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> ` (...) They keep pushing it to later!’ His big concern about AI isn’t Judgment Day, but rather ‘that people will believe machines actually understand things’

> ` (...) They keep pushing it to later!’ His big concern about AI isn’t Judgment Day, but rather ‘that people will believe machines actually understand things’. He gives examples of symmetrical chess configurations in which humans consistently outperform computers by abstracting to a higher level This sounds a lot like the usual moving of goalposts whereby "anything computers can do isn't AI, so AI doesn't work". When AI couldn't do anything, chess was supposed to be a demonstration of human intelligence. Now that AI can play chess and other board games, suddenly it needs to solve symmetrical configurations and think "abstractly" (which is left fairly loosely defined).

bonoboTP 6y ago
The goalposts (as AI was originally envisioned) are still at the same place, at human equivalent performance in general. Depending on what is still not solved, people point out different things at different times to illustrate that we aren't there yet.
- FartyMcFarter 6y ago
  You're right, the overall goal is clear to everyone. But progress in AI is often dismissed because it doesn't achieve that final goal, regardless of how impressive the progress is; cf the first part of the quote: > They keep pushing it to later!
stanfordkid 6y ago
There's something deeper at the core of his observation IMO -- that our consciousness has some connection / dependence to the universes overall notion of symmetry through it's biological make up. His theory of consciousness looks at these quantum microtubules that are found in proteins ... so what he's saying is that maybe there is some sort of computational power within "wet brains", in how those brains relate to the broader environment that is difficult to precisely characterize. Silicon AI is fundamentally incapable of tapping in to these forces due to the lack of such a connection. The point is that the computational power of the brain may be non-local and non-constrained to the physical dimensions or neural capacity of the brain.
- koeng 6y ago
  Is there any evidence of his theory of consciousness?
  - varjag 6y ago
    No, it's pure speculation. The only reason you still hear about it is his physics credentials.
    - protonfish 6y ago
      It's so unfortunate because he is such a brilliant mathematician and physicist. To hear him spew this pseudo-scientific nonsense makes me embarrassed for him.
      - nescioquid 6y ago
        He got the idea from someone else. I had the impression he doesn't attach too strongly to the idea, but he offers it as an example of how you could have a something non-deterministic happening in human cognition. That may well be understating his commitment to the idea. It seems weak to me, but I really don't understand the details of the idea.
      - Der_Einzige 6y ago
        Too many very smart scientists have gone the same direction. Was sad to see Carl Jung go down this route.
        discreteevent 6y ago
        Who knows if it is sad until one is as smart as they are?
      - morlockabove 6y ago
        Brilliant scientists tend to be insane weirdos. Newton was into alchemy. The kind of personality that's willing to break one orthodoxy won't stop at the next; all great new ideas are plucked from the midst of mad ramblings.
hprotagonist 6y ago
Searle’s room is less a moved goalpost and more a claim that the question is ill-posed. From very early days, the question of “what does it mean for a computer program to have agency” has been asked. Usually poorly. Never with a satisfactory answer, at least to date. Perlisism 63: When we write programs that "learn", it turns out that we do and they don't.
- FartyMcFarter 6y ago
  > From very early days, the question of “what does it mean for a computer program to have agency” has been asked. Usually poorly. Never with a satisfactory answer, at least to date. If one asks this question, mustn't one also define what agency is? That seems like a hard problem in itself. Personally I don't see the problem with considering the computer as a black box and evaluating its intelligence (or lack of it) from that standpoint. After all, that is what us humans do with each other on a regular basis; for example, we evaluate humans as a black box in job interviews.
  - hprotagonist 6y ago
    yes, agency is also a real pain to define. what does it mean for a thing to “want” to do something? https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD09xx/EWD936.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD09xx/E... is also an ever-present problem: when anthroomorphic language is appropriate and when it is not is something of an open question, but the prior should be towards avoiding it. Possibly particularly in systems we’ve built. You don’t have to go full-on radical behaviorist to be wary of this trend, (and tangentially i think behaviorism isn’t the be all and end all of explanations by a long shot) but once you’re aware of it you see it cropping up everywhere. Viruses don’t “want” to infect you, protein binding sites don’t “want” to bind amino acids, REST endpoints don’t “expect” a json datagram, GPT-3 doesn’t “know” anything and hasn’t “learned” anything, and so on. But we regularly speak of them as if that were the case. What category errors are we missing when we do this that could open new doors of understanding?
    - carapace 6y ago
LatteLazy 6y ago
Until someone works out how to define and measure intelligence, the only thing people can do is compare to human. That means the goal post is always "what can't it do that humans can?". I think it's dumb, but that is the state of the field at the moment so...
