8 ms·

What Would the Father of Cybernetics Think About A.I. Today?

32 points by benbreen 7y ago

jacques_chester 7y ago
> Finally, because of his emphasis on control, Wiener could not foresee a technological world in which innovation and self-organization bubble up from the bottom rather than being imposed from the top. I think this misunderstands the meaning of "control" in a control system / cybernetic sense, mistaking it for a more popular sense of the term. It's the difference between control-as-behaviour and control-as-power. The latter is strictly about humans, the former can include power structures but extends to any circular causality with at least one balancing loop. Cybernetics thinkers were well aware of emergence and multi-layered autonomy. Some of them made it a central concept (eg Stafford Beer).
- atoav 7y ago
  This was my first thought, even in his simpler examples Wiener doesn't use control in this colloquial connotation, but rather as a thing that helps to shape the whole system with its feedback cycles.
- cma 7y ago
  > Wiener could not foresee a technological world in which innovation and self-organization bubble up from the bottom rather than being imposed from the top. His book Cybernetics even has a whole chapter on random circuits being able to self-organize with some kind of learning algorithm for adjusting weights.
  - Bartweiss 7y ago
    It sort of makes you wonder what "self-organization from the bottom" is supposed to mean, if it's not some kind of control system. When entities specialize into particular roles in a system, there's a control relationship between them even without any central authority. The cybernetic definition of control which covers self-organization in technology is the same one which includes self-organization in cells, brain structures, and even social groups.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- mehh 7y ago
  It is weird how off that statement is, its practically the opposite of the philosophy of Cybernetics!
- Bartweiss 7y ago
  Ironically, the Soviet cyberneticists (Kantorovich and especially Glushkov) were decried as secretly capitalistic for not employing enough central control! They were still working on a planned economy, but their goal was to create a system where economic components could send signals to dictate their requirements upwards, essentially self-organizing necessary inputs. (The differences between that and capitalism being that a central administrator could set priorities, and the value of final goods wasn't to be determined by "what people are willing to pay" but "what's been allotted".) Any system that can adjust its behavior to circumstances involves 'control'. Really, anything that responds to stimuli at all has some control component. Confusing that with centralization or a lack of autonomy suggests that Lloyd is missing something pretty fundamental about the history of cybernetics.
carapace 7y ago
FWIW, the Chilean Project Cybersyn would have been fascinating, however it might have turned out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn > Project Cybersyn was a Chilean project from 1971–1973 during the presidency of Salvador Allende aimed at constructing a distributed decision support system to aid in the management of the national economy. > After the CIA-backed military coup on September 11, 1973, Cybersyn was abandoned and the operations room was destroyed.
- scottlocklin 7y ago
  You realize it was a Potemkin village, right? The screens were viewgraphs assembled by people, and the fancy looking knobs were basically a DC circuit that did neilsen reports style voting.
  - sgt101 7y ago
    They had no hope of making it work in 1973, but the idea points towards the potential of modern technology for economic control. The USSR couldn't work because the control loops just didn't exist - there were no sensor networks, just concocted figures, and it couldn't work because any control that they implemented worked over periods of months or years. By the time the central office decided what should be done, conditions had moved on so far as to make these decisions meaningless. This made open and free societies more efficient and effective than totalitarian states. Today, I think that the opposite may be true. That worries me.
    - scottlocklin 7y ago
      I think the capability and math (Kantorovich and of course Dantzig) was actually there in 1973, but Beer was a wanker and a mountebank, and Chile probably couldn't have afforded it anyway. Apparently the main use of computers there was more or less workers collectives using telex to "email" numbers to central.
      - mehh 7y ago
ZhuanXia 7y ago
Worth noting that this is no longer true: “The world’s best chess players are neither computers nor humans but humans working together with computers.”
- detaro 7y ago
  Interesting. Humans playing with the help of a strong chess engine are weaker than the chess engine itself? (=make more mistakes than right decisions when they leave the machine recommendation?)
  - dsteinman 7y ago
    Google's AlphaZero can beat all other previous chess engines, and learned chess on it's own and invented strategies that were never conceived of before: https://deepmind.com/blog/article/alphazero-shedding-new-light-grand-games-chess-shogi-and-go https://deepmind.com/blog/article/alphazero-shedding-new-lig...
ausbah 7y ago
I feel like the comparisons this article uses between current AI systems and humans on the front of learning to induce skepticism on the overall ability of AI is a bit misleading. Current systems may suck at learning like humans (on most fronts), but unlike the human mind there is reason to believe we can and will improve AI to overcome this shortcoming.
scottlocklin 7y ago
