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The AI effect: AI gets a bad rap because once something exists and is practical it's no longer called AI. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://

The AI effect: AI gets a bad rap because once something exists and is practical it's no longer called AI. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

VBprogrammer 6y ago
This reminds me of the Tim Minchin song Storm. "Do you know what they call alternative medicine that has been proven to work?...Medicine." I've never thought of it that way before but alternative medicine and AI have a lot in common.
- iamcurious 6y ago
  Yup, the similarities are profound. They both confront the limit of consciousness and what counts as knowledge.
- riantogo 6y ago
  Do you know what qualifies as alternative medicine? Anything that is not medicine.
  - mayankkaizen 6y ago
    What is medicine? I mean if I take some herb and (successfully) use it to treat abdominal pain without knowing what that herb is or how it works, would that herb be classified as medicine or not? I have read description of many medicines and found out that we still don't know how those medicines work. But they are still called medicines. So what is medicine?
    - kilbuz 6y ago
      If your herb was shown to improve abdominal pain in a certain population through use of well-executed, replicated randomized control trials, I think it would count as medicine, yes.
    - hikarudo 6y ago
      Knowing how something works is better than not knowing. But you can still have a pretty good idea that it does have the desired effect (i.e. verify cause and effect) via randomized controlled trials. Of course, alternative medicine proponents rarely do randomized controlled trials.
      - mark-r 6y ago
        If the alternative medicine is widely known, you won't be able to get a patent on it. Without a patent you won't be able to make a profit. Without a profit there's no incentive to spend the enormous money required for a randomized controlled trial.
        TeMPOraL 6y ago
        But if the alternative medicine is widely known to work, it means the effect is powerful enough that a cheap RCT done at a local medical university should be more than enough to demonstrate it. If it can't, then frankly, you don't really know it works.
        mark-r 6y ago
        The point is that without a monetary payout at the end, you're going to have trouble incentivizing someone to do the study no matter how cheap it is. And don't forget the opposite, if there's a current medical treatment for the condition you're testing they will try to block you at every step.
        TeMPOraL 6y ago
        You can pester scientists, they have their own separate set of perverted incentives - academic status - which, in this case, works in your favor. As for the opposite case - if there was a thing you wanted to test that had a strong effect, then the company that owns the current treatment would happily fund you the tests in exchange for dibs if the tests pans out.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- lmilcin 6y ago
  It is a problem with medicine. Normally, we would not only want a proof that something works but also verifiable explanation of HOW something works. Medicine is a problem because we don't understand how many of the chemicals work but the problem is so important (and also it is big business) that we just let it pass and we are happy that we can get some results even if we don't completely understand how we get them.
- dllthomas 6y ago
  > song You mean 9 minute beat poem.
- mehrdadn 6y ago
  What're some examples of things that were called "alternative medicine" but that were later proven to work and regarded as "medicine"? Edit: Since people are bringing up ancient examples and kind of missing the point of the question: I'm not looking for examples from the Roman Empire here. Let's stick with the past < 50 years. Maybe something your parents might actually remember being dismissed as "alternative medicine" (whatever that meant at the time) but which now is clearly just accepted "medicine". Basically, try to find something that's in the spirit of the question. The goal is obviously to find things that modern medicine actually previously dismissed and later accepted, not to find a loophole in the question.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - VBprogrammer 6y ago
    I guess it depends how you define alternative medicine. The bark of a willow tree, a traditional remedy, from which aspirin is derived is given as an example in the beat poem.
    - mehrdadn 6y ago
      The point was you don't have to define it at all. You just need some things that were previously dismissed as "alternative medicine" in the past (say) 50 years, but which are now widely seen as ordinary medicine. I'm looking for examples a lot of people might actually remember from their own lives here... if you have to go back a century to find something then that doesn't count (sorry).
      - mark-r 6y ago