crispyambulance 6y ago
> His big concern about AI isn’t Judgment Day, but rather ‘that people will believe machines actually understand things’. I think there's a third concern that is far more sinister and more likely than those two. Advances in AI, regardless of whether machines "surpass" or even come close to human intelligence, will be exploited by a few against the many. It will further exacerbate power imbalance and it is already happening. Forget about whether machines get "agency". Humans, in many cases, don't have agency or are rapidly losing it. They are losing it to other humans which are gaining power, financially, politically and perhaps now computationally. That's disturbing and it's part of what Jaron Lanier has been warning about for quite a while now.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  There's no scenario where AI become sensient through realization that one group of human is harming the other and refuses to act ?
  - crispyambulance 6y ago
    I'm sure that would make provocative sci-fi. We, as a people, haven't figured out to how to get along with each other even though we're all sentient. Why should machines behave differently as they become sentient? Whatever the case, I'm less worried about machines than I am about people with machines. At least for the foreseeable future. Heck, if we're talking sci-fi, the _truly_ destructive beings in Blade Runner weren't the synthetic humans (even though they became sentient), it was the "real" humans with their organizations, their power, and their machines all at their disposal.
    - pault 6y ago
      If they had just given the replicants a visa and a software update there wouldn't have been any fuss. Of course, then we wouldn't have had that great final monolog. :)
  - mhermher 6y ago
    We are all sentient, and many have had that realization. But how many have refused to act? No, we just mostly participate in that harm in order to survive.
simion314 6y ago
>chess was supposed to be a demonstration of human intelligence. why would brute forcing tons of chess moves would be intelligence and not search. Aren't ANN just some kind of brute forcing, just that this time brute forcing happens at training time. True intelligence could reason and adapt, the AI should be able to play any chess variant I invent without new training or if it is that smart should be able to defeat a human at any new task for both of them. But yeah, many things that are not intelligent were called AI, like expert systems where the human had to define all the rules, or genetic algorithms where the hard part was made by humans by defining the encoding and the fitting functions, same for the ANN , the humans need to dot he hard part, collect good data , define the ANN parameters, then train and evaluate the results. AI is so pathetic that the big software developers could not integrate it with coding, so you could do something like "Hey AI I need you to implement an integration with this API, find an SDK/library or implement it from the documentation and when my user uploads a photo use the xxx function of this API".
- FartyMcFarter 6y ago
  > Aren't ANN just some kind of brute forcing, just that this time brute forcing happens at training time. Not by any definition of "brute force" that I know about. Brute force implies searching through all possibilities, which is impossible in chess as there are too many of them.
  - simion314 6y ago
    Not all possibilities, even basic algorithms will avoid testing invalid or obvious bad moves or do some kind of backtracking. I did not studied this NN for chess, I am wondering if they just compressed the search space while training so searching is much faster.
    - morlockabove 6y ago
      How is that not what humans do?
      - 6y ago
AndrewKemendo 6y ago
It makes sense if your definition of "Intelligence" is "things only humans can do." In which case the set of all things only humans do shrinks but never goes to zero and thus you can always maintain some kind of superiority. IMO that's how people use the term - whether they are experts or not.
mcnamaratw 6y ago
As long as we keep using the marketing term "AI" and we just argue about what the technical definition is, we're going to have this problem. If Penrose wants, he can define AI using the Turing test. That's reasonable. I can say, no, that's moving the goalposts, my definition of AI is "things that looked incredibly hard in 1990. By that standard decent automatic translation is definitely AI." That's also reasonable. As long as our definition of "AI" is fluid, discussing whether it's been met or not is pointless.
- JKCalhoun 6y ago
  > I can say, no, ... my definition of AI is "things that looked incredibly hard in 1990 So, magic? "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." — Clarke
coldtea 6y ago
>This sounds a lot like the usual moving of goalposts whereby "anything computers can do isn't AI, so AI doesn't work". Well, it's also useful to establish a concrete definition of what is AI, and what is to be expected of it. >"chess was supposed to be a demonstration of human intelligence" Well, if it was, it was a bad one, and in restrospect it's obvious. You can play chess (as a program) and have totally 0 IQ in all over realms (e.g. any specialized chess engine, which is nothing like a general AI), whereas that's no true for humans. Human intelligence allows a chess player to ALSO play chess, it's not a chess-oriented algorithm. The same way a plastic ruler might measure better than us ("this is 12.45 inches", whereas we might say "that's about a foot", but its "measuring intelligence" is not human intelligence by any definition.