>Wiener could not foresee a technological world in which innovation and self-organization bubble up from the bottom rather than being imposed from the top. Holy shit this author is unutterably clueless. Wiener in fact wrote a whole book more or less on how innovation and self organization bubble up from the bottom. It was called "Invention: The Care and Feeding of Ideas." > Wiener saw the world in a deeply pessimistic light. Gee, a Jewish guy in 1950 was pessimistic and worried about totalitarianism. I wonder where he might have acquired this attitude? Maybe, you know, all them people recently killed in WW-2 might have spooked the man? I used to respect Seth Lloyd ... until he published the ridiculous "on the computational capacity of the universe." Google informs me he also takes money from child molesting gangsters, which sounds about right. Dude should stop grubbing money from pedophiles and read a book.
- orbifold 7y ago
  You basically have to listen to any lecture he gives to understand that he has at least a drastically overinflated ego. Compare that to lectures by people like Witten or any other world-class theoretical physicist / mathematician. The vast majority of them are extremely humble. Seth Loyd and people like Mark Tegmark are the kind of guys that thrive in the current academic environment, flashy ideas with some substance pushed into prestigious journals is a winning strategy.
- nnq 7y ago
  > the ridiculous "on the computational capacity of the universe." I'm really interested to know more about the critic of this paper. Please detail or share some links. (Note: not part of of the academic field, and I really don't care at all about the politics and characters involved, but I am interested a lot in the concepts in the paper)
thewarrior 7y ago
I wonder if a second go at central planning in the future using networks, machine learning and smartphones+ sensors could end up performing much better than similar attempts in the past. One of the chief critiques of central planning has been its inability to adapt to constantly changing conditions and its lack of information about individual preferences. Amazon is already a centrally planned algorithmic system for delivering goods to people. Data collection is used to personalize someone’s experience in a way that wasn’t possible before. The feedback loops are extremely quick in terms of the ability to do constant A/B tests. Perhaps USSR 2.0 might have its own amazon app for citizens that would collect preferences for what they want in real time and automatically feed it all through the economy. While also allowing to correct for certain things which the market might not be able to so easily as for eg medicine for poor people is more important than fidget spinners. You might also be able to experiment with different algorithms to see which of them lead to more growth and productivity. After a few years you might have enough data to do predictive analytics to improve things ahead of time. It would never take off because of its totalitarian implications but we might get to witness a real world test of this idea in China in the coming years. Life in China is already quite convenient in ways not possible in the west.
- jacques_chester 7y ago
  Amazon is solving a teeny, tiny sliver of the total problem. The total structure of production is incalculably vaster than the consumer end market. Summarising a complex history, the USSR did have folks who argued for a cybernetic approach to production planning, but it was never tried. An entertaining semi-fictionalised account is Red Plenty. A drastically less entertaining but more scholarly read is Newspeak to Cyberspeak.
  - thewarrior 7y ago
    Yeah but the didnt have the tech of today right ?
  - cr0sh 7y ago
    > Summarising a complex history, the USSR did have folks who argued for a cybernetic approach to production planning, but it was never tried. Not in the USSR - but there was an attempt elsewhere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
ismail 7y ago
“These broader applications of cybernetics were an almost unequivocal failure.“ This is incorrect. There are no “cybernetics” department at universities, nor people with this title or role. However the concepts and ideas from cybernetics have infiltrated and influenced most areas of science. If you trace the ideas you will find them, you will recognize the DNA. The ideas from cybernetics + information theory was a paradigm shift in science at the time. I would say the cybernetic ideas were a victim of its own success. It became subsumed into many other disciplines by other names. It is like a snake eating its own tail. See the Ouroboros symbol [0] . “Finally, because of his emphasis on control” Here he is assuming control means too-down with a naive view of control. Control here could be replaced with regulation, direction, steering, facilitation. I would define control as the mechanism that allows a system to achieve it's purpose in an efficient and effective way. This definition says nothing about top-down. In actual fact there is a concept within cybernetics of "self-regulation" or "internal control". This means that control must be exhibited from within the system and not from an external party. "Wiener could not foresee a technological world in which innovation and self-organization bubble up from the bottom rather than being imposed from the top." Within the field of there is a ton of material on self-organization. This was one of the topics that was specifically investigated and written about at length. In particular how do you design for "self-organization"? Staford Beer and the organizational cybernetician were specifically focused on maximizing freedom, by balancing of both bottom up, and top-down feedback loops. While Weiner did give the field the name i would hesitate in calling him the "father" of the field. Alot of the ideas were developed in collaboration with others, particularly at the Macy conferences [1]. The ideas have a long history and cybernetics has been heavily influenced by Ashby, Beer, Shannon, Maturana, Van Forester etc. Cybernetics itself born out of the tradition of operational research and systems engineering. [0] https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Serpiente_alquimica.jpg# https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Serpiente_alquimic... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macy_conferences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macy_conferences
