4 ms·

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 su

by 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
the8472 7y ago
> Years later Y solves that task with a clever hack and lots of computation, but no general intelligence. While that is true the set that contains instances of Y is only growing and the members are each becoming less narrow. Deepblue was only chess with many handcrafted parts. AlphaZero does chess, shogi and go with no prior knowledge. Then they went from perfect information, turn-based games to RTS with fog of war. It's not general intelligence, but at least further down the road in behavioral complexity than jellyfish, despite some crippling limitations (e.g. separation of training and inference)
yongjik 7y ago
Well, I think you do have a point, but on the other hand, there have been people saying "Machines will never play chess well because it will require general intelligence!" And when machines start to play chess (or go, or Starcraft) they just say "Oh well it's just computation." So I think it's justified to bring up "AI effect" when people say "machines will never do $(insert your favorite activity here) because it requires general intelligence!"
- perl4ever 7y ago
  Since the beginning of time, people have anthropomorphized any and every thing that is complex enough to be beyond a person's understanding. Being equivalent to a human mind is the default assumption for anything. If it was a wrong assumption when applied to storms, volcanoes, Babbage's machine, Clever Hans, ELIZA, and a billion other things, then why would you assign any weight to most claims that something requires intelligence? It makes me think of the saying about atheism, that an atheism disbelieves just one more god out of thousands than a (mono)theist. You disbelieve in intelligence in very nearly all of the things it's been used to explain.
- edflsafoiewq 7y ago
  It's also possible that an autistic chess-winning machine is not actually reproducing the full range of behaviors humans mean by the phrase "playing chess".
visarga 7y ago
> There's something called general intelligence, humans can do it, and Deep Blue cannot There's no such thing. General is a strong word. Humans can't for example handle more than 7 objects in working memory. We have an inbuilt limitation to how much complexity we can grasp. Programmers know what I mean. General intelligence requires a general (infinitely complex and challenging) environment. Without it it will always be a specialised intelligence. Human intelligence is specialised in human survival, as individuals and part of society.
- YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
  Well, humans can understand any utterance certainly in their native language and there are an infinite number of those, given that natural language, as far as we can tell, is infinite (you can genereate utterances for ever without ever generating the same utterance twice). That is as general as anything gets. Also, we may not be able to keep some number N of objects in memory simultaneously, but we can definitely reason about an infinite number of objects, like I did above. And if you want to handle more than N objects, you just do it N objects at a time. You can always write things down etc. You can always extend your memory, I mean.
  - visarga 7y ago
    Some systems are impossible to parcel out in sets of N objects we could grasp at once, for example, the DNA code. Think about trying to explain the stock market to an ant. Then scale up, and imagine a similar situation for humans.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
      I'll need an example of a process we can't explain by cutting it up in chunks though. DNA and the stock market- well, maybe we don't "understand" them as such, but that's not to say we can't, ever. I think it would be very difficult to find a process that _cannot_ be understood by humans, let alon explain why. It'd be a bit of a paradox really. "Let me explain to you this thing that is impossible to understand".
- 7y ago

by feral 7y ago

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

the8472 7y ago

> Years later Y solves that task with a clever hack and lots of computation, but no general intelligence. While that is true the set that contains instances of Y is only growing and the members are each becoming less narrow. Deepblue was only chess with many handcrafted parts. AlphaZero does chess, shogi and go with no prior knowledge. Then they went from perfect information, turn-based games to RTS with fog of war. It's not general intelligence, but at least further down the road in behavioral complexity than jellyfish, despite some crippling limitations (e.g. separation of training and inference)

yongjik 7y ago

Well, I think you do have a point, but on the other hand, there have been people saying "Machines will never play chess well because it will require general intelligence!" And when machines start to play chess (or go, or Starcraft) they just say "Oh well it's just computation." So I think it's justified to bring up "AI effect" when people say "machines will never do $(insert your favorite activity here) because it requires general intelligence!"

perl4ever 7y ago
Since the beginning of time, people have anthropomorphized any and every thing that is complex enough to be beyond a person's understanding. Being equivalent to a human mind is the default assumption for anything. If it was a wrong assumption when applied to storms, volcanoes, Babbage's machine, Clever Hans, ELIZA, and a billion other things, then why would you assign any weight to most claims that something requires intelligence? It makes me think of the saying about atheism, that an atheism disbelieves just one more god out of thousands than a (mono)theist. You disbelieve in intelligence in very nearly all of the things it's been used to explain.
edflsafoiewq 7y ago
It's also possible that an autistic chess-winning machine is not actually reproducing the full range of behaviors humans mean by the phrase "playing chess".

visarga 7y ago

> There's something called general intelligence, humans can do it, and Deep Blue cannot There's no such thing. General is a strong word. Humans can't for example handle more than 7 objects in working memory. We have an inbuilt limitation to how much complexity we can grasp. Programmers know what I mean. General intelligence requires a general (infinitely complex and challenging) environment. Without it it will always be a specialised intelligence. Human intelligence is specialised in human survival, as individuals and part of society.

YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
Well, humans can understand any utterance certainly in their native language and there are an infinite number of those, given that natural language, as far as we can tell, is infinite (you can genereate utterances for ever without ever generating the same utterance twice). That is as general as anything gets. Also, we may not be able to keep some number N of objects in memory simultaneously, but we can definitely reason about an infinite number of objects, like I did above. And if you want to handle more than N objects, you just do it N objects at a time. You can always write things down etc. You can always extend your memory, I mean.
- visarga 7y ago
  Some systems are impossible to parcel out in sets of N objects we could grasp at once, for example, the DNA code. Think about trying to explain the stock market to an ant. Then scale up, and imagine a similar situation for humans.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
    I'll need an example of a process we can't explain by cutting it up in chunks though. DNA and the stock market- well, maybe we don't "understand" them as such, but that's not to say we can't, ever. I think it would be very difficult to find a process that _cannot_ be understood by humans, let alon explain why. It'd be a bit of a paradox really. "Let me explain to you this thing that is impossible to understand".
7y ago