8 ms·

AGI Has Been Delayed

69 points by chubot 7y ago

eps 7y ago
Apparently, AGI stands for "Artificial General Intelligence".
- ramblerman 7y ago
  I think you are being 'unfairly' downvoted because AGI is very commonly used on here, or at least it comes up a lot. But yes, AGI is the holy grail of AI research. Currently all AI successes have been training computers to be really good at one thing, chess, go, driving etc... And in many of these domains AI has outperformed humans by a large margin. But take those AI systems and ask them to do something else outside of their specialty and their knowledge doesn't transfer. In essence they are really just optimized functions for a very specific set of inputs. AGI would be an AI that increases in intelligence across multiple domains and can respond to novel problems (like a human) note: you could argue the real definition of AI is actually AGI but that is a different discussion :)
  - tialaramex 7y ago
    Right, this is why Turing's "imitation game" test matters. The humans won't accept that a machine is intelligent, whatever the machine does it's just another clever trick that isn't "real" intelligence. So you have to humiliate the humans. You have to rub their faces in the dirt or they'll disregard all sense rather than admit that they weren't all that. It isn't enough to beat them at chess, at Go, at a million other problems, you have to pretend to be a human so well the other humans don't know you're a machine and only then are they forced to confront the reality that they're just a half-arsed compute substrate made of warm biological soup and not after all anything special. The animal intelligence researchers face a similar problem.
    - ramblerman 7y ago
      I agree about moving the goal posts on animal intelligence but we don't have AGI, not even close. And it has nothing to do with human pride or not facing the facts. I mean by that same logic you could argue we solved AI when we invented the calculator. Because it's far better at calculating than us.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - tialaramex 7y ago
        Of course we aren't close to AGI. Maybe I should be clearer, I expect that such an AI would pass the Turing test more or less inadvertently in the course of other activities. We might even briefly be unaware of it because of this. From its point of view "humiliate humans by being smarter than them" is not a thing, just as I'm sure sparrows don't aim to "humiliate humans by being able to fly unaided". But the moving goal posts are a symptom of the problem that inspired Turing here. The humans will claim they're still the only ones with real intelligence even after they fail that test, but they'll know what they're doing. As we see in this thread, today plenty of people are convinced that they aren't moving the goal posts, even though they are. My suspicion is that the humiliation of the "imitation game" stops that, even as the outward pantomime continues. Humans will keep _saying_ they know they're special but they won't really believe it any more. Good. When a Pope insists they are certain God exists, I know they're lying, whereas when some little old lady in a sleepy rural village insists the same perhaps she really believes. The Pope has seen enough to know he isn't sure, lie to me as he might.
    - TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
      The idea that human intelligence is defined by skill in board games or terminal chat is a hilariously inept failure of human intelligence. Turing's test is useless for real AGI, because human-level intelligence is embodied. That means a human-equivalent AGI has to be able to improvise solutions with physical objects, parse body language, generate body language, understand social and cultural expectations in different situations, and do all of this while recognising and generating everyday speech in at least one human language. These are all defining basic skills for humans. Literally every school age and over human can do them at a basic level. And gifted or exceptional humans can take these "simple" challenges to very advanced levels. A chatbot doesn't come close to approaching them. Nor does a chess-bot or a go-bot. Nor does an equation solver. AGI will fail until AI research stops trying to build a better AI research nerd, and starts trying to understand what applied human intelligence looks like in the wild.
      - paganel 7y ago
        > AGI will fail until AI research stops trying to build a better AI research nerd, and starts trying to understand what applied human intelligence looks like in the wild. I fully agree with your comment, just wanted to point out that imho the quoted paragraph also says a lot about how most of today's researchers totally disregard "human studies" (the "human intelligence in the wild" that you mention), as long as it's not quantifiable/turned into mathematics it has almost no value for them. Which, of course, it's a total bastardization of what even science-oriented people like Popper were writing about.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - tialaramex 7y ago