- mehh 7y ago
  There are Cybernetics departments, where people get degrees in Cybernetics!
RocketSyntax 7y ago
Reading 'Dream Machine' now! (1) Automatons need be able to create new AI models on the fly. (2) The UI was created to increase speed of interaction between human brain and machine. Need the neural lace.
dsteinman 7y ago
I think the author massively underestimates how ahead of his time Weiner was and how relevant cybernetics is right now and how important it will become. I've been studying and working on cybernetics for a while now and have become a true believer in classic cybernetics as a way forward to develop better/smarter networked apps and especially for things like speech recognition and smart homes. I've been developing a startup project building a cybernetic control system in JavaScript that makes extensive use of feedback loops that get dynamically spawned between devices and services and it is truly marvelous to see the full system in action. I'm getting capabilities out of the system that I didn't even foresee being able to do, like being able to write fully voice-controlled chess game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faOfKd1eAQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faOfKd1eAQA That was just a fun side-project too. With a true cybernetic control layer running between the speech recognition system and the things you want to control building apps like this becomes relatively straight-forward, perhaps not easy but a lot easier than it would be without one. I am quite busy in a rewrite of the whole system, not a whole lot of documentation yet: https://github.com/jaxcore/jaxcore https://github.com/jaxcore/jaxcore I'll be rewriting the speech recognition system as well and integrating it better into the new version, I wrote a bit of a writeup here about how Mozilla's DeepSpeech can be hooked into the web: https://github.com/jaxcore/jaxcore-listen https://github.com/jaxcore/jaxcore-listen And there's hardware aspect of the project as well, I created a new cybernetic control dial that gets hooked into the Jaxcore to control all sorts of things like stereo equipment, wireless speakers, and can control pretty much anything in a super elegant way.
- classified 7y ago
  Wiener
xvilka 7y ago
It's impossible to create AGI until we understand the human intelligence completely. At least to know its parameters, to be able to make AI stronger. So far we are nowhere close. Probably, 100 years required to reach that level of understanding.
- nnq 7y ago
  We suck at estimating in general. In tech we suck bigtime! Whether it takes 50 or 500 years, the point is that we'll totally missestimate it and when it does finally happen it will totally take us by surprise... and likely we'll do something very very stupid in response to being surprised by it.
- glial 7y ago
  I'm not sure this is necessarily true. At a smaller scale, we didn't need to understand how humans play chess in order to build a good chess AI. I do think we need a better understanding of what we mean when we talk about intelligence, if we expect to recreate it. Francois Chollet has a good recent paper about this [1]. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547 https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547
tomaszs 7y ago
AI? This is not AI. HE would say
mehh 7y ago
Why is it that now AI is a hot topic all these physicist and other scientist are suddenly all chipping in with their opinions like they have substantive opinions about the subject? Sure they understand maths, but there is a lot more to the subject than that, get off our bandwagon!
LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
Article mentions many others besides Norbert Wiener but omits [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Stafford_Beer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Stafford_Beer and his [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viable_System_Model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viable_System_Model Not sure why (not)?
- Bartweiss 7y ago
  It looks like this is an excerpt from Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI, which explains why past Wiener the focus is entirely on artificial intelligence researchers and commentators: first McCulloch and Pitts, then von Neumann, then Minsky and Simon, Kurzweil, and finally Hawking and Musk. It's an odd line to take, though, since artificial intelligence has never been the sole or even central focus of cybernetics. There was a relatively explicit split in 1956 at the Dartmouth workshop, but the piece follows the AI thread from there on with no real acknowledgement that there was any other path in effect. Beer and Forrester began their cybernetics-related work around 1960, and so the article seems to drop them entirely as no longer interesting. This is convenient for the overall thesis: Lloyd works on the limits of computation and Moore's Law, so he structured this article as "Wiener underestimated advances in raw computing power, but now that's dying down and so he's especially relevant". But the offhand references to Wiener's relevance to unemployment, human-computer interfacing, environmental disasters, and warfare are cheapened by the speculative "what would Wiener think?" tone. His work has actively shaped the current state of economic planning, environmental modelling, and military strategy, so it doesn't make much sense to read him like an outside commentator on those topics.