- FartyMcFarter 6y ago
  > Well, if it was, it was a bad one, and in restrospect it's obvious. That's exactly the point - this keeps happening with various things. Having reasonable machine translation / playing chess / computer vision were all considered as AI problems at some point, now they're often dismissed as not being AI, depending on whether or not computers are seen as achieving them. Alternatively, progress in those problems is dismissed due to not having enough "understanding" or "abstraction", even if computers are way better than humans at solving them (e.g. Penrose's point about chess). The goalposts keep moving so that AI is always what computers can't yet do.
  - pm90 6y ago
    I’ll bite. So what? Goalposts changing isn’t some sign of shadiness. Science isn’t a soccer game. Goalposts change all the damn time. Newtonian physics was considered as something that explained almost everything. Then we discovered that it doesn’t really, there are other theories that are better in being able to account for experiments. It’s not some sign of some big con. There was a goal, it was achieved and we moved on to the next one.
    - FartyMcFarter 6y ago
      To use your physics analogy, the situation with Penrose and AI would be like someone going "see, Newtonian physics don't explain everything, I told you physics is unsolvable!".
CJefferson 6y ago
I think there is a deeper point here. I do AI research, I use logic programming, deep learning, and a bunch of other techniques. These things together can produce amazing results, solving problems of which humans could never solve in thousands of years. However, I don't want black-box AI anywhere near me -- I don't want it deciding who gets into my University, the grades our students get, if I get a morgage or if I committed a crime. While AI can solve many problems, it's not really "thinking", it's just pattern matching and brute force, and (at least at the moment) every AI system is very easy to confuse if you try.
- JKCalhoun 6y ago
  You think we're doing something better than pattern matching? That seems to be what I do most of the time. :-)
  - CJefferson 6y ago
    I agree, the problem with AI is that companies seem much happier to say "the computer said so", and leave the answer at that. Except of course when they want to get out of something, at which point they say "Oh, that was just the computer which said that, we didn't mean it".
JKCalhoun 6y ago
> ` (...) His big concern about AI isn’t Judgment Day, but rather ‘that people will believe machines actually understand things’. The part where I'm always stalled with these arguments: what makes you think people actually understand things?
simonh 6y ago
I don't believe anyone with any significant knowledge of the subject has ever seriously suggested that the ability to play chess well requires full human level AI. Automatons that can play chess, some real and some fake, have existed for hundreds of years and nobody I'm aware of mistook them for human level intelligences but just clever curiosities, so I think this is clearly a particularly poorly informed straw man argument. I can maybe imagine someone not working in AI or unfamiliar with how computers work, and ignorant of the history of Chess automatons maybe saying something like this, but even if so who cares? It's simply wrong. We're not going to issue Deep Blue citizenship because Chess. The gold standard test for human level intelligence has long been and still remains the Turing Test. Not hobbled, limited "easy mode" tests as in some recent competitions for chat bots, but a full on, no holds barred freeform dialogue including whatever games, discussions, tests and topics a sophisticated tester chooses.
- FartyMcFarter 6y ago
  I'm not saying that chess equals human-level intelligence. I'm saying that dismissing any progress in AI because it doesn't solve a corner case of a previously important unsolved problem is moving the goalposts of AI research. Especially if dismissing the progress requires usage of fuzzy terms such as "understanding".
  - simonh 6y ago
    Right, but I suspect what’s happening is the inverse. Things like a chess and image classifiers are special cases. They’re important problems of course, but they’re not core building blocks of general AI and mistaking them for that is, well, a mistake. And sure some people do that, like the famous comment on Slashdot that Alphago was a sign that general AI was imminent, but actual AI researchers know this is simply not the case. Discussions about be real human level AI do involve using poorly defined terms unfortunately, but that’s because we don’t actually understand general Intelligence. I think pinning down those concepts more concretely will be part of the process.
- gowld 6y ago
  > The gold standard test for human level intelligence has long been and still remains the Turing Test The Turing Test was an offhand example that Turing brainstormed. The hard part of the turing test isn't "intelligence" but "human" -- imitating a human's irrational quirks. It doesn't make sense to call that a "level", because computers are far better at imitating humans than humans are at imitating computers. In other words, humans can't even pass a symmetric Turing Test.
gumby 6y ago
> His big concern about AI [is] ‘that people will believe machines actually understand things’. Right at the very beginning of the interview he has the same issue with human beings.
sorokod 6y ago
What it sounds like is that you have Penrose participate in game he wasn't party to ( not according to the interview anyway ) and then accuse him of violating the rules of that game.

