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> The technologists know it’s bullshit. Fed up with the fog that marketers have created, they’ve simply ditched A.I. and moved on to a new term called “artifici

> The technologists know it’s bullshit. Fed up with the fog that marketers have created, they’ve simply ditched A.I. and moved on to a new term called “artificial general intelligence.” Not to detract from an otherwise excellent BS takedown, but unfortunately the author fails to mention that there’s a non-zero possibility that AGI itself is merely taking the bullshit to the next level. It continues to astound me how some technologists actually believe AGI is not just inevitable but around the corner. When to my naive perspective (as a machine learning rank amateur but with several decades experience as a professional human being) all I see is machines that can do some form of pattern recognition, but nothing resembling the common sense that the words “general intelligence” seemed to indicate at one point. Minor quibbles about truth and meaning of words aside, I have to support any article that skewers the soft underbelly of the phony AI ecosystem as effectively as this one does.

povertyworld 7y ago
While it's true the AI hype is getting a bit overboard, couldn't one make the argument that humans, and to a lesser extent other animals, are just a collection responses to pattern recognition like when I see a thing that looks like this I should eat it, but when I see a thing that sounds like that I should run away? After all, what is common sense but "believe it when I see it" type thinking which is most certainly pattern intuition? The overhype part is that there are armies of lowly paid Mechanical Turk tier workers tagging all these data sets, so that these pattern recognition algorithms have something to train on.
- Thorentis 7y ago
  Sure, one could make that argument. But suggesting that we are close to creating a general intelligence on-par with humans is entirely unfounded. Even if we assume that the only thing differentiating humans from other forms of intelligence (including artificial neural networks) is more pattern to learn, then that still requires data sets millions if not billions the size of what we currently have. Plus, we know very little about the types of patterns we would need to train an AI on in order for them to reach the AGI level. I think it's safe to say that "artificial general intelligence" is just another iteration of the BS Industrial Complex.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - visarga 7y ago
    > a general intelligence on-par with humans Humans aren't general intelligences. We're good at things that make us survive, and that's about it. We're not good at 'general' problems, it takes us decades or hundreds of years of small steps and theories, and we may never find the answer. Most of us can't even grasp the fine nuances of math and physics, even after 12-16 years of education. Look at how hard it is for us to even imagine quantum and relativistic effects, or 5-dimensional geometry. Consider how long it took us to create germ theory of disease and how many of us died without raising to the challenge of understanding the cause. Look at what we believed about nature just 500 years ago. Humans without the larger system of culture, society, industry, lots of time and resources, can't do much. AI will inherit our tech, culture and scientific advances right from the start. There is a limit to how intelligent a system can become, and this limit is given by the complexity of the survival problem and the environment. You don't become smarter than the problems you have to deal with require. And environments don't evolve exponentially, so AI won't evolve exponentially fast either. Evolution is a series of sigmoids, not an exponential, and there can never be really exponential processes in nature, there's always an upper limit. I'd say it would be enough to have AI that can survive by itself and sustain us along with it, instead of AGI.
- mindgam3 7y ago
  > After all, what is common sense but "believe it when I see it" type thinking which is most certainly pattern intuition? I guess I would argue that common sense encompasses something outside of pure pattern intuition, which is the ability to synthesize not just solutions to a known problem/question but to figure out what question to ask in the first place, across a variety of situations include some that have never been seen previously. The overhype part isn’t just the Mechanical Turk later, although that’s part of it. It’s also the assumption that pattern recognition within any given domain can generalize to this meta-ability to essentially level jump outside previously established boundaries or “training data.”
  - zubspace 7y ago
