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Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says

223 points by Hard_Space 5y ago

dr_dshiv 5y ago
We could just accept that AI is incredibly pervasive and doesn’t require computers (for instance, autopilot in planes were invented in 1914).
GekkePrutser 5y ago
That's what you get with a hype. Like all the products with 'blockchain' that have no actual blockchain or that do but derive zero benefit from it. It's just a way to get investors to sign up that have no more knowledge than they get from Gartner.
mathematically 5y ago
Unrelated to the article but I ran across an interesting result recently that is related to AI (and the hype surrounding it): Let A be an agent and let S be a Turing machine deductive system. If A correctly understands S, then A can correctly deduce that S does not have A’s capability for solving halting problems. [1] One way to interpret this is that all existing AI systems are obviously halting computations simply because they are acyclic dataflow graphs of floating point operations and this fact is both easy to state and to prove in any formal system that can express the logic of contemporary AI models. So no matter how much Ray Kurzweil might hope, we are still very far from the singularity. 1: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11023-014-9349-3 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11023-014-9349-3
- IshKebab 5y ago
  > all existing AI systems are obviously halting computations simply because they are acyclic dataflow graphs No they aren't. Think about LSTMs for example.
  - mathematically 5y ago
    So how do you get a value out of an LSTM?
    - IshKebab 5y ago
      Run it for as long as you want and look at the output state. How do you the a value out of a person?
      - mathematically 5y ago
        So then in the statement of the theorem the agent A can determine how many cycles the unit will run before halting, correct?
        drdeca 5y ago
        By determine do you mean predict or choose?
        mathematically 5y ago
        I mean by looking at the source code for the neural network someone can give an upper bound on how many steps will be required before the entire network halts and gives an answer and they can prove that their upper bound is really an upper bound.
        IshKebab 5y ago
        They need to know the input length too. With an infinite input it will never halt.
        mathematically 5y ago
        Yes, that's the usual assumption when working with Turing machines and proofs. But I guess you could also allow infinite inputs and it wouldn't make that much difference, e.g. computing exp(x) for some real x as input.
- AstralStorm 5y ago
  Your argument is wrong or miscommunicated. The AI itself can figure only some of the halting problem results, not all, plus it can make a mistake. It is not an oracle. Recursive neural networks are not necessarily halting when executed in arbitrary precision arithmetic.
  - mathematically 5y ago
    Have you read the referenced article?
    - drdeca 5y ago
      I’ve read a fair portion of it now (at least, a fair portions as far as reading on one’s phone goes), but not all of it yet, and while I do think it seems to probably be making some interesting points, I do feel like it is taking a fair bit of time to get to the point? Maybe that’s partly due to the expectations of the medium, but I feel like it could be much more concise to, instead of saying, “here is a non-rigorous version of an argument which was previously presented at [other location] (note that while we believe the argument as we are presenting it is essentially the same as it was presented, we are making this different choice of terminology). Now, here is a reason why that argument is insufficiently rigorous, and a way in which that lack of rigor could be used to prove too much. Now, here is a more rigorous valid version of the argument (with various additional side tangents)”, one could instead say “Let objects X,Y,Z satisfy properties P,Q,R. Then, see this argument. Now, to see what this is applicable to the situations that it is meant to represent, [blah].”
      - mathematically 5y ago
        Ya, it could be more concise but I think that would require more prerequisites from the reader in terms of model theory and formal logic.
deleted 5y ago
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drpixie 5y ago
Michael I. Jordan is spot on. We have NO artificial intelligent systems, for any sensible definition of "intelligent". None. ZERO. We have "big data". We have (brittle and rather poor) "pattern recognition". We have (very limited) "simulate a conversation". But we do not even know what "intelligence" really means! We (the industry) should recognise "AI" as term that has become essentially meaningless. "AI" is now nothing but a marketing splat, like "New and Improved" or "Low Fat".
- jcun4128 5y ago
  I wonder what the breakthrough will be is it hardware or software. Seems like we can make as powerful of a computer as we want/try but what makes sentience. Does a fly or gnat have sentience?
  - RansomStark 5y ago
    I know I shouldn't be so pedantic, but you probably don't mean sentience but Sapience [0]. Sentience is the ability to sense and react to stimuli. A fly or a gnat is certainly sentient; they can see, smell, feel the sensation of touch and react accordingly. That is all that is required for a being to be sentient. A really interesting example is if you shock a caterpillar even after metamorphosis the resultant moth remembers the experience and reacts accordingly [1]. Although it is pedantic, it is also an important distinction, sentience and sapience exist on a spectrum. At one end you might have Gnats as purely sentient beings, humans always claim themselves as fully Sapient, so much so we named our species Homo Sapiens. Different species exist somewhere on this spectrum and where a particular species ends up is subjective. Many people would put Whales and Dolphins [2], and often dogs and cats, further towards the Sapient end of the spectrum (vegans would probably push most mammals towards the sapient end), with insects remaining simply sentient (even for many vegans). As humans we seem to have an almost inbuilt understanding that not all species are capable of feeling the same way we do, but when you look at the animals we seek to protect and those we don't, what you find is that the less human the species the less we care for the well being of a particular specimen of that species; we care most about the suffering of mammals (more so for the larger ones that the small), and least about the suffering of fish or insects or spiders. I'd argue that our inbuilt understanding of where an animal fits on the sentient-sapient spectrum is simply how easy it is for us as humans to imagine the plight of a specimen of that species. What Is It Like to Be a Bat? [3] is an excellent paper on this subject, it argues that we as humans can never fully understand what it is to be a bat, we can imagine what it is like to fly, or echolocate, but that will