17 ms·
The dark ages of AI: A panel discussion at AAAI-84 (1985)
- account73466 7y agoThis time it is different.^{tm} More seriously, we are almost about to i) Generate a good book using a short intro. ii) Generate a meaningful video using a few photos and a basic text scenario. Which makes us closer to generate movies on demand (say in 2025) and then good luck to people claiming that the current progress in AI is a bubble.
- monocasa 7y agoI mean, even if we were to get nothing else out of the current AI boom, it'd e hard to call it a bubble as much as the 80s crash.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- azinman2 7y agoWe’re no where near a “good book” (we can’t even do a good 3 paragraphs reliably), nor a “meaningful video.” You’re confusing a 1000 monkeys (transformers) with 1 human intelligence (AGI). That giant leap hasn’t been met.
- account73466 7y agoI guess you are not from the field. Edit: I was right, he is an engineer and not a researcher who is active in the field.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dang 7y agoPlease don't make personal dismissals. That's not in the spirit of this site, and we already had to ask you about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21615955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21615955. Instead, if you know more, share some of what you know. Then we all can learn something. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- azinman2 7y agoEspecially since I do have a background in AI and machine learning.
- account73466 7y agoYour publications track didn't suggest it. Edit: you flag me while I am stating that his publications are not ML/AI, go and check it yourself.
- username90 7y agoCare to link the papers that makes you so sure that we will soon be able to generate whole coherent books? As far as we know you could just be an enthusiastic college student who knows nothing.
- account73466 7y agoHe started with "You’re confusing" which is pretty personal. He said "We’re no where near" which is fine if he is an engineer, he is probably "no where near" in contrast to people doing research in that field. I stated the obvious, he is not active in the field.
- username90 7y agoYou talk as if you have information to share, why don't you share it?
- 7y ago
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- AlexCoventry 7y agoHave you seen the tables in Appendix E (starts p. 16) of the Transformer-XL paper? I think they're pretty good. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.02860.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.02860.pdf
- account73466 7y agoGlad to find they used something from my research. Don't want to disclose more, was flagged too much.
- username90 7y agoQuote from that paper: > The Battle of Austerlitz was the decisive French victory against Napoleon It didn't even catch that Napoleon was the leader of the French as described in the source snippet. And this was when it just generated text of similar size as the input. Based on just that paper I highly doubt that this method will generalize to creating entire books.
- account73466 7y ago"he was still in conflict with Emperor Napoleon, the French Republic’s king"
- username90 7y agoMy point was that the text lacked coherence, that quote only makes it worse. If it can't even keep coherence for a single page how would it manage for a hundred?
- account73466 7y agoby improving metrics over time see, e.g., https://gluebenchmark.com/leaderboard/ https://gluebenchmark.com/leaderboard/
- account73466 7y ago
- mamp 7y agoAI winters are caused because people keep thinking the effort required to achieve some improvement is linear instead of exponential.
- codingslave 7y agoDark ages of AI is a meme like dunning krueger effect
- sysbin 7y agoI find it odd that people get most excited when thoughts of AI are aimed towards education in the classroom as the research hinted. I've always thought the most exciting thing about AI would be making robots that can cover the work needed so all human beings get to focus on what's meaningful for them. The interest as hinted from the article makes me question where peoples priorities are when it comes to the next generation getting to live life.
- whichquestion 7y agoWhat if the work needed is the work human beings want to focus on because it’s meaningful to them? When you have AIs that can do arbitrary work that humans can do, what prevents other humans from simply cutting out the humans that want to do that work for AI?