        Why doesn't it count? Your restriction seems very arbitrary and makes it much harder to find an answer. There are too many counter examples muddying the space, such as vitamin C curing colds.
        mehrdadn 6y ago
- SkyBelow 6y ago
  >"Do you know what they call alternative medicine that has been proven to work?...Medicine." I don't like this quote. It is mostly true, yet it is not completely true. But because it is mostly true so many treat it as if it is completely true and thus miss the edge cases where it is not true. Take for example certain substances that are deemed by the US federal government to have no medical value. They cannot be medicines. Yet they are alternative medicines and even prescribed by doctors. Their are even states who go against the federal government by saying these substances do have medical value. And if you go back a few decades, you'll find a time where mainstream science largely ignored any medical benefits of these substances, likely due to pressure from the federal government, and yet at that time those substances were alternative medicines that worked.
  - eindiran 6y ago
    The medical establishment doesn't think that eg marijuana is "alternative medicine" or without medical value: the DEA does. The fact that the medical establishment now accepts marijuana as a therapeutic tool is evidence of the quote: it was "alternative medicine" until there was sufficient evidence that it worked. Other drugs which are Schedule 1 (ie without medical value _according to the DEA_) are in various stages of this process (eg MDMA for PTSD). That's not same thing as saying that there isn't anything which is currently considered "alternative medicine" that works. Rather, once an alternative medicine has sufficient evidence going for it (and is better understood), it becomes less mystical and is accepted as mainstream medicine.
    - SkyBelow 6y ago
      >The medical establishment doesn't think that eg marijuana is "alternative medicine" or without medical value: the DEA does. Does the DEA and the FDA not play a role in what is considered a medicine or an alternative medicine? >The fact that the medical establishment now accepts marijuana as a therapeutic tool is evidence of the quote: it was "alternative medicine" until there was sufficient evidence that it worked. This is effectively making the claim that while there were problems in the past, the fixing of past problems can be taken as evidence that current problems do not exist. I'm arguing the opposite. That problems in the past, without fixing the systematic causes of those problems, is a reliable indicator that we are still at risk of those same problems. Think of it like code. If your code had bugs but you fixed them, should you assume that A: my code had bugs but now they are gone and my code is bug free or B: the process by which I write code allows for bugs, and while I have fixed those bugs I haven't fundamentally changed how I write code so I am still at risk for having bugs. I find the latter the more reasonable approach. >That's not same thing as saying that there isn't anything which is currently considered "alternative medicine" that works. When people use that quote, I find that this is exactly what they are saying in the majority of cases. That if something is currently considered alternative medicine, it doesn't work because otherwise it would be considered medicine. A claim that as our knowledge progresses alternative medicine that works becomes medicine is a much more reasonable claim, because it recognizes there is a timeline and since we aren't at the end of that timeline we allow for some alternative medicine actually work with the recognition in the future it will be refined into medicine. And if someone wanted to make the claim that the majority of alternative medicine doesn't work, I would also fully agree. My issue is people taking a guideline that is generally true and applying it as if it is always true.
saidajigumi 6y ago
Back in the early 90s, my grad AI class referred to AI as the "incredible shrinking field". The class kicked off with a black-and-white newsreel style interview from the 1950's with an MIT professor[1] who says, to eternal breathless infamy, something along the lines of "we'll have machines that can think within five years!" Part of the challenge is/was the line of thinking "surely if we can solve Hard Problem X, we'll have intelligence!" This turned out to be entirely wrongheaded, since a vast litany of Hard Problems X turned out to have plain old algorithmic solutions. [1] I keep hoping this shows up online somewhere. It was shot using a machine room as the set, where mid-century modern furniture had been brought in for guest and host!
- shanemhansen 6y ago
  Maybe in a few years we'll have bridged the gap between computer and machine capabilities. Not by deciding computers think, but by realizing that what humans do is computing.
- ryanhuff 6y ago
  Was the video titled “The Thinking Machine”?
  - saidajigumi 6y ago
    That indeed looks like it, thanks. It also looks like old memory mixed up bits and pieces of it; the interview wasn't in fact set in the machine room shots.