never be the same as the bats perspective. From where I'm sitting computers are already sentient, they can sense their environment and react accordingly, self-driving cars are an excellent example, but so is the temperature sensor in my greenhouse that opens a window to keep itself cool; it is sensing the temperature of the air and reacting accordingly. I in no way believe that my temperature sensor has any sapient qualities, It can't reason about why it's reacting, it can simply react. I don't believe that as the temperature passes the 'open window' threshold that the system recognises the signal as pain. But the same is true of the fly. If I pull a wing off a fly, I know it senses the damage, but does it really feel it as pain? When considering my cat, if I step on it's tail, I'm sure it feels pain, but is that true or does it simply react in a way that I as a human consider an appropriate reaction to pain. I can't ever truly understand how my cat feels when I stand on her tail, just as I can't truly know that the fly isn't trying to scream out in horror and pain at what I've just done to it. It is because of our subjectivity to the placement of animals on the sentient-sapient spectrum and our inability to every fully appreciate the experience of another that I am convinced even if we did create a sapient machine it's experience would be so far removed from our own we would fail to recognise it as such. The problem with this rabbit hole is, firstly I might convince myself that eating meat is wrong, and well I like bacon too much for that, and the second is that you'll quickly end up in the philosophical territory of I, Robot: "There have always been ghosts in the machine. Random segments of code, that have grouped together to form unexpected protocols. Unanticipated, these free radicals engender questions of free will, creativity, and even the nature of what we might call the soul. Why is it that when some robots are left in darkness, they will seek out the light? Why is it that when robots are stored in an empty space, they will group together, rather than stand alone? How do we explain this behavior? Random segments of code? Or is it something more? When does a perceptual schematic become consciousness? When does a difference engine become the search for truth? When does a personality simulation become the bitter mote... of a soul?" [4]. [0] https://grammarist.com/usage/sentience-vs-sapience/ https://grammarist.com/usage/sentience-vs-sapience/ [1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13412-butterflies-remember-caterpillar-experiences/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13412-butterflies-rem... [2] https://uk.whales.org/whale-culture/sentient-and-sapient-whale-and-dolphins/ https://uk.whales.org/whale-culture/sentient-and-sapient-wha... [3] https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/study/ugmodules/humananimalstudies/lectures/32/nagel_bat.pdf https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/study/ugmodules/hum... [4] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0343818/characters/nm0000342 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0343818/characters/nm0000342
mszcz 5y ago
That's what pisses me the most about world these days, my pet peeve. Words seem to be losing their meaning. People just throw whatever words they want. Recently I've been shopping for a steam station and I've seen that the top of the line Philips Stream&Go has a camera "with AI" that recognizes the fabric. The sales guy was persistent that that claim was true. Oh please. If it was, it was only in the simplest, most technical way possible so as not to get sued. There's more heuristics in there than anything. Or the "luxury & exclusive iPhone etui for $9.99". Or "we value our customers privacy". Or the Apple "Genius". Or the amount of "revolutionary" things "invented" at Apple for that matter (not that they don't, just not as much as they claim). (BTW, don't know how I landed on Apple at the end, they're not the worst offenders)
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
  My pet peeve is "it will blow your mind." Hasn't happened to me ever. Also "exciting." Yes, I was excited when I first saw C-128 with its dual C-64 and CP/M modes. When I saw Linux for the first time on a 386. When I created my first app for the iPhone 3GS. But for marketing folks everything (they do) seems exciting. No, your revolutionary project is not revolutionary and your innovation means gluing together many ideas of others (who also borrowed it from other people tbh).
  - rambojazz 5y ago
    They are not excited about any product. They're only excited by the thought of how much money they can make with it. The more money, the more exciting the product is. "This product is exciting! Why are you not excited? I'm gonna make a load of money by selling it to you!"
- xyz11 5y ago
  Agreed, just because some words are catchy and appear intellectual does not mean they should be used everywhere; it is very misleading and sometimes unprofessional.
- echopurity 5y ago
  These days, eh? Maybe you just started to notice, but words never had much meaning.
rspoerri 5y ago
Interestingly as soon as a system works or we understand it's principles we stop using the term "artificial intelligence". It becomes image recognition, autonomous cars, or face detection. We mostly talk about artificial intelligence when we dont really know or understand what we are talking about :-)
- AstralStorm 5y ago
  Not really, the autonomous machine learning systems designed to solve games with limited observability are called AI properly, unlike say game scripts on fuzzy logic that are attempting to fool the user into thinking the machine is actually smart; or ones that work on fully observable games. (So no, AlphaZero is not exactly an AI.) And for an intelligence, they are still pretty bad at figuring things out.
- Aicy 5y ago
  Exactly, the same happens with the word "technology". Are scissors technology? They used to be but now they are comparatively too well understood and simple. Just like with AI, we label things technology that are on the forefront and not yet well understood and ironed out.
  - klyrs 5y ago
    Yes, even simple machines are technology.
  - webmaven 5y ago
    > Are scissors technology? To an anthropologist or archeologist scissors are most definitely a technology. As are basket weaving, flint-knapped tools, speech and writing, etc.
- sidpatil 5y ago
  This is known as the AI effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect#AI_applications_become_mainstream https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect#AI_applications_beco...
- aspaceman 5y ago
senectus1 5y ago
Could not agree more. The watering down or whitewashing by overmarketing of these terms is a significant issue.
halotrope 5y ago
The George Carlin bit [1] about euphemisms comes to mind. While not quite in the lens of marketing hyperbole it captures really well what it means to dilute the language. The result is a loss of meaning and expressive power. If everything is something, nothing is. 1: https://youtu.be/vuEQixrBKCc https://youtu.be/vuEQixrBKCc
hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
This ship has long sailed, today everything is AI. It has nothing to do with AI but the necessity of using the current buzzword dominating the market. Before it was the web, XML, Ajax, OO, cloud, whatever. Now it's "AI." It means absolutely nothing. People implement simplest algorithms with a couple of case statements and call it AI without a blink. Everyone else jumps the train as they don't want to be perceived as obsolete. All this happens along (sometimes totally independently of) some real, interesting developments in machine learning.
jvanderbot 5y ago
I'm in the submarine AI camp[1]. I'd rather build tools that kinda help humans do thinking, rather than thinking machines. Like how submarines help humans swim but who cares if they are actually swimming. 1. "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." - Edsger Dijkstra
- billyjobob 5y ago
  There are lots of creatures that can swim. Most of them swim better than a human. That’s why it’s not very interesting when we discover a new one. In contrast, humans are arguably the only creatures in the universe that can think. Certainly we have never discovered a creature that can think better than a human. Thus it would be highly exciting if we discovered or created one.
  - netizen-936824 5y ago
    >In contrast, humans are arguably the only creatures in the universe that can think. Citation very strongly required to back up this statement. I'm not aware of any evidence that this is the case, in fact its quite the opposite.
    - herlitzj 5y ago
      Second. Not sure how "think" is being defined here, but even for a spatial/temporal sense of self or mortality I'd say that's probably an incorrect statement. Let alone the general notion of thinking. E.g. dogs exhibit basic thinking like predetermination, delayed gratification, etc.
    - deleted 5y ago
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  - jvanderbot 5y ago
    I can see that. Its just not something I'm particularly interested in. I'm not an expert in brains. After taking a few casual courses I saw recommended here, and reading some of the books, I'm suspicious that our story about our own intelligence is somewhat oversold, and we may find that our intelligence is 99% mundane, custom-built automation and 1% story telling. But that story telling is pretty magical. Buddhism and Modern Psychology Happiness Hypothesis (which is more about brains than happiness)
hprotagonist 5y ago
“stochastic optimization” is a lot more honest, but much less easily funded.
1cvmask 5y ago
Was there ever a moment in time when every company called themselves an “Excel” company? I feel the same about “AI”.
nikanj 5y ago
How else are we going to get funded?! Besides, the board came down on the CEO hard, demanding we have an AI strategy. Calling our round-robin load balancer "heuristic AI" gives us a break.
- blackbear_ 5y ago
  And don't forget "rule-based AI"!
Barrin92 5y ago
People often bring up the quip that "as soon as something is AI, people stop calling it AI" but I think pretty much the opposite has happened, the term has been expanded so much that almost any stochastic computation that solves some computational problem is now shoved under that umbrella. However unlike jordan in the article who takes that as an opportunity to focus even more on engineering and practical applications I think it's well worth going back to the original dream of the 1950s. I'd be happy if people return to the drawing board to figure out how to build real, artificial life and how to create a mind.
- tluyben2 5y ago
  People in my circles stopped saying AI and switched to ML after it 'did something previously identified as more or less intelligent'. I see this is more or less the norm. That makes some sense because once we understand how things work they become repeatable and thus not-that-intelligent in the eye of many. And that, again, makes sense considering we are nowhere near anything that has the 'I' in it: it's pattern matching which is statistics and it works on a massive scale due to tech/gpu and ago advances but there is no 'I' there. The most basic mistakes are not correctable by the most advanced stuff we have and as such, it gets things it is 'bred for' wrong all the time, with sometimes disastrous outcomes. This stuff should be in labs, not identifying gun shots, faces of criminals, driving cars, identifying 'fraudulent' people and such. Because of the 'I' missing, this is a nightmare and it will get worse.
- darksaints 5y ago
  The description of the Turing test certainly alludes to a test of machine intelligence. So to some degree it is appropriate for AI to have a large umbrella. My problem with the endless battle to define AI is that there are a hopelessly clueless cohort of people with money that chase the term like its their golden goose, and therefore anybody that wants funding needs to market their thing as AI. And I think a lot of researchers cringe at the wanton use of AI because it devalues the work that they're doing. I just give it the shoulder shrug of approval - "I get it, you need funding too". And from that perspective I really wish that tree-based ML methods and logic programming languages and rule engines were still called AI, because they're really cool but horribly neglected because theyre not the latest thing.
shoto_io 5y ago
It's all about definition here. Seth Godin once said: >One common insightful definition of AI: Artificial Intelligence is everything a computer can't do yet. As soon as it can, we call it obvious. What is AI? Let's define it first.
indymike 5y ago
What is the marketing team going to do without machine learning, artificial intelligent, blockchain driven cloud based PAAS?
- pjmorris 5y ago
  Clearly, quantum blockchain driven cloud based PaaS.
  - unemphysbro 5y ago
    This certainly is the future of Impact-Driven Value as a Service (I-DVaaS).
  - mlac 5y ago
    Please let me know when this is ready for prime time - I'm really interested in bringing an Intelligent Quantum (IQ) Blockchain driven cloud based PaaS security platform to market. The secret of IQ technology, is that, while the others have "artificial" intelligence, there is nothing fake about ours. I believe we could realize great value with a blue ocean strategy like that.
- toomanybeersies 5y ago
  They might have to switch to some new up-and-coming buzzwords, such as "supply chain", or "graph". Here's a great example I found after a quick search [1]: > Why TigerGraph, a Native Parallel Graph Database for Supply Chain Analysis? > Manage Supply Chains Efficiently With Deep Link Analytics Oh, and then there's also "Internet of Things": > Uncover Insights From Temporal Analysis of Internet of Things Data [1] https://www.tigergraph.com/solutions/supply-chain-analysis/ https://www.tigergraph.com/solutions/supply-chain-analysis/
Veedrac 5y ago