- Animats 7y ago"To sketch a worst case scenario, suppose that five years from now (from 1985) the strategic computing initiative collapses miserably as autonomous vehicles fail to roll. The fifth generation turns out not to go anywhere, and the Japanese government immediately gets out of computing. Every startup company fails. Texas Instruments and Schlumberger and all other companies lose interest." All of which happened. That was the "AI Winter". The "Fifth Generation" was an initiative by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry in Japan to develop a new generation of computers intended to run Prolog. Yes, really.[1] The "Strategic Computing Initiative" was a DARPA-funded push on AI in the 1980s. DARPA pulled the plug in 1987. I got an MSCS from Stanford in 1985. Many of the AI faculty from that period were in deep denial about this. I could see that expert systems were way overrated. I'd done previous work with automatic theorem proving, and was painfully aware of how brittle inference systems are. Each round of AI has been like that. Good idea, claims that strong AI is just around the corner, good idea hits its limit, field stuck. I've seen four cycles of this in my lifetime. At least this time around, machine learning has substantial commercial applications and generates more than enough revenue to fund itself. It's a broadly useful technology. Expert systems were a niche. There's enough money and enough hardware now that if someone has the next good idea, it will be implementable. But strong AI from improvements to machine learning? Probably not. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Computing_Initiative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Computing_Initiative
- mcswell 7y agoI worked on an AI program in the 80s that is perhaps the only program from that era that's still being used. I got hired in 1984 into the AI group at Boeing Computer Services (neither the AI group nor BCS exists any more, and yes, it was part of that Boeing); I was in the Natural Language Processing group (the expert systems group was a different set of people). I left in 1987 to do s.t. else. By that time, we had built a syntactic parser of English that covered most everything in "standard" English (but without most of the probabilistic apparatus that modern parsers have). It was a solution in search of a problem. After I left, the rest of the NLP team came up with the problem. When Boeing builds an aircraft, they have hundreds, if not thousands, of manuals. (No comment on the 737 MAX...) The planes are sold to airlines around the world, many of whose employees don't understand English anywhere near as well as a native speaker would. Boeing wanted its writers of manuals to write in simplified English. There was (and is) a standard for that, but it was very hard to ensure that writers conformed to it. The solution was to rip out all the "interesting" constructions from my grammar, and retain only the constructions and lexicon that conformed to the simplified (technical) English standard. Then the manuals got pushed through the parser; anything that didn't parse had to be re-written to conform to the grammar. And (I think, remember this was after I left) if anything parsed too ambiguously, it was sent for a rewrite as well. And that's how a 1980s AI program is still in use today.
- netwanderer3 7y agoAI is going to be huge no doubt. However, in my opinion there would likely be some costly mistakes made before humans can reap its full benefits. We have been seeing a lot of AI developments but in reality it hasn't really brought us many meaningful changes as we had expected. In general our daily lives still remain pretty much the same as before. Our civilization has never experienced significant AI impacts at a large scale so mistakes may be hard to avoid, and it will serve as lessons for later generations not to repeat those same errors. I have noticed human emotions and intelligence seem to be at odds with each other. Sometimes they are even a trade-off. The increase of one may lead to the decrease of the other. If we look around, humans today have the most advanced technologies in history, but are our lives really better compared to people's in the past? Materialistic wise, certainly yes because they are products directly produced by technologies, but mentally and emotionally it could arguably be worse. AI and techs keep getting better and better everyday, but then human have to work more with longer hours and higher stress. We all thought the machines are supposed to help us human but it's actually the other way around. We work tirelessly days and nights in order to keep making those machines better and more advanced, but in return our lives have not seen many meaningful improvements, and even arguably worse than before in some areas. Individually our personal ability has limits and naturally it evolves very slowly, but the power of AI machines is potentially unlimited and growing at an even faster rate than Moore's law. We seem to be collectively working to make machine much better than us while we are remaining relatively the same individually. Are technlogies actually enslaving us? We keep buying things that don't really serve us much. We have a lot of stuff now but they don't mean much. If something broke, meh we will just get another one. It's just another item and it will get shipped here tomorrow. We didn't have as much in the past but every little thing carried much greater value. Even the most simplest thing could fascinate and brought us joy. We humans today already operate based on rules and algorithms dictated by the machines. We still don't know how our brains function organically (memory, consciousness, etc...), but in the quest of trying to make AI becoming human-like, we have created AI neural networks to simulate our brain. The danger is that even though we still don't know how our real brain functions, but we have now turned around and claimed that the human brain works in a similar way under the same principles of an AI neural network. We are enforcing AI rules onto ourselves. This is a dangerous assumption to make simply because AI does not have emotions. Once we begin to operate strictly under these rules and principles that are dictated by AI, we would soon lose the attributes and characteristics of what made us human. Our emotional spectrum may get increasingly shorten. TV shows and movies are an example as they are a form of story telling that have biggest influences on us at the emotional level. It's no coincidence that "Seinfeld" and "Friends" are still the two best tv shows today. Many movies that are considered as best were also made from a while ago. Despite the most advanced technologies, why is it that today we can't seem to tell stories that bring out the same level of emotional reponse and intensity as before? They all seem to lack the genuity and inspiration that the previous generation once had. Is it because AI do not understand human emotions so its algorithms cannot accurately factor that into consideration? One can say that today humans are the ones who write those algorithms so maybe we can add in compenents to account for that? But just like the example above, if we don't even understand how our brain works, how can we simulate the machine to accurately reflect us? In the future, machines are supposed to learn and write all the codes by itself without human intervention, what would likely happen then? Would we still retain the ability to even understand those codes? Would it possible that human may slowly evolve into machines? In trying to make those machines becoming like us, we may instead become like machines.
