ow... UPD: without even digging deep in the different types of networks, even AlphaGo(/Zero) works like that.
  - Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
    > no one has a foggiest clue how to solve them Would you care to cite any sources for that? Sounds like something a couch expert would say. Have you talked to every Waymo engineer?
    - throwaway84742 8y ago
      Testing autonomous cars in areas with inclement weather would be a good indicator of progress. So far no autonomous car can remain autonomous in heavy rain or moderate snow, and no car can predict if a kid standing on the sidewalk will dash in front of the car all of a sudden. Or if the thing being blown across the road is a plastic bag or something more substantial. Or where to drive if road markings have worn out or otherwise became invisible, or how to avoid a pothole, etc, etc. All that stuff which you do without thinking, all of it is unsolved. Wake me up when they’re testing L5 in Alaska in winter, using a car with no steering wheel. Then I might consider trusting my life to it.
      - Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
        So what you are saying, it takes time to perfect the technology? How is that the same as "no one has a foggiest clue how to do it"? There are many people with lots of clues.
        throwaway84742 8y ago
        No, what I’m saying is LIDAR doesn’t work when it snows, and lane localization doesn’t work when there’s sleet on the road.
  - sien 8y ago
    Waymo is going to have a service on the road in Arizona for the general public this year. Sure, it isn't cars in every environment without having seen the territory, but it is an incredibly useful product that can be extended into more cities as the technology improves. And plenty of cities around the world have similar conditions to what is being used in Arizona. Low speed, AI driven electric buses on limited routes are already all over the place too. Driverless trucks on certain runs is likely too within a decade.
    - shanghaiaway 8y ago
      Busses on predefined routes aren't AI.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > Are we smarter than evolution, because we like to think we are? Of course we are. We went from "natural state" to spaceflight in mere couple thousand years, of which the most meaningful were last 300. We design, build and test things on a scale that's orders of magnitude shorter than gene-driven biological evolution. Still, that doesn't mean everything gets perfected instantly, and we humans are quite an impatient bunch (no surprise here, given our short lifespans).
TwoBit 8y ago
I have this idea that the only way to create true AI necessarily results in something that has feelings.
- throwaway84742 8y ago
  I’d settle for probabilistic, context aware cognition, myself. Sadly (or thankfully, depending on one’s perspective) this won’t happen in my lifetime.
  - jon_richards 8y ago
    What do we want? Context aware language processing! When do we want it? When do we want what?
- Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
  Not sure about what your definition of "feelings" are, but if you are talking about the perceptual system parrallel to thoughts and images etc ("I feel sad in this situation", or "I feel that this person is happy" while talking about another person) - then it certainly sounds like such a system would be very helpful in making strong AI. Just from our own subjective experience we know that for certain situations, feelings are a much better match than for example visualization (even though both often go together, visuals activating feelings, feelings bringing up visual memories/scenarios) etc.
- taneq 8y ago
  You can think of feelings as a mode-selection heuristic - most of them have direct analogues in any sufficiently adaptable system. So it's a pretty safe bet that "real AI" will have "feelings" or some reasonable analogue thereof.
robotresearcher 8y ago
You seem to be ignoring the many, many AI applications that are already working with just fine accuracy in the real world. They are quietly working in the background where you don’t notice them.
- euske 8y ago
  Such as...? Please don't go BS like "Google is an AI app" etc. I'd expect an app where AI is the indispensable component. You can make a decent search engine/camera/phone/car/microwave without AI.
  - jon_richards 8y ago
    The problem is that the definition of AI keeps changing. It essentially means "Things computers can't do". A roomba would have been considered AI not long ago, but now its just a vacuum cleaner that moves around randomly for a while and then goes back to its charger. I'd imagine turn by turn directions would be considered AI if you go back far enough.
    - varjag 8y ago
      If we refer specifically to the AI hype of 2010s, the tech in question is convolutional neural networks. An argument is made it is oversold.
    - shanghaiaway 8y ago
      Whether a roomba is AI or not depends on what it actually does. Moving around randomly based on a computer program is not intelligence.
  - nopinsight 8y ago
    Image search and categorization require machine learning to work well. Similarly with recommendation engines, speech recognition, and machine translation (the last one still often not too well but much better than in the past).
  - make3 8y ago
mtgx 8y ago
All the more concerning that the Pentagon plans to have autonomous killing machines "ready" this year (hint: they won't actually be ready, but it's not like they'll tell us how many innocents they'll actually kill, especially with their very loose definitions of what a target is. They are yet to do that with the manual ones after all). https://thenextweb.com/syndication/2018/04/16/drones-will-soon-decide-kill/ https://thenextweb.com/syndication/2018/04/16/drones-will-so...
- throwaway84742 8y ago
  Killing is one of those scenarios where high error rate is no big deal, as long as there are no Americans on the ground. /s
  - shanghaiaway 8y ago
    But you have to be able to identify individuals as Americans or non-Americans or at least generate good excuses for why your system killed them.