chongli 6y ago
This is because intelligence isn't like most of the other words we use in computer science. It's a word with a history of deep philosophical debate and no clear answer. We haven't come to an agreement on what is intelligence in biological systems so it may be premature to call anything artificially intelligent.
- zoomablemind 6y ago
  I was wondering what happened to the 'Computer-aided' notion? It was very representative of the utility and provenance. Noone claimed intelligence but literally just the help side of the computers. AI as well could stand for 'Assisted Inference'.
- hnick 6y ago
  Perhaps that is the point. If we can understand it, it's not intelligence. We're trying to make computers do things we can't understand, and if we do, we've reached our goal. Until then we have Machine Learning or gradient descent or whatever else.
mehrdadn 6y ago
Eh, I think we still have the Turing test, and AFAIK it hasn't had a case where it's passed without raising eyebrows for potentially trying to cover up for deficiencies. I think the threshold needs to be high (maybe "beyond a reasonable doubt"?) and reproducible with high probability: I'd say at least X% (I don't know what X should be, but it should be much higher than 50%) of the adults that engage in or read the conversation would need to be convinced it's between two typical humans in their societies. Certainly nothing that leaves room for e.g. excuses like the computer being a 13-year-old from another country, or that leaves inadequate time for the participants to gauge the plausibility...
- Izkata 6y ago
  For years there have been bots that carry on conversations on dating sites and go undetected...
- outworlder 6y ago
  Turing test? There are other definitions for 'AI' that are not strong AI. Natural language processing is a subset of AI.
glaugh 6y ago
Similarly: “Technology is a word that describes something that doesn’t work yet.” Douglas Adams
muldvarp 6y ago
That effect is explained by the fact that the problems in AI research are thought to be solvable only by intelligent agents. This can often turn out to be false. Many problems that seemingly require intelligence don't actually require it. Nick Bostrom wrote the following few lines in his book "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies" (which I absolutely recommend reading): > There is an important sense, however, in which chess-playing AI turned out to be a lesser triumph than many imagined it would be. It was once supposed, perhaps not unreasonably, that in order for a computer to play chess at grandmaster level, it would have to be endowed with a high degree of general intelligence.
- jkhdigital 6y ago
  Feels like this is about where problems lie along the closed-world/open-world, fast-thinking/slow-thinking fault line.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  But you know what? It could have been solved with general intelligence. But by defining it as some kind of major breakthrough a bunch of money got spent on solving just that one problem and then declaring victory by the players. I predict that this will happen for anything that gets pointed at as 'the' example of what a general AI would solve. A better benchmark would be that a single piece of software that is not specialized is able to solve two of these problems.
  - larksimian 6y ago
    This is trivial to do right now: Build a software program that recognizes the problem it is being set(limited list of problems it can handle at first, ie. extract text from an image, tell me if an image is a cat or a dog, play a chess game, play a go game) and once it has identified the problem get it to call into a specialized program for that problem(chess playing, OCR whatever). As you want to support more use cases, you just need to plug in a new subprogram and modify the top level problem recognizer. A chat bot sitting on top of a bunch of specialized systems, basically. This is clearly still not general intelligence and probably not super useful, but hey. The true benchmark for intelligence is a piece of software that is presented with some pattern and told to turn it into some other pattern and then figures out how to do it. This probably requires general and deep language comprehension(ie. get me a list of emails for environmental managers at US public water utilities. system needs to have some idea about google, some idea about the EPA and their web resources as a starting point for getting that dataset, some ability to google, read and understand web page data etc). Obviously you can cheat by just having a giant database of information, but at some point you have to be able to answer questions that are not in the database.
Semiapies 6y ago
Every time someone write software, someone comes along after-the-fact to try to claim it as "artificial intelligence", no matter how little (or absolutely nothing) the software in question has to do with whatever's being sold that year as "AI". AI used to be sold as human-like or even superhuman intelligence. Now, it just means "running software".

