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What a confused and muddled post, trying to touch on psychology, philosophy, and mathematics, and missing the mark on basically all three. I'm quite bearish on

by dvt 5y ago

What a confused and muddled post, trying to touch on psychology, philosophy, and mathematics, and missing the mark on basically all three. I'm quite bearish on AI/ML, but calling it a "parlor trick" is like calling modern computers a parlor trick. I mean, at the end of the day, they're just very fast abacuses, right? Let's face it: what ML has brought to the forefront -- from self-landing airplanes to self-driving cars, to AI-assisted diagnoses -- is pretty impressive. If you insist on being reductive, sure, I guess it's "merely" statistics. Bringing up quantitative vs qualitative analysis is just silly, since science has had this problem way before AI. Hume famously described it as the is/ought problem†. And that was a few hundred years ago. Finally, dropping the mic with "I don't think we're anywhere close to consciousness" is just bizarre. I don't think that any serious academic working in AI/ML has made any arguments that claim machine learning models are "conscious." And Strong AI will probably remain unattainable for a very long time (I'd argue forever). This is not a particularly controversial position. † Okay, it's not the same thing, but closely related. I suppose the fact–value distinction might be a bit closer.

flyinglizard 5y ago
> what ML has brought to the forefront -- from self-landing airplanes to self-landing cars I am not aware of any ML in flight controls. Being black box and probabilistic by nature, these things won’t get past industry standards and regulations (at least for a while).
- dvt 5y ago
  > I am not aware of any ML in flight controls. Being black box and probabilistic by nature, these things won’t get past industry standards and regulations (at least for a while). (Hah, I accidentally wrote "self-landing cars," fixed). But yeah, I guess I was thinking more of drones, I'm not exactly sure what ML (if any) is in the guts of a commercial or military airplane.
  - meheleventyone 5y ago
    Drones don’t need ML to self-land AFAIK?
  - moyix 5y ago
    I don't know if they have made it into production yet (probably not?) but Lindsey Kuper wrote a nice pair of posts on how DNNs can replace an existing collision avoidance system (ACAS), and how to verify whether it's still safe after doing so: http://composition.al/blog/2017/05/30/proving-that-safety-critical-neural-networks-do-what-theyre-supposed-to-where-we-are-where-were-going-part-1-of-2/ http://composition.al/blog/2017/05/30/proving-that-safety-cr... http://composition.al/blog/2017/05/31/proving-that-safety-critical-neural-networks-do-what-theyre-supposed-to-where-we-are-where-were-going-part-2-of-2/ http://composition.al/blog/2017/05/31/proving-that-safety-cr...
    - light_hue_1 5y ago
      ACAS X is like the sweet spot for AI. We have a system now, TCAS II which is reliable but has a lot of false positives and has a big limitation: both aircraft need to have TCAS in order to detect and resolve a conflict. It's also an environment that is very simple to simulate and model mathematically compared to virtually anything else AI will ever be applied to. TCAS II will be around for a very long time, like two decades, while ACAS X is deployed. So the AI system will also have a backup that already works. This is really the perfect target for AI: clear backups, we just need some extra capabilities and warnings, easy to simulate, false positives are acceptable. That's basically unique. Even then nothing has been deployed yet. We're half a decade away or so at best.
  - mopsi 5y ago
    > I'm not exactly sure what ML (if any) is in the guts of a commercial or military airplane. I never get tired of the fact that first jet airliners with fully automated landing systems had been developed and were going through certification for regular use by the time first microcontrollers popped up. Intel 4004 came in 1971, here's Hawker Siddeley Trident landing in a 1968 promo movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flVcxfOnWi0&t=9s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flVcxfOnWi0&t=9s
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Hmmm I'm all in on ML/AI but I've yet to be impressed by blockchain like at all. Do you have some example where it has actually been "impressive"?
evrydayhustling 5y ago
Yeah, most of this is "not even wrong". Like: > We don’t have any consensus on what we meant by “intelligence,” but all the leading definitions include “comprehension,” and statistical inference doesn’t lead to comprehension, even if it sometimes approximates it. So now the semantic shell game is stuck on defining "comprehension". In the next paragraph he starts to suggest it has something to do with generalization -- but that's a concept around which ML practitioners are constantly innovating in formalizing, and using those formal measures to good effect. Also, "comprehension" is absent in plenty of definitions of intelligence. Take Oxford's "the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills". Huge parts of the world work around notions of intelligence demonstrated through action, not a philosophical abstraction. I'll never understand the "ML won't make my version of AGI" crowd's view on science in general. "This won't work in ways I refuse to define" isn't scientific criticism, and doesn't show any particular curiosity or interest in advancing the state of the art. It's just a rhetorical pose that seems aimed at building up a platform for the next time there's some AI pratfall to point out.
WA 5y ago
I liked the post. It is clearly aimed at people who think that we are close to achieving AI and that AI "knows best". It might be obvious for most people here on HN that we are very far away from true artificial intelligence, but most normal people aren’t and the marketing bullshit around calling statistical models "artificial intelligence" paints the wrong picture. This article shows why.