People were calling everything agent-like AI since forever. Video games had AI. Heck, Pacman's ghosts had AI. Nobody cared. They understood what it was referring to. I only started hearing how it would ‘dilute the language’ or the term was ‘disingenuous’ or whatever once AI started actually doing intellectually impressive feats, and the naysayers started trying to redefine language to suit their prefered worldview. The fact is the term has always been used loosely. Even if it hadn't been, several of the undisputed top machine learning corporations (eg. DeepMind) has the explicit goal of reaching general intelligence, which remains true even if you are sure they will fail. Its use as a term is more appropriate than ever.
pkrumins 5y ago
My AI is the `if` statement.
calibas 5y ago
>today’s artificial-intelligence systems aren’t actually intelligent Artificial butter isn't actual butter, that's why we call it artificial. Personally, I prefer saying ML just because of all the semantics regarding AI.
deleted 5y ago
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Raro 5y ago
"AI is 'Machine Learning' for journalists" Unfortunately I can't recall where I first heard this great quip.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  "'Machine Learning' is Linear Algebra for marketers" You read it here first.
Volker_W 5y ago
I think we need another word for AI, one that only real programmers and mathematicians know. That way, we can talk about that stuff without some incompetent journalist or marketing salesman saying stupid stuff.
- gcr 5y ago
  Call deep learning what it is: learnable nonlinear function approximation.
binarymax 5y ago
I propose we actually HIJACK the AI acronym to be 'Advanced Instruments'. I've had a ranty blog post in my head about this for a while so really glad to see this article. People are going to use AI forever - but we need to change what it stands for, since they will never switch to using machine learning or ML.
- dr_dshiv 5y ago
  I like Artifact Intelligence. Then we can explode the term use even further, which I think would be better than moving goal posts.
winterismute 5y ago
Title probably meant "AI Pioneer".
dr_dshiv 5y ago
The term Artificial Intelligence implicitly makes people design systems that don’t involve people—because if people have an information processing role, then it seems like the system isn’t artificial yet, and therefore unfinished. That’s rather unhealthy
- webmaven 5y ago
  > The term Artificial Intelligence implicitly makes people design systems that don’t involve people—because if people have an information processing role, then it seems like the system isn’t artificial yet, and therefore unfinished. That’s rather unhealthy Well put, but doesn't go quite far enough. Because those systems do still involve people, it only as objects to be acted upon, rather than actors with agency. Which isn't just unhealthy, it is downright pathological (and often socio- or psycho-pathic). We've seen this sort of creeping bias before, with terms such as "Content Management System" displacing more human centric terms such as reading, writing (or even authoring), sharing, and publishing. "Content" is just an amorphous mass that is only produced in order to be "managed", poured into various containers, distributed, and delivered in order to be consumed.
bitwize 5y ago
Today's AI is, as I like to call it, statistics with sexy marketing. A lot of AI programming consists of loading Python modules that correspond to various models, and fooling around with them to see which best fits the data you have. In other words, you're working more like a mathematician experimenting with potential solutions. There's pressure at my job for architects to "leverage AI". What I always suggest to them is to find a statistician and see if things like neural networks are even necessary before committing to them. Sometimes the problem could best be solved with a heuristic, a rules engine, or a simple statistical model like linear regression, in which case "leveraging AI" is merely hype.
nbardy 5y ago
I used to be in the grouchy, "Stop calling it AI camp". But the last three years of progress are impossible to ignore. Scaling models is working better than anyone thought. We're in for a wild ride with this new AI.
tshoaib 5y ago
Is Michael I. Jordan the Michael Jordan of AI research?
tibiahurried 5y ago
My background is in automation and robotics; I studied system identification: a discipline where you would use mathematical means to identify a dynamic system model by observing input/output. You treat the system as a black box and estimate a set of parameters that can describe it (e.g., Kalman filter). I struggle to understand what's the fundamental difference between system identification and ML/AI. Anyone? You ultimately have a bunch of data and try to estimate/fit a model that can describe a particular behavior. It all comes down to a big optimization/interpolation problem. Isn't what they call "Learning" just really "estimating" ? Then the more CPU/memory/storage you have, the more parameters/data you can estimate/process, the more accurate and sophisticated the model can be.
- fasterbynight 5y ago
  As someone with a similar background, I believe some of the confusion is because there is a lot of overlap. System identification is very similar to supervised learning, however there are other learning "methods" that still fall under the umbrella of ML/AI. For example, unsupervised learning doesn't really have a good controls analog (as far as I know). Reinforcement learning on the other hand is somewhat analogous to model predictive control. A better way of phrasing your point is that ML/AI is "just" optimization.
- tommiegannert 5y ago
  > It all comes down to a big optimization/interpolation problem. Isn't what they call "Learning" just really "estimating" ? Yes. A mathematician will say "why do you call this 'back propagation', isn't it just matrix multiplication?" Many disciplines have different names for the same process.
DeathArrow 5y ago
AI means almost intelligent.
oblak 5y ago
"The real problem is not whether machines think, but whether men do." - B.F. Skinner In all honesty, I learned that from Civilization IV
giardini 5y ago
I periodically re-read the following to keep my perspective on AI: "ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE MEETS NATURAL STUPIDITY" by Drew McDermott https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234784524_Artificial_Intelligence_meets_natural_stupidity https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234784524_Artificia... (click on "Read Full Text" and then scroll down a half page.)
tabtab 5y ago
Too late. Marketers commandeered it and ain't giving it back. Create new terms such as ACS: "Artificial Common Sense" for future breakthroughs.
m0zg 5y ago
This is pissing into the wind. There's nothing any "machine learning pioneer" can do about marketing, and this is marketing. And it's all right. People are beginning to catch on that we won't have "thinking robots" or "self driving cars" in the foreseeable future. Doesn't mean that it's not intelligence or that it's not useful. It's also most definitely "atificial". What we call it is a matter of tertiary importance at best.

