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The argumentation here is poor. - there is no explanation of what the "AI philosophy" or "AI way of thinking" is according to the authors - according to the a

• sheeshkebab 6y ago
  > the authors propose "focusing on the human" as an alternative but the two aren't mutually exclusive at all the holy grail of AI, it's ultimate goal, is AGI, which is quite opposite of human focus.
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • arethuza 6y ago
    "the holy grail of AI, it's ultimate goal, is AGI" I don't think it is an explicit goal for many people - most people seem to be focusing on using 'AI' techniques to solve narrowly defined practical problems that were difficult or impossible with other techniques. Edit: AGI was perhaps more of an explicit goal during the phase of "good old fashioned" symbolic AI the peaked in the 1980s and early 1990s.
  • ganzuul 6y ago
    Full AGI has little economic use aside from a brief resurgence of slavery. Its real value lies in creating an alien, terrestrial, intelligence to which we can compare and learn about ourselves. Philosophically AGI is ancient and has always been about humans.
• qsort 6y ago
  There's a famous paper by Dijkstra where he claims that using anthropomorphic terms for computers is a sign of immaturity of the discipline. I used to think that was a bit extreme, but the more people keep talking about fucking AI, the more I'm convinced he was actually right. Machine learning is linear algebra, nothing more nothing less. Making a model, using it wrong, and then complaining that "the model failed" is a unique kind of stupidity that's becoming more and more popular with "hoi polloi" due to garbage articles like this.
  • ogogmad 6y ago
    > Machine learning is linear algebra, nothing more nothing less Neural nets are non-linear. If they were linear, that would be linear regression. I actually don't get what your point is.
    • qsort 6y ago
      I'm not claiming it's literally a linear model, obviously. The point is that they are relatively simple mathematical models (that actually use linear algebra inside, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neuron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neuron does the output formula remind you of anything?) different in scope/use but not conceptually from linear regressions. Attaching (meta)physical meanings ("neurons", "intelligence") to any of that is dubious at best.
      • mbeex 6y ago
        Without non-linearity you are mathematically provable not able to get solutions for most contemporary problems. Refusing the general AI hype bullshit and over-simplifying the hard foundations are quite different things, IMO.
        • qsort 6y ago
          I don't disagree with this. It was a misuse of terminology on my part, my broader point has absolutely nothing to do with the mathematical details of neural networks.
• unishark 6y ago
  > - there is no explanation of what the "AI philosophy" or "AI way of thinking" is according to the authors I think this point was implied here: "A clear alternative to “AI” is to focus on the people present in the system. If a program is able to distinguish cats from dogs, don’t talk about how a machine is learning to see. Instead talk about how people contributed examples in order to define the visual qualities distinguishing “cats” from “dogs” in a rigorous way for the first time. There's always a second way to conceive of any situation in which AI is purported. " It's basically like saying it's all really just "curve-fitting", a mathematical tool which which requires smart mathematicians and programmers to implement successfully, not anything genuinely intelligent about the software.
  • Kalium 6y ago
    Now we're talking about humans doing data labor to help enable computer systems tell cats from dogs in imagines in a rigorous way. Now that we've rejected the AI philosophy and refuse to use the AI way of thinking and remember and center the human, what have we gained? I feel like I'm talking to a college sophomore who has learned that framing and jargon are useful rhetorical tools, but hasn't learned that they serve useful purposes.
    • unishark 6y ago
      I'd say the authors have impressive resumes, though the arguments about economics and society are too far out there for me. So I didn't read very far into that stuff to see what they have gained from the position. But I see it more as using accurate descriptions rather than just alternatives, which does have value in not misleading people.
    • ssivark 6y ago
      > Now that we've rejected the AI philosophy and refuse to use the AI way of thinking and remember and center the human, what have we gained? Very simple. If we contextual ever the contribution of the people, then why if it that Google captures most of the value of search ads, rather than the people who created the web pages that Google scraped? Why don’t they get a greater say in Google’s comment policies and ranking biases, including influencing which algorithms are appropriate for which context?
• vivekd 6y ago
  They didn't make the point very well but I think they may have been trying to argue that algorithms while pretending to be objective have biases of their creators built in. The ideology they are critical of being that algorithmic decision making is the best or most of objective form of decision making.
