6 ms·

Noam Chomsky v. IBM’s Watson Computer

49 points by bgraves 16y ago

iwwr 16y ago
There is probably no way of formally proving that an AI actually has general intelligence on a human level. The Turing test is merely a more elaborate way of saying "we'll know one when we see one". A generally intelligent AI will not be passive, it will demand to be recognized for what it is and perhaps as an independent creature with rights. We would be wise not to try to enslave these creatures.
- Jach 16y ago
  You're projecting your own mind design onto the minds of all possible AGIs. You don't know whether it/they will be active or passive or think as an individual or have a concept of rights or have any preference toward slavery.
  - MrScruff 16y ago
    Exactly, the majority of what our minds are concerned with is evolutionary baggage derived from natural selection.
    - iwwr 16y ago
      It would be very strange if the AI had no self-image or were not concerned with its own survival. If it's only lacking a self-image, it may become a solipsistic entity of sorts.
      - tsotha 16y ago
        It's only strange because intelligence has never (by us, at least) been constructed before.
      - Jach 16y ago
        Potentially more useful to get you thinking of different mind designs, personify evolution for a moment. It's not general intelligence, but it built you, which is pretty amazing, all with the only goal in "its mind" being to favor genes with more copies in each generation of replication.
- amalcon 16y ago
  There is probably no way of formally proving that a human has general intelligence on a human level, except by definition.
bgraves 16y ago
I loved the comparison of Watson to Deep Blue as a "bigger steamroller".
- doron 16y ago
  Yeah, somewhat akin to saying "Noam Chomsky is just a better known linguist". factually true, but misses much.
jokermatt999 16y ago
Two great minds, too brief answers. However, Kurzweil has written about it elsewhere. I don't know enough about Chomsky to know if he's expressed his opinions on AI in more depth, but he seems to be suggesting AI can never really "think".
- joshes 16y ago
  I agree with your comment about the exaggerated brevity. But I am not so certain he is commenting that AI will never be capable of thought. My reading of his comment, and of the original Turing paper which he is citing (Computing Machinery and Intelligence by AM Turing, 1950), is that the term "think" needs to be re-thought itself. That is to say, the common use of the word "think" to differentiate between the processes of AI and Natural intelligence is irrelevant at best, and misguided at worst. But I may be way off.
fefzero 16y ago
I liked Kurzweil's response best: "As long as AI has any flaws or limitations, people will jump on these. By the time that the set of these limitations is nil, AI will have long since surpassed unaided human intelligence." Watson isn't the end, it's a building block. It's true that it's been largely hyped to some degree, but I think that opens doors that wouldn't have been opened otherwise. Chomsky's dismissal seems too quick.
- grandalf 16y ago
  Chomsky's point is that he doesn't think brute force AI really accomplishes much toward a theory of mind. He may be right or wrong about this, but it's an empirically testable point (over time). He indicates that his inclination is toward a different research approach which is not brute force oriented (meaning it's more algorithmically/conceptually sophisticated but not fundamentally different). This is why he trivializes the notion of "intelligence"... b/c he probably has a hard time calling the approach he favors intelligence, much less a far less intelligent brute force approach. In Chomsky's world, intelligence essentially refers to "innate knowlege systems". If it's brute force than it's totally non-innate.
chubot 16y ago
You have to respect Chomsky, but he certainly comes off like a curmudgeon here. He can't even be bothered to clearly explain his lack of interest in Watson. It seems less like lack of interest than anger at what he sees as a misguided approach. I think he thinks that Watson and Deep Blue are "brute force" solutions (hence the steamroller metaphor), while his work on the relation of computation and grammar (and the vision guy he mentioned) actually get at the core of intelligence. He may think there is a small elegant machine in the brain that understands grammar, and which is of course computational. He may be right but Watson is still interesting for any reasonably curious person. It's not obvious how much brute force you need to play Jeopardy.
- grandalf 16y ago
  How is deep blue playing Jeopardy anything more than eliza + google search? The steamroller metaphor is intended to illustrate the brute force aspect of the approach. Google + deep blue burns many many orders of magnitude more calories than a human.
  - scott_s 16y ago
    There is a fundamental difference between Deep Blue and Watson: Deep Blue truly did just do a brute force search of a decision tree. Watson does not. It employs machine learning techniques to find correlations between words in the questions and words in its (enormous) data store. Yes, Watson is brute force compared to a human brain. But Watson is still fundamentally different than the brute-force approach of traversing decision trees of a well-defined rule set.
- tensor 16y ago
  I find it curious why so many people think that there is a small and elegant machine in the brain. In terms of brute force computation, the brain is still far, far in the lead. It has so many neural connections that we are not even close to simulating it yet. Given that, assuming that it implements some small and elegant algorithm is a very strange assumption to make.
  - 16y ago
asknemo 16y ago
Calling a system "bigger steamroller" is easy and may make one sound cool, but actually designing and making one that is as good as Watson is hard, much harder than non-engineers will believe, and such attempts often give more insights than mere paper-logic and debates IMHO. Ability to entertain drastically different ideas is a feature of great minds.
- grandalf 16y ago
  It is definitely a hard engineering problem, but a fundamentally different one than engineering something that thinks, since the goal in this case is simply to answer jeopardy questions correctly. As Eliza demonstrates, simply doing something that seems "smart" is often nearly trivial.
ankimal 16y ago