223 points by Hard_Space 5y ago

We could just accept that AI is incredibly pervasive and doesn’t require computers (for instance, autopilot in planes were invented in 1914).

GekkePrutser 5y ago

That's what you get with a hype. Like all the products with 'blockchain' that have no actual blockchain or that do but derive zero benefit from it. It's just a way to get investors to sign up that have no more knowledge than they get from Gartner.

mathematically 5y ago

Unrelated to the article but I ran across an interesting result recently that is related to AI (and the hype surrounding it): Let A be an agent and let S be a Turing machine deductive system. If A correctly understands S, then A can correctly deduce that S does not have A’s capability for solving halting problems. [1] One way to interpret this is that all existing AI systems are obviously halting computations simply because they are acyclic dataflow graphs of floating point operations and this fact is both easy to state and to prove in any formal system that can express the logic of contemporary AI models. So no matter how much Ray Kurzweil might hope, we are still very far from the singularity. 1: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11023-014-9349-3 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11023-014-9349-3

IshKebab 5y ago
> all existing AI systems are obviously halting computations simply because they are acyclic dataflow graphs No they aren't. Think about LSTMs for example.
- mathematically 5y ago
  So how do you get a value out of an LSTM?
  - IshKebab 5y ago
    Run it for as long as you want and look at the output state. How do you the a value out of a person?
    - mathematically 5y ago
      So then in the statement of the theorem the agent A can determine how many cycles the unit will run before halting, correct?
      - drdeca 5y ago
        By determine do you mean predict or choose?
        mathematically 5y ago
        I mean by looking at the source code for the neural network someone can give an upper bound on how many steps will be required before the entire network halts and gives an answer and they can prove that their upper bound is really an upper bound.
        IshKebab 5y ago
        They need to know the input length too. With an infinite input it will never halt.
        mathematically 5y ago
        Yes, that's the usual assumption when working with Turing machines and proofs. But I guess you could also allow infinite inputs and it wouldn't make that much difference, e.g. computing exp(x) for some real x as input.
AstralStorm 5y ago
Your argument is wrong or miscommunicated. The AI itself can figure only some of the halting problem results, not all, plus it can make a mistake. It is not an oracle. Recursive neural networks are not necessarily halting when executed in arbitrary precision arithmetic.
- mathematically 5y ago
  Have you read the referenced article?
  - drdeca 5y ago
    I’ve read a fair portion of it now (at least, a fair portions as far as reading on one’s phone goes), but not all of it yet, and while I do think it seems to probably be making some interesting points, I do feel like it is taking a fair bit of time to get to the point? Maybe that’s partly due to the expectations of the medium, but I feel like it could be much more concise to, instead of saying, “here is a non-rigorous version of an argument which was previously presented at [other location] (note that while we believe the argument as we are presenting it is essentially the same as it was presented, we are making this different choice of terminology). Now, here is a reason why that argument is insufficiently rigorous, and a way in which that lack of rigor could be used to prove too much. Now, here is a more rigorous valid version of the argument (with various additional side tangents)”, one could instead say “Let objects X,Y,Z satisfy properties P,Q,R. Then, see this argument. Now, to see what this is applicable to the situations that it is meant to represent, [blah].”
    - mathematically 5y ago
      Ya, it could be more concise but I think that would require more prerequisites from the reader in terms of model theory and formal logic.

deleted 5y ago

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drpixie 5y ago

Michael I. Jordan is spot on. We have NO artificial intelligent systems, for any sensible definition of "intelligent". None. ZERO. We have "big data". We have (brittle and rather poor) "pattern recognition". We have (very limited) "simulate a conversation". But we do not even know what "intelligence" really means! We (the industry) should recognise "AI" as term that has become essentially meaningless. "AI" is now nothing but a marketing splat, like "New and Improved" or "Low Fat".