The AI effect: AI gets a bad rap because once something exists and is practical it's no longer called AI. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

VBprogrammer 6y ago

This reminds me of the Tim Minchin song Storm. "Do you know what they call alternative medicine that has been proven to work?...Medicine." I've never thought of it that way before but alternative medicine and AI have a lot in common.

iamcurious 6y ago
Yup, the similarities are profound. They both confront the limit of consciousness and what counts as knowledge.
riantogo 6y ago
Do you know what qualifies as alternative medicine? Anything that is not medicine.
- mayankkaizen 6y ago
  What is medicine? I mean if I take some herb and (successfully) use it to treat abdominal pain without knowing what that herb is or how it works, would that herb be classified as medicine or not? I have read description of many medicines and found out that we still don't know how those medicines work. But they are still called medicines. So what is medicine?
  - kilbuz 6y ago
    If your herb was shown to improve abdominal pain in a certain population through use of well-executed, replicated randomized control trials, I think it would count as medicine, yes.
  - hikarudo 6y ago
    Knowing how something works is better than not knowing. But you can still have a pretty good idea that it does have the desired effect (i.e. verify cause and effect) via randomized controlled trials. Of course, alternative medicine proponents rarely do randomized controlled trials.
    - mark-r 6y ago
      If the alternative medicine is widely known, you won't be able to get a patent on it. Without a patent you won't be able to make a profit. Without a profit there's no incentive to spend the enormous money required for a randomized controlled trial.
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
        But if the alternative medicine is widely known to work, it means the effect is powerful enough that a cheap RCT done at a local medical university should be more than enough to demonstrate it. If it can't, then frankly, you don't really know it works.
        mark-r 6y ago
        The point is that without a monetary payout at the end, you're going to have trouble incentivizing someone to do the study no matter how cheap it is. And don't forget the opposite, if there's a current medical treatment for the condition you're testing they will try to block you at every step.
        TeMPOraL 6y ago
        You can pester scientists, they have their own separate set of perverted incentives - academic status - which, in this case, works in your favor. As for the opposite case - if there was a thing you wanted to test that had a strong effect, then the company that owns the current treatment would happily fund you the tests in exchange for dibs if the tests pans out.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
lmilcin 6y ago
It is a problem with medicine. Normally, we would not only want a proof that something works but also verifiable explanation of HOW something works. Medicine is a problem because we don't understand how many of the chemicals work but the problem is so important (and also it is big business) that we just let it pass and we are happy that we can get some results even if we don't completely understand how we get them.
dllthomas 6y ago
> song You mean 9 minute beat poem.
mehrdadn 6y ago
What're some examples of things that were called "alternative medicine" but that were later proven to work and regarded as "medicine"? Edit: Since people are bringing up ancient examples and kind of missing the point of the question: I'm not looking for examples from the Roman Empire here. Let's stick with the past < 50 years. Maybe something your parents might actually remember being dismissed as "alternative medicine" (whatever that meant at the time) but which now is clearly just accepted "medicine". Basically, try to find something that's in the spirit of the question. The goal is obviously to find things that modern medicine actually previously dismissed and later accepted, not to find a loophole in the question.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- VBprogrammer 6y ago
  I guess it depends how you define alternative medicine. The bark of a willow tree, a traditional remedy, from which aspirin is derived is given as an example in the beat poem.