32 points by benbreen 7y ago

> Finally, because of his emphasis on control, Wiener could not foresee a technological world in which innovation and self-organization bubble up from the bottom rather than being imposed from the top. I think this misunderstands the meaning of "control" in a control system / cybernetic sense, mistaking it for a more popular sense of the term. It's the difference between control-as-behaviour and control-as-power. The latter is strictly about humans, the former can include power structures but extends to any circular causality with at least one balancing loop. Cybernetics thinkers were well aware of emergence and multi-layered autonomy. Some of them made it a central concept (eg Stafford Beer).

atoav 7y ago
This was my first thought, even in his simpler examples Wiener doesn't use control in this colloquial connotation, but rather as a thing that helps to shape the whole system with its feedback cycles.
cma 7y ago
> Wiener could not foresee a technological world in which innovation and self-organization bubble up from the bottom rather than being imposed from the top. His book Cybernetics even has a whole chapter on random circuits being able to self-organize with some kind of learning algorithm for adjusting weights.
- Bartweiss 7y ago
  It sort of makes you wonder what "self-organization from the bottom" is supposed to mean, if it's not some kind of control system. When entities specialize into particular roles in a system, there's a control relationship between them even without any central authority. The cybernetic definition of control which covers self-organization in technology is the same one which includes self-organization in cells, brain structures, and even social groups.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mehh 7y ago
It is weird how off that statement is, its practically the opposite of the philosophy of Cybernetics!
Bartweiss 7y ago
Ironically, the Soviet cyberneticists (Kantorovich and especially Glushkov) were decried as secretly capitalistic for not employing enough central control! They were still working on a planned economy, but their goal was to create a system where economic components could send signals to dictate their requirements upwards, essentially self-organizing necessary inputs. (The differences between that and capitalism being that a central administrator could set priorities, and the value of final goods wasn't to be determined by "what people are willing to pay" but "what's been allotted".) Any system that can adjust its behavior to circumstances involves 'control'. Really, anything that responds to stimuli at all has some control component. Confusing that with centralization or a lack of autonomy suggests that Lloyd is missing something pretty fundamental about the history of cybernetics.

