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Artificial Intelligence is stupid and causal reasoning won't fix it
- konjin 6y agoThanks for the link. It will take quite a while to read the paper.
- mellosouls 6y agoPaper rendered as web page: https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/2008.07371/ https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/2008.07371/
- dandanua 6y agoRelevant: Youtube algorithm blocked a video on a popular chess channel with 1800 videos, supposedly for a "racism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSjrYWPxsG8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSjrYWPxsG8
- Kaze404 6y agoI'm not saying this is the case but as chess podcast can be racist. It's presented by people.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoSure, it can be. Or it could just talk about black and white, and, say, about how black has a clearly inferior position, and be talking about nothing but chess, and still trigger an algorithm.
- tasty_freeze 6y agoWhat is your point? People make bad calls all the time too. I got a ticket for parking my car behind a sign saying "no parking beyond this point." As a secondary point, I suspect youtube's classifier is a bag of heuristics they are constantly fiddling with. Any failures of it are no indictment of the futility of developing AGI.
- dandanua 6y ago1. I don't need "a point" to attach a relevant information. 2. But I indeed have one - giving algorithms so much power without an appropriate checking and appeal process is clearly wrong. 3. This doesn't imply we shouldn't do science or develop AI systems.
- fizixer 6y ago- loaded premise (that AI community thinks causal reasoning, whatever form that may take, is the silver bullet) - Failure to distinguish b/w narrow and human-level AI - Zero mention of attention/transformer models - Zero mention of BERT, GPT, let alone GPT-3 Note-to-self: ignore and file away in the gary-marcus box.
- mellosouls 6y agoIgnoring the lack-of-any-progress-towards-AGI elephant in the room is presumably the main reason the AI hype train happily speeds on its pointless route throwing out it's cute tricks and tools with no actual destination in sight. Best not to ignore.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoI would definitely argue there's been substantial progress towards AGI. We've been seeing increasingly impressive AI results with increasingly more general architectures. Which criteria do you have for progress towards AGI that aren't being met?
- dumbfoundded 6y agoI don't entirely disagree that we're progressing towards AGI. For me, the most disappointing part of machine learning is complete lack of systems that can extrapolate.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoThe problem is that AI doesn't actually understand anything. We don't know what understanding is, but we know that an AI doesn't. But because we don't know what understanding is, we don't know how to make an AI do it. We're seeing AIs that can kind of hide their lack of any kind of understanding by means of more and more sophisticated behavior. But unless understanding = "not understanding, but in a really sophisticated way", that road isn't going to get us to AGI, ever. Personally, my bet is that understanding != "sophisticated non-understanding". I can't prove it, of course, because I don't know what understanding is either... [Edit: I suppose the other alternative is that understanding is real, but AGI doesn't actually require understanding. That seems improbable to me, but it is at least theoretically possible.]
- vixen99 6y agoWe all know it but somehow ... 'it is not so much that AI machinery cannot grasp causality, but that AI machinery - qua computation - cannot understand anything at all.'
- visarga 6y ago> Figure (8) shows a screen-shot from an iPhone after Siri, Apple’s AI ‘chatbot’, was asked to add a ‘litre of books’ to a shopping list; Siri’s response clearly demonstrates that it doesn’t understand language So his conclusion is based on Siri, an AI assistant I would agree was 'stupid', but not representative of SOTA. It's unfair to judge AI by Siri, Siri is a mass produced system with scaling costs, Apple can't host GPT-3 for everyone yet. Not even Google can use the latest and greatest neural nets in mass produced AI systems because they don't have the hardware and it would not make economical sense.
- pippy 6y ago> the ability to infer causes from observed phenomena So 'reading the room'. In social settings you can't follow logic and rationale blindly because there are these things on two legs full of meat and organs that don't like it.
- fouc 6y ago"all the impressive achievements of deep learning amount to just curve fitting"
- avmich 6y agoYeah, and then the same Judea Pearl also admits that "we didn't expect curve fitting to work so well".
- visarga 6y agoThat's because their mental model of AI is not good enough. Apparently humans don't really 'understand AI', the irony. By the way, causal reasoning is not the product of just one human, it is based on experiments, observations and careful model building by the whole human society over long spans of time. We didn't understand even basic things such as infections and the role of hygiene until recently. What does that say about our causal reasoning powers? That we were stupid? We know how COVID spreads and many people are still exposing themselves without care, sometimes causing their own demise or somebody else's. Why isn't causal reasoning working for us all the time? I think humans can only do causal reasoning when they have a very good model of the thing they are trying to understand. Causal intelligence is not in our brains naturally, it depends on having access to specific models.
- lostmsu 6y agoAnd the God is just a function. Who is there to tell, that curve fitting is insufficient for AGI?
- xkgt 6y ago... so says a curve fitting machine operating in a hyperplane in 100 trillion dimensions
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- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoI feel like the author has unreasonably strict expectations with some of his examples. Humans sometimes crash cars, misunderstand grocery lists, or learn to say things just as racist as Tay did - surely he wouldn't argue that any human who does dumb things lacks phenomenal consciousness.
- tanatocenose 6y agoNot to say that any dumb person lacks consciousness, but you might be surprised how many cognitive scientists think not everyone is “conscious.” There could be zombie/automatons living all around us.
- visarga 6y ago> There could be zombie/automatons living all around us. So now we have 'consciousness of the gaps'. It's an ever retreating concept, as AI advances what we call consciousness recedes into these gaps. Now we're discussing about how some humans are not really 'conscious', what next? Maybe in the end the only remaining 'conscious' people will be philosophers who don't believe in AI.
