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I'm curious, when you say "This kind of understanding won’t work with an AI", do you mean currently, or in principle, even in the future? note: children's brai

by yboris 5y ago

I'm curious, when you say "This kind of understanding won’t work with an AI", do you mean currently, or in principle, even in the future? note: children's brains come pre-loaded with so much stuff when we are born (we are not "blank slates").

jonplackett 5y ago
What I mean is AIs aren’t really built with the goal of ‘understanding’ anything currently. They are awesome at individual tasks but they don’t have the kind of common sense a person can use to reason with and build up an understanding of how pieces of knowledge fit together. Eg. Driverless cars can identify a car, or a motorbike or a cyclist and maybe work out a trajectory for it. But they don’t understand that a bike is a person on top of a metal frame and that person is made up of a head and body and limbs. And if that head is looking away from them it can’t see them coming. For me, that’s understanding. Deconstructing and reconstructing knowledge to come to conclusions that add to your knowledge.
- yboris 5y ago
  Thank you for the response. A bit of a push back: On the driverless cars example you're right that AI models abstract away needless complexity, but so do we, as humans, can live without understanding that bodies are made up of cells (or how muscles move during a tennis match). If we want AI models to include a person's gaze in their calculations, we can make it happen. From an abstract-enough perspective, the AI model will do enough that whether it "understands" may become irrelevant. Language understanding is much harder, because words are about stuff in the world. Just like when a toddler says "love" we know they don't fully understand what they mean, AI won't have the capacity to mean "love" unless it has a lot more it "understands" along the way. But it feels like it could in the near few decades "understand" enough about "duck" to mean it when it says "I see a duck".
  - jonplackett 5y ago
    Thanks for yours too! Isn’t this civilised? I can tell I’m not on reddit… I think what I’m getting at is the way an AI learns is kind of a black box. Maybe it is learning about cyclists head movements. Maybe it only learned that for cyclists wearing helmets. We don’t really know it’s put the pieces together correctly - like the classic example of training an AI to recognise friendly tanks and it just learning the difference between day and night. Because we let it essentially define its own characteristics for recognising things we don’t know if it picked the right ones. We just have to hope the training data was large enough to average out. Using the right features is fundamental to understanding what’s really going on. Perhaps occasionally an AI might notice some connection we humans have been ignoring and that might be good. But in general I think we’ve done a pretty good job of allocating words and language to the important things. We separated out the body into parts that make sense. That kind of thing. If an AI had those underlying building blocks wired up more like our own. maybe understanding in a similar way that we do would be a lot easier. Last quick example / thought experiment: To test understanding in a person you try asking them questions that would confuse them if they didn’t understand. Eg. If I photoshopped a crocodile head onto a Tiger’s body and have it a fish tail and put it on the moon. My toddle would still recognise all the bits and describe it as such. An AI would just come up 33% ish for each possibility because it doesn’t understand what an animal is and that it has those parts.
    - yboris 5y ago
      I love that we can, for some network architectures, "ask" it to generate a (set of varied) super-stimulus example(s), something that is 100% "that thing". So at least sometimes, we can see what "friendly tank" means. I wonder if in many of the AI can/can't discussions we are implicitly talking about different time horizons. I think you're right, yet given enough time, I feel like an AI (designed for, among other goals, understanding) would be capable of communicating out its credence values and points of misunderstanding.
      - jonplackett 5y ago
        Yeah I think we're more or less saying the same kind of thing with different hopes for the future. I'm sure a lot of this will be worked out. I am excited for a computer as smart as my toddler - possibly within my life time - and hopefully with better ability to stay on-task!

by yboris 5y ago

jonplackett 5y ago

What I mean is AIs aren’t really built with the goal of ‘understanding’ anything currently. They are awesome at individual tasks but they don’t have the kind of common sense a person can use to reason with and build up an understanding of how pieces of knowledge fit together. Eg. Driverless cars can identify a car, or a motorbike or a cyclist and maybe work out a trajectory for it. But they don’t understand that a bike is a person on top of a metal frame and that person is made up of a head and body and limbs. And if that head is looking away from them it can’t see them coming. For me, that’s understanding. Deconstructing and reconstructing knowledge to come to conclusions that add to your knowledge.

yboris 5y ago
Thank you for the response. A bit of a push back: On the driverless cars example you're right that AI models abstract away needless complexity, but so do we, as humans, can live without understanding that bodies are made up of cells (or how muscles move during a tennis match). If we want AI models to include a person's gaze in their calculations, we can make it happen. From an abstract-enough perspective, the AI model will do enough that whether it "understands" may become irrelevant. Language understanding is much harder, because words are about stuff in the world. Just like when a toddler says "love" we know they don't fully understand what they mean, AI won't have the capacity to mean "love" unless it has a lot more it "understands" along the way. But it feels like it could in the near few decades "understand" enough about "duck" to mean it when it says "I see a duck".
- jonplackett 5y ago
  Thanks for yours too! Isn’t this civilised? I can tell I’m not on reddit… I think what I’m getting at is the way an AI learns is kind of a black box. Maybe it is learning about cyclists head movements. Maybe it only learned that for cyclists wearing helmets. We don’t really know it’s put the pieces together correctly - like the classic example of training an AI to recognise friendly tanks and it just learning the difference between day and night. Because we let it essentially define its own characteristics for recognising things we don’t know if it picked the right ones. We just have to hope the training data was large enough to average out. Using the right features is fundamental to understanding what’s really going on. Perhaps occasionally an AI might notice some connection we humans have been ignoring and that might be good. But in general I think we’ve done a pretty good job of allocating words and language to the important things. We separated out the body into parts that make sense. That kind of thing. If an AI had those underlying building blocks wired up more like our own. maybe understanding in a similar way that we do would be a lot easier. Last quick example / thought experiment: To test understanding in a person you try asking them questions that would confuse them if they didn’t understand. Eg. If I photoshopped a crocodile head onto a Tiger’s body and have it a fish tail and put it on the moon. My toddle would still recognise all the bits and describe it as such. An AI would just come up 33% ish for each possibility because it doesn’t understand what an animal is and that it has those parts.
  - yboris 5y ago
    I love that we can, for some network architectures, "ask" it to generate a (set of varied) super-stimulus example(s), something that is 100% "that thing". So at least sometimes, we can see what "friendly tank" means. I wonder if in many of the AI can/can't discussions we are implicitly talking about different time horizons. I think you're right, yet given enough time, I feel like an AI (designed for, among other goals, understanding) would be capable of communicating out its credence values and points of misunderstanding.
    - jonplackett 5y ago
      Yeah I think we're more or less saying the same kind of thing with different hopes for the future. I'm sure a lot of this will be worked out. I am excited for a computer as smart as my toddler - possibly within my life time - and hopefully with better ability to stay on-task!