        > Literally every school age and over human can do them at a basic level This is the other side of the same coin. No. These "defining basic skills" aren't defining anything except if you're going to be a fascist who eradicates people that defy their beliefs about embodiment. Understanding social expectations is tricky and lots of humans can't do this at all. They require lifetime care as a result, but they are still definitely human and there's no reason to believe they lack general intelligence although it may be stunted if their problems make it hard to undertake activities that let intelligence thrive. Although human infants do try to bootstrap language, the bootstrap process will not spontaneously produce a working human language from zero in the absence of exposure to existing human language. Humans brought up without language (typically through extreme circumstances because doing this experimentally would be unethical) create a proto-language but not a full-blown human language. We _think_ that a few generations of humans otherwise unexposed to external culture would turn this into a full-blown human language through some mechanism akin to creolisation but we can't check because - as mentioned - it would be grossly unethical. So, there definitely are humans (though not many) who don't recognise and generate "everyday speech" even taking that very broadly to include sign and the procedure used to talk to deaf-blind people. Elderly people also often cease to be able to generate speech, or give no sign they continue to understand it, while continuing to apparently be intelligent.
    - paganel 7y ago
      > so you have to humiliate the humans. Not sure that's what you meant but for me yes, the moment when a "machine" would be able to make genuine jokes or when it will become self-aware of its "humiliating" us then I'll agree that we have reached true AGI. To reiterate, I cannot agree how important it is for AI system to posses "the ability to make jokes/to understand double-entendres", right now that's what makes companies like FB or Google perfect targets for the media and public opinion (that and their total disregard of privacy issues, of course). A true AGI would have to understand the meaning of a green frog or of a cartoony bear by context alone.
phkahler 7y ago
>> Now a self driving car does not need to have general human level intelligence, but a self driving car is certainly a lower bound on human level intelligence. This is exactly the misconception that allows people to believe in fully autonomous cars. Following a lane is easy (in good weather). Stopping when the car ahead does is easy. Route planning when you have detailed maps and GPS is reasonable. Understanding what unusual things might be lying in the road and what to do about them is hard. Navigating a construction zone with a flag man directing you on the opposite shoulder requires a brain, not pattern matching. Opening the window and following verbal directions... The range of scenarios we encounter when driving requires AGI to cope with.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Most of the unexpected do not - human drivers handle it on reflex - but there is enough that does. The manually directed traffic example would require some sort of workaround for instance - map update or protocol to tell it to the car. Human drivers utilise informal protocols in such situations including blinking signals, voice communication and formal ones like policeman signals. None of which actually requires AGI to handle, and actually educated guesswork to figure out. Think of it as a human driver in another country - they have to learn the behavior from the observed subset to not stick out, but it's not actually too hard or involving. It's not AGI, but it is sparse dictionary learning (bounded set of allowed behaviors) which is hard anyway. And a bunch of high grade logical inputs as context. Figuring out outdated map such as not driving into a lake, damaged or unfinished road can be done without AGI reasonably well, as can predicting potential accidents and dangers and pre-planning responses. Fun part would be the car asking for directions with voice synthesis then trying to execute them. I want to see that working in practice, still not AGI really. It'd be really freaky the first few times it happens, especially if it's driverless. Mind you, human drivers tend to do stupid and unlawful things because they're intelligent too.
  - taneq 7y ago
    > human drivers handle it on reflex I'm not sure we can write off human subconscious behaviour as "not general intelligence". It might not be the conscious, self-analytical reasoning that we tend to think of as 'intelligence' but there's a whole bunch of things that humans 'just know how to do' after practice without being able to explain how we do it. > Figuring out outdated map such as not driving into a lake, damaged or unfinished road can be done without AGI reasonably well Yeah, I think a lot of that could be solved by having a hierarchy of different classifiers (maybe they do this already?) so instead of trying to identify every individual object in the world, you can just detect "something large in front of me" and hit the brakes. You don't have to care particuarly what it is, you just have to not hit the thing.
