6 ms·

There are a lot of people in this thread who seem to be very confident and skeptical of the author's position. Maybe this would be a good opportunity to try the

There are a lot of people in this thread who seem to be very confident and skeptical of the author's position. Maybe this would be a good opportunity to try the exercise he challenges in the article? Please post your nomination for what’s the least impressive accomplishment that you are very confident cannot be done in the next two years. We can check back in 2022 and see how we did!

Hnrobert42 6y ago
Successfully respond to my basic questions for help at my bank website.
- ilaksh 6y ago
  "Basic" is very broad. What questions?
  - abainbridge 6y ago
    I think the broadness is the problem. If it wasn't broad, you could hard code answers to all the questions. Examples of some basic questions that have no chance of working today: "Do you remember that discussion we were having last time?", "I've scanned the document you want, can I paste it straight into the chat window?", "Is PDF format OK?", "Can you look at page 2 in the PDF?".
    - mehrdadn 6y ago
      I think just "No" would work as an answer to all of those questions. (Tongue only halfway in cheek...)
      - abainbridge 6y ago
        Haha. I guess that's what real people who work at my bank would say. But I'm not sure they possess general purpose intelligence either.
memexy 6y ago
Proving theorems. I will nominate Cauchy's Residue Theorem. It has already been formalized so a neural network or any generally intelligent agent should be able to do the same: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~wl302/publications/itp16.pdf https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~wl302/publications/itp16.pdf. Complex analysis in general is one of the more fun parts of math and I doubt it's getting automated any time soon. It also has a lot of application in signal processing (https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-application-of-complex-analysis-in-engineering?share=1 https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-application-of-complex-ana...) so any automation improvements in complex analysis can be carried over to those fields. More generally, I don't think AI is the scary monster people make it out to be. It's another tool in the toolbox for automation and intelligence augmentation. I don't fear hammers so I don't see why people fear AI and the benefits of extra automation that AI enables.
- caf 6y ago
  I like to think I'm a generally intelligent agent, but I put long odds that I'll be doing that in the next 2 years.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - memexy 6y ago
    Point is you could do it if you really wanted to learn enough complex analysis to understand the theorem and its proof. AI progress is impressive but it's nowhere near anything people can do when they sit down to think about stuff. I don't fear the AI overlords. If they start proving new theorems then I will learn from them, same way Magnus Carlson learned to be the best human chess player by practicing with chess AI. More generally, AI can extend human planning horizons and extending planning horizons is, in my opinion, a very good thing. The more computations we can do that extend further out in time and the more widespread this capability the better decisions we can make as individuals and as a society.
    - nopinsight 6y ago
mehrdadn 6y ago
Okay, sure. :-) Take the set of people [1] who: - Have had an email account for at least 5 years, - Have checked their spam folder at least once every month over the course of the past two years, and - Have marked a set of emails as spam on at least 1 day every three months over the course of the past two years. I'm very confident that, within the next 2 years, we will not have an accurate enough classifier that would cause > 80% of these people to simultaneously (a) check their spam folders less than one day each year, and (b) mark emails as spam on less than 1 day every year. Oh, and to help prevent cheating: - Let's say the classifier must not have been trained with any emails in the world that are sent more recently than 1 month prior to the beginning of its trial. I'm also very tempted to say we don't need to worry about AGI before we can achieve the above for 30% of these people, but I'm less confident in this one. [1] I suppose, as a practical matter, even if we had such a classifier, this would be untestable without access to everyones' email accounts. So, for the sake of argument, let's say our population under study itself is a simple random sample of 100M accounts from the set of providers who service > 50M accounts each and who are willing to run such a test at the time of the trial.
- ajuc 6y ago
  That's cheating because improving AI is working on both sides - it's making better classifiers but also better spam generators :) In the future with general AI classifying spam will be a hard problem even for people. Imagine you get a message looking like it's from your facebook friend with his catchphrases telling you about his last trip and saying how great that travel agency was :) Spam or not?
  - mehrdadn 6y ago
    Quite an interesting point I hadn't considered at all. On the one hand I'm wondering: what's your suggestion on how to address this with minimal changes to my criteria? On the other hand I'm wondering: well, if the analog of this is that AGI might get solved with more AGI, then that's only going to make me less likely to be worried in the first place!
    - 6y ago
SCdF 6y ago
Build a microwave that heats food evenly. I mean this probably doesn't involve AI or anything, but it would be nice!
6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
I think it's a weird challenge. Like what's the shortest height that you're very confident that most people (> 50%) would consider tall? This is a tough question. You might get silence and tentative answers if you asked it. You might get different answers in different circumstances. But it doesn't mean "tall" is a concept we can't reason about confidently. "What is the least X that you're confident of f(X)?" is just a hard question for any uncertain or vaguely defined X. Doubly so for an uncertain and vaguely defined X. But I don't think it tells us that much about X.