jcun4128 5y ago
I wonder what the breakthrough will be is it hardware or software. Seems like we can make as powerful of a computer as we want/try but what makes sentience. Does a fly or gnat have sentience?
- RansomStark 5y ago
  I know I shouldn't be so pedantic, but you probably don't mean sentience but Sapience [0]. Sentience is the ability to sense and react to stimuli. A fly or a gnat is certainly sentient; they can see, smell, feel the sensation of touch and react accordingly. That is all that is required for a being to be sentient. A really interesting example is if you shock a caterpillar even after metamorphosis the resultant moth remembers the experience and reacts accordingly [1]. Although it is pedantic, it is also an important distinction, sentience and sapience exist on a spectrum. At one end you might have Gnats as purely sentient beings, humans always claim themselves as fully Sapient, so much so we named our species Homo Sapiens. Different species exist somewhere on this spectrum and where a particular species ends up is subjective. Many people would put Whales and Dolphins [2], and often dogs and cats, further towards the Sapient end of the spectrum (vegans would probably push most mammals towards the sapient end), with insects remaining simply sentient (even for many vegans). As humans we seem to have an almost inbuilt understanding that not all species are capable of feeling the same way we do, but when you look at the animals we seek to protect and those we don't, what you find is that the less human the species the less we care for the well being of a particular specimen of that species; we care most about the suffering of mammals (more so for the larger ones that the small), and least about the suffering of fish or insects or spiders. I'd argue that our inbuilt understanding of where an animal fits on the sentient-sapient spectrum is simply how easy it is for us as humans to imagine the plight of a specimen of that species. What Is It Like to Be a Bat? [3] is an excellent paper on this subject, it argues that we as humans can never fully understand what it is to be a bat, we can imagine what it is like to fly, or echolocate, but that will never be the same as the bats perspective. From where I'm sitting computers are already sentient, they can sense their environment and react accordingly, self-driving cars are an excellent example, but so is the temperature sensor in my greenhouse that opens a window to keep itself cool; it is sensing the temperature of the air and reacting accordingly. I in no way believe that my temperature sensor has any sapient qualities, It can't reason about why it's reacting, it can simply react. I don't believe that as the temperature passes the 'open window' threshold that the system recognises the signal as pain. But the same is true of the fly. If I pull a wing off a fly, I know it senses the damage, but does it really feel it as pain? When considering my cat, if I step on it's tail, I'm sure it feels pain, but is that true or does it simply react in a way that I as a human consider an appropriate reaction to pain. I can't ever truly understand how my cat feels when I stand on her tail, just as I can't truly know that the fly isn't trying to scream out in horror and pain at what I've just done to it. It is because of our subjectivity to the placement of animals on the sentient-sapient spectrum and our inability to every fully appreciate the experience of another that I am convinced even if we did create a sapient machine it's experience would be so far removed from our own we would fail to recognise it as such. The problem with this rabbit hole is, firstly I might convince myself that eating meat is wrong, and well I like bacon too much for that, and the second is that you'll quickly end up in the philosophical territory of I, Robot: "There have always been ghosts in the machine. Random segments of code, that have grouped together to form unexpected protocols. Unanticipated, these free radicals engender questions of free will, creativity, and even the nature of what we might call the soul. Why is it that when some robots are left in darkness, they will seek out the light? Why is it that when robots are stored in an empty space, they will group together, rather than stand alone? How do we explain this behavior? Random segments of code? Or is it something more? When does a perceptual schematic become consciousness? When does a difference engine become the search for truth? When does a personality simulation become the bitter mote... of a soul?" [4]. [0] https://grammarist.com/usage/sentience-vs-sapience/ https://grammarist.com/usage/sentience-vs-sapience/ [1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13412-butterflies-remember-caterpillar-experiences/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13412-butterflies-rem... [2] https://uk.whales.org/whale-culture/sentient-and-sapient-whale-and-dolphins/ https://uk.whales.org/whale-culture/sentient-and-sapient-wha... [3] https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/study/ugmodules/humananimalstudies/lectures/32/nagel_bat.pdf https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/study/ugmodules/hum... [4] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0343818/characters/nm0000342 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0343818/characters/nm0000342

mszcz 5y ago

That's what pisses me the most about world these days, my pet peeve. Words seem to be losing their meaning. People just throw whatever words they want. Recently I've been shopping for a steam station and I've seen that the top of the line Philips Stream&Go has a camera "with AI" that recognizes the fabric. The sales guy was persistent that that claim was true. Oh please. If it was, it was only in the simplest, most technical way possible so as not to get sued. There's more heuristics in there than anything. Or the "luxury & exclusive iPhone etui for $9.99". Or "we value our customers privacy". Or the Apple "Genius". Or the amount of "revolutionary" things "invented" at Apple for that matter (not that they don't, just not as much as they claim). (BTW, don't know how I landed on Apple at the end, they're not the worst offenders)

hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
My pet peeve is "it will blow your mind." Hasn't happened to me ever. Also "exciting." Yes, I was excited when I first saw C-128 with its dual C-64 and CP/M modes. When I saw Linux for the first time on a 386. When I created my first app for the iPhone 3GS. But for marketing folks everything (they do) seems exciting. No, your revolutionary project is not revolutionary and your innovation means gluing together many ideas of others (who also borrowed it from other people tbh).
- rambojazz 5y ago
  They are not excited about any product. They're only excited by the thought of how much money they can make with it. The more money, the more exciting the product is. "This product is exciting! Why are you not excited? I'm gonna make a load of money by selling it to you!"
xyz11 5y ago
Agreed, just because some words are catchy and appear intellectual does not mean they should be used everywhere; it is very misleading and sometimes unprofessional.
echopurity 5y ago
These days, eh? Maybe you just started to notice, but words never had much meaning.

rspoerri 5y ago

Interestingly as soon as a system works or we understand it's principles we stop using the term "artificial intelligence". It becomes image recognition, autonomous cars, or face detection. We mostly talk about artificial intelligence when we dont really know or understand what we are talking about :-)

AstralStorm 5y ago
Not really, the autonomous machine learning systems designed to solve games with limited observability are called AI properly, unlike say game scripts on fuzzy logic that are attempting to fool the user into thinking the machine is actually smart; or ones that work on fully observable games. (So no, AlphaZero is not exactly an AI.) And for an intelligence, they are still pretty bad at figuring things out.
Aicy 5y ago
Exactly, the same happens with the word "technology". Are scissors technology? They used to be but now they are comparatively too well understood and simple. Just like with AI, we label things technology that are on the forefront and not yet well understood and ironed out.
- klyrs 5y ago
  Yes, even simple machines are technology.
- webmaven 5y ago
  > Are scissors technology? To an anthropologist or archeologist scissors are most definitely a technology. As are basket weaving, flint-knapped tools, speech and writing, etc.
sidpatil 5y ago
This is known as the AI effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect#AI_applications_become_mainstream https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect#AI_applications_beco...
aspaceman 5y ago

senectus1 5y ago

Could not agree more. The watering down or whitewashing by overmarketing of these terms is a significant issue.

halotrope 5y ago

The George Carlin bit [1] about euphemisms comes to mind. While not quite in the lens of marketing hyperbole it captures really well what it means to dilute the language. The result is a loss of meaning and expressive power. If everything is something, nothing is. 1: https://youtu.be/vuEQixrBKCc https://youtu.be/vuEQixrBKCc

hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago

This ship has long sailed, today everything is AI. It has nothing to do with AI but the necessity of using the current buzzword dominating the market. Before it was the web, XML, Ajax, OO, cloud, whatever. Now it's "AI." It means absolutely nothing. People implement simplest algorithms with a couple of case statements and call it AI without a blink. Everyone else jumps the train as they don't want to be perceived as obsolete. All this happens along (sometimes totally independently of) some real, interesting developments in machine learning.