carapace 7y ago

FWIW, the Chilean Project Cybersyn would have been fascinating, however it might have turned out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn > Project Cybersyn was a Chilean project from 1971–1973 during the presidency of Salvador Allende aimed at constructing a distributed decision support system to aid in the management of the national economy. > After the CIA-backed military coup on September 11, 1973, Cybersyn was abandoned and the operations room was destroyed.

scottlocklin 7y ago
You realize it was a Potemkin village, right? The screens were viewgraphs assembled by people, and the fancy looking knobs were basically a DC circuit that did neilsen reports style voting.
- sgt101 7y ago
  They had no hope of making it work in 1973, but the idea points towards the potential of modern technology for economic control. The USSR couldn't work because the control loops just didn't exist - there were no sensor networks, just concocted figures, and it couldn't work because any control that they implemented worked over periods of months or years. By the time the central office decided what should be done, conditions had moved on so far as to make these decisions meaningless. This made open and free societies more efficient and effective than totalitarian states. Today, I think that the opposite may be true. That worries me.
  - scottlocklin 7y ago
    I think the capability and math (Kantorovich and of course Dantzig) was actually there in 1973, but Beer was a wanker and a mountebank, and Chile probably couldn't have afforded it anyway. Apparently the main use of computers there was more or less workers collectives using telex to "email" numbers to central.
    - mehh 7y ago

ZhuanXia 7y ago

Worth noting that this is no longer true: “The world’s best chess players are neither computers nor humans but humans working together with computers.”

detaro 7y ago
Interesting. Humans playing with the help of a strong chess engine are weaker than the chess engine itself? (=make more mistakes than right decisions when they leave the machine recommendation?)
- dsteinman 7y ago
  Google's AlphaZero can beat all other previous chess engines, and learned chess on it's own and invented strategies that were never conceived of before: https://deepmind.com/blog/article/alphazero-shedding-new-light-grand-games-chess-shogi-and-go https://deepmind.com/blog/article/alphazero-shedding-new-lig...

ausbah 7y ago

I feel like the comparisons this article uses between current AI systems and humans on the front of learning to induce skepticism on the overall ability of AI is a bit misleading. Current systems may suck at learning like humans (on most fronts), but unlike the human mind there is reason to believe we can and will improve AI to overcome this shortcoming.

scottlocklin 7y ago

>Wiener could not foresee a technological world in which innovation and self-organization bubble up from the bottom rather than being imposed from the top. Holy shit this author is unutterably clueless. Wiener in fact wrote a whole book more or less on how innovation and self organization bubble up from the bottom. It was called "Invention: The Care and Feeding of Ideas." > Wiener saw the world in a deeply pessimistic light. Gee, a Jewish guy in 1950 was pessimistic and worried about totalitarianism. I wonder where he might have acquired this attitude? Maybe, you know, all them people recently killed in WW-2 might have spooked the man? I used to respect Seth Lloyd ... until he published the ridiculous "on the computational capacity of the universe." Google informs me he also takes money from child molesting gangsters, which sounds about right. Dude should stop grubbing money from pedophiles and read a book.