- ProfHewitt 7y agoBecause of strategic challenges, Reusable Scalable Intelligent Systems will be developed by 2025 with the following characteristics: • Interactively acquire information from video, Web pages, hologlasses (electronic glasses with holographic-like overlays), online data bases, sensors, articles, human speech and gestures, etc. • Real-time integration of massive pervasively inconsistent information • Self-informative in the sense of knowing its own goals, plans, history, provenance of its information and having relevant information about its own strengths and weaknesses. • Close human interaction using hologlasses for secure mobile communication. • No closed-form algorithmic solution is possible to implement the above capabilities • Reusable so that advances in one area can readily be used elsewhere without having to start over from scratch. • Scalable in all important dimensions meaning that there are no hard barriers to continual improvement in the above areas, i.e., system performance continually significantly improves. A large project (analogous to Manhattan and Apollo) is required to meet strategic challenges for Intelligent Systems and S5G (Secure 5G). See the following for an outline of technology involved: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3428114 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3428114
- yters 7y agoWhy do you think intelligent systems is even feasible? Why do you assume it will be developed? And how is this any different than today's social networks? Either it already exists, or there is a significant AI portion that is completely unsubstantiated at this point.
- ProfHewitt 7y agoStrategic competition will be crucial because once one side shows that it is possible others will quickly follow. Do you see any reason that the technology outlined in the article cannot be implemented by 2025?
- yters 7y agoAll the AI technology in the article is promissory technology, i.e. it doesn't exist except by analogy to human intelligence, and specious claims it'll be better than what has come before. What if all AI tech that has come before sucks because there is a fundamental limit to what algorithms can do, and that limit is much less (infinitely less) than what human intelligence can do? There is a fundamental assumption behind all AI research that the human mind can be simulated by a Turing machine, and no one has verified that assumption. AI research is just floating on the materialistic bias that the mind is reducible to the matter in the brain. We could very well have a supernatural soul, and thus the materialistic bias is completely wrong. Thus, I don't see any reason the technology can be implemented by any date.
- yters 7y agoWhat if the human mind is not computable? Why does no one test this hypothesis instead of throwing billions of dollars and our brightest minds against an unsubstantiated hypothesis? Why are we so unscientific in testing assumptions when it comes to AI? It is not difficult. I've thought of tests myself. But, the closest I've seen in academic literature is Penrose' microtubules and silly hypercomputation. Nothing with empirical tests. I blame materialistic bias, since if materialism is true then the human mind must be a computation. But, materialism does not need to be true in order to have empirical tests whether the mind is computable.
- thrax 7y agoThe fact that you can ask the question is, paradoxically, the answer. Your mind is computed by your brain.
- yters 7y agoHow do you know the mind is computed by the brain? Maybe the brain is just an antenna for the mind.
- arpa 7y agoLet's not leave the tangible positivistic discourse for the alluring sirens' call of metaphysics.
- yters 7y agoWhat if metaphysics is tangible? E.g. here's an experiment I ran with an EEG. Seems pretty tangible. https://mindmatters.ai/2019/12/playing-tetris-shows-that-true-ai-is-impossible/ https://mindmatters.ai/2019/12/playing-tetris-shows-that-tru...
- arpa 7y agoTangible metaphysics is an oxymoron by definition of metaphysics (something beyond/above physical, i.e. tangible). If it's tangible, it's not metaphysics. If you can subject it to the scientific method, it's not metaphysics. Your EEG experiment is nowhere near metaphysical, it's as positivistic as can get - you very crudely measured cognitive load using EEG. Well, of course, if you consider psychology to be metaphysical, you are only partly true - Freud, for example, can be neither validated, nor invalidated. Skinner or Pavlov, however... and anything published in respectable journals for the last 30 or 40 years.
- gautamcgoel 7y agoOne of the panelists (B. Chandrasekaran at Ohio State University) was my dad's PhD advisor (my dad is Ashok Goel at Georgia Tech). Pretty cool to come across his name on HN!