bonoboTP 6y ago

The goalposts (as AI was originally envisioned) are still at the same place, at human equivalent performance in general. Depending on what is still not solved, people point out different things at different times to illustrate that we aren't there yet.

FartyMcFarter 6y ago
You're right, the overall goal is clear to everyone. But progress in AI is often dismissed because it doesn't achieve that final goal, regardless of how impressive the progress is; cf the first part of the quote: > They keep pushing it to later!

stanfordkid 6y ago

There's something deeper at the core of his observation IMO -- that our consciousness has some connection / dependence to the universes overall notion of symmetry through it's biological make up. His theory of consciousness looks at these quantum microtubules that are found in proteins ... so what he's saying is that maybe there is some sort of computational power within "wet brains", in how those brains relate to the broader environment that is difficult to precisely characterize. Silicon AI is fundamentally incapable of tapping in to these forces due to the lack of such a connection. The point is that the computational power of the brain may be non-local and non-constrained to the physical dimensions or neural capacity of the brain.

koeng 6y ago
Is there any evidence of his theory of consciousness?
- varjag 6y ago
  No, it's pure speculation. The only reason you still hear about it is his physics credentials.
  - protonfish 6y ago
    It's so unfortunate because he is such a brilliant mathematician and physicist. To hear him spew this pseudo-scientific nonsense makes me embarrassed for him.
    - nescioquid 6y ago
      He got the idea from someone else. I had the impression he doesn't attach too strongly to the idea, but he offers it as an example of how you could have a something non-deterministic happening in human cognition. That may well be understating his commitment to the idea. It seems weak to me, but I really don't understand the details of the idea.
    - Der_Einzige 6y ago
      Too many very smart scientists have gone the same direction. Was sad to see Carl Jung go down this route.
      - discreteevent 6y ago
        Who knows if it is sad until one is as smart as they are?
    - morlockabove 6y ago
      Brilliant scientists tend to be insane weirdos. Newton was into alchemy. The kind of personality that's willing to break one orthodoxy won't stop at the next; all great new ideas are plucked from the midst of mad ramblings.

hprotagonist 6y ago

Searle’s room is less a moved goalpost and more a claim that the question is ill-posed. From very early days, the question of “what does it mean for a computer program to have agency” has been asked. Usually poorly. Never with a satisfactory answer, at least to date. Perlisism 63: When we write programs that "learn", it turns out that we do and they don't.

FartyMcFarter 6y ago
> From very early days, the question of “what does it mean for a computer program to have agency” has been asked. Usually poorly. Never with a satisfactory answer, at least to date. If one asks this question, mustn't one also define what agency is? That seems like a hard problem in itself. Personally I don't see the problem with considering the computer as a black box and evaluating its intelligence (or lack of it) from that standpoint. After all, that is what us humans do with each other on a regular basis; for example, we evaluate humans as a black box in job interviews.
- hprotagonist 6y ago
  yes, agency is also a real pain to define. what does it mean for a thing to “want” to do something? https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD09xx/EWD936.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD09xx/E... is also an ever-present problem: when anthroomorphic language is appropriate and when it is not is something of an open question, but the prior should be towards avoiding it. Possibly particularly in systems we’ve built. You don’t have to go full-on radical behaviorist to be wary of this trend, (and tangentially i think behaviorism isn’t the be all and end all of explanations by a long shot) but once you’re aware of it you see it cropping up everywhere. Viruses don’t “want” to infect you, protein binding sites don’t “want” to bind amino acids, REST endpoints don’t “expect” a json datagram, GPT-3 doesn’t “know” anything and hasn’t “learned” anything, and so on. But we regularly speak of them as if that were the case. What category errors are we missing when we do this that could open new doors of understanding?
  - carapace 6y ago

LatteLazy 6y ago

Until someone works out how to define and measure intelligence, the only thing people can do is compare to human. That means the goal post is always "what can't it do that humans can?". I think it's dumb, but that is the state of the field at the moment so...

