6 ms·

This is a perfect example of the 'AI effect' in action: >"It's part of the history of the field of artificial intelligence that every time somebody figured out

This is a perfect example of the 'AI effect' in action: >"It's part of the history of the field of artificial intelligence that every time somebody figured out how to make a computer do something—play good checkers, solve simple but relatively informal problems—there was a chorus of critics to say, 'that's not thinking'." AIS researcher Rodney Brooks complains: "Every time we figure out a piece of it, it stops being magical; we say, 'Oh, that's just a computation.'" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

username90 7y ago
No, it talks about the other AI effect, where AI researchers thinks that generalizing the model will be relatively easy. Like, lets say someone makes an AI to play tic-tac-toe at the same level as the best human and then says that with just a little bit more work it will be able to beat a grandmaster at Go.
- Animats 7y ago
  Right. Someone linked to "Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Stupidity" last week, which makes that argument in detail. People in the field have been claiming Strong AI Real Soon Now since the General Problem Solver of the 1960s, which is a simple tree search algorithm. I heard a lot of that at Stanford in the 1980s, when the expert systems boom was about to crash and people thought Symbolics LISP machines were magical. There is progress, though. Machine learning does do a lot. And it makes money, so effort will continue at a high level. AI used to be a dinky field - maybe 20-50 people at MIT, CMU, and Stanford. Now it's huge.
- NoodleIncident 7y ago
  I've only seen the headlines whizzing by, but isn't this exactly what Deepmind(/AlphaGo/AlphaZero/MuZero) has been doing lately?
  - username90 7y ago
    My point was that machines mastered tic-tac-toe 50 years ago and mastered Go just last year. Making a statistical model to predict a small subset of three body problems isn't very impressive at all, kinda like tic-tac-toe. It is a bit interesting that it works, but not much more than that. Adding another body, or adding starting velocities to these three bodies, would make the problem a lot less tractable, so it is very unlikely the same techniques will work there.
blauditore 7y ago
I think the root the issue is that "AI" is a vague term where almost any kind of program, no none at all could go under. The fact that a machine can automatically calculate the sum of two numbers could be considered artificially intelligent by someone who's never seen a computer before. At the same time, no matter how far you go, any program (based on turing-like machines) will always be a deterministic chain of cause-and-effect, which is "just a computation". But AI in its meaning use contains a certain set of fields in a way that makes sense. It's just the puplic misinterpration nonsense that makes it look so weird.
- sjy 7y ago
  Are computers meaningfully different to brains in that “deterministic” respect? Both are apparently based on deterministic interactions at the nanometre scale and exhibit simple behaviour that can be explained from first principles (eg. simple arithmetic, or a stroke). Both also exhibit complex emergent behaviour that can’t be explained from first principles (eg. the output of complex ML systems, or most human behaviour), which we sometimes call “non-deterministic.” I’m happy to concede that software is artificially intelligent just as I’m prepared to concede that most animals are naturally intelligent. It’s just a question of drawing an arbitrary line when things are intelligent enough to warrant the description. The AI effect is the process of that line getting moved closer and closer to “capable of doing everything an average human can do.”
  - meowface 7y ago
    Exactly. That's why there's the AI vs. AGI distinction.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    The definition of a modern human is someone who does what machines do not do, so as machines become more capable it changes what humans do. I guess it seems very likely to me that we will have Skynet/paperclip maximizers before AGI. I mean, I think we kind of do right now in what the internet is growing into. We're like single cells imagining what a brain would be like but we'll never know because probably we'll be part of something brainless that dominates the ecosystem, or if there is an organism with a brain, we won't be able to perceive it because we're components.
feral 7y ago
We really need another name, which refers to people uninformedly quoting 'the AI effect'. How about "the AI effect effect"? This happens all the time: - X suggests that success at a particular task is a good proxy to general intelligence. - Years later Y solves that task with a clever hack and lots of computation, but no general intelligence. - The media breathlessly suggests we've made progress on general intelligence. - Z points out we haven't really. - Someone says "Oh that's the AI effect!", by which they mean the goalposts have been unfairly moved on AI. No, they have not. There's something called general intelligence, humans can do it, and Deep Blue cannot, and it's fine to say that Deep Blue beating humans at Chess was not thinking. It just turned out that Chess wasn't as good a proxy to thinking as we initially thought, and mentioning "The AI effect" just clouds the discussion.
- whatisthiseven 7y ago
  That is a good point about something I hadn't considered. I was going to disagree with you until the last sentence, which then clicked. As AI is developed, it is also championed as "closer to real thought" and might someday solve the more general intelligence problem, only for those same experts to later realize that would never be the case and then retroactively proclaim "this was never going to solve general intelligence, but it is still AI". The history is full of this kind of revisionism, so I agree with you.
- didibus 7y ago
  I agree with you, but just want to clarify for others who don't understand why the parent misused the term AI effect. AI effect is more related to the fact that once you understand the trick behind the magic you no longer believe the task to require intelligence, even though it is still able to do an amazing task that wasn't possible before and had for centuries been thought off as requiring intelligence and something that only humans could do. That the current AI techniques couldn't work for every imaginable task, and that people believed they might isn't a case of the AI effect. That's just hype, and possibly another coming case of the AI freeze. The AI effect will be how in 5 or 10 years, CS students will learn neural nets as part of their first or second year curriculum and the whole machinery will be behind a single API to some Apache library. And someone will then use that to some cool effect and say they're doing AI, and others will laugh and say, you're not doing AI, you just used a neural net to learn weights from a big data set silly, that's not AI. This effect happens for every task, even when AI is not involved. Until you understand how, someone doing something you can't comprehend will have you think they are a genius and maybe of a higher IQ and probably very intelligent. But learn the "how" for yourself and it'll stop being so impressive. Rubik's cube is a good example of this. Once you realize there's a trick to it, it stops being as impressive. Some relevant quotes from the wikipedia article: > AI effect is: As soon as AI successfully solves a problem, the problem is no longer a part of AI. > Software and algorithms developed by AI researchers are now integrated into many applications throughout the world, without really being called AI. > AI advances are not trumpeted as artificial intelligence so much these days, but are often seen as advances in some other field > practical AI successes, computational programs that actually achieved intelligent behavior, were soon assimilated into whatever application domain they were found to be useful in, and became silent partners alongside other problem-solving approaches, which left AI researchers to deal only with the "failures", the tough nuts that couldn't yet be cracked > The great practical benefits of AI applications and even the existence of AI in many software products go largely unnoticed by many despite the already widespread use of AI techniques in software. This is the AI effect. Many marketing people don't use the term 'artificial intelligence' even when their company's products rely on some AI techniques. Why not? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
domnomnom 7y ago
That link honestly reads like more kool aid and deflection of criticism written by AI professionals. Why aren’t mathematicians complaining about their work being largely unknown?
debt 7y ago
The concept of AI to the average person outside of the computer bubble is "human intelligence made artificial" So if it's not actually thinking, then technically, from the perspective of an average layperson, it is not real AI. However, the "AI effect" is still real, but it's related to a problem local to academics and AI laypeople. Most non-AI-laypeople/AI academics believe AI is a machine that can think like how a person thinks.