by dvt 5y ago

flyinglizard 5y ago

> what ML has brought to the forefront -- from self-landing airplanes to self-landing cars I am not aware of any ML in flight controls. Being black box and probabilistic by nature, these things won’t get past industry standards and regulations (at least for a while).

dvt 5y ago
> I am not aware of any ML in flight controls. Being black box and probabilistic by nature, these things won’t get past industry standards and regulations (at least for a while). (Hah, I accidentally wrote "self-landing cars," fixed). But yeah, I guess I was thinking more of drones, I'm not exactly sure what ML (if any) is in the guts of a commercial or military airplane.
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  Drones don’t need ML to self-land AFAIK?
- moyix 5y ago
  I don't know if they have made it into production yet (probably not?) but Lindsey Kuper wrote a nice pair of posts on how DNNs can replace an existing collision avoidance system (ACAS), and how to verify whether it's still safe after doing so: http://composition.al/blog/2017/05/30/proving-that-safety-critical-neural-networks-do-what-theyre-supposed-to-where-we-are-where-were-going-part-1-of-2/ http://composition.al/blog/2017/05/30/proving-that-safety-cr... http://composition.al/blog/2017/05/31/proving-that-safety-critical-neural-networks-do-what-theyre-supposed-to-where-we-are-where-were-going-part-2-of-2/ http://composition.al/blog/2017/05/31/proving-that-safety-cr...
  - light_hue_1 5y ago
    ACAS X is like the sweet spot for AI. We have a system now, TCAS II which is reliable but has a lot of false positives and has a big limitation: both aircraft need to have TCAS in order to detect and resolve a conflict. It's also an environment that is very simple to simulate and model mathematically compared to virtually anything else AI will ever be applied to. TCAS II will be around for a very long time, like two decades, while ACAS X is deployed. So the AI system will also have a backup that already works. This is really the perfect target for AI: clear backups, we just need some extra capabilities and warnings, easy to simulate, false positives are acceptable. That's basically unique. Even then nothing has been deployed yet. We're half a decade away or so at best.
- mopsi 5y ago
  > I'm not exactly sure what ML (if any) is in the guts of a commercial or military airplane. I never get tired of the fact that first jet airliners with fully automated landing systems had been developed and were going through certification for regular use by the time first microcontrollers popped up. Intel 4004 came in 1971, here's Hawker Siddeley Trident landing in a 1968 promo movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flVcxfOnWi0&t=9s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flVcxfOnWi0&t=9s

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

stjohnswarts 5y ago
Hmmm I'm all in on ML/AI but I've yet to be impressed by blockchain like at all. Do you have some example where it has actually been "impressive"?

evrydayhustling 5y ago

Yeah, most of this is "not even wrong". Like: > We don’t have any consensus on what we meant by “intelligence,” but all the leading definitions include “comprehension,” and statistical inference doesn’t lead to comprehension, even if it sometimes approximates it. So now the semantic shell game is stuck on defining "comprehension". In the next paragraph he starts to suggest it has something to do with generalization -- but that's a concept around which ML practitioners are constantly innovating in formalizing, and using those formal measures to good effect. Also, "comprehension" is absent in plenty of definitions of intelligence. Take Oxford's "the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills". Huge parts of the world work around notions of intelligence demonstrated through action, not a philosophical abstraction. I'll never understand the "ML won't make my version of AGI" crowd's view on science in general. "This won't work in ways I refuse to define" isn't scientific criticism, and doesn't show any particular curiosity or interest in advancing the state of the art. It's just a rhetorical pose that seems aimed at building up a platform for the next time there's some AI pratfall to point out.

WA 5y ago

I liked the post. It is clearly aimed at people who think that we are close to achieving AI and that AI "knows best". It might be obvious for most people here on HN that we are very far away from true artificial intelligence, but most normal people aren’t and the marketing bullshit around calling statistical models "artificial intelligence" paints the wrong picture. This article shows why.