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These days, you can translate text by pointing your phone at it and taking a picture. Thirty years ago, this would have been unambiguously AI, because it would

by msla 6y ago

These days, you can translate text by pointing your phone at it and taking a picture. Thirty years ago, this would have been unambiguously AI, because it would have been not only impossible, but stupid impossible like something out of a soft SF novel where little self-flying robots deliver stuff to your house, or you can ask a computer a question in a natural voice and reasonably expect a civil, natural-language answer sourced from global databases. Ah, but all that works. If AI is perpetually defined to be "that which does not work" then it's perpetually potential, perpetually postulated, perpetually possible perfection. It never has to be compared to a clunky translation, or a drone that gets shot down. Unwritten novels never have story problems in the third act, unwritten programs never give ludicrous output.

austinjp 6y ago
a.k.a. "the AI effect", Larry Tesler (mis)quoted by Douglas Hofstadter.
lambdatronics 6y ago
Yes, but you're missing the point. In 1950's sci-fi, those marvels were possible because there was imagined to be something like a general artificial intelligence behind the technology. We've achieved narrow AI, but the perception is that in order to get it, we would already have general AI, which is why people are disappointed.
- robbrown451 6y ago
  Whether 50s sci-fi imagined or implied other things is irrelevant to the question of whether or not the current capability described (point camera at sign, get translation) qualifies as AI. The point is we have current things that are quite amazing, and would at one time have been considered to be the sort of thing that only an AI would be able to do, and yet we keep moving the goalposts. As if AI is defined as "that which humans can do but machines can't, done by machines".
  - jpttsn 6y ago
    But was it the “capability” that qualified as AI in the 50s? Or was the capability just one example of what the AI could do? Suppose we said we’ve invented Jesus because we’ve invented ways to walk on water and turn it into wine.
    - robbrown451 6y ago
      I don't get your Jesus analogy, I mean Jesus is a proper noun for an individual. A technology is different. Its capabilities pretty much define it. Unless you are going to try to get all philosophical about it and say it doesn't count if it doesn't experience qualia or something (which is nonsense) Or, unless you are defining it in ways that specifically call out the implementation details. A helium balloon isn't a hot air balloon, not because it doesn't have capabilities, but because you've specifically said in the name that it must use hot air.
      - jpttsn 6y ago
        If a client/muggle asks me to build an “AI” I’ll be wary that their “spec” is sometimes just examples of what the “AI” should be able to do: play chess, write a poem. In their mental model, the AI is far from defined by these capabilities. They won’t be happy unless there’s an actual AGI whose capabilities happen to overlap with the spec. So my point is historically we have cheated our way out of defining “intelligence” and instead given necessary but insufficient examples. I think this is the mechanism behind the goalpost-shifting in “AI”. That’s the metaphor: it would clearly be absurd for engineers to define Jesus by some examples of capabilities. People who are waiting for the second coming won’t be satisfied. In the lab we maybe should define AI by some set of capabilities. But clients, journalists etc. picture the Hollywood version, and narrowly fulfilling their spec won’t actually satisfy them.
0x262d 6y ago
this is also one-sided though - the translation is cool but only kind of works and the quality varies a lot based on language, becoming unusably bad for many languages. so there's some amount of dismissal by AI boosters of its failures that people have grown accustomed to.
- robocat 6y ago
  > becoming unusably bad for many languages I presume that is not due to a failure of the ML, but instead is often due to the lack of a good corpus of text, or the lack of appropriate manual training/nudging/correcting of the model for unprofitable languages.

by msla 6y ago

austinjp 6y ago

a.k.a. "the AI effect", Larry Tesler (mis)quoted by Douglas Hofstadter.

lambdatronics 6y ago

Yes, but you're missing the point. In 1950's sci-fi, those marvels were possible because there was imagined to be something like a general artificial intelligence behind the technology. We've achieved narrow AI, but the perception is that in order to get it, we would already have general AI, which is why people are disappointed.

robbrown451 6y ago
Whether 50s sci-fi imagined or implied other things is irrelevant to the question of whether or not the current capability described (point camera at sign, get translation) qualifies as AI. The point is we have current things that are quite amazing, and would at one time have been considered to be the sort of thing that only an AI would be able to do, and yet we keep moving the goalposts. As if AI is defined as "that which humans can do but machines can't, done by machines".
- jpttsn 6y ago
  But was it the “capability” that qualified as AI in the 50s? Or was the capability just one example of what the AI could do? Suppose we said we’ve invented Jesus because we’ve invented ways to walk on water and turn it into wine.
  - robbrown451 6y ago
    I don't get your Jesus analogy, I mean Jesus is a proper noun for an individual. A technology is different. Its capabilities pretty much define it. Unless you are going to try to get all philosophical about it and say it doesn't count if it doesn't experience qualia or something (which is nonsense) Or, unless you are defining it in ways that specifically call out the implementation details. A helium balloon isn't a hot air balloon, not because it doesn't have capabilities, but because you've specifically said in the name that it must use hot air.
    - jpttsn 6y ago
      If a client/muggle asks me to build an “AI” I’ll be wary that their “spec” is sometimes just examples of what the “AI” should be able to do: play chess, write a poem. In their mental model, the AI is far from defined by these capabilities. They won’t be happy unless there’s an actual AGI whose capabilities happen to overlap with the spec. So my point is historically we have cheated our way out of defining “intelligence” and instead given necessary but insufficient examples. I think this is the mechanism behind the goalpost-shifting in “AI”. That’s the metaphor: it would clearly be absurd for engineers to define Jesus by some examples of capabilities. People who are waiting for the second coming won’t be satisfied. In the lab we maybe should define AI by some set of capabilities. But clients, journalists etc. picture the Hollywood version, and narrowly fulfilling their spec won’t actually satisfy them.

0x262d 6y ago

this is also one-sided though - the translation is cool but only kind of works and the quality varies a lot based on language, becoming unusably bad for many languages. so there's some amount of dismissal by AI boosters of its failures that people have grown accustomed to.

robocat 6y ago
> becoming unusably bad for many languages I presume that is not due to a failure of the ML, but instead is often due to the lack of a good corpus of text, or the lack of appropriate manual training/nudging/correcting of the model for unprofitable languages.