Tenoke 7y ago
Let me honestly summarize this article: Part 1 - Musk and others said we'll have self-driving cars all over the place by 2020. Author tweeted that we wont and discusses that for roughly half the article. This part finishes with a quote by Urmson that he expects self-driving cars to take "up to 30-50 years" before they are really common. Part 2 - this one quote aobve agrees with the author so he then looks at an actual forecast from a 2018 “Human Level AI” conference where some/most think AGI will occur soonish. For some reason, he decides Urmson is the only relevant expert, and says these "more large hats than cattle, but [...] people with paying corporate or academic jobs" from the conference must be wrong because Urmson's prediction doesn't match them. He then does the same for Kurzweil and FHI - they dont match Urmson's prediction either. Thus AGI has been 'delayed'. _______ The argument is in my opinion so badly made that I am wondering if the 17 people who upvoted read it, upvoted just because they are anti-AI in general, or because they like the author for other reasons. Edit: This article is also from May, so it's appearance on the frontpage given the quality puzzles me further.
- hdhdhe3i 7y ago
  I not sure I see the value in treating academics as individuals and not a single entity here. Academic consensus matters more than any individual academic, so why not treat it as a single gestalt entity?
  - Tenoke 7y ago
    You can treat it as a single entity. The questionable thing is then throwing out 'the consensus' because a single other expert gives a different prediction.
    - The_rationalist 7y ago
      What are you talking about? There is no scientific consensus that fully autonomous cars will be available for 2020s. It require necessarily AGI cognition on some tasks and research have zero clue, zero formal roadmap to achieve AGI. Thus any prediction is baseless, absurd wishful thinking. As what I say is true, unless a sound refutation is provided, this should be the scientific consensus.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Beltiras 7y ago
AGI hasn't been delayed. It's been overpromised. And the proponents will continue to overpromise right up till when it arrives. We need a breakthrough in AI research of at least two magnitudes before even tackling the AGI problem. One is we need to understand the mechanisms of neural networks at least an order of magnitude better than we currently do. Best article on the subject that concisely describes NNs is The NN zoo[0]. I have no idea what needs to happen for us to collectively understand the mechanisms better. We need an Einstein moment I think where some researcher has a happy thought and a decade where the rest of us catch up (at minimum). The other is we need to understand the problem we are solving. At it's core it seems very easy to define intelligence but you very soon realize that it's an endless Matryoska with no discernible root. It's very easy to define intelligence in terms of solving elementary cogitation tasks and this is what we are doing writ-large. This leads to a culture of solving Weak AI tasks, hoping that the aggregation of the solutions will lead to AGI. Well, it's only going to do so if we are engineering solutions that will solve the larger problem and if we don't understand it well enough it's going to be a really random occurrence finding it. [0] https://www.asimovinstitute.org/neural-network-zoo/ https://www.asimovinstitute.org/neural-network-zoo/
- FeepingCreature 7y ago
  IMO the one thing we really need is some reliable way to do online learning. If we can get NNs to the point where you can just say, somewhere in code, "make this decision NNly, based on this set of features" and get reasonably good decisionmaking if the decision is in some sense approximable as a function of the features, I think GOFAI suddenly becomes feasible again. We would then enter an area of risk where we don't really understand NNs and we don't really understand the algorithms we can build with them either, but these algorithms could still have a lot of power. The aphorism used to be "hard things are easy and easy things are hard". Ie. arithmetic with large numbers is trivial, but opening a door or recognizing a label is the most difficult problem in the world. We're starting to close in on reliable, possibly prepackaged solutions for the latter; on the other hand, understanding the logic of intelligence turns out to have some teeth after all. Reality would do us a great favor if building genuine intelligence required actual understanding and knowledge of how to build reliable cognition; unfortunately our precedent suggests it's mostly done by kludging a half-baked barely-debugged motivation system onto a big heap of instinct-driven neural networks. I'm worried some spark will get the bright idea to combine some approximating variant of AIXI and a neural network for theory selection...
sigsergv 7y ago