Was it just me or did someone else think this was satirical? It could be the "bigger stem-roller" comment he made that made me think that.
tjmaxal 16y ago
To get to the heart of the debate, as a species, we still have trouble quantifying what intelligence is. Regardless of its source or its scope.
tzs 16y ago
Steamrollers, even bigger ones don't learn from their mistakes. Watson does. For example, in one of the auditions they did for the Jeopardy producers, the questions in the category each referred to two holidays which occurred in the same calendar month, and the question was supposed to ask what is that month. Watson did not get it. it was finding sensible answers, but answers that did not fit the category. It got a couple wrong, then stopped buzzing on that category. After it saw the correct answers from the other contestants for a few, it started buzzing again, with the correct answers.
- synnik 16y ago
  There is a difference between learning from your mistakes and using the same algorithm on an updated data source.
  - tjr 16y ago
    Maybe about this time next week someone will post a thread, "Show HN: I Rewrote Watson in 112 Lines of Ruby as a Weekend Side Project"
  - burgerbrain 16y ago
    Is there? I don't touch things that cause pain. I, in ignorance, touch a hot stove. Now I no longer touch hot stoves, but my algorithm remained the same. Even if you were right, it'd just be another example of "do submarines swim?". The difference is meaningless.
    - ochoa 16y ago
      Having algorithms that learn is nothing new. Steamrollers (neural networks, genetic algorithms, etc.) have been learning from their mistakes for a long time. I think chubot (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2217740 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2217740) explained best the problem Chomsky seems to have with Watson.
    - synnik 16y ago
      Yes, there is a difference, and it is not meaningless. Let's go with your example. You don't touch things that cause pain. And you think that hot stoves, fire, etc cause pain. But what if people show you the trick to walking over hot coals? Then you are able to touch an object that you previously would not have. Not because your list of items that cause pain has changed, but because you developed a deeper understanding of WHY they caused pain, and adjust your algorithm to take that into account. You now are thinking about HOW you are touching an object, and not just about the object itself. To me, this is a clear, meaningful difference. We're not talking about semantics, we're talking about a fundamental adjustment to the questions and processes you go through before making a decision.
ck2 16y ago
Watson isn't an "end all" final solution, it's a step on a very long ladder.
kfranken 16y ago
Turing's paper is available online: http://mind.oxfordjournals.org/content/LIX/236/433.full.pdf http://mind.oxfordjournals.org/content/LIX/236/433.full.pdf It's 28 pages, not the 8 pages claimed by Chomsky, but it's quite readable.
mhewett 16y ago
I presume that Chomsky is not impressed with his own brain, since it is just a "bigger steamroller" than other primate brains.
icandoitbetter 16y ago
Yeah, and the brain is nothing more than a bunch of atoms. Nobody is aware that you can make every single thing sound unimpressive by brutally reducing it to its components, and nobody has used that trick before! Way to go, Chomsky. Insightful as a twelve year old.
- psykotic 16y ago
  > Way to go, Chomsky. Insightful as a twelve year old. What an immature response. You're the one acting like a twelve year-old here. Unless you've read a good portion of his writings on language and cognition published through the last half century, you might not want to dismiss his life's work based on an off-the-cuff response to a random email prodding him for sound bites. There are solid reasons to believe that purely empiricist approaches to learning have fundamental limitations that seem incompatible with what we know about human cognition. Those reasons (e.g. the poverty of the stimulus argument) may be less convincing now than they were in the 60s but they are still not easily dismissable. Keep in mind that Chomsky's goal is not to build useful software but to uncover the roots and mechanisms of human language and cognition.
  - icandoitbetter 16y ago
    Sorry, I'm not going respect silly one-line remark because he's a celebrity in the field. This is exactly what he seems to be counting on, his 'authority': he can say whatever stubbornly contrarian thing he wants and be considered seriously because he's so established. If he didn't have time for an actual response, he should have not responded in the first place. He did, and he will be criticized for it.
    - psykotic 16y ago
      Just before you replied I added an extra paragraph with some background that explains where he's coming from. If the standard critique of empiricism I mention there is not familiar to you, you might want to study more before passing judgement.
calibraxis 16y ago
People would do well reading Chomsky's many writings on the subject, rather than reacting to these tiny snippets. Like maybe "Language and Problems of Knowledge: the Managua Lectures" or "Language and Thought". http://www.google.com/search?tbo=p&tbm=bks&q=turing+test+inauthor:chomsky&num=10 http://www.google.com/search?tbo=p&tbm=bks&q=turing+... A quick email conversation or off-the-cuff interview is too brief to convey the context. Most of the dismissive comments here don't seem to engage that context in a way that makes me confident that they're informed by it.
sfphotoarts 16y ago
Mankind has built a lot of civilization using bigger steamrollers.
eru 16y ago
First thing I liked by Noam Chomsky. But I guess I shouldn't have read his political writings.
olalonde 16y ago
I stopped reading at "but not these devices to sell computers".
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
InclinedPlane 16y ago
Chomsky is wrong headed. You don't have to build a bird to build a 747. And you don't have to replicate human cognition, reason, experience, culture, etc. to build a worthwhile artificial intelligence. I think this is the greatest error that many people make in approaching AI. AI need not be complete, nor need it be like us, it merely needs to be functional and useful. It may well be that an automated agent that can do limited research for you in a manner similar in scope to Watson may not even remotely "understand" in a human sense the knowledge it is exploring, but perhaps it doesn't need to. Anymore than a 747 needs to understand how to fly.

