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>> 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

>> 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.

pfisch 7y ago
> 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 think AIs making music will come long before AAA games and movies, both of which encompass music as an art and then throw in like another 5 artistic pursuits on top. I think AIs will be making music inside 10-20 years or less. Honestly I think it could happen in like 1-2 years if a company with lots of AI resources chose to focus on it.
- atoav 7y ago
  Note that the parent comment wrote interpret music not make it. I am a musician and there were already impressive algorithmic compositions in the 70s using Markov chains, and today we use machine learning to create something that resembles the works of J.S. Bach. But how is that creativity? Creativity means coming up with new and interesting things (and fair enough many musicians make quite uncreative decisions all the time). These statistcal improvisators can come up with some interesting combinations but they are completely unaware of them and don’t repeat it ever again. IMO we didn’t even solve composition, because it also requires a good feel for how humans react to a piece and how a given piece or instrument fits culturally and what emotions it envokes for what reasons. Interpretation is yet another thing, it means interacting with an audience in one way or another. To think we managed to solve composition by scrambling together some melodies from an input of thousand melodies and thinking we are done with the hardest part is hubris at it’s best.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Creativity and purposeful manipulation of human emotions are orthogonal concerns, even if often bundled together under the term "creativity" in context of arts. To disentangle them I propose a simple test: take these 'impressive algorithmic compositions that resemble the works of J.S. Bach' and play them to people, telling them they were composed by a gifted human. Then ask what they think of their creativity, and of emotions the author intended to communicate. That's creativity. As for purposeful manipulation of human emotions, this is harder and would require an AI with a theory of (human) mind, or some equivalent of that. Doesn't sound insurmountable though.
    - nineteen999 7y ago
      > Creativity and purposeful manipulation of human emotions are orthogonal concerns, even if often bundled together under the term "creativity" in context of arts. No, absolutely not, I disagree. If we know that a piece of music is generated by software algorithms, it instantly loses any real meaning. > To disentangle them I propose a simple test: take these 'impressive algorithmic compositions that resemble the works of J.S. Bach' and play them to people, telling them they were composed by a gifted human. Then ask what they think of their creativity, and of emotions the author intended to communicate. The problem here is you are lying to people in order to achieve an effect. Deception has been known to cause a significant backlash amongst music fans [1] There are enough music fans out there that will honestly want to know whether the music was created by a human or a computer program. If it ever becomes common place that procedurally generated music is misrepresented as the works of a human or group of humans, then there is a large segment of the population that will turn their noses up, and only listen to live music, where it is apparent that the music is performed by humans. The rest of the audience, meh, if they want to hear meaning in music composed by machines, that's their prerogative I suppose. Most people I know who actually play instruments or sing are appalled by the idea, or at best, slightly bemused. I will assert, those who have never stepped away from their computer keyboard long enough to have taken a deep breath, stood in front of a microphone, plucked an electric guitar at high volume or smashed drum skins with sticks in front of a live audience of 100 to 1000 cheering people may just be incapable of understanding this. The feeling in the air can be electric. Humans connecting with other humans through the creation and reception of music will never be correctly emulated or simulated through silicon, no matter how good the facsimile. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milli_Vanilli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milli_Vanilli
jbay808 7y ago
I think music will be the first of these milestones, and before long AI will be writing enjoyable compositions and pop chart hits. Next AI will write passable stories, and then decent ones, and then marketable novels with a coherent plot. AI assist tools will be able to help animators create scenes, backgrounds, and characters using just keywords descriptions. Then with the ability to write scripts will come the ability to create movies. It will take some editing to filter out the nonsense but we'll probably have AI film productions within 30 years. That's my guess, purely based on what's been demonstrated so far.
- arugulum 7y ago
  I actually think AI will never really make great "pop chart hits", for the mundane economic reason that once we figure out how to make good music with AI, it will be possible to absolutely flood the market with that genre of music, making it impossible for any potentially great hits to stand out. That said, I absolutely believe that AI-generated music can soon and will easily easily replace any sort of background or generic license-free music uses, where they simply need to be "good enough" rather than great.
ahartmetz 7y ago
I don't think that you need to limit creativity to the arts, which is unfair to machines because art really depends on human emotional quirks. That is even kind of the whole point of art. What about technical inventions? Can AI invent, let's say, the process to produce aluminum? Or planar semiconductors? Or a rocket engine? These are also creative works. (I do think that AGI soon claims are rubbish)
- nineteen999 7y ago
  Agree completely, just used art as its an easy example.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
> How long until we could assemble an orchestra of computers that can interpret sheet music with feeling well enough to impress a human audience? As others wrote, this will be the first to go. In fact, I believe current breed of NNs can do this already. Artistic creativity is a trivial problem compared to all others. All you have to do is inject a bit of randomness to the process and then not tell people that the work was done by a computer program. The "interpret sheet music with feeling" actually happens within the brain of the listener, who tries to connect the music and feelings it evokes in them to a vision of a human being who created that music. In other words, emotions are actually projected. The mechanism works somewhat well if the artist is a human with clear intent of creating emotional impact. But when the artist doesn't intend to create that impact, the audience will find one in there anyway. And so will they if the artist is actually a matrix multiplicator running on a stack of GPUs. The same phenomenon happens in writing[0], but writing (and similarly, painting) is harder, because the sentences have to have at least some semblance of sense[1]. In music, anything that's not just pure white noise can get accolades for creativity if you insist hard enough that it was composed by a gifted human. -- - [0] - Ever heard of the stories about people building these whole towers of interpretations of a literary work, and then when someone asks the author whether they meant any of that, it turns out the whole edifice is just a pile of bullshit, and the author really just wanted to write a story they liked? - [1] - But see https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/14/gwerns-ai-generated-poetry/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/14/gwerns-ai-generated-po..., in particular near the end of the post.
- jbay808 7y ago
  Yes exactly. You can even get a head start by training on award-winning performances by Izhak Perlman and such, comparing them to the sheet music. Then your NN will be able to read sheet music in the style of Perlman, the same way that GPT2 can write in the style of Tolkien. Kasparov remarked that Deep Blue seemed to make insightful moves in a way that wasn't machine-like, and he suspected it was human assisted. I don't know if he was right or wrong, but I'm sure today's chess software will feel at least as insightful as Deep Blue did to a chess grandmaster, especially if they think they're playing against a human.