  - mehrdadn 6y ago
    The point was you don't have to define it at all. You just need some things that were previously dismissed as "alternative medicine" in the past (say) 50 years, but which are now widely seen as ordinary medicine. I'm looking for examples a lot of people might actually remember from their own lives here... if you have to go back a century to find something then that doesn't count (sorry).
    - mark-r 6y ago
      Why doesn't it count? Your restriction seems very arbitrary and makes it much harder to find an answer. There are too many counter examples muddying the space, such as vitamin C curing colds.
      - mehrdadn 6y ago
SkyBelow 6y ago
>"Do you know what they call alternative medicine that has been proven to work?...Medicine." I don't like this quote. It is mostly true, yet it is not completely true. But because it is mostly true so many treat it as if it is completely true and thus miss the edge cases where it is not true. Take for example certain substances that are deemed by the US federal government to have no medical value. They cannot be medicines. Yet they are alternative medicines and even prescribed by doctors. Their are even states who go against the federal government by saying these substances do have medical value. And if you go back a few decades, you'll find a time where mainstream science largely ignored any medical benefits of these substances, likely due to pressure from the federal government, and yet at that time those substances were alternative medicines that worked.
- eindiran 6y ago
  The medical establishment doesn't think that eg marijuana is "alternative medicine" or without medical value: the DEA does. The fact that the medical establishment now accepts marijuana as a therapeutic tool is evidence of the quote: it was "alternative medicine" until there was sufficient evidence that it worked. Other drugs which are Schedule 1 (ie without medical value _according to the DEA_) are in various stages of this process (eg MDMA for PTSD). That's not same thing as saying that there isn't anything which is currently considered "alternative medicine" that works. Rather, once an alternative medicine has sufficient evidence going for it (and is better understood), it becomes less mystical and is accepted as mainstream medicine.
  - SkyBelow 6y ago
    >The medical establishment doesn't think that eg marijuana is "alternative medicine" or without medical value: the DEA does. Does the DEA and the FDA not play a role in what is considered a medicine or an alternative medicine? >The fact that the medical establishment now accepts marijuana as a therapeutic tool is evidence of the quote: it was "alternative medicine" until there was sufficient evidence that it worked. This is effectively making the claim that while there were problems in the past, the fixing of past problems can be taken as evidence that current problems do not exist. I'm arguing the opposite. That problems in the past, without fixing the systematic causes of those problems, is a reliable indicator that we are still at risk of those same problems. Think of it like code. If your code had bugs but you fixed them, should you assume that A: my code had bugs but now they are gone and my code is bug free or B: the process by which I write code allows for bugs, and while I have fixed those bugs I haven't fundamentally changed how I write code so I am still at risk for having bugs. I find the latter the more reasonable approach. >That's not same thing as saying that there isn't anything which is currently considered "alternative medicine" that works. When people use that quote, I find that this is exactly what they are saying in the majority of cases. That if something is currently considered alternative medicine, it doesn't work because otherwise it would be considered medicine. A claim that as our knowledge progresses alternative medicine that works becomes medicine is a much more reasonable claim, because it recognizes there is a timeline and since we aren't at the end of that timeline we allow for some alternative medicine actually work with the recognition in the future it will be refined into medicine. And if someone wanted to make the claim that the majority of alternative medicine doesn't work, I would also fully agree. My issue is people taking a guideline that is generally true and applying it as if it is always true.