8bitsrule 8y ago

It has to evolve, not revolve. Like cars did (and they're still -far- from perfect). Our remarkable bodies weren't designed by engineers, they survive now because, earlier, so many didn't. Are we smarter than evolution, because we like to think we are? Time will tell.

throwaway84742 8y ago
Cars (assuming you mean level 5 autonomous ones) are another one of those things which we won’t really be getting for at least 20 more years. 90% of the problem is solved, the remaining 10% are exponentially harder, so no one has a foggiest clue how to solve them, let alone solve economically enough to make the cars viable on the market.
- ergothus 8y ago
  I grew up hearing "we will eventually get computers that can play chess, but go is exponentially more complicated." People wee talking a century. I don't know that cars will happen soon(5-10 years), but I wouldn't want to bet one way or the other past that. We don't need perfection, we just need to equal humans, and humans are actually pretty bad, we are just used to it.
  - throwaway84742 8y ago
    Humans are _amazing_ because they are able to correct the deficiencies of their perception with high level cognition augmented with memory of past experience. Machines can’t do cognition, and they can’t effectively use past experience either, to say nothing of doing a combination of those two things. Current “AI” is basically function approximation and nothing else. And humans do everything they do in a 20W power envelope.
    - finebalance 8y ago
      "they can’t effectively use past experience either" While I'm unsure whether the on board computer of your autonomous car will be able to leverage past experience, I thought it was a forgone conclusion that the telemetry from all the cars on the road will be used to iteratively improve the core model. Which would then be dispersed as an os upgrade, effectively teaching your individual unit from the past experience from all the units on the road so far.
      - throwaway84742 8y ago
        But it’s not memory. Currently you just show your neural net a million examples of a thing and it derives a function which, given an example input, minimizes the output error. That’s it. It’s not like “last time I caught a ball in a similar situation I moved like this, so let me start with that and correct based on visuals, audio, proprioception, and cognition”, all within 20 milliseconds, before you even fully understand you’re about to catch a ball. That’s not to mention that you also maintain the illusion of a continuous and static visual field, without even noticing, in stereo.
        Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
        > last time I caught a ball in a similar situation I moved like this, so let me start with that and correct based on visuals, audio, proprioception, and cognition There are types of neural networks (and other algorithms) that work literally like that. Just because a simple deep perceptron does not work like that does not mean no network does. This one is just off the top of my head, it's quite recent but the memory part is based on old prior work. https://medium.com/applied-data-science/how-to-build-your-own-world-model-using-python-and-keras-64fb388ba459 https://medium.com/applied-data-science/how-to-build-your-ow... UPD: without even digging deep in the different types of networks, even AlphaGo(/Zero) works like that.
- Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
  > no one has a foggiest clue how to solve them Would you care to cite any sources for that? Sounds like something a couch expert would say. Have you talked to every Waymo engineer?
  - throwaway84742 8y ago
    Testing autonomous cars in areas with inclement weather would be a good indicator of progress. So far no autonomous car can remain autonomous in heavy rain or moderate snow, and no car can predict if a kid standing on the sidewalk will dash in front of the car all of a sudden. Or if the thing being blown across the road is a plastic bag or something more substantial. Or where to drive if road markings have worn out or otherwise became invisible, or how to avoid a pothole, etc, etc. All that stuff which you do without thinking, all of it is unsolved. Wake me up when they’re testing L5 in Alaska in winter, using a car with no steering wheel. Then I might consider trusting my life to it.
    - Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
      So what you are saying, it takes time to perfect the technology? How is that the same as "no one has a foggiest clue how to do it"? There are many people with lots of clues.
      - throwaway84742 8y ago
        No, what I’m saying is LIDAR doesn’t work when it snows, and lane localization doesn’t work when there’s sleet on the road.
- sien 8y ago
  Waymo is going to have a service on the road in Arizona for the general public this year. Sure, it isn't cars in every environment without having seen the territory, but it is an incredibly useful product that can be extended into more cities as the technology improves. And plenty of cities around the world have similar conditions to what is being used in Arizona. Low speed, AI driven electric buses on limited routes are already all over the place too. Driverless trucks on certain runs is likely too within a decade.
  - shanghaiaway 8y ago
    Busses on predefined routes aren't AI.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
> Are we smarter than evolution, because we like to think we are? Of course we are. We went from "natural state" to spaceflight in mere couple thousand years, of which the most meaningful were last 300. We design, build and test things on a scale that's orders of magnitude shorter than gene-driven biological evolution. Still, that doesn't mean everything gets perfected instantly, and we humans are quite an impatient bunch (no surprise here, given our short lifespans).