crispyambulance 6y ago

> His big concern about AI isn’t Judgment Day, but rather ‘that people will believe machines actually understand things’. I think there's a third concern that is far more sinister and more likely than those two. Advances in AI, regardless of whether machines "surpass" or even come close to human intelligence, will be exploited by a few against the many. It will further exacerbate power imbalance and it is already happening. Forget about whether machines get "agency". Humans, in many cases, don't have agency or are rapidly losing it. They are losing it to other humans which are gaining power, financially, politically and perhaps now computationally. That's disturbing and it's part of what Jaron Lanier has been warning about for quite a while now.

agumonkey 6y ago
There's no scenario where AI become sensient through realization that one group of human is harming the other and refuses to act ?
- crispyambulance 6y ago
  I'm sure that would make provocative sci-fi. We, as a people, haven't figured out to how to get along with each other even though we're all sentient. Why should machines behave differently as they become sentient? Whatever the case, I'm less worried about machines than I am about people with machines. At least for the foreseeable future. Heck, if we're talking sci-fi, the _truly_ destructive beings in Blade Runner weren't the synthetic humans (even though they became sentient), it was the "real" humans with their organizations, their power, and their machines all at their disposal.
  - pault 6y ago
    If they had just given the replicants a visa and a software update there wouldn't have been any fuss. Of course, then we wouldn't have had that great final monolog. :)
- mhermher 6y ago
  We are all sentient, and many have had that realization. But how many have refused to act? No, we just mostly participate in that harm in order to survive.

simion314 6y ago

>chess was supposed to be a demonstration of human intelligence. why would brute forcing tons of chess moves would be intelligence and not search. Aren't ANN just some kind of brute forcing, just that this time brute forcing happens at training time. True intelligence could reason and adapt, the AI should be able to play any chess variant I invent without new training or if it is that smart should be able to defeat a human at any new task for both of them. But yeah, many things that are not intelligent were called AI, like expert systems where the human had to define all the rules, or genetic algorithms where the hard part was made by humans by defining the encoding and the fitting functions, same for the ANN , the humans need to dot he hard part, collect good data , define the ANN parameters, then train and evaluate the results. AI is so pathetic that the big software developers could not integrate it with coding, so you could do something like "Hey AI I need you to implement an integration with this API, find an SDK/library or implement it from the documentation and when my user uploads a photo use the xxx function of this API".

FartyMcFarter 6y ago
> Aren't ANN just some kind of brute forcing, just that this time brute forcing happens at training time. Not by any definition of "brute force" that I know about. Brute force implies searching through all possibilities, which is impossible in chess as there are too many of them.
- simion314 6y ago
  Not all possibilities, even basic algorithms will avoid testing invalid or obvious bad moves or do some kind of backtracking. I did not studied this NN for chess, I am wondering if they just compressed the search space while training so searching is much faster.
  - morlockabove 6y ago
    How is that not what humans do?
    - 6y ago

AndrewKemendo 6y ago

It makes sense if your definition of "Intelligence" is "things only humans can do." In which case the set of all things only humans do shrinks but never goes to zero and thus you can always maintain some kind of superiority. IMO that's how people use the term - whether they are experts or not.

mcnamaratw 6y ago

As long as we keep using the marketing term "AI" and we just argue about what the technical definition is, we're going to have this problem. If Penrose wants, he can define AI using the Turing test. That's reasonable. I can say, no, that's moving the goalposts, my definition of AI is "things that looked incredibly hard in 1990. By that standard decent automatic translation is definitely AI." That's also reasonable. As long as our definition of "AI" is fluid, discussing whether it's been met or not is pointless.

JKCalhoun 6y ago
> I can say, no, ... my definition of AI is "things that looked incredibly hard in 1990 So, magic? "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." — Clarke

coldtea 6y ago

>This sounds a lot like the usual moving of goalposts whereby "anything computers can do isn't AI, so AI doesn't work". Well, it's also useful to establish a concrete definition of what is AI, and what is to be expected of it. >"chess was supposed to be a demonstration of human intelligence" Well, if it was, it was a bad one, and in restrospect it's obvious. You can play chess (as a program) and have totally 0 IQ in all over realms (e.g. any specialized chess engine, which is nothing like a general AI), whereas that's no true for humans. Human intelligence allows a chess player to ALSO play chess, it's not a chess-oriented algorithm. The same way a plastic ruler might measure better than us ("this is 12.45 inches", whereas we might say "that's about a foot", but its "measuring intelligence" is not human intelligence by any definition.