49 points by bgraves 16y ago

iwwr 16y ago

There is probably no way of formally proving that an AI actually has general intelligence on a human level. The Turing test is merely a more elaborate way of saying "we'll know one when we see one". A generally intelligent AI will not be passive, it will demand to be recognized for what it is and perhaps as an independent creature with rights. We would be wise not to try to enslave these creatures.

Jach 16y ago
You're projecting your own mind design onto the minds of all possible AGIs. You don't know whether it/they will be active or passive or think as an individual or have a concept of rights or have any preference toward slavery.
- MrScruff 16y ago
  Exactly, the majority of what our minds are concerned with is evolutionary baggage derived from natural selection.
  - iwwr 16y ago
    It would be very strange if the AI had no self-image or were not concerned with its own survival. If it's only lacking a self-image, it may become a solipsistic entity of sorts.
    - tsotha 16y ago
      It's only strange because intelligence has never (by us, at least) been constructed before.
    - Jach 16y ago
      Potentially more useful to get you thinking of different mind designs, personify evolution for a moment. It's not general intelligence, but it built you, which is pretty amazing, all with the only goal in "its mind" being to favor genes with more copies in each generation of replication.
amalcon 16y ago
There is probably no way of formally proving that a human has general intelligence on a human level, except by definition.

bgraves 16y ago

I loved the comparison of Watson to Deep Blue as a "bigger steamroller".

doron 16y ago
Yeah, somewhat akin to saying "Noam Chomsky is just a better known linguist". factually true, but misses much.

jokermatt999 16y ago

Two great minds, too brief answers. However, Kurzweil has written about it elsewhere. I don't know enough about Chomsky to know if he's expressed his opinions on AI in more depth, but he seems to be suggesting AI can never really "think".

joshes 16y ago
I agree with your comment about the exaggerated brevity. But I am not so certain he is commenting that AI will never be capable of thought. My reading of his comment, and of the original Turing paper which he is citing (Computing Machinery and Intelligence by AM Turing, 1950), is that the term "think" needs to be re-thought itself. That is to say, the common use of the word "think" to differentiate between the processes of AI and Natural intelligence is irrelevant at best, and misguided at worst. But I may be way off.

