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Fuzzy Logic, Fuzzy Ethics

47 points by Futurebot 7y ago

skybrian 7y ago
This article gets history approximately wrong. Yes, Cyc failed at its original goals, but it's still going, kind of, and as far as I know was never intended for image recognition. Fuzzy logic isn't used much in science because probability and statistics are the more usual ways to handle uncertainty. Given its inaccuracy so far, I'm not sure the article is worth finishing?
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  It isn't - it is sophistic and sophomorophic press piece probably out for personal advancement. It attempts to scapegoat tech for not obeying their literally theoretically and practically impossible set of demands for "ethics". All while wrapped in the overwrought and vapidness of the worst of a stereotypical arrogant philisophy major speaking about what they know nothing about.
- dfrage 7y ago
  To quote Wikipedia it is: > attempting to assemble a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base that spans the basic concepts and "rules of thumb" about how the world works (think common sense knowledge but focusing more on things that rarely get written down or said, in contrast with facts one might find somewhere on the internet or retrieve via a search engine or Wikipedia), with the goal of enabling AI applications to perform human-like reasoning and be less "brittle" when confronted with novel situations that were not preconceived. As explained by Douglas Lenat in a talk in the 1980s, he said his AI efforts had reached a point where there was a mattress on the road blocking him, and he decided to do something about it. As the article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc) alludes to in passing, it started out as an effort to capture the information needed to understand all the entries in a 2 volume encyclopedia", "Cyc" itself is from encyclopedia. Image recognition? Well, I suppose once you identify an object, Cyc might be useful to reason about it, but....
whatshisface 7y ago
I remember reading about fuzzy logic in a discrete math book. It was exactly the same as basic probability theory. I think the article is overblowing it a little...
- protomyth 7y ago
  I'm really not sure about using fuzzy logic or fuzzy sets for AI, but I did use it for control and doing, of all things, some social stuff. It worked really well and was very simple and understandable. The article does seem to be a bit overblown and more concerned with the word "fuzzy" than what was in the fuzzy logic papers.
- HillRat 7y ago
  This article goes off the rails when it conflates fuzzy set theory with connectionism, and then goes over the cliff when it starts talking about ethics without reference to any of the underlying philosophical theories of ethical reasoning under risk and uncertainty — at least a nod to Nozick would have been appreciated. (The idea that probabilistic set theory somehow destroys ethical certainty is nonsense that doesn’t need to be addressed.) The author, I think, may be a bit out of his field; his PhD is coming out of UCLA’s college of library science, so he’s opining on technology and philosophy without coming out of either discipline.
- DonaldFisk 7y ago
  Not my recollection and I gave a lecture on it (in 1987): https://web.archive.org/web/20081202004655/http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/ai-course/lec02.txt https://web.archive.org/web/20081202004655/http://web.onetel... There are crisp sets, such as the set of French people. People are either French or not French. It doesn't make sense to say that someone's not very French, for example. But it does make sense to say that there's an 80% chance that someone's French, given other information about them. The set of tall people is a fuzzy set. It does make sense to say that someone's not very tall. Tallness is a mapping from height to degree of membership of the set of tall people. So, for example, tallness(1.6m) = 0.0, and tallness(2.0m) = 1.0. To find out whether someone's quite tall, you could use the square root of tallness,to find out whether someone's very tall, you could use the square, and to find out whether someone's not tall, you could subtract their tallness from 1.0. And you might want to put a value on whether someone's quite tall but not very rich, for example, or make deductions given this. Maybe at some deeper level fuzzy logic does reduce to probability theory, but the idea is quite different. It's about vagueness rather than about uncertainty.
DonaldFisk 7y ago
> Cyc still proved incapable of more demanding tasks, like digital image recognition, or more complex gameplay, like chess or Go. As Cyc wasn't designed to recognize objects in images, or play chess or go, it's hardly surprising that it proved incapable of those tasks.

47 points by Futurebot 7y ago

This article gets history approximately wrong. Yes, Cyc failed at its original goals, but it's still going, kind of, and as far as I know was never intended for image recognition. Fuzzy logic isn't used much in science because probability and statistics are the more usual ways to handle uncertainty. Given its inaccuracy so far, I'm not sure the article is worth finishing?

Nasrudith 7y ago
It isn't - it is sophistic and sophomorophic press piece probably out for personal advancement. It attempts to scapegoat tech for not obeying their literally theoretically and practically impossible set of demands for "ethics". All while wrapped in the overwrought and vapidness of the worst of a stereotypical arrogant philisophy major speaking about what they know nothing about.
dfrage 7y ago
To quote Wikipedia it is: > attempting to assemble a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base that spans the basic concepts and "rules of thumb" about how the world works (think common sense knowledge but focusing more on things that rarely get written down or said, in contrast with facts one might find somewhere on the internet or retrieve via a search engine or Wikipedia), with the goal of enabling AI applications to perform human-like reasoning and be less "brittle" when confronted with novel situations that were not preconceived. As explained by Douglas Lenat in a talk in the 1980s, he said his AI efforts had reached a point where there was a mattress on the road blocking him, and he decided to do something about it. As the article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc) alludes to in passing, it started out as an effort to capture the information needed to understand all the entries in a 2 volume encyclopedia", "Cyc" itself is from encyclopedia. Image recognition? Well, I suppose once you identify an object, Cyc might be useful to reason about it, but....

whatshisface 7y ago

I remember reading about fuzzy logic in a discrete math book. It was exactly the same as basic probability theory. I think the article is overblowing it a little...

protomyth 7y ago
I'm really not sure about using fuzzy logic or fuzzy sets for AI, but I did use it for control and doing, of all things, some social stuff. It worked really well and was very simple and understandable. The article does seem to be a bit overblown and more concerned with the word "fuzzy" than what was in the fuzzy logic papers.
HillRat 7y ago
This article goes off the rails when it conflates fuzzy set theory with connectionism, and then goes over the cliff when it starts talking about ethics without reference to any of the underlying philosophical theories of ethical reasoning under risk and uncertainty — at least a nod to Nozick would have been appreciated. (The idea that probabilistic set theory somehow destroys ethical certainty is nonsense that doesn’t need to be addressed.) The author, I think, may be a bit out of his field; his PhD is coming out of UCLA’s college of library science, so he’s opining on technology and philosophy without coming out of either discipline.
DonaldFisk 7y ago
Not my recollection and I gave a lecture on it (in 1987): https://web.archive.org/web/20081202004655/http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/ai-course/lec02.txt https://web.archive.org/web/20081202004655/http://web.onetel... There are crisp sets, such as the set of French people. People are either French or not French. It doesn't make sense to say that someone's not very French, for example. But it does make sense to say that there's an 80% chance that someone's French, given other information about them. The set of tall people is a fuzzy set. It does make sense to say that someone's not very tall. Tallness is a mapping from height to degree of membership of the set of tall people. So, for example, tallness(1.6m) = 0.0, and tallness(2.0m) = 1.0. To find out whether someone's quite tall, you could use the square root of tallness,to find out whether someone's very tall, you could use the square, and to find out whether someone's not tall, you could subtract their tallness from 1.0. And you might want to put a value on whether someone's quite tall but not very rich, for example, or make deductions given this. Maybe at some deeper level fuzzy logic does reduce to probability theory, but the idea is quite different. It's about vagueness rather than about uncertainty.

DonaldFisk 7y ago

> Cyc still proved incapable of more demanding tasks, like digital image recognition, or more complex gameplay, like chess or Go. As Cyc wasn't designed to recognize objects in images, or play chess or go, it's hardly surprising that it proved incapable of those tasks.