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Your comment is a good example of AI meaning whatever we haven't solved yet. Yes, I'm aware of the Rodney Brooks quote. I think it's kind of glib and misses t
by vanusa 5y ago
Your comment is a good example of AI meaning whatever we haven't solved yet.
Yes, I'm aware of the Rodney Brooks quote. I think it's kind of glib and misses the mark.
Take chess, for example. When algorithms were developed to beat humans at chess -- it wasn't, like the quote implies, out of some sense of envy or schadenfreude that people said, "Oh, but that's not real AI".
But rather -- from the intrinsic features of the system that first met this challenge. Which, at the end of the day, were basically about generalized tree search. Okay, there was more to it than that -- but in 3 word or less, that's gist of the AlphaZero algorithm, as described in the original paper.
So people said "Oh -- it turns out you don't need human-like cognition to beat humans at chess/go/shogi. You just need good enough tree search, and some decent hardware."
Pretty soon self-driving cars will also not count as AI, because we'll have solved self-driving and therefore it's not hard enough anymore.
That's one of the weird things about the current moment in AI: people keep talking about self-driving cars as if they're a straight-line extrapolation the breakthroughs we've seen so far (give or take a few details).
They're not. If you just think about if for a minute: nearly all of the challenges met thus far -- taking the two you just mentioned as particularly shining examples -- as significant as they have been, have been pretty darn one-dimensional. "Here's a function; optimize it" (basically).
The reason self-driving cars are floundering at the moment is that the intrinsic problem they're dealing with is an entirely different beast from "solve this symbolic game faster than a human" or "label these photos better than a roomful of monkees". It is vastly more complex. And the emerging consensus (whatever some companies may say to the contrary) is that solution is not lurking just around the corner, and not coming our way anytime soon -- certainly not "pretty soon".
- TulliusCicero 5y agoRegardless, you probably won’t need human level, general purpose AI to drive a car. It’s just a dumb definitional game that some people insist on playing. AI doesn’t just mean human level intelligence. The field is bigger than that. When people talk about the AI in their video game, they’re not demanding that bots be as smart as humans. There are more specific terms like hard AI or AGI for when that’s the topic of discussion, and there’s no reason to assume that whenever someone says AI they mean one of those other things.
- vanusa 5y agoRegardless, you probably won’t need human level, general purpose AI to drive a car. Right (most likely), but my point was -- we're not going to get there by extrapolating linearly from human-beating technologies such as AlphaZero (impressive though they are). Or by stitching a few of these on top of each other. When people talk about the AI in their video game, they’re not demanding that bots be as smart as humans. Of course the ML/AI distinction is completely muddled in public discourse, and the marketing fluff of many startups hasn't helped either. But the point from the very beginning was: from practitioners (and journals like Nature) we should expect better.
- TulliusCicero 5y agoUh, no. We've had decades of AI being more than "how long til they think like humans?" That's not what AI is. You're talking about AGI or hard AI. Hell, even Wikiepdia makes it clear: > Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence demonstrated by machines, as opposed to natural intelligence displayed by animals including humans. Leading AI textbooks define the field as the study of "intelligent agents": any system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of achieving its goals.[a] Some popular accounts use the term "artificial intelligence" to describe machines that mimic "cognitive" functions that humans associate with the human mind, such as "learning" and "problem solving", however, this definition is rejected by major AI researchers.[b] > AI applications include advanced web search engines (e.g., Google), recommendation systems (used by YouTube, Amazon and Netflix), understanding human speech (such as Siri and Alexa), self-driving cars (e.g., Tesla), automated decision-making and competing at the highest level in strategic game systems (such as chess and Go).[2][citation needed] As machines become increasingly capable, tasks considered to require "intelligence" are often removed from the definition of AI, a phenomenon known as the AI effect.[3] For instance, optical character recognition is frequently excluded from things considered to be AI,[4] having become a routine technology.[5] Insisting that others use your non-standard definition is silly.
- vanusa 5y agoI just said, very clearly, that self-driving cars ≠ AGI and don't need to be human-like. You're browbeating me for a position I'm not taking. Weird.