orbifold 7y ago
You basically have to listen to any lecture he gives to understand that he has at least a drastically overinflated ego. Compare that to lectures by people like Witten or any other world-class theoretical physicist / mathematician. The vast majority of them are extremely humble. Seth Loyd and people like Mark Tegmark are the kind of guys that thrive in the current academic environment, flashy ideas with some substance pushed into prestigious journals is a winning strategy.
nnq 7y ago
> the ridiculous "on the computational capacity of the universe." I'm really interested to know more about the critic of this paper. Please detail or share some links. (Note: not part of of the academic field, and I really don't care at all about the politics and characters involved, but I am interested a lot in the concepts in the paper)

thewarrior 7y ago

I wonder if a second go at central planning in the future using networks, machine learning and smartphones+ sensors could end up performing much better than similar attempts in the past. One of the chief critiques of central planning has been its inability to adapt to constantly changing conditions and its lack of information about individual preferences. Amazon is already a centrally planned algorithmic system for delivering goods to people. Data collection is used to personalize someone’s experience in a way that wasn’t possible before. The feedback loops are extremely quick in terms of the ability to do constant A/B tests. Perhaps USSR 2.0 might have its own amazon app for citizens that would collect preferences for what they want in real time and automatically feed it all through the economy. While also allowing to correct for certain things which the market might not be able to so easily as for eg medicine for poor people is more important than fidget spinners. You might also be able to experiment with different algorithms to see which of them lead to more growth and productivity. After a few years you might have enough data to do predictive analytics to improve things ahead of time. It would never take off because of its totalitarian implications but we might get to witness a real world test of this idea in China in the coming years. Life in China is already quite convenient in ways not possible in the west.

jacques_chester 7y ago
Amazon is solving a teeny, tiny sliver of the total problem. The total structure of production is incalculably vaster than the consumer end market. Summarising a complex history, the USSR did have folks who argued for a cybernetic approach to production planning, but it was never tried. An entertaining semi-fictionalised account is Red Plenty. A drastically less entertaining but more scholarly read is Newspeak to Cyberspeak.
- thewarrior 7y ago
  Yeah but the didnt have the tech of today right ?
- cr0sh 7y ago
  > Summarising a complex history, the USSR did have folks who argued for a cybernetic approach to production planning, but it was never tried. Not in the USSR - but there was an attempt elsewhere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn

ismail 7y ago

“These broader applications of cybernetics were an almost unequivocal failure.“ This is incorrect. There are no “cybernetics” department at universities, nor people with this title or role. However the concepts and ideas from cybernetics have infiltrated and influenced most areas of science. If you trace the ideas you will find them, you will recognize the DNA. The ideas from cybernetics + information theory was a paradigm shift in science at the time. I would say the cybernetic ideas were a victim of its own success. It became subsumed into many other disciplines by other names. It is like a snake eating its own tail. See the Ouroboros symbol [0] . “Finally, because of his emphasis on control” Here he is assuming control means too-down with a naive view of control. Control here could be replaced with regulation, direction, steering, facilitation. I would define control as the mechanism that allows a system to achieve it's purpose in an efficient and effective way. This definition says nothing about top-down. In actual fact there is a concept within cybernetics of "self-regulation" or "internal control". This means that control must be exhibited from within the system and not from an external party. "Wiener could not foresee a technological world in which innovation and self-organization bubble up from the bottom rather than being imposed from the top." Within the field of there is a ton of material on self-organization. This was one of the topics that was specifically investigated and written about at length. In particular how do you design for "self-organization"? Staford Beer and the organizational cybernetician were specifically focused on maximizing freedom, by balancing of both bottom up, and top-down feedback loops. While Weiner did give the field the name i would hesitate in calling him the "father" of the field. Alot of the ideas were developed in collaboration with others, particularly at the Macy conferences [1]. The ideas have a long history and cybernetics has been heavily influenced by Ashby, Beer, Shannon, Maturana, Van Forester etc. Cybernetics itself born out of the tradition of operational research and systems engineering. [0] https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Serpiente_alquimica.jpg# https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Serpiente_alquimic... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macy_conferences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macy_conferences

mehh 7y ago
There are Cybernetics departments, where people get degrees in Cybernetics!