pfisch 7y ago

> 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 think AIs making music will come long before AAA games and movies, both of which encompass music as an art and then throw in like another 5 artistic pursuits on top. I think AIs will be making music inside 10-20 years or less. Honestly I think it could happen in like 1-2 years if a company with lots of AI resources chose to focus on it.

atoav 7y ago
Note that the parent comment wrote interpret music not make it. I am a musician and there were already impressive algorithmic compositions in the 70s using Markov chains, and today we use machine learning to create something that resembles the works of J.S. Bach. But how is that creativity? Creativity means coming up with new and interesting things (and fair enough many musicians make quite uncreative decisions all the time). These statistcal improvisators can come up with some interesting combinations but they are completely unaware of them and don’t repeat it ever again. IMO we didn’t even solve composition, because it also requires a good feel for how humans react to a piece and how a given piece or instrument fits culturally and what emotions it envokes for what reasons. Interpretation is yet another thing, it means interacting with an audience in one way or another. To think we managed to solve composition by scrambling together some melodies from an input of thousand melodies and thinking we are done with the hardest part is hubris at it’s best.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Creativity and purposeful manipulation of human emotions are orthogonal concerns, even if often bundled together under the term "creativity" in context of arts. To disentangle them I propose a simple test: take these 'impressive algorithmic compositions that resemble the works of J.S. Bach' and play them to people, telling them they were composed by a gifted human. Then ask what they think of their creativity, and of emotions the author intended to communicate. That's creativity. As for purposeful manipulation of human emotions, this is harder and would require an AI with a theory of (human) mind, or some equivalent of that. Doesn't sound insurmountable though.
  - nineteen999 7y ago
    > Creativity and purposeful manipulation of human emotions are orthogonal concerns, even if often bundled together under the term "creativity" in context of arts. No, absolutely not, I disagree. If we know that a piece of music is generated by software algorithms, it instantly loses any real meaning. > To disentangle them I propose a simple test: take these 'impressive algorithmic compositions that resemble the works of J.S. Bach' and play them to people, telling them they were composed by a gifted human. Then ask what they think of their creativity, and of emotions the author intended to communicate. The problem here is you are lying to people in order to achieve an effect. Deception has been known to cause a significant backlash amongst music fans [1] There are enough music fans out there that will honestly want to know whether the music was created by a human or a computer program. If it ever becomes common place that procedurally generated music is misrepresented as the works of a human or group of humans, then there is a large segment of the population that will turn their noses up, and only listen to live music, where it is apparent that the music is performed by humans. The rest of the audience, meh, if they want to hear meaning in music composed by machines, that's their prerogative I suppose. Most people I know who actually play instruments or sing are appalled by the idea, or at best, slightly bemused. I will assert, those who have never stepped away from their computer keyboard long enough to have taken a deep breath, stood in front of a microphone, plucked an electric guitar at high volume or smashed drum skins with sticks in front of a live audience of 100 to 1000 cheering people may just be incapable of understanding this. The feeling in the air can be electric. Humans connecting with other humans through the creation and reception of music will never be correctly emulated or simulated through silicon, no matter how good the facsimile. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milli_Vanilli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milli_Vanilli