    So at what point in a life of a human does general intelligence, or common sense, develop? Watching a baby do things feels like watching a robot trying to perform a task for the very first time. It seems like pattern matching overall with a very complex and fine grained sensory input system. Also some things are definitely preprogrammed and passed on from one generation to the next. There are many examples regarding animals, like small pigeons reacting to the shape of an eagle which they have never seen before. Now add a decade long learning phase and you get general intelligence? Or is it all just layers and layers of pattern matching, imitation and preprogrammed behavior? Could be the reason why humans are so bad at adressing some problems like climate change, plastic pollution or poverty. There is no clear pattern we can match, learned through individual sensory input, leading us to a solution.
    - zimpenfish 7y ago
      > Could be the reason why humans are so bad at adressing some problems like climate change, plastic pollution or poverty. I think that basically comes down to greed and ignorance. > There is no clear pattern we can match [...] leading us to a solution. Except, as best I know, both the problem and solution were recognised in the 80s but it wasn't in the companies' interests to torpedo their profits at the time. e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/sep/19/shell-and-exxons-secret-1980s-climate-change-warnings https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...
baybal2 7y ago
We have not yet invented "Artificial Intelligence," but are already making big leaps in "Artificial Ignorance"
roenxi 7y ago
The real issue we are facing is that everything that we thought was not going to be pattern matching and tree search has turned out to be pattern matching and tree search. I remember my father telling me computers were never going to be able to play Chess, because it required creativity for example. Nowadays a neural network with tree search plays chess that looks remarkably human. A lot of problem domains have fallen to what is basically pattern match and tree search. Extrapolating the trend of the last 30 years, there is evidence that computers will be able to solve every task a human can using pattern matching. If that isn't AGI, it might turn out to be better than intelligence. The technological future is unknowable, so believing AGI is certain is too much. But believing it certainly isn't around the corner is also too little. If computers can do anything a human can intellectually, they have reached AGI. The list of discrete tasks (games, decision making once the parameters are defined) a computer can't do is a very short list. If someone finds an objective function for deciding what decision parameters are important AGI could be upon us very quickly. As a postcript, I think people radically overestimate human intelligence.
- jbay808 7y ago
  I'd be interested in knowing what coungerarguments the people downvoting this comment might know of, which I apparently don't.
  - nineteen999 7y ago
    >> The list of discrete tasks (games, decision making once the parameters are defined) a computer can't do is a very short list. > I'd be interested in knowing what coungerarguments the people downvoting this comment might know of, which I apparently don't. I didn't downvote, but I will cite artistic endeavours. How long until a film crew of computers can shoot, edit and score a documentary or film that would be interesting to humans to watch? How long until they could develop an AAA computer game worth playing? How long until we could assemble an orchestra of computers that can interpret sheet music with feeling well enough to impress a human audience? I could go on and on finding other examples of human endeavours that computers/robots/AI will suck at for an extremely long time, if not forever. As we've seen recently, we are further from completely autonomous self driving cars than was hyped over the past few years. In my experience, programmers typically like to underestimate the breadth of human endeavour outside the domain of programming, particularly where the arts are concerned. And larger groups of humans working on larger artistic endeavours will take even longer to be displaced by AI, IMHO.
runciblespoon 7y ago
@mindgam3 .. “Minor quibbles about truth and meaning of words aside, I have to support any article that skewers the soft underbelly of the phony AI ecosystem as effectively as this one does.” I fully concur ..
thrwo434234 7y ago
> AGI itself is merely taking the bullshit to the next level. You sir are a heretic! Are you saying that transformers along with a gazillion GPU-years of compute, and tons of intern-descent at the hallowed halls of OpenAI, Google and Facebook, can't solve AGI ? You must be out of your mind!
jcelerier 7y ago
> all I see is machines that can do some form of pattern recognition what proof do we have that the brain isn't just doing that ?
blablabla123 7y ago
But also the whole concept of AI is so deeply fascinating and even frightening to people that maybe there is no other way than to buy into this. Once it happens, everybody wants to be a part of it ;)