username90 7y ago

No, it talks about the other AI effect, where AI researchers thinks that generalizing the model will be relatively easy. Like, lets say someone makes an AI to play tic-tac-toe at the same level as the best human and then says that with just a little bit more work it will be able to beat a grandmaster at Go.

Animats 7y ago
Right. Someone linked to "Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Stupidity" last week, which makes that argument in detail. People in the field have been claiming Strong AI Real Soon Now since the General Problem Solver of the 1960s, which is a simple tree search algorithm. I heard a lot of that at Stanford in the 1980s, when the expert systems boom was about to crash and people thought Symbolics LISP machines were magical. There is progress, though. Machine learning does do a lot. And it makes money, so effort will continue at a high level. AI used to be a dinky field - maybe 20-50 people at MIT, CMU, and Stanford. Now it's huge.
NoodleIncident 7y ago
I've only seen the headlines whizzing by, but isn't this exactly what Deepmind(/AlphaGo/AlphaZero/MuZero) has been doing lately?
- username90 7y ago
  My point was that machines mastered tic-tac-toe 50 years ago and mastered Go just last year. Making a statistical model to predict a small subset of three body problems isn't very impressive at all, kinda like tic-tac-toe. It is a bit interesting that it works, but not much more than that. Adding another body, or adding starting velocities to these three bodies, would make the problem a lot less tractable, so it is very unlikely the same techniques will work there.

blauditore 7y ago

I think the root the issue is that "AI" is a vague term where almost any kind of program, no none at all could go under. The fact that a machine can automatically calculate the sum of two numbers could be considered artificially intelligent by someone who's never seen a computer before. At the same time, no matter how far you go, any program (based on turing-like machines) will always be a deterministic chain of cause-and-effect, which is "just a computation". But AI in its meaning use contains a certain set of fields in a way that makes sense. It's just the puplic misinterpration nonsense that makes it look so weird.