FartyMcFarter 6y ago
> Well, if it was, it was a bad one, and in restrospect it's obvious. That's exactly the point - this keeps happening with various things. Having reasonable machine translation / playing chess / computer vision were all considered as AI problems at some point, now they're often dismissed as not being AI, depending on whether or not computers are seen as achieving them. Alternatively, progress in those problems is dismissed due to not having enough "understanding" or "abstraction", even if computers are way better than humans at solving them (e.g. Penrose's point about chess). The goalposts keep moving so that AI is always what computers can't yet do.
- pm90 6y ago
  I’ll bite. So what? Goalposts changing isn’t some sign of shadiness. Science isn’t a soccer game. Goalposts change all the damn time. Newtonian physics was considered as something that explained almost everything. Then we discovered that it doesn’t really, there are other theories that are better in being able to account for experiments. It’s not some sign of some big con. There was a goal, it was achieved and we moved on to the next one.
  - FartyMcFarter 6y ago
    To use your physics analogy, the situation with Penrose and AI would be like someone going "see, Newtonian physics don't explain everything, I told you physics is unsolvable!".

CJefferson 6y ago

I think there is a deeper point here. I do AI research, I use logic programming, deep learning, and a bunch of other techniques. These things together can produce amazing results, solving problems of which humans could never solve in thousands of years. However, I don't want black-box AI anywhere near me -- I don't want it deciding who gets into my University, the grades our students get, if I get a morgage or if I committed a crime. While AI can solve many problems, it's not really "thinking", it's just pattern matching and brute force, and (at least at the moment) every AI system is very easy to confuse if you try.

JKCalhoun 6y ago
You think we're doing something better than pattern matching? That seems to be what I do most of the time. :-)
- CJefferson 6y ago
  I agree, the problem with AI is that companies seem much happier to say "the computer said so", and leave the answer at that. Except of course when they want to get out of something, at which point they say "Oh, that was just the computer which said that, we didn't mean it".

JKCalhoun 6y ago

> ` (...) His big concern about AI isn’t Judgment Day, but rather ‘that people will believe machines actually understand things’. The part where I'm always stalled with these arguments: what makes you think people actually understand things?

simonh 6y ago

I don't believe anyone with any significant knowledge of the subject has ever seriously suggested that the ability to play chess well requires full human level AI. Automatons that can play chess, some real and some fake, have existed for hundreds of years and nobody I'm aware of mistook them for human level intelligences but just clever curiosities, so I think this is clearly a particularly poorly informed straw man argument. I can maybe imagine someone not working in AI or unfamiliar with how computers work, and ignorant of the history of Chess automatons maybe saying something like this, but even if so who cares? It's simply wrong. We're not going to issue Deep Blue citizenship because Chess. The gold standard test for human level intelligence has long been and still remains the Turing Test. Not hobbled, limited "easy mode" tests as in some recent competitions for chat bots, but a full on, no holds barred freeform dialogue including whatever games, discussions, tests and topics a sophisticated tester chooses.

FartyMcFarter 6y ago
I'm not saying that chess equals human-level intelligence. I'm saying that dismissing any progress in AI because it doesn't solve a corner case of a previously important unsolved problem is moving the goalposts of AI research. Especially if dismissing the progress requires usage of fuzzy terms such as "understanding".
- simonh 6y ago
  Right, but I suspect what’s happening is the inverse. Things like a chess and image classifiers are special cases. They’re important problems of course, but they’re not core building blocks of general AI and mistaking them for that is, well, a mistake. And sure some people do that, like the famous comment on Slashdot that Alphago was a sign that general AI was imminent, but actual AI researchers know this is simply not the case. Discussions about be real human level AI do involve using poorly defined terms unfortunately, but that’s because we don’t actually understand general Intelligence. I think pinning down those concepts more concretely will be part of the process.
gowld 6y ago
> The gold standard test for human level intelligence has long been and still remains the Turing Test The Turing Test was an offhand example that Turing brainstormed. The hard part of the turing test isn't "intelligence" but "human" -- imitating a human's irrational quirks. It doesn't make sense to call that a "level", because computers are far better at imitating humans than humans are at imitating computers. In other words, humans can't even pass a symmetric Turing Test.

gumby 6y ago

> His big concern about AI [is] ‘that people will believe machines actually understand things’. Right at the very beginning of the interview he has the same issue with human beings.

sorokod 6y ago

What it sounds like is that you have Penrose participate in game he wasn't party to ( not according to the interview anyway ) and then accuse him of violating the rules of that game.