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As if humans haven't also hit the barrier of meaning? And yet we've still made unimaginable discoveries. I almost added the word "progress" but I guess that dep

As if humans haven't also hit the barrier of meaning? And yet we've still made unimaginable discoveries. I almost added the word "progress" but I guess that depends on what you find meaningful. The article states: "But ultimately, the goal of developing trustworthy A.I. will require a deeper investigation into our own remarkable abilities and new insights into the cognitive mechanisms we ourselves use to reliably and robustly understand the world." Why limit the field to the capacity of humans? What the author calls "remarkable abilities" and "robustly understand[ing] the world" can also be seen as just reproducing our own innate and learned collective human biases. Our theories from observation, and their unprecedented ability to predict future events, is more about describing the world vs understanding it. Is there any topic in the world that doesn't have contrary interpretations? What quantifiable metric would we even use to gauge artificial intelligence's grasp of "meaning"? We don't even have one for our own.

freeone3000 8y ago
This is not philosophy. This is "apples are smaller than watermelons", "objects must be contiguous to be the same object", "the thing that makes an elephant an elephant is the presence of several large key features (ears, nose, trunk, legs) and not its color". If machines are going to meaningfully process our data, they're going to have to agree with us on certain base facts of reality.
nathan_long 8y ago
> What the author calls "remarkable abilities" and "robustly understand[ing] the world" can also be seen as just reproducing our own innate and learned collective human biases. From the article: > “The bareheaded man needed a hat” is transcribed by my phone’s speech-recognition program as “The bear headed man needed a hat.” If A.I. is going to work with humans, then yes, reproducing some of our "biases", such as the tendency to describe someone as "bearheaded" far more often that "bear headed", is a good goal. In an alternative universe of chimeras, a different bias would be needed. But in any case, the A.I. needs to "understand" that one of these transcriptions is much more likely to be correct than the other. So a level of processing beyond "sounds like this word" is needed. Take the famous absurd quote++: "Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana." Reading the second sentence makes you, a human, double-take, and re-read the first sentence, and try reinterpreting it to see if it makes sense a different way. (The fact that it doesn't is what makes it funny.) An A.I. that has no "wait did that make sense?" step, no "is that funny?" step, is going to produce results that disappoint or confuse us humans who do. (++Interestingly, this quote seems to originate in A.I. research: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/04/time-flies-arrow/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/04/time-flies-arrow/)

freeone3000 8y ago

This is not philosophy. This is "apples are smaller than watermelons", "objects must be contiguous to be the same object", "the thing that makes an elephant an elephant is the presence of several large key features (ears, nose, trunk, legs) and not its color". If machines are going to meaningfully process our data, they're going to have to agree with us on certain base facts of reality.

nathan_long 8y ago

> What the author calls "remarkable abilities" and "robustly understand[ing] the world" can also be seen as just reproducing our own innate and learned collective human biases. From the article: > “The bareheaded man needed a hat” is transcribed by my phone’s speech-recognition program as “The bear headed man needed a hat.” If A.I. is going to work with humans, then yes, reproducing some of our "biases", such as the tendency to describe someone as "bearheaded" far more often that "bear headed", is a good goal. In an alternative universe of chimeras, a different bias would be needed. But in any case, the A.I. needs to "understand" that one of these transcriptions is much more likely to be correct than the other. So a level of processing beyond "sounds like this word" is needed. Take the famous absurd quote++: "Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana." Reading the second sentence makes you, a human, double-take, and re-read the first sentence, and try reinterpreting it to see if it makes sense a different way. (The fact that it doesn't is what makes it funny.) An A.I. that has no "wait did that make sense?" step, no "is that funny?" step, is going to produce results that disappoint or confuse us humans who do. (++Interestingly, this quote seems to originate in A.I. research: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/04/time-flies-arrow/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/04/time-flies-arrow/)