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Ignoring 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 throwin

Ignoring 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 ago
I 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 ago
  I 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 ago
  The 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.]
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    perhaps understanding = sophisticated non-understanding + (being unaware that one does not understand || having a belief that one understands)
  - HenryKissinger 6y ago
    I know what understanding is...
  - visarga 6y ago
    We have all been surprised a few times in the last years by AI advancements, not even experts could predict AlphaGo or GPT. Why are you so sure you won't be surprised again, this time by human level understanding? The missing piece for real understanding is embodiment - we can act on our environment while GPT-3 like models can only see a fixed training set. This means an AI could construct its own hypothesis and test it if it were embodied, but can't do that otherwise. Understanding comes from playing 'the same game' with us: sharing the same environment and having aligned rewards. Imagine if a scientist were kept locked up all her life and only had access to a video feed showing the world. Would she gain anything by coming out of the cave and actually seeing and interacting with the world?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    My concern is, if we don't know what understanding is, how do we know it's not becoming a god of the gaps? Playing Go and writing poetry were canonical examples of things AI couldn't do without true understanding, right up until we wrote AIs that could do them.
    - wahern 6y ago
      Go was never thought of in that way. Search Google books for "Go chess artificial intelligence computer" and use the 20th century time filter. It was only believed that Go was impervious to the brute-force search strategies employed by the most successful chess programs. The alternative was never "true understanding", but rather believed to be the application of knowledge engineering, expert systems, etc, none of which could be equivocated with "true understanding". Regarding poetry, the counter argument is that a modern neural network can't generate poetry any more than a Xerox machine can generate poetry. IOW, it can only replicate styles, not invent new ones. Though, that's often good enough as far as the vast majority of readers are concerned.
      - perl4ever 6y ago
        >any more than a Xerox machine can generate poetry You assume, but are you sure...? https://www.theregister.com/2013/08/06/xerox_copier_flaw_means_dodgy_numbers_and_dangerous_designs/ https://www.theregister.com/2013/08/06/xerox_copier_flaw_mea...
    - perl4ever 6y ago
      Playing Go was a big deal because it could be done by a program that started from zero. Did somebody create a program that can write poetry without first consuming basically everything humans have ever written? Or even after consuming roughly what a well-read human might have read? I think it's reasonable to allow for the fact that humans must have a certain amount of information encoded by evolution, but I can't believe it's either qualitatively or quantitatively comparable to a database of all the text on the internet.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

I 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 ago
I 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 ago
The 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.]
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  perhaps understanding = sophisticated non-understanding + (being unaware that one does not understand || having a belief that one understands)
- HenryKissinger 6y ago
  I know what understanding is...
- visarga 6y ago
  We have all been surprised a few times in the last years by AI advancements, not even experts could predict AlphaGo or GPT. Why are you so sure you won't be surprised again, this time by human level understanding? The missing piece for real understanding is embodiment - we can act on our environment while GPT-3 like models can only see a fixed training set. This means an AI could construct its own hypothesis and test it if it were embodied, but can't do that otherwise. Understanding comes from playing 'the same game' with us: sharing the same environment and having aligned rewards. Imagine if a scientist were kept locked up all her life and only had access to a video feed showing the world. Would she gain anything by coming out of the cave and actually seeing and interacting with the world?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  My concern is, if we don't know what understanding is, how do we know it's not becoming a god of the gaps? Playing Go and writing poetry were canonical examples of things AI couldn't do without true understanding, right up until we wrote AIs that could do them.
  - wahern 6y ago
    Go was never thought of in that way. Search Google books for "Go chess artificial intelligence computer" and use the 20th century time filter. It was only believed that Go was impervious to the brute-force search strategies employed by the most successful chess programs. The alternative was never "true understanding", but rather believed to be the application of knowledge engineering, expert systems, etc, none of which could be equivocated with "true understanding". Regarding poetry, the counter argument is that a modern neural network can't generate poetry any more than a Xerox machine can generate poetry. IOW, it can only replicate styles, not invent new ones. Though, that's often good enough as far as the vast majority of readers are concerned.
    - perl4ever 6y ago
      >any more than a Xerox machine can generate poetry You assume, but are you sure...? https://www.theregister.com/2013/08/06/xerox_copier_flaw_means_dodgy_numbers_and_dangerous_designs/ https://www.theregister.com/2013/08/06/xerox_copier_flaw_mea...
  - perl4ever 6y ago
    Playing Go was a big deal because it could be done by a program that started from zero. Did somebody create a program that can write poetry without first consuming basically everything humans have ever written? Or even after consuming roughly what a well-read human might have read? I think it's reasonable to allow for the fact that humans must have a certain amount of information encoded by evolution, but I can't believe it's either qualitatively or quantitatively comparable to a database of all the text on the internet.