saidajigumi 6y ago

Back in the early 90s, my grad AI class referred to AI as the "incredible shrinking field". The class kicked off with a black-and-white newsreel style interview from the 1950's with an MIT professor[1] who says, to eternal breathless infamy, something along the lines of "we'll have machines that can think within five years!" Part of the challenge is/was the line of thinking "surely if we can solve Hard Problem X, we'll have intelligence!" This turned out to be entirely wrongheaded, since a vast litany of Hard Problems X turned out to have plain old algorithmic solutions. [1] I keep hoping this shows up online somewhere. It was shot using a machine room as the set, where mid-century modern furniture had been brought in for guest and host!

shanemhansen 6y ago
Maybe in a few years we'll have bridged the gap between computer and machine capabilities. Not by deciding computers think, but by realizing that what humans do is computing.
ryanhuff 6y ago
Was the video titled “The Thinking Machine”?
- saidajigumi 6y ago
  That indeed looks like it, thanks. It also looks like old memory mixed up bits and pieces of it; the interview wasn't in fact set in the machine room shots.

chongli 6y ago

This is because intelligence isn't like most of the other words we use in computer science. It's a word with a history of deep philosophical debate and no clear answer. We haven't come to an agreement on what is intelligence in biological systems so it may be premature to call anything artificially intelligent.

zoomablemind 6y ago
I was wondering what happened to the 'Computer-aided' notion? It was very representative of the utility and provenance. Noone claimed intelligence but literally just the help side of the computers. AI as well could stand for 'Assisted Inference'.
hnick 6y ago
Perhaps that is the point. If we can understand it, it's not intelligence. We're trying to make computers do things we can't understand, and if we do, we've reached our goal. Until then we have Machine Learning or gradient descent or whatever else.

mehrdadn 6y ago

Eh, I think we still have the Turing test, and AFAIK it hasn't had a case where it's passed without raising eyebrows for potentially trying to cover up for deficiencies. I think the threshold needs to be high (maybe "beyond a reasonable doubt"?) and reproducible with high probability: I'd say at least X% (I don't know what X should be, but it should be much higher than 50%) of the adults that engage in or read the conversation would need to be convinced it's between two typical humans in their societies. Certainly nothing that leaves room for e.g. excuses like the computer being a 13-year-old from another country, or that leaves inadequate time for the participants to gauge the plausibility...

Izkata 6y ago
For years there have been bots that carry on conversations on dating sites and go undetected...
outworlder 6y ago
Turing test? There are other definitions for 'AI' that are not strong AI. Natural language processing is a subset of AI.

glaugh 6y ago

Similarly: “Technology is a word that describes something that doesn’t work yet.” Douglas Adams

muldvarp 6y ago

That effect is explained by the fact that the problems in AI research are thought to be solvable only by intelligent agents. This can often turn out to be false. Many problems that seemingly require intelligence don't actually require it. Nick Bostrom wrote the following few lines in his book "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies" (which I absolutely recommend reading): > There is an important sense, however, in which chess-playing AI turned out to be a lesser triumph than many imagined it would be. It was once supposed, perhaps not unreasonably, that in order for a computer to play chess at grandmaster level, it would have to be endowed with a high degree of general intelligence.

jkhdigital 6y ago
Feels like this is about where problems lie along the closed-world/open-world, fast-thinking/slow-thinking fault line.
jacquesm 6y ago
But you know what? It could have been solved with general intelligence. But by defining it as some kind of major breakthrough a bunch of money got spent on solving just that one problem and then declaring victory by the players. I predict that this will happen for anything that gets pointed at as 'the' example of what a general AI would solve. A better benchmark would be that a single piece of software that is not specialized is able to solve two of these problems.
- larksimian 6y ago
  This is trivial to do right now: Build a software program that recognizes the problem it is being set(limited list of problems it can handle at first, ie. extract text from an image, tell me if an image is a cat or a dog, play a chess game, play a go game) and once it has identified the problem get it to call into a specialized program for that problem(chess playing, OCR whatever). As you want to support more use cases, you just need to plug in a new subprogram and modify the top level problem recognizer. A chat bot sitting on top of a bunch of specialized systems, basically. This is clearly still not general intelligence and probably not super useful, but hey. The true benchmark for intelligence is a piece of software that is presented with some pattern and told to turn it into some other pattern and then figures out how to do it. This probably requires general and deep language comprehension(ie. get me a list of emails for environmental managers at US public water utilities. system needs to have some idea about google, some idea about the EPA and their web resources as a starting point for getting that dataset, some ability to google, read and understand web page data etc). Obviously you can cheat by just having a giant database of information, but at some point you have to be able to answer questions that are not in the database.

Semiapies 6y ago

Every time someone write software, someone comes along after-the-fact to try to claim it as "artificial intelligence", no matter how little (or absolutely nothing) the software in question has to do with whatever's being sold that year as "AI". AI used to be sold as human-like or even superhuman intelligence. Now, it just means "running software".