Self driving cars are not realistic in that form that general audience understand. Most people think that autonomous car is a regular car with some AI but that not the case. Not the solution for general problem. Regular cars are not advanced form of horse-powered carriage, they are much more different and complex that people could imagine because “car” is a part of extremely complex infrastructure that completely replaced old one ~70 years ago. Gas stations, light poles, traffic rules, changes in laws, education etc etc. Autonomous car must introduce a new global infrastructure that will be (inevitably) incompatible with current one. I think that man-driven vehicles won't be allowed on AI-roads. AI-driven car doesn't require optical sensors to detect road signs, traffic lights etc, these things will be replaced by multiple invisible RF-modules. And so on. AGI is just not needed here, look at ants/bees, they are “dumb” but build and maintain complex things.
- antupis 7y ago
  Also, we don't have the same kind tolerance to deadly accidents as before, look airplanes it was rather dangerous to fly (5.2 deaths per 100,000 hours as the 50s) but there was still industry around flying.
himinlomax 7y ago
The fundamental problem with autonomous vehicles is that I haven't seen (and can't think of) a gradual rollout plan. As it stands, the idea seems to be, as soon as the AI is good enough, autonomous cars will flood the streets. But in the mean time, zero. Well, that's not going to work, and not just for technical reasons. That reminds me of IPv6. There is no technical challenge to implementing it, but we're still running out of IPv4 addresses, simply because the designers had no plan for gradual adoption. (Dual stacks was not such a plan, in fact dual stacks was an effective way of delaying adoption compared to any other design choice.) People (users, insurers, legislators, regulators, lenders, investors ...) won't be confident with autonomous cars if they have no practical experience to look at to trust them. And maybe they will, but at the first significant / publicized accidents, they will be demonized, banned or penalized.
- cjg 7y ago
  The first few autonomous vehicles have clear utility. The first few machines on IPv6 did not. There's no network effect holding back autonomous vehicles.
fdsa_111111111 7y ago
Maybe people working in ML separate AGI from consciousness / self awareness / sentience but I don't think anyone else does. (If so, what is general non-human intelligence?) Saying AGI is around the corner is like saying "cloud backups for consciousness" is just around the corner. We don't yet: 1. Understand the location of consciousness (if that even makes sense). We think it's in the brain area as that seems to be our CPU. Our knowledge stops there. 2. Understand the physics of consciousness. Is it some sort of emergent-y brainwave pattern thing? Again, pure speculation. So, we're assuming: 1. Machine learning is in any way analogous to what processes our consciousness arises from. Which is just horse shit, repeated because someone decided to call college level math a "neural network". 2. If we do enough ML simultaneously we'll cross some threshold into sentient-computer land. 3. Or, there exist "magical algorithms" that will do the same. A self-driving car is as self-aware as a calculator. It's not going to start learning, in earnest, or solving problems at the level humans can. Ever. Our level of problem solving requires conscious awareness (theory of mind, imagination, et al). We won't be able to recreate that until we understand our own. There's a distinct possibility that is, by definition, unknowable. But, hey, let's keep bullshitting greedy investors and scaring technophobes. The computers are taking over!!
- olalonde 7y ago
  The idea the human brain must be reverse engineered in order to achieve AGI is speculation. It might be true but we don't know that. To quote "Artificial Intelligence - A Modern Approach": > The quest for “artificial flight” succeeded when the Wright brothers and others stopped imitating birds and started using wind tunnels and learning about aerodynamics.
anon234345566 7y ago
given the current state of the art of IT, any close to AGI system most probably would need capacity close to a couple of datacenters (maybe a nuclear reactor close to them to provide power). Before stating "AGI was delayed" I would double check what's running in any massive DC complex built in the last 5 years, and more interesting, how much power are they using compared to standard datacenters. If AGI is actually "discovered" at some point, it will spoted by leaked information about power consumption (any money dump in that kind of technology would be seriously disguised probably).
sauwan 7y ago
Based on all the negativity I've seen on self driving cars, I would have guessed we were further along the hype cycle than where Gartner puts us now: https://blogs.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/files/2019/08/CTMKT_741609_CTMKT_for_Emerging_Tech_Hype_Cycle_LargerText-1.png https://blogs.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/files/2019/08/C...
jdkdnfndnfjd 7y ago
> so what does this say about predictions that AGI is right around the corner? Literally nothing

