4 ms·

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

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.

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.