RocketSyntax 7y ago

Reading 'Dream Machine' now! (1) Automatons need be able to create new AI models on the fly. (2) The UI was created to increase speed of interaction between human brain and machine. Need the neural lace.

dsteinman 7y ago

I think the author massively underestimates how ahead of his time Weiner was and how relevant cybernetics is right now and how important it will become. I've been studying and working on cybernetics for a while now and have become a true believer in classic cybernetics as a way forward to develop better/smarter networked apps and especially for things like speech recognition and smart homes. I've been developing a startup project building a cybernetic control system in JavaScript that makes extensive use of feedback loops that get dynamically spawned between devices and services and it is truly marvelous to see the full system in action. I'm getting capabilities out of the system that I didn't even foresee being able to do, like being able to write fully voice-controlled chess game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faOfKd1eAQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faOfKd1eAQA That was just a fun side-project too. With a true cybernetic control layer running between the speech recognition system and the things you want to control building apps like this becomes relatively straight-forward, perhaps not easy but a lot easier than it would be without one. I am quite busy in a rewrite of the whole system, not a whole lot of documentation yet: https://github.com/jaxcore/jaxcore https://github.com/jaxcore/jaxcore I'll be rewriting the speech recognition system as well and integrating it better into the new version, I wrote a bit of a writeup here about how Mozilla's DeepSpeech can be hooked into the web: https://github.com/jaxcore/jaxcore-listen https://github.com/jaxcore/jaxcore-listen And there's hardware aspect of the project as well, I created a new cybernetic control dial that gets hooked into the Jaxcore to control all sorts of things like stereo equipment, wireless speakers, and can control pretty much anything in a super elegant way.

classified 7y ago
Wiener

xvilka 7y ago

It's impossible to create AGI until we understand the human intelligence completely. At least to know its parameters, to be able to make AI stronger. So far we are nowhere close. Probably, 100 years required to reach that level of understanding.

nnq 7y ago
We suck at estimating in general. In tech we suck bigtime! Whether it takes 50 or 500 years, the point is that we'll totally missestimate it and when it does finally happen it will totally take us by surprise... and likely we'll do something very very stupid in response to being surprised by it.
glial 7y ago
I'm not sure this is necessarily true. At a smaller scale, we didn't need to understand how humans play chess in order to build a good chess AI. I do think we need a better understanding of what we mean when we talk about intelligence, if we expect to recreate it. Francois Chollet has a good recent paper about this [1]. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547 https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547

tomaszs 7y ago

AI? This is not AI. HE would say

mehh 7y ago

Why is it that now AI is a hot topic all these physicist and other scientist are suddenly all chipping in with their opinions like they have substantive opinions about the subject? Sure they understand maths, but there is a lot more to the subject than that, get off our bandwagon!

LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago

Article mentions many others besides Norbert Wiener but omits [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Stafford_Beer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Stafford_Beer and his [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viable_System_Model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viable_System_Model Not sure why (not)?

Bartweiss 7y ago
It looks like this is an excerpt from Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI, which explains why past Wiener the focus is entirely on artificial intelligence researchers and commentators: first McCulloch and Pitts, then von Neumann, then Minsky and Simon, Kurzweil, and finally Hawking and Musk. It's an odd line to take, though, since artificial intelligence has never been the sole or even central focus of cybernetics. There was a relatively explicit split in 1956 at the Dartmouth workshop, but the piece follows the AI thread from there on with no real acknowledgement that there was any other path in effect. Beer and Forrester began their cybernetics-related work around 1960, and so the article seems to drop them entirely as no longer interesting. This is convenient for the overall thesis: Lloyd works on the limits of computation and Moore's Law, so he structured this article as "Wiener underestimated advances in raw computing power, but now that's dying down and so he's especially relevant". But the offhand references to Wiener's relevance to unemployment, human-computer interfacing, environmental disasters, and warfare are cheapened by the speculative "what would Wiener think?" tone. His work has actively shaped the current state of economic planning, environmental modelling, and military strategy, so it doesn't make much sense to read him like an outside commentator on those topics.