jvanderbot 5y ago

I'm in the submarine AI camp[1]. I'd rather build tools that kinda help humans do thinking, rather than thinking machines. Like how submarines help humans swim but who cares if they are actually swimming. 1. "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." - Edsger Dijkstra

billyjobob 5y ago
There are lots of creatures that can swim. Most of them swim better than a human. That’s why it’s not very interesting when we discover a new one. In contrast, humans are arguably the only creatures in the universe that can think. Certainly we have never discovered a creature that can think better than a human. Thus it would be highly exciting if we discovered or created one.
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  >In contrast, humans are arguably the only creatures in the universe that can think. Citation very strongly required to back up this statement. I'm not aware of any evidence that this is the case, in fact its quite the opposite.
  - herlitzj 5y ago
    Second. Not sure how "think" is being defined here, but even for a spatial/temporal sense of self or mortality I'd say that's probably an incorrect statement. Let alone the general notion of thinking. E.g. dogs exhibit basic thinking like predetermination, delayed gratification, etc.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- jvanderbot 5y ago
  I can see that. Its just not something I'm particularly interested in. I'm not an expert in brains. After taking a few casual courses I saw recommended here, and reading some of the books, I'm suspicious that our story about our own intelligence is somewhat oversold, and we may find that our intelligence is 99% mundane, custom-built automation and 1% story telling. But that story telling is pretty magical. Buddhism and Modern Psychology Happiness Hypothesis (which is more about brains than happiness)

hprotagonist 5y ago

“stochastic optimization” is a lot more honest, but much less easily funded.

1cvmask 5y ago

Was there ever a moment in time when every company called themselves an “Excel” company? I feel the same about “AI”.

nikanj 5y ago

How else are we going to get funded?! Besides, the board came down on the CEO hard, demanding we have an AI strategy. Calling our round-robin load balancer "heuristic AI" gives us a break.

blackbear_ 5y ago
And don't forget "rule-based AI"!

Barrin92 5y ago

People often bring up the quip that "as soon as something is AI, people stop calling it AI" but I think pretty much the opposite has happened, the term has been expanded so much that almost any stochastic computation that solves some computational problem is now shoved under that umbrella. However unlike jordan in the article who takes that as an opportunity to focus even more on engineering and practical applications I think it's well worth going back to the original dream of the 1950s. I'd be happy if people return to the drawing board to figure out how to build real, artificial life and how to create a mind.

tluyben2 5y ago
People in my circles stopped saying AI and switched to ML after it 'did something previously identified as more or less intelligent'. I see this is more or less the norm. That makes some sense because once we understand how things work they become repeatable and thus not-that-intelligent in the eye of many. And that, again, makes sense considering we are nowhere near anything that has the 'I' in it: it's pattern matching which is statistics and it works on a massive scale due to tech/gpu and ago advances but there is no 'I' there. The most basic mistakes are not correctable by the most advanced stuff we have and as such, it gets things it is 'bred for' wrong all the time, with sometimes disastrous outcomes. This stuff should be in labs, not identifying gun shots, faces of criminals, driving cars, identifying 'fraudulent' people and such. Because of the 'I' missing, this is a nightmare and it will get worse.
darksaints 5y ago
The description of the Turing test certainly alludes to a test of machine intelligence. So to some degree it is appropriate for AI to have a large umbrella. My problem with the endless battle to define AI is that there are a hopelessly clueless cohort of people with money that chase the term like its their golden goose, and therefore anybody that wants funding needs to market their thing as AI. And I think a lot of researchers cringe at the wanton use of AI because it devalues the work that they're doing. I just give it the shoulder shrug of approval - "I get it, you need funding too". And from that perspective I really wish that tree-based ML methods and logic programming languages and rule engines were still called AI, because they're really cool but horribly neglected because theyre not the latest thing.

shoto_io 5y ago

It's all about definition here. Seth Godin once said: >One common insightful definition of AI: Artificial Intelligence is everything a computer can't do yet. As soon as it can, we call it obvious. What is AI? Let's define it first.

indymike 5y ago

What is the marketing team going to do without machine learning, artificial intelligent, blockchain driven cloud based PAAS?

pjmorris 5y ago
Clearly, quantum blockchain driven cloud based PaaS.
- unemphysbro 5y ago
  This certainly is the future of Impact-Driven Value as a Service (I-DVaaS).
- mlac 5y ago
  Please let me know when this is ready for prime time - I'm really interested in bringing an Intelligent Quantum (IQ) Blockchain driven cloud based PaaS security platform to market. The secret of IQ technology, is that, while the others have "artificial" intelligence, there is nothing fake about ours. I believe we could realize great value with a blue ocean strategy like that.
toomanybeersies 5y ago
They might have to switch to some new up-and-coming buzzwords, such as "supply chain", or "graph". Here's a great example I found after a quick search [1]: > Why TigerGraph, a Native Parallel Graph Database for Supply Chain Analysis? > Manage Supply Chains Efficiently With Deep Link Analytics Oh, and then there's also "Internet of Things": > Uncover Insights From Temporal Analysis of Internet of Things Data [1] https://www.tigergraph.com/solutions/supply-chain-analysis/ https://www.tigergraph.com/solutions/supply-chain-analysis/