povertyworld 7y ago

While it's true the AI hype is getting a bit overboard, couldn't one make the argument that humans, and to a lesser extent other animals, are just a collection responses to pattern recognition like when I see a thing that looks like this I should eat it, but when I see a thing that sounds like that I should run away? After all, what is common sense but "believe it when I see it" type thinking which is most certainly pattern intuition? The overhype part is that there are armies of lowly paid Mechanical Turk tier workers tagging all these data sets, so that these pattern recognition algorithms have something to train on.

Thorentis 7y ago
Sure, one could make that argument. But suggesting that we are close to creating a general intelligence on-par with humans is entirely unfounded. Even if we assume that the only thing differentiating humans from other forms of intelligence (including artificial neural networks) is more pattern to learn, then that still requires data sets millions if not billions the size of what we currently have. Plus, we know very little about the types of patterns we would need to train an AI on in order for them to reach the AGI level. I think it's safe to say that "artificial general intelligence" is just another iteration of the BS Industrial Complex.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- visarga 7y ago
  > a general intelligence on-par with humans Humans aren't general intelligences. We're good at things that make us survive, and that's about it. We're not good at 'general' problems, it takes us decades or hundreds of years of small steps and theories, and we may never find the answer. Most of us can't even grasp the fine nuances of math and physics, even after 12-16 years of education. Look at how hard it is for us to even imagine quantum and relativistic effects, or 5-dimensional geometry. Consider how long it took us to create germ theory of disease and how many of us died without raising to the challenge of understanding the cause. Look at what we believed about nature just 500 years ago. Humans without the larger system of culture, society, industry, lots of time and resources, can't do much. AI will inherit our tech, culture and scientific advances right from the start. There is a limit to how intelligent a system can become, and this limit is given by the complexity of the survival problem and the environment. You don't become smarter than the problems you have to deal with require. And environments don't evolve exponentially, so AI won't evolve exponentially fast either. Evolution is a series of sigmoids, not an exponential, and there can never be really exponential processes in nature, there's always an upper limit. I'd say it would be enough to have AI that can survive by itself and sustain us along with it, instead of AGI.
mindgam3 7y ago
> After all, what is common sense but "believe it when I see it" type thinking which is most certainly pattern intuition? I guess I would argue that common sense encompasses something outside of pure pattern intuition, which is the ability to synthesize not just solutions to a known problem/question but to figure out what question to ask in the first place, across a variety of situations include some that have never been seen previously. The overhype part isn’t just the Mechanical Turk later, although that’s part of it. It’s also the assumption that pattern recognition within any given domain can generalize to this meta-ability to essentially level jump outside previously established boundaries or “training data.”
- zubspace 7y ago
  So at what point in a life of a human does general intelligence, or common sense, develop? Watching a baby do things feels like watching a robot trying to perform a task for the very first time. It seems like pattern matching overall with a very complex and fine grained sensory input system. Also some things are definitely preprogrammed and passed on from one generation to the next. There are many examples regarding animals, like small pigeons reacting to the shape of an eagle which they have never seen before. Now add a decade long learning phase and you get general intelligence? Or is it all just layers and layers of pattern matching, imitation and preprogrammed behavior? Could be the reason why humans are so bad at adressing some problems like climate change, plastic pollution or poverty. There is no clear pattern we can match, learned through individual sensory input, leading us to a solution.
  - zimpenfish 7y ago
    > Could be the reason why humans are so bad at adressing some problems like climate change, plastic pollution or poverty. I think that basically comes down to greed and ignorance. > There is no clear pattern we can match [...] leading us to a solution. Except, as best I know, both the problem and solution were recognised in the 80s but it wasn't in the companies' interests to torpedo their profits at the time. e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/sep/19/shell-and-exxons-secret-1980s-climate-change-warnings https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...

baybal2 7y ago

We have not yet invented "Artificial Intelligence," but are already making big leaps in "Artificial Ignorance"

roenxi 7y ago

The real issue we are facing is that everything that we thought was not going to be pattern matching and tree search has turned out to be pattern matching and tree search. I remember my father telling me computers were never going to be able to play Chess, because it required creativity for example. Nowadays a neural network with tree search plays chess that looks remarkably human. A lot of problem domains have fallen to what is basically pattern match and tree search. Extrapolating the trend of the last 30 years, there is evidence that computers will be able to solve every task a human can using pattern matching. If that isn't AGI, it might turn out to be better than intelligence. The technological future is unknowable, so believing AGI is certain is too much. But believing it certainly isn't around the corner is also too little. If computers can do anything a human can intellectually, they have reached AGI. The list of discrete tasks (games, decision making once the parameters are defined) a computer can't do is a very short list. If someone finds an objective function for deciding what decision parameters are important AGI could be upon us very quickly. As a postcript, I think people radically overestimate human intelligence.

jbay808 7y ago
I'd be interested in knowing what coungerarguments the people downvoting this comment might know of, which I apparently don't.
- nineteen999 7y ago
  >> The list of discrete tasks (games, decision making once the parameters are defined) a computer can't do is a very short list. > I'd be interested in knowing what coungerarguments the people downvoting this comment might know of, which I apparently don't. I didn't downvote, but I will cite artistic endeavours. How long until a film crew of computers can shoot, edit and score a documentary or film that would be interesting to humans to watch? How long until they could develop an AAA computer game worth playing? How long until we could assemble an orchestra of computers that can interpret sheet music with feeling well enough to impress a human audience? I could go on and on finding other examples of human endeavours that computers/robots/AI will suck at for an extremely long time, if not forever. As we've seen recently, we are further from completely autonomous self driving cars than was hyped over the past few years. In my experience, programmers typically like to underestimate the breadth of human endeavour outside the domain of programming, particularly where the arts are concerned. And larger groups of humans working on larger artistic endeavours will take even longer to be displaced by AI, IMHO.

runciblespoon 7y ago

@mindgam3 .. “Minor quibbles about truth and meaning of words aside, I have to support any article that skewers the soft underbelly of the phony AI ecosystem as effectively as this one does.” I fully concur ..

thrwo434234 7y ago

> AGI itself is merely taking the bullshit to the next level. You sir are a heretic! Are you saying that transformers along with a gazillion GPU-years of compute, and tons of intern-descent at the hallowed halls of OpenAI, Google and Facebook, can't solve AGI ? You must be out of your mind!

jcelerier 7y ago

> all I see is machines that can do some form of pattern recognition what proof do we have that the brain isn't just doing that ?

blablabla123 7y ago

But also the whole concept of AI is so deeply fascinating and even frightening to people that maybe there is no other way than to buy into this. Once it happens, everybody wants to be a part of it ;)