Hnrobert42 6y ago

Successfully respond to my basic questions for help at my bank website.

ilaksh 6y ago
"Basic" is very broad. What questions?
- abainbridge 6y ago
  I think the broadness is the problem. If it wasn't broad, you could hard code answers to all the questions. Examples of some basic questions that have no chance of working today: "Do you remember that discussion we were having last time?", "I've scanned the document you want, can I paste it straight into the chat window?", "Is PDF format OK?", "Can you look at page 2 in the PDF?".
  - mehrdadn 6y ago
    I think just "No" would work as an answer to all of those questions. (Tongue only halfway in cheek...)
    - abainbridge 6y ago
      Haha. I guess that's what real people who work at my bank would say. But I'm not sure they possess general purpose intelligence either.

memexy 6y ago

Proving theorems. I will nominate Cauchy's Residue Theorem. It has already been formalized so a neural network or any generally intelligent agent should be able to do the same: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~wl302/publications/itp16.pdf https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~wl302/publications/itp16.pdf. Complex analysis in general is one of the more fun parts of math and I doubt it's getting automated any time soon. It also has a lot of application in signal processing (https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-application-of-complex-analysis-in-engineering?share=1 https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-application-of-complex-ana...) so any automation improvements in complex analysis can be carried over to those fields. More generally, I don't think AI is the scary monster people make it out to be. It's another tool in the toolbox for automation and intelligence augmentation. I don't fear hammers so I don't see why people fear AI and the benefits of extra automation that AI enables.

caf 6y ago
I like to think I'm a generally intelligent agent, but I put long odds that I'll be doing that in the next 2 years.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- memexy 6y ago
  Point is you could do it if you really wanted to learn enough complex analysis to understand the theorem and its proof. AI progress is impressive but it's nowhere near anything people can do when they sit down to think about stuff. I don't fear the AI overlords. If they start proving new theorems then I will learn from them, same way Magnus Carlson learned to be the best human chess player by practicing with chess AI. More generally, AI can extend human planning horizons and extending planning horizons is, in my opinion, a very good thing. The more computations we can do that extend further out in time and the more widespread this capability the better decisions we can make as individuals and as a society.
  - nopinsight 6y ago

mehrdadn 6y ago

Okay, sure. :-) Take the set of people [1] who: - Have had an email account for at least 5 years, - Have checked their spam folder at least once every month over the course of the past two years, and - Have marked a set of emails as spam on at least 1 day every three months over the course of the past two years. I'm very confident that, within the next 2 years, we will not have an accurate enough classifier that would cause > 80% of these people to simultaneously (a) check their spam folders less than one day each year, and (b) mark emails as spam on less than 1 day every year. Oh, and to help prevent cheating: - Let's say the classifier must not have been trained with any emails in the world that are sent more recently than 1 month prior to the beginning of its trial. I'm also very tempted to say we don't need to worry about AGI before we can achieve the above for 30% of these people, but I'm less confident in this one. [1] I suppose, as a practical matter, even if we had such a classifier, this would be untestable without access to everyones' email accounts. So, for the sake of argument, let's say our population under study itself is a simple random sample of 100M accounts from the set of providers who service > 50M accounts each and who are willing to run such a test at the time of the trial.

ajuc 6y ago
That's cheating because improving AI is working on both sides - it's making better classifiers but also better spam generators :) In the future with general AI classifying spam will be a hard problem even for people. Imagine you get a message looking like it's from your facebook friend with his catchphrases telling you about his last trip and saying how great that travel agency was :) Spam or not?
- mehrdadn 6y ago
  Quite an interesting point I hadn't considered at all. On the one hand I'm wondering: what's your suggestion on how to address this with minimal changes to my criteria? On the other hand I'm wondering: well, if the analog of this is that AGI might get solved with more AGI, then that's only going to make me less likely to be worried in the first place!
  - 6y ago

SCdF 6y ago

Build a microwave that heats food evenly. I mean this probably doesn't involve AI or anything, but it would be nice!

6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago

I think it's a weird challenge. Like what's the shortest height that you're very confident that most people (> 50%) would consider tall? This is a tough question. You might get silence and tentative answers if you asked it. You might get different answers in different circumstances. But it doesn't mean "tall" is a concept we can't reason about confidently. "What is the least X that you're confident of f(X)?" is just a hard question for any uncertain or vaguely defined X. Doubly so for an uncertain and vaguely defined X. But I don't think it tells us that much about X.