fefzero 16y ago

I liked Kurzweil's response best: "As long as AI has any flaws or limitations, people will jump on these. By the time that the set of these limitations is nil, AI will have long since surpassed unaided human intelligence." Watson isn't the end, it's a building block. It's true that it's been largely hyped to some degree, but I think that opens doors that wouldn't have been opened otherwise. Chomsky's dismissal seems too quick.

grandalf 16y ago
Chomsky's point is that he doesn't think brute force AI really accomplishes much toward a theory of mind. He may be right or wrong about this, but it's an empirically testable point (over time). He indicates that his inclination is toward a different research approach which is not brute force oriented (meaning it's more algorithmically/conceptually sophisticated but not fundamentally different). This is why he trivializes the notion of "intelligence"... b/c he probably has a hard time calling the approach he favors intelligence, much less a far less intelligent brute force approach. In Chomsky's world, intelligence essentially refers to "innate knowlege systems". If it's brute force than it's totally non-innate.

chubot 16y ago

You have to respect Chomsky, but he certainly comes off like a curmudgeon here. He can't even be bothered to clearly explain his lack of interest in Watson. It seems less like lack of interest than anger at what he sees as a misguided approach. I think he thinks that Watson and Deep Blue are "brute force" solutions (hence the steamroller metaphor), while his work on the relation of computation and grammar (and the vision guy he mentioned) actually get at the core of intelligence. He may think there is a small elegant machine in the brain that understands grammar, and which is of course computational. He may be right but Watson is still interesting for any reasonably curious person. It's not obvious how much brute force you need to play Jeopardy.

grandalf 16y ago
How is deep blue playing Jeopardy anything more than eliza + google search? The steamroller metaphor is intended to illustrate the brute force aspect of the approach. Google + deep blue burns many many orders of magnitude more calories than a human.
- scott_s 16y ago
  There is a fundamental difference between Deep Blue and Watson: Deep Blue truly did just do a brute force search of a decision tree. Watson does not. It employs machine learning techniques to find correlations between words in the questions and words in its (enormous) data store. Yes, Watson is brute force compared to a human brain. But Watson is still fundamentally different than the brute-force approach of traversing decision trees of a well-defined rule set.
tensor 16y ago
I find it curious why so many people think that there is a small and elegant machine in the brain. In terms of brute force computation, the brain is still far, far in the lead. It has so many neural connections that we are not even close to simulating it yet. Given that, assuming that it implements some small and elegant algorithm is a very strange assumption to make.
- 16y ago

asknemo 16y ago

Calling a system "bigger steamroller" is easy and may make one sound cool, but actually designing and making one that is as good as Watson is hard, much harder than non-engineers will believe, and such attempts often give more insights than mere paper-logic and debates IMHO. Ability to entertain drastically different ideas is a feature of great minds.

grandalf 16y ago
It is definitely a hard engineering problem, but a fundamentally different one than engineering something that thinks, since the goal in this case is simply to answer jeopardy questions correctly. As Eliza demonstrates, simply doing something that seems "smart" is often nearly trivial.

ankimal 16y ago

Was it just me or did someone else think this was satirical? It could be the "bigger stem-roller" comment he made that made me think that.

tjmaxal 16y ago

To get to the heart of the debate, as a species, we still have trouble quantifying what intelligence is. Regardless of its source or its scope.

tzs 16y ago

Steamrollers, even bigger ones don't learn from their mistakes. Watson does. For example, in one of the auditions they did for the Jeopardy producers, the questions in the category each referred to two holidays which occurred in the same calendar month, and the question was supposed to ask what is that month. Watson did not get it. it was finding sensible answers, but answers that did not fit the category. It got a couple wrong, then stopped buzzing on that category. After it saw the correct answers from the other contestants for a few, it started buzzing again, with the correct answers.