• apostacy 6y ago
  I strongly suspect that the author of this article does not have much background or interest in AI, and is merely part of a push to politicize it. I have spoken to people who are adamant that AI is racist and needs to be forced to change, but seem at a loss to go into even layman levels of technical details. So I suspect that they are just parroting a received opinion. To be clear, of course I know that there are all sorts of systematic forms of unfairness. But I think that AI is just an implementation of systems. The AI umbrella extends as far as what are essentially spreadsheets. Are spreadsheets unfair, or are the policies unfair? Does it make sense to lobby Microsoft to do something about predatory lenders using Excel?
• deleted 6y ago
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• gambler 6y ago
  >- there is no explanation of what the "AI philosophy" or "AI way of thinking" is according to the authors "The core of the ideology is that a suite of technologies, designed by a small technical elite, can and should become autonomous from and eventually replace, rather than complement, not just individual humans but much of humanity."
• unabst 6y ago
  The AI way of thinking is: AI is better than humans, and that it will replace our labor and our decisions. Therefore we must focus and invest in AI, as well as fear it, because it is taking over. The damage done is obvious. We discount human agency and human labor in the face of this idea. Products are being sold based on this idea. Foreign and domestic policy, security and privacy, and private and public funding are being redirected by this idea. If one were to simply replace "AI" with "machine learning", which is the name of the actual technology in most of these cases, in most of these contexts the hype and ideology would go away. And with it take away the attention and the money. We would then be able to focus on better things.
  • bonoboTP 6y ago
    I wouldn't blame all that on the term "AI". There was quite a bit of hype before that under the label of "big data". In Germany it's trendy to talk about Industry 4.0 and "digitalization". You can generate quite a lot of buzz even without talking about "AI".
    • unabst 6y ago
      Exactly. "AI" used by the media, by marketing, and by science fiction has created its own concept, and that concept having consequences beyond the technologies associated with the label is what the article is about.
      • bonoboTP 6y ago
        That's not what I meant. I mean that overusing the term "AI" is kinda bad and annoying but I think it's not doing the heavy lifting in the rapid adoption of these technologies and the buzz it creates. Even if we just talked about large-scale high-performance statistical data processing, or "algorithmic automation" (AA) it would still be used everywhere, it would just be more difficult for laypeople to come to grips with it. It's a bit as if people around 2000 were saying it's stupid to talk about "cyberspace", it's not some new space out there, it's just people sitting behind their computers connected by wires! But that term was not the reason for the hype. Now, sure the label AI does contribute its share to the hype, but this stuff is so good that whatever way you call it (as long as it's not too many syllables), it will become a buzzword just for that reason. It's like euphemism treadmills. You can rename the concept, but it will re-acquire the same meanings. I mean "convolutional" managed to become quite a buzzword itself (even though it's a well defined technical term), as it appeared so often alongside really sexy stories.
• Animats 6y ago
  According to the authors this undefined philosophy has caused economical and social damage The authors propose "focusing on the human" as an alternative but the two aren't mutually exclusive at all Yes, it's rather vague. What seems to be annoying the original author is simple. Most of the areas where machine learning is currently deployed are somewhat obnoxious. Ad targeting. Face recognition. Behavior recognition. Those are areas where some error is expected, so mediocre ML performance is acceptable. ML isn't yet good enough to drive, for example. That has a lower tolerance for errors. All this is "focusing on the human". In the sense of "Big Brother is Watching You". Be careful of what you ask for.
• kemitchell 6y ago
  On explanation of AI as a philosophy: > "AI" is best understood as a political and social ideology rather than as a basket of algorithms. The core of the ideology is that a suite of technologies, designed by a small technical elite, can and should become autonomous from and eventually replace, rather than complement, not just individual humans but much of humanity. On economical and social damage: The article mentions that less than 10 percent of the US workforce is counted as employed by the technology sector, that essential contributions of others aren't counted as "work" or compensated, that this has "hollowed out" the economy and contributed to the concentration of wealth in an elite, and that this has contributed to concentrating power, as well. On mutual exclusivity: The article proposes paying people for contributions, rather than writing them off as non-work. It also mentions humans with "AI resources" outperforming AI alone.
• TurkishPoptart 6y ago
  They explain it here in this paragraph: >“AI” is best understood as a political and social ideology rather than as a basket of algorithms. The core of the ideology is that a suite of technologies, designed by a small technical elite, can and should become autonomous from and eventually replace, rather than complement, not just individual humans but much of humanity. Given that any such replacement is a mirage, this ideology has strong resonances with other historical ideologies, such as technocracy and central-planning-based forms of socialism, which viewed as desirable or inevitable the replacement of most human judgement/agency with systems created by a small technical elite. It is thus not all that surprising that the Chinese Communist Party would find AI to be a welcome technological formulation of its own ideology.