TwoBit 8y ago

I have this idea that the only way to create true AI necessarily results in something that has feelings.

throwaway84742 8y ago
I’d settle for probabilistic, context aware cognition, myself. Sadly (or thankfully, depending on one’s perspective) this won’t happen in my lifetime.
- jon_richards 8y ago
  What do we want? Context aware language processing! When do we want it? When do we want what?
Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
Not sure about what your definition of "feelings" are, but if you are talking about the perceptual system parrallel to thoughts and images etc ("I feel sad in this situation", or "I feel that this person is happy" while talking about another person) - then it certainly sounds like such a system would be very helpful in making strong AI. Just from our own subjective experience we know that for certain situations, feelings are a much better match than for example visualization (even though both often go together, visuals activating feelings, feelings bringing up visual memories/scenarios) etc.
taneq 8y ago
You can think of feelings as a mode-selection heuristic - most of them have direct analogues in any sufficiently adaptable system. So it's a pretty safe bet that "real AI" will have "feelings" or some reasonable analogue thereof.

robotresearcher 8y ago

You seem to be ignoring the many, many AI applications that are already working with just fine accuracy in the real world. They are quietly working in the background where you don’t notice them.

euske 8y ago
Such as...? Please don't go BS like "Google is an AI app" etc. I'd expect an app where AI is the indispensable component. You can make a decent search engine/camera/phone/car/microwave without AI.
- jon_richards 8y ago
  The problem is that the definition of AI keeps changing. It essentially means "Things computers can't do". A roomba would have been considered AI not long ago, but now its just a vacuum cleaner that moves around randomly for a while and then goes back to its charger. I'd imagine turn by turn directions would be considered AI if you go back far enough.
  - varjag 8y ago
    If we refer specifically to the AI hype of 2010s, the tech in question is convolutional neural networks. An argument is made it is oversold.
  - shanghaiaway 8y ago
    Whether a roomba is AI or not depends on what it actually does. Moving around randomly based on a computer program is not intelligence.
- nopinsight 8y ago
  Image search and categorization require machine learning to work well. Similarly with recommendation engines, speech recognition, and machine translation (the last one still often not too well but much better than in the past).
- make3 8y ago

mtgx 8y ago

All the more concerning that the Pentagon plans to have autonomous killing machines "ready" this year (hint: they won't actually be ready, but it's not like they'll tell us how many innocents they'll actually kill, especially with their very loose definitions of what a target is. They are yet to do that with the manual ones after all). https://thenextweb.com/syndication/2018/04/16/drones-will-soon-decide-kill/ https://thenextweb.com/syndication/2018/04/16/drones-will-so...

throwaway84742 8y ago
Killing is one of those scenarios where high error rate is no big deal, as long as there are no Americans on the ground. /s
- shanghaiaway 8y ago
  But you have to be able to identify individuals as Americans or non-Americans or at least generate good excuses for why your system killed them.