69 points by chubot 7y ago

eps 7y ago

Apparently, AGI stands for "Artificial General Intelligence".

ramblerman 7y ago
I think you are being 'unfairly' downvoted because AGI is very commonly used on here, or at least it comes up a lot. But yes, AGI is the holy grail of AI research. Currently all AI successes have been training computers to be really good at one thing, chess, go, driving etc... And in many of these domains AI has outperformed humans by a large margin. But take those AI systems and ask them to do something else outside of their specialty and their knowledge doesn't transfer. In essence they are really just optimized functions for a very specific set of inputs. AGI would be an AI that increases in intelligence across multiple domains and can respond to novel problems (like a human) note: you could argue the real definition of AI is actually AGI but that is a different discussion :)
- tialaramex 7y ago
  Right, this is why Turing's "imitation game" test matters. The humans won't accept that a machine is intelligent, whatever the machine does it's just another clever trick that isn't "real" intelligence. So you have to humiliate the humans. You have to rub their faces in the dirt or they'll disregard all sense rather than admit that they weren't all that. It isn't enough to beat them at chess, at Go, at a million other problems, you have to pretend to be a human so well the other humans don't know you're a machine and only then are they forced to confront the reality that they're just a half-arsed compute substrate made of warm biological soup and not after all anything special. The animal intelligence researchers face a similar problem.
  - ramblerman 7y ago
    I agree about moving the goal posts on animal intelligence but we don't have AGI, not even close. And it has nothing to do with human pride or not facing the facts. I mean by that same logic you could argue we solved AI when we invented the calculator. Because it's far better at calculating than us.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - tialaramex 7y ago
      Of course we aren't close to AGI. Maybe I should be clearer, I expect that such an AI would pass the Turing test more or less inadvertently in the course of other activities. We might even briefly be unaware of it because of this. From its point of view "humiliate humans by being smarter than them" is not a thing, just as I'm sure sparrows don't aim to "humiliate humans by being able to fly unaided". But the moving goal posts are a symptom of the problem that inspired Turing here. The humans will claim they're still the only ones with real intelligence even after they fail that test, but they'll know what they're doing. As we see in this thread, today plenty of people are convinced that they aren't moving the goal posts, even though they are. My suspicion is that the humiliation of the "imitation game" stops that, even as the outward pantomime continues. Humans will keep _saying_ they know they're special but they won't really believe it any more. Good. When a Pope insists they are certain God exists, I know they're lying, whereas when some little old lady in a sleepy rural village insists the same perhaps she really believes. The Pope has seen enough to know he isn't sure, lie to me as he might.
  - TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
    The idea that human intelligence is defined by skill in board games or terminal chat is a hilariously inept failure of human intelligence. Turing's test is useless for real AGI, because human-level intelligence is embodied. That means a human-equivalent AGI has to be able to improvise solutions with physical objects, parse body language, generate body language, understand social and cultural expectations in different situations, and do all of this while recognising and generating everyday speech in at least one human language. These are all defining basic skills for humans. Literally every school age and over human can do them at a basic level. And gifted or exceptional humans can take these "simple" challenges to very advanced levels. A chatbot doesn't come close to approaching them. Nor does a chess-bot or a go-bot. Nor does an equation solver. AGI will fail until AI research stops trying to build a better AI research nerd, and starts trying to understand what applied human intelligence looks like in the wild.
    - paganel 7y ago
      > AGI will fail until AI research stops trying to build a better AI research nerd, and starts trying to understand what applied human intelligence looks like in the wild. I fully agree with your comment, just wanted to point out that imho the quoted paragraph also says a lot about how most of today's researchers totally disregard "human studies" (the "human intelligence in the wild" that you mention), as long as it's not quantifiable/turned into mathematics it has almost no value for them. Which, of course, it's a total bastardization of what even science-oriented people like Popper were writing about.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - tialaramex 7y ago
      > Literally every school age and over human can do them at a basic level This is the other side of the same coin. No. These "defining basic skills" aren't defining anything except if you're going to be a fascist who eradicates people that defy their beliefs about embodiment. Understanding social expectations is tricky and lots of humans can't do this at all. They require lifetime care as a result, but they are still definitely human and there's no reason to believe they lack general intelligence although it may be stunted if their problems make it hard to undertake activities that let intelligence thrive. Although human infants do try to bootstrap language, the bootstrap process will not spontaneously produce a working human language from zero in the absence of exposure to existing human language. Humans brought up without language (typically through extreme circumstances because doing this experimentally would be unethical) create a proto-language but not a full-blown human language. We _think_ that a few generations of humans otherwise unexposed to external culture would turn this into a full-blown human language through some mechanism akin to creolisation but we can't check because - as mentioned - it would be grossly unethical. So, there definitely are humans (though not many) who don't recognise and generate "everyday speech" even taking that very broadly to include sign and the procedure used to talk to deaf-blind people. Elderly people also often cease to be able to generate speech, or give no sign they continue to understand it, while continuing to apparently be intelligent.
  - paganel 7y ago
    > so you have to humiliate the humans. Not sure that's what you meant but for me yes, the moment when a "machine" would be able to make genuine jokes or when it will become self-aware of its "humiliating" us then I'll agree that we have reached true AGI. To reiterate, I cannot agree how important it is for AI system to posses "the ability to make jokes/to understand double-entendres", right now that's what makes companies like FB or Google perfect targets for the media and public opinion (that and their total disregard of privacy issues, of course). A true AGI would have to understand the meaning of a green frog or of a cartoony bear by context alone.