jbay808 7y ago

I think music will be the first of these milestones, and before long AI will be writing enjoyable compositions and pop chart hits. Next AI will write passable stories, and then decent ones, and then marketable novels with a coherent plot. AI assist tools will be able to help animators create scenes, backgrounds, and characters using just keywords descriptions. Then with the ability to write scripts will come the ability to create movies. It will take some editing to filter out the nonsense but we'll probably have AI film productions within 30 years. That's my guess, purely based on what's been demonstrated so far.

arugulum 7y ago
I actually think AI will never really make great "pop chart hits", for the mundane economic reason that once we figure out how to make good music with AI, it will be possible to absolutely flood the market with that genre of music, making it impossible for any potentially great hits to stand out. That said, I absolutely believe that AI-generated music can soon and will easily easily replace any sort of background or generic license-free music uses, where they simply need to be "good enough" rather than great.

ahartmetz 7y ago

I don't think that you need to limit creativity to the arts, which is unfair to machines because art really depends on human emotional quirks. That is even kind of the whole point of art. What about technical inventions? Can AI invent, let's say, the process to produce aluminum? Or planar semiconductors? Or a rocket engine? These are also creative works. (I do think that AGI soon claims are rubbish)

nineteen999 7y ago
Agree completely, just used art as its an easy example.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

> How long until we could assemble an orchestra of computers that can interpret sheet music with feeling well enough to impress a human audience? As others wrote, this will be the first to go. In fact, I believe current breed of NNs can do this already. Artistic creativity is a trivial problem compared to all others. All you have to do is inject a bit of randomness to the process and then not tell people that the work was done by a computer program. The "interpret sheet music with feeling" actually happens within the brain of the listener, who tries to connect the music and feelings it evokes in them to a vision of a human being who created that music. In other words, emotions are actually projected. The mechanism works somewhat well if the artist is a human with clear intent of creating emotional impact. But when the artist doesn't intend to create that impact, the audience will find one in there anyway. And so will they if the artist is actually a matrix multiplicator running on a stack of GPUs. The same phenomenon happens in writing[0], but writing (and similarly, painting) is harder, because the sentences have to have at least some semblance of sense[1]. In music, anything that's not just pure white noise can get accolades for creativity if you insist hard enough that it was composed by a gifted human. -- - [0] - Ever heard of the stories about people building these whole towers of interpretations of a literary work, and then when someone asks the author whether they meant any of that, it turns out the whole edifice is just a pile of bullshit, and the author really just wanted to write a story they liked? - [1] - But see https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/14/gwerns-ai-generated-poetry/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/14/gwerns-ai-generated-po..., in particular near the end of the post.

jbay808 7y ago
Yes exactly. You can even get a head start by training on award-winning performances by Izhak Perlman and such, comparing them to the sheet music. Then your NN will be able to read sheet music in the style of Perlman, the same way that GPT2 can write in the style of Tolkien. Kasparov remarked that Deep Blue seemed to make insightful moves in a way that wasn't machine-like, and he suspected it was human assisted. I don't know if he was right or wrong, but I'm sure today's chess software will feel at least as insightful as Deep Blue did to a chess grandmaster, especially if they think they're playing against a human.