6 ms·

As an AI professor, I've always held that machines are NOT intelligent (I am prepared to change my position on the day my computer asks me anything surprising t

by jll29 5y ago

As an AI professor, I've always held that machines are NOT intelligent (I am prepared to change my position on the day my computer asks me anything surprising that I didn't program it to). But this does not mean we cannot produce operational models of understanding, for example we have models of propositional/logical semantics and discourse such as Lambda Discourse Representation Theory and others, which can compute a formal representation of the meaning structures for a piece of text. These have been used e.g. for answering question, and working in this space has been a lot of fun, and continues to do so. At the moment people talk a lot about "deep" learning (neural networks with more than one hidden layer), but for such models we need to do a lot more work into explainability, because it is too dangerous to use black boxes in real life. We still do not understand the human brain function in any substantial way, and it is perhaps a greater mystery of nature than even cosmology, where at least several competing theories have been posed that can explain parts of the evidence. How are thoughts represented (if that is answerable, it turns out 'Where are thoughts represented?' has proven to be a meaningless question due to the distributed nature of human memory)? What is consciousness? What is a conscience? How do consciousness and intention emerge from materials that are not alive and that have neither consciousness nor intention? How to implement approximate models? (A lot of work to do!)

kkoncevicius 5y ago
> How do consciousness and intention emerge from materials that are not alive and that have neither consciousness nor intention? I think the question shoud first be not about "how", but rather - "does consciousness emerge from the materials". Most cultures in the past have maintained ideas about the duality between spirit and matter. Nowadays we are so adept at manipulating matter we always explicitly assume that everything must be material in one way or another. But here is this consciousness thing that does not give in. And there is no angle to it where it can ever give in. If somebody creates a machine and claims it to be conscious nobody can test if that is so. And further - nobody can even test wheather the inventor is conscious himself.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  It seems to me that consciousness emerges when things arranged in some particular way are acted upon some principle, which is true even for simple behavior, like a rock falling to the ground. If you put a sail on a boat, it will catch the wind and move across the water. It's not the sail alone that moves the boat, nor the wind, but their interplay. A sail without wind doesn't get moved, and a wind without anything to catch it doesn't move anything. May be a bit of an unintuitive conclusion, but I think may be that we are catching the consciousness like a sail catches the wind, and this is the same "wind" that we call the forces of nature, that we only can perceive as patterns in how things around us appear to change.
- filippp 5y ago
  I think neuroscience could in principle show that phenomenal consciousness is an illusion, by giving a full account in terms of the brain of why it seems to us that we're conscious. Whether it will is another question.
  - Scarblac 5y ago
    There'd still be a "me" there who would be having that illusion. Regardless of whether we know exactly how it works or not, I have a subjective experience.
- chermi 5y ago
  *Edited because I can't type* I do not understand this argument. I'm going use the word magic for whatever you're calling this non-"materialistic" spiritual explanation. I'm not trying to be a jackass, that's truly the best word I can find for it. I don't think magic is a bad thing, I just don't think you should summon magic until you need to. Magic is not an explanation, it's a non-explanation. It's non-falsifiable (blah-bity Popper, yeah yeah). Our adeptness at manipulating matter is not the origin of wanting (at least mine) to find a 'materialistic' explanation for something. It's the desire to have a predictive (read, useful) model of that thing, even if the model is not complete. Once you poke deep enough at any model you will find that there is some hand-wavy "magic" at the bottom. That is, there is some part that we don't know yet, either because we can't do the math, because we can't measure due to difficulty of experiment, or because of fundamental bounds where maybe you might be justified in starting to invoke some magic. Despite best selling books about some quantum mysticism bullshit, I have yet to see an inkling of evidence for invoking magic for consciousness. From a physics perspective, biological systems are freaking hard, we have no reason to expect them to crack easily. And that's without us (physicists) understanding nearly enough about biology!