phkahler 7y ago

>> Now a self driving car does not need to have general human level intelligence, but a self driving car is certainly a lower bound on human level intelligence. This is exactly the misconception that allows people to believe in fully autonomous cars. Following a lane is easy (in good weather). Stopping when the car ahead does is easy. Route planning when you have detailed maps and GPS is reasonable. Understanding what unusual things might be lying in the road and what to do about them is hard. Navigating a construction zone with a flag man directing you on the opposite shoulder requires a brain, not pattern matching. Opening the window and following verbal directions... The range of scenarios we encounter when driving requires AGI to cope with.

AstralStorm 7y ago
Most of the unexpected do not - human drivers handle it on reflex - but there is enough that does. The manually directed traffic example would require some sort of workaround for instance - map update or protocol to tell it to the car. Human drivers utilise informal protocols in such situations including blinking signals, voice communication and formal ones like policeman signals. None of which actually requires AGI to handle, and actually educated guesswork to figure out. Think of it as a human driver in another country - they have to learn the behavior from the observed subset to not stick out, but it's not actually too hard or involving. It's not AGI, but it is sparse dictionary learning (bounded set of allowed behaviors) which is hard anyway. And a bunch of high grade logical inputs as context. Figuring out outdated map such as not driving into a lake, damaged or unfinished road can be done without AGI reasonably well, as can predicting potential accidents and dangers and pre-planning responses. Fun part would be the car asking for directions with voice synthesis then trying to execute them. I want to see that working in practice, still not AGI really. It'd be really freaky the first few times it happens, especially if it's driverless. Mind you, human drivers tend to do stupid and unlawful things because they're intelligent too.
- taneq 7y ago
  > human drivers handle it on reflex I'm not sure we can write off human subconscious behaviour as "not general intelligence". It might not be the conscious, self-analytical reasoning that we tend to think of as 'intelligence' but there's a whole bunch of things that humans 'just know how to do' after practice without being able to explain how we do it. > Figuring out outdated map such as not driving into a lake, damaged or unfinished road can be done without AGI reasonably well Yeah, I think a lot of that could be solved by having a hierarchy of different classifiers (maybe they do this already?) so instead of trying to identify every individual object in the world, you can just detect "something large in front of me" and hit the brakes. You don't have to care particuarly what it is, you just have to not hit the thing.