synnik 16y ago
There is a difference between learning from your mistakes and using the same algorithm on an updated data source.
- tjr 16y ago
  Maybe about this time next week someone will post a thread, "Show HN: I Rewrote Watson in 112 Lines of Ruby as a Weekend Side Project"
- burgerbrain 16y ago
  Is there? I don't touch things that cause pain. I, in ignorance, touch a hot stove. Now I no longer touch hot stoves, but my algorithm remained the same. Even if you were right, it'd just be another example of "do submarines swim?". The difference is meaningless.
  - ochoa 16y ago
    Having algorithms that learn is nothing new. Steamrollers (neural networks, genetic algorithms, etc.) have been learning from their mistakes for a long time. I think chubot (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2217740 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2217740) explained best the problem Chomsky seems to have with Watson.
  - synnik 16y ago
    Yes, there is a difference, and it is not meaningless. Let's go with your example. You don't touch things that cause pain. And you think that hot stoves, fire, etc cause pain. But what if people show you the trick to walking over hot coals? Then you are able to touch an object that you previously would not have. Not because your list of items that cause pain has changed, but because you developed a deeper understanding of WHY they caused pain, and adjust your algorithm to take that into account. You now are thinking about HOW you are touching an object, and not just about the object itself. To me, this is a clear, meaningful difference. We're not talking about semantics, we're talking about a fundamental adjustment to the questions and processes you go through before making a decision.

ck2 16y ago

Watson isn't an "end all" final solution, it's a step on a very long ladder.

kfranken 16y ago

Turing's paper is available online: http://mind.oxfordjournals.org/content/LIX/236/433.full.pdf http://mind.oxfordjournals.org/content/LIX/236/433.full.pdf It's 28 pages, not the 8 pages claimed by Chomsky, but it's quite readable.

mhewett 16y ago

I presume that Chomsky is not impressed with his own brain, since it is just a "bigger steamroller" than other primate brains.

icandoitbetter 16y ago

Yeah, and the brain is nothing more than a bunch of atoms. Nobody is aware that you can make every single thing sound unimpressive by brutally reducing it to its components, and nobody has used that trick before! Way to go, Chomsky. Insightful as a twelve year old.

psykotic 16y ago
> Way to go, Chomsky. Insightful as a twelve year old. What an immature response. You're the one acting like a twelve year-old here. Unless you've read a good portion of his writings on language and cognition published through the last half century, you might not want to dismiss his life's work based on an off-the-cuff response to a random email prodding him for sound bites. There are solid reasons to believe that purely empiricist approaches to learning have fundamental limitations that seem incompatible with what we know about human cognition. Those reasons (e.g. the poverty of the stimulus argument) may be less convincing now than they were in the 60s but they are still not easily dismissable. Keep in mind that Chomsky's goal is not to build useful software but to uncover the roots and mechanisms of human language and cognition.
- icandoitbetter 16y ago
  Sorry, I'm not going respect silly one-line remark because he's a celebrity in the field. This is exactly what he seems to be counting on, his 'authority': he can say whatever stubbornly contrarian thing he wants and be considered seriously because he's so established. If he didn't have time for an actual response, he should have not responded in the first place. He did, and he will be criticized for it.
  - psykotic 16y ago
    Just before you replied I added an extra paragraph with some background that explains where he's coming from. If the standard critique of empiricism I mention there is not familiar to you, you might want to study more before passing judgement.

calibraxis 16y ago

People would do well reading Chomsky's many writings on the subject, rather than reacting to these tiny snippets. Like maybe "Language and Problems of Knowledge: the Managua Lectures" or "Language and Thought". http://www.google.com/search?tbo=p&tbm=bks&q=turing+test+inauthor:chomsky&num=10 http://www.google.com/search?tbo=p&tbm=bks&q=turing+... A quick email conversation or off-the-cuff interview is too brief to convey the context. Most of the dismissive comments here don't seem to engage that context in a way that makes me confident that they're informed by it.

sfphotoarts 16y ago

Mankind has built a lot of civilization using bigger steamrollers.

eru 16y ago

First thing I liked by Noam Chomsky. But I guess I shouldn't have read his political writings.

olalonde 16y ago

I stopped reading at "but not these devices to sell computers".

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

InclinedPlane 16y ago

Chomsky is wrong headed. You don't have to build a bird to build a 747. And you don't have to replicate human cognition, reason, experience, culture, etc. to build a worthwhile artificial intelligence. I think this is the greatest error that many people make in approaching AI. AI need not be complete, nor need it be like us, it merely needs to be functional and useful. It may well be that an automated agent that can do limited research for you in a manner similar in scope to Watson may not even remotely "understand" in a human sense the knowledge it is exploring, but perhaps it doesn't need to. Anymore than a 747 needs to understand how to fly.