Veedrac 5y ago

People were calling everything agent-like AI since forever. Video games had AI. Heck, Pacman's ghosts had AI. Nobody cared. They understood what it was referring to. I only started hearing how it would ‘dilute the language’ or the term was ‘disingenuous’ or whatever once AI started actually doing intellectually impressive feats, and the naysayers started trying to redefine language to suit their prefered worldview. The fact is the term has always been used loosely. Even if it hadn't been, several of the undisputed top machine learning corporations (eg. DeepMind) has the explicit goal of reaching general intelligence, which remains true even if you are sure they will fail. Its use as a term is more appropriate than ever.

pkrumins 5y ago

My AI is the `if` statement.

calibas 5y ago

>today’s artificial-intelligence systems aren’t actually intelligent Artificial butter isn't actual butter, that's why we call it artificial. Personally, I prefer saying ML just because of all the semantics regarding AI.

deleted 5y ago

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Raro 5y ago

"AI is 'Machine Learning' for journalists" Unfortunately I can't recall where I first heard this great quip.

marginalia_nu 5y ago
"'Machine Learning' is Linear Algebra for marketers" You read it here first.

Volker_W 5y ago

I think we need another word for AI, one that only real programmers and mathematicians know. That way, we can talk about that stuff without some incompetent journalist or marketing salesman saying stupid stuff.

gcr 5y ago
Call deep learning what it is: learnable nonlinear function approximation.

binarymax 5y ago

I propose we actually HIJACK the AI acronym to be 'Advanced Instruments'. I've had a ranty blog post in my head about this for a while so really glad to see this article. People are going to use AI forever - but we need to change what it stands for, since they will never switch to using machine learning or ML.

dr_dshiv 5y ago
I like Artifact Intelligence. Then we can explode the term use even further, which I think would be better than moving goal posts.

winterismute 5y ago

Title probably meant "AI Pioneer".

dr_dshiv 5y ago

The term Artificial Intelligence implicitly makes people design systems that don’t involve people—because if people have an information processing role, then it seems like the system isn’t artificial yet, and therefore unfinished. That’s rather unhealthy

webmaven 5y ago
> The term Artificial Intelligence implicitly makes people design systems that don’t involve people—because if people have an information processing role, then it seems like the system isn’t artificial yet, and therefore unfinished. That’s rather unhealthy Well put, but doesn't go quite far enough. Because those systems do still involve people, it only as objects to be acted upon, rather than actors with agency. Which isn't just unhealthy, it is downright pathological (and often socio- or psycho-pathic). We've seen this sort of creeping bias before, with terms such as "Content Management System" displacing more human centric terms such as reading, writing (or even authoring), sharing, and publishing. "Content" is just an amorphous mass that is only produced in order to be "managed", poured into various containers, distributed, and delivered in order to be consumed.

bitwize 5y ago

Today's AI is, as I like to call it, statistics with sexy marketing. A lot of AI programming consists of loading Python modules that correspond to various models, and fooling around with them to see which best fits the data you have. In other words, you're working more like a mathematician experimenting with potential solutions. There's pressure at my job for architects to "leverage AI". What I always suggest to them is to find a statistician and see if things like neural networks are even necessary before committing to them. Sometimes the problem could best be solved with a heuristic, a rules engine, or a simple statistical model like linear regression, in which case "leveraging AI" is merely hype.

nbardy 5y ago

I used to be in the grouchy, "Stop calling it AI camp". But the last three years of progress are impossible to ignore. Scaling models is working better than anyone thought. We're in for a wild ride with this new AI.

tshoaib 5y ago

Is Michael I. Jordan the Michael Jordan of AI research?

tibiahurried 5y ago

My background is in automation and robotics; I studied system identification: a discipline where you would use mathematical means to identify a dynamic system model by observing input/output. You treat the system as a black box and estimate a set of parameters that can describe it (e.g., Kalman filter). I struggle to understand what's the fundamental difference between system identification and ML/AI. Anyone? You ultimately have a bunch of data and try to estimate/fit a model that can describe a particular behavior. It all comes down to a big optimization/interpolation problem. Isn't what they call "Learning" just really "estimating" ? Then the more CPU/memory/storage you have, the more parameters/data you can estimate/process, the more accurate and sophisticated the model can be.

fasterbynight 5y ago
As someone with a similar background, I believe some of the confusion is because there is a lot of overlap. System identification is very similar to supervised learning, however there are other learning "methods" that still fall under the umbrella of ML/AI. For example, unsupervised learning doesn't really have a good controls analog (as far as I know). Reinforcement learning on the other hand is somewhat analogous to model predictive control. A better way of phrasing your point is that ML/AI is "just" optimization.
tommiegannert 5y ago
> It all comes down to a big optimization/interpolation problem. Isn't what they call "Learning" just really "estimating" ? Yes. A mathematician will say "why do you call this 'back propagation', isn't it just matrix multiplication?" Many disciplines have different names for the same process.

DeathArrow 5y ago

AI means almost intelligent.

oblak 5y ago

"The real problem is not whether machines think, but whether men do." - B.F. Skinner In all honesty, I learned that from Civilization IV

giardini 5y ago

I periodically re-read the following to keep my perspective on AI: "ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE MEETS NATURAL STUPIDITY" by Drew McDermott https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234784524_Artificial_Intelligence_meets_natural_stupidity https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234784524_Artificia... (click on "Read Full Text" and then scroll down a half page.)

tabtab 5y ago

Too late. Marketers commandeered it and ain't giving it back. Create new terms such as ACS: "Artificial Common Sense" for future breakthroughs.

m0zg 5y ago

This is pissing into the wind. There's nothing any "machine learning pioneer" can do about marketing, and this is marketing. And it's all right. People are beginning to catch on that we won't have "thinking robots" or "self driving cars" in the foreseeable future. Doesn't mean that it's not intelligence or that it's not useful. It's also most definitely "atificial". What we call it is a matter of tertiary importance at best.