Tenoke 7y ago

Let me honestly summarize this article: Part 1 - Musk and others said we'll have self-driving cars all over the place by 2020. Author tweeted that we wont and discusses that for roughly half the article. This part finishes with a quote by Urmson that he expects self-driving cars to take "up to 30-50 years" before they are really common. Part 2 - this one quote aobve agrees with the author so he then looks at an actual forecast from a 2018 “Human Level AI” conference where some/most think AGI will occur soonish. For some reason, he decides Urmson is the only relevant expert, and says these "more large hats than cattle, but [...] people with paying corporate or academic jobs" from the conference must be wrong because Urmson's prediction doesn't match them. He then does the same for Kurzweil and FHI - they dont match Urmson's prediction either. Thus AGI has been 'delayed'. _______ The argument is in my opinion so badly made that I am wondering if the 17 people who upvoted read it, upvoted just because they are anti-AI in general, or because they like the author for other reasons. Edit: This article is also from May, so it's appearance on the frontpage given the quality puzzles me further.

hdhdhe3i 7y ago
I not sure I see the value in treating academics as individuals and not a single entity here. Academic consensus matters more than any individual academic, so why not treat it as a single gestalt entity?
- Tenoke 7y ago
  You can treat it as a single entity. The questionable thing is then throwing out 'the consensus' because a single other expert gives a different prediction.
  - The_rationalist 7y ago
    What are you talking about? There is no scientific consensus that fully autonomous cars will be available for 2020s. It require necessarily AGI cognition on some tasks and research have zero clue, zero formal roadmap to achieve AGI. Thus any prediction is baseless, absurd wishful thinking. As what I say is true, unless a sound refutation is provided, this should be the scientific consensus.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Beltiras 7y ago

AGI hasn't been delayed. It's been overpromised. And the proponents will continue to overpromise right up till when it arrives. We need a breakthrough in AI research of at least two magnitudes before even tackling the AGI problem. One is we need to understand the mechanisms of neural networks at least an order of magnitude better than we currently do. Best article on the subject that concisely describes NNs is The NN zoo[0]. I have no idea what needs to happen for us to collectively understand the mechanisms better. We need an Einstein moment I think where some researcher has a happy thought and a decade where the rest of us catch up (at minimum). The other is we need to understand the problem we are solving. At it's core it seems very easy to define intelligence but you very soon realize that it's an endless Matryoska with no discernible root. It's very easy to define intelligence in terms of solving elementary cogitation tasks and this is what we are doing writ-large. This leads to a culture of solving Weak AI tasks, hoping that the aggregation of the solutions will lead to AGI. Well, it's only going to do so if we are engineering solutions that will solve the larger problem and if we don't understand it well enough it's going to be a really random occurrence finding it. [0] https://www.asimovinstitute.org/neural-network-zoo/ https://www.asimovinstitute.org/neural-network-zoo/

FeepingCreature 7y ago
IMO the one thing we really need is some reliable way to do online learning. If we can get NNs to the point where you can just say, somewhere in code, "make this decision NNly, based on this set of features" and get reasonably good decisionmaking if the decision is in some sense approximable as a function of the features, I think GOFAI suddenly becomes feasible again. We would then enter an area of risk where we don't really understand NNs and we don't really understand the algorithms we can build with them either, but these algorithms could still have a lot of power. The aphorism used to be "hard things are easy and easy things are hard". Ie. arithmetic with large numbers is trivial, but opening a door or recognizing a label is the most difficult problem in the world. We're starting to close in on reliable, possibly prepackaged solutions for the latter; on the other hand, understanding the logic of intelligence turns out to have some teeth after all. Reality would do us a great favor if building genuine intelligence required actual understanding and knowledge of how to build reliable cognition; unfortunately our precedent suggests it's mostly done by kludging a half-baked barely-debugged motivation system onto a big heap of instinct-driven neural networks. I'm worried some spark will get the bright idea to combine some approximating variant of AIXI and a neural network for theory selection...