sjy 7y ago
Are computers meaningfully different to brains in that “deterministic” respect? Both are apparently based on deterministic interactions at the nanometre scale and exhibit simple behaviour that can be explained from first principles (eg. simple arithmetic, or a stroke). Both also exhibit complex emergent behaviour that can’t be explained from first principles (eg. the output of complex ML systems, or most human behaviour), which we sometimes call “non-deterministic.” I’m happy to concede that software is artificially intelligent just as I’m prepared to concede that most animals are naturally intelligent. It’s just a question of drawing an arbitrary line when things are intelligent enough to warrant the description. The AI effect is the process of that line getting moved closer and closer to “capable of doing everything an average human can do.”
- meowface 7y ago
  Exactly. That's why there's the AI vs. AGI distinction.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  The definition of a modern human is someone who does what machines do not do, so as machines become more capable it changes what humans do. I guess it seems very likely to me that we will have Skynet/paperclip maximizers before AGI. I mean, I think we kind of do right now in what the internet is growing into. We're like single cells imagining what a brain would be like but we'll never know because probably we'll be part of something brainless that dominates the ecosystem, or if there is an organism with a brain, we won't be able to perceive it because we're components.

feral 7y ago

We really need another name, which refers to people uninformedly quoting 'the AI effect'. How about "the AI effect effect"? This happens all the time: - X suggests that success at a particular task is a good proxy to general intelligence. - Years later Y solves that task with a clever hack and lots of computation, but no general intelligence. - The media breathlessly suggests we've made progress on general intelligence. - Z points out we haven't really. - Someone says "Oh that's the AI effect!", by which they mean the goalposts have been unfairly moved on AI. No, they have not. There's something called general intelligence, humans can do it, and Deep Blue cannot, and it's fine to say that Deep Blue beating humans at Chess was not thinking. It just turned out that Chess wasn't as good a proxy to thinking as we initially thought, and mentioning "The AI effect" just clouds the discussion.

whatisthiseven 7y ago
That is a good point about something I hadn't considered. I was going to disagree with you until the last sentence, which then clicked. As AI is developed, it is also championed as "closer to real thought" and might someday solve the more general intelligence problem, only for those same experts to later realize that would never be the case and then retroactively proclaim "this was never going to solve general intelligence, but it is still AI". The history is full of this kind of revisionism, so I agree with you.
didibus 7y ago
I agree with you, but just want to clarify for others who don't understand why the parent misused the term AI effect. AI effect is more related to the fact that once you understand the trick behind the magic you no longer believe the task to require intelligence, even though it is still able to do an amazing task that wasn't possible before and had for centuries been thought off as requiring intelligence and something that only humans could do. That the current AI techniques couldn't work for every imaginable task, and that people believed they might isn't a case of the AI effect. That's just hype, and possibly another coming case of the AI freeze. The AI effect will be how in 5 or 10 years, CS students will learn neural nets as part of their first or second year curriculum and the whole machinery will be behind a single API to some Apache library. And someone will then use that to some cool effect and say they're doing AI, and others will laugh and say, you're not doing AI, you just used a neural net to learn weights from a big data set silly, that's not AI. This effect happens for every task, even when AI is not involved. Until you understand how, someone doing something you can't comprehend will have you think they are a genius and maybe of a higher IQ and probably very intelligent. But learn the "how" for yourself and it'll stop being so impressive. Rubik's cube is a good example of this. Once you realize there's a trick to it, it stops being as impressive. Some relevant quotes from the wikipedia article: > AI effect is: As soon as AI successfully solves a problem, the problem is no longer a part of AI. > Software and algorithms developed by AI researchers are now integrated into many applications throughout the world, without really being called AI. > AI advances are not trumpeted as artificial intelligence so much these days, but are often seen as advances in some other field > practical AI successes, computational programs that actually achieved intelligent behavior, were soon assimilated into whatever application domain they were found to be useful in, and became silent partners alongside other problem-solving approaches, which left AI researchers to deal only with the "failures", the tough nuts that couldn't yet be cracked > The great practical benefits of AI applications and even the existence of AI in many software products go largely unnoticed by many despite the already widespread use of AI techniques in software. This is the AI effect. Many marketing people don't use the term 'artificial intelligence' even when their company's products rely on some AI techniques. Why not? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

domnomnom 7y ago

That link honestly reads like more kool aid and deflection of criticism written by AI professionals. Why aren’t mathematicians complaining about their work being largely unknown?

debt 7y ago

The concept of AI to the average person outside of the computer bubble is "human intelligence made artificial" So if it's not actually thinking, then technically, from the perspective of an average layperson, it is not real AI. However, the "AI effect" is still real, but it's related to a problem local to academics and AI laypeople. Most non-AI-laypeople/AI academics believe AI is a machine that can think like how a person thinks.