- avmich 6y agoIt's like a conspiracy that Americans didn't land on the Moon. Maybe a few decades will pass and people will be surprised to learn that on a leading technical forum people entertained ideas of absence of progress.
- wrnr 6y agoTo be honest I struggle with causal reasoning myself. I can intuit on some level that one thing causes another, and that in the process of causing the "other" the "thing" itself is reflexively brought about. This leaves me stuck in a place trying to make sense of things infinitely far apart in space and time all influencing each other instantaneously.
- renox 6y agoYou can't send information faster than C, so if causality == communication it's not instantaneously.
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- tasty_freeze 6y agoI recall reading about Searle's Chinese Room argument in Daniel Dennett's "Consciousness Explained" about 25 years ago. Maybe the exposition there was more complete than the version given in this article, but the argument of this article is terrible. The author says that the English speaker who simply manipulates symbols and follows rules will never get the joke written in Chinese, even if the people external to the room understand it and think it was produced by an intelligence that understands the joke. But that contains the assumption that the human is the consciousness in that arrangement, when in fact the human is just the energy source which drives the hardware. One might as well say that computers can never create a 3D drawing because its power supply doesn't understand arithmetic.
- dboreham 6y agoUgh. I remember listening to Searle on the BBC in the early 1980s, and becoming quite irate, as a 17 year old does, at his mistake in defining the boundary within which intelligence should be found as the operator not the whole room.
- variaga 6y agoYou can make a pretty good argument that the _rulebook_ is the Chinese-speaking intelligence in the room. "But it's an inanimate object, if the human stops following the rules it will be inert". Yeah, and if your mitochondria stop producing ATP you'll be inert too. Also. People taking Seale's position rarely reckon with just how big that rulebook would be.
- wrs 6y agoDaniel Dennett coined the term “intuition pump” for this, which is a great concept to keep in mind so you don’t get caught by one. Wikipedia: An argument “designed to elicit intuitive but incorrect answers by formulating the description in such a way that important implications of the experiment would be difficult to imagine and tend to be ignored.”
- 3PS 6y ago
- mmazing 6y agoThe paper is right, all impressive achievements amount to just curve fitting. But ... maybe that's why the human brain works so well. The 10s of billions of neurons in your brain are designed to adapt to patterns and adjust to external stimuli from sensory input. Just like compression algorithms can only compress something so far before losing data, maybe being limited by how much processing we are throwing at this problem limits the usefulness of our solutions.
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- Darvon 6y agoIf it was just a matter of horsepower we could perfectly simulate animals with simpler brains already.
- hprotagonist 6y ago"why does OpenWorm need a distributed supercomputer when the thing it's simulating needs about 10 millicalories a day" is one of those category of questions people don't like thinking about too much.
- anotheryou 6y agoAre you sure the bulk of it is not emulating physics and environment? I mean how many resources can you even throw at "302 neurons and 95 muscle cells"? edit: down the wormhole I go just look at the screenshots of the "brain": https://github.com/openworm/c302 https://github.com/openworm/c302 and the sim: https://github.com/openworm/OpenWorm/blob/master/README.md#quickstart https://github.com/openworm/OpenWorm/blob/master/README.md#q... Reading further, more physics: > Some simulators enable ion channel dynamics to be included and enable neurons to be described in detail in space (multi-compartmental models), while others ignore ion channels and treat neurons as points connected directly to other neurons. In OpenWorm, we focus on multi-compartmental neuron models with ion channels.
- carrolldunham 6y ago>but that AI machinery - qua computation - cannot understand anything at all Ugh, here we go. I swear this was all gone over with a very similar post just a week ago where it was pointed out that if an author says physical things can't 'understand' or whatever else, they are implying some non-physical soul-spark in humans.
- nurettin 6y agoThen it was pointed out wrongly and this isn't some spiritual talk. If you are able to retrofit new knowledge into the observations and categories you've previously formed by correcting what you already know and by changing perspective so that you can have proper inputs without causing contradictions, you understand it. Do you think curve fitting does this?
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoI'm not sure what you mean by "curve fitting" here. I would definitely say that a deep neural net has observations and categories, and I think it's pretty reasonable to characterize the training process as retrofitting new knowledge into it by correcting its knowledge and changing its perspective.
- nurettin 6y agoThis is the reply I was expecting, and I think you are right, but a CNN doesn't take into account any contradictions. It doesn't test the input for correctness, it just tries to categorize and fucked if the results make no sense.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoI'd agree, but I'm not sure how much this is an inherent problem. To what degree does it just reduce to needing a good conceptual framework for a "makes no sense" category?
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- euske 6y agoI can't stand with the unquestioned use of "understanding" here and there - did the author give a more precise definition of that? (I couldn't find any in the paper.) It reads more like a ranty blog piece than an academic article. It's sad that some people will read this and get confused.
- foxes 6y agoSpeculation in an absence of information. There are definitely biological organisms that suffer the same mistakes as our curve fitting. Eg the bird that pecks the red dot on the mothers beak. Its selected to pick the biggest red dot, so if you put a giant red dot next to the nest they will starve. Seems reasonable to believe human brains are lots of very good curve fitters working together. If anything because this is so successful maybe it's all we actually need. Specific neural nets for specific tasks. Maybe dualism is correct and conciousness is something special, but we have no ideas on how to test that.