sigsergv 7y ago

Self driving cars are not realistic in that form that general audience understand. Most people think that autonomous car is a regular car with some AI but that not the case. Not the solution for general problem. Regular cars are not advanced form of horse-powered carriage, they are much more different and complex that people could imagine because “car” is a part of extremely complex infrastructure that completely replaced old one ~70 years ago. Gas stations, light poles, traffic rules, changes in laws, education etc etc. Autonomous car must introduce a new global infrastructure that will be (inevitably) incompatible with current one. I think that man-driven vehicles won't be allowed on AI-roads. AI-driven car doesn't require optical sensors to detect road signs, traffic lights etc, these things will be replaced by multiple invisible RF-modules. And so on. AGI is just not needed here, look at ants/bees, they are “dumb” but build and maintain complex things.

antupis 7y ago
Also, we don't have the same kind tolerance to deadly accidents as before, look airplanes it was rather dangerous to fly (5.2 deaths per 100,000 hours as the 50s) but there was still industry around flying.

himinlomax 7y ago

The fundamental problem with autonomous vehicles is that I haven't seen (and can't think of) a gradual rollout plan. As it stands, the idea seems to be, as soon as the AI is good enough, autonomous cars will flood the streets. But in the mean time, zero. Well, that's not going to work, and not just for technical reasons. That reminds me of IPv6. There is no technical challenge to implementing it, but we're still running out of IPv4 addresses, simply because the designers had no plan for gradual adoption. (Dual stacks was not such a plan, in fact dual stacks was an effective way of delaying adoption compared to any other design choice.) People (users, insurers, legislators, regulators, lenders, investors ...) won't be confident with autonomous cars if they have no practical experience to look at to trust them. And maybe they will, but at the first significant / publicized accidents, they will be demonized, banned or penalized.

cjg 7y ago
The first few autonomous vehicles have clear utility. The first few machines on IPv6 did not. There's no network effect holding back autonomous vehicles.

fdsa_111111111 7y ago

Maybe people working in ML separate AGI from consciousness / self awareness / sentience but I don't think anyone else does. (If so, what is general non-human intelligence?) Saying AGI is around the corner is like saying "cloud backups for consciousness" is just around the corner. We don't yet: 1. Understand the location of consciousness (if that even makes sense). We think it's in the brain area as that seems to be our CPU. Our knowledge stops there. 2. Understand the physics of consciousness. Is it some sort of emergent-y brainwave pattern thing? Again, pure speculation. So, we're assuming: 1. Machine learning is in any way analogous to what processes our consciousness arises from. Which is just horse shit, repeated because someone decided to call college level math a "neural network". 2. If we do enough ML simultaneously we'll cross some threshold into sentient-computer land. 3. Or, there exist "magical algorithms" that will do the same. A self-driving car is as self-aware as a calculator. It's not going to start learning, in earnest, or solving problems at the level humans can. Ever. Our level of problem solving requires conscious awareness (theory of mind, imagination, et al). We won't be able to recreate that until we understand our own. There's a distinct possibility that is, by definition, unknowable. But, hey, let's keep bullshitting greedy investors and scaring technophobes. The computers are taking over!!

olalonde 7y ago
The idea the human brain must be reverse engineered in order to achieve AGI is speculation. It might be true but we don't know that. To quote "Artificial Intelligence - A Modern Approach": > The quest for “artificial flight” succeeded when the Wright brothers and others stopped imitating birds and started using wind tunnels and learning about aerodynamics.

anon234345566 7y ago

given the current state of the art of IT, any close to AGI system most probably would need capacity close to a couple of datacenters (maybe a nuclear reactor close to them to provide power). Before stating "AGI was delayed" I would double check what's running in any massive DC complex built in the last 5 years, and more interesting, how much power are they using compared to standard datacenters. If AGI is actually "discovered" at some point, it will spoted by leaked information about power consumption (any money dump in that kind of technology would be seriously disguised probably).

sauwan 7y ago

Based on all the negativity I've seen on self driving cars, I would have guessed we were further along the hype cycle than where Gartner puts us now: https://blogs.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/files/2019/08/CTMKT_741609_CTMKT_for_Emerging_Tech_Hype_Cycle_LargerText-1.png https://blogs.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/files/2019/08/C...

jdkdnfndnfjd 7y ago

> so what does this say about predictions that AGI is right around the corner? Literally nothing