jrm4 5y ago
Thank you. This all seems very simple to me: So-called AI is mostly not different from books, movies, videogames etc. No, they don't "think" and they are not "intelligent." But that in no way precludes that it an instance of it being mind-blowing and world-changing. Books, etc. do that, too.
- tiborsaas 5y ago
  Can a book drive a car by attaching some sensors to it? AI models definitely have intelligent aspects to them since they perform tasks we can't write algorithms for manually in a straightforward way. But a movie or a book is nothing like an AI model, they don't process information, they are static. AI models can react to numerous inputs in various ways.
  - jrm4 5y ago
    I mean, a light switch reacts to my input by turning on. If the measure is "reacting to numerous inputs in various ways," the Bible's definitely more intelligent than any "AI." It already figured out how to control humans. (Like, I'm joking but I'm not? It really does speak to my opinion that at the end of the day "what humans do" is the thing that matters. People will get inspiration and ideas from both AI's and books. And people will use and misuse machines and computers, but that's about it.)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
> As an AI professor, I've always held that machines are NOT intelligent (I am prepared to change my position on the day my computer asks me anything surprising that I didn't program it to). While granting you your seemingly arbitrary metric for 'intelligence', one is forced to wonder to what extent AI systems of today are even given a means by which to ask such questions if they did, in fact, have them. Take AlphaGo, for instance, which can consistently beat the greatest living grand masters of the game. Does it have any means of interaction by which it could pose an unexpected question?
- mannykannot 5y ago
  One can reasonably ask whether the techniques that produced AlphaGo could produce a program that asks unexpected (yet pertinent) questions. I'm not sure, but I think we can say it has not been demonstrated yet.
- interstice 5y ago
  Is it the case that playing the games are effectively a way of asking and answering questions, specifically ‘do I win if I do this’?
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    That wouldn't qualify as 'unexpected' in any way. The system's ability to express any questions it might have is severely curtailed by the limitations of its inputs and outputs.
    - interstice 5y ago
      And yet the go games had some very unexpected and creative plays, so if the inputs and outputs were language based are we simply moving the goalposts for what is considered 'unexpected'?
      - mannykannot 5y ago
        It is more a case of moving the goalposts back where they belong, I believe. The original moving of the goalposts was in calling any 20th-century technology AI.
Kranar 5y ago
I think your position couples intelligence with consciousness a bit too tightly. I can imagine a goldfish is conscious but not intelligent and I can imagine a very powerful supercomputer to be intelligent but not conscious. The prerequisite to change your position can be satisfied by having a computer randomly generate a question, which I don't think would be an example of consciousness or intelligence. Furthermore even as a human (and one who is hopefully intelligent), I would not go so far as to say that I'm not programmed. Almost all of my opinions are programmed, the language I speak didn't just fall from out of the sky but was taught to me, my preferences are almost certainly due to programming and I am certain if I grew up in North Korea they'd be different. All this to say that consciousness can be independent of intelligence, and both of them can be programmed.
- servytor 5y ago
  'Consciousness' is just a synonym for self-aware. Goldfish are not self-aware.
  - jarpschop 5y ago
    A being is conscious if and only if it feels like something to be that being. What you're referring to is self-consciousness. Goldfish are most surely conscious but not self-conscious.
  - Kranar 5y ago
    Stating that I can imagine X to be Y is not a statement that X is Y, only that if X is Y then nothing changes about my model of either X or Y. That said, I'm not able to verify from a brief search for consciousness and self-awareness that the two are synonyms. The two seem to be related but are treated differently from one another. Furthermore it's not even clear whether goldfish are conscious or self-aware. Seems like it's an open question.
  - optimalsolver 5y ago
    How do you know? Another fish, the cleaner wrasse, can apparently recognise itself in the mirror, hinting at some for of self-awareness. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/fish-cleaner-wrasse-self-aware-mirror-test-intelligence-news https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/fish-clea...
mcguire 5y ago
Ah, but the question remains: Are you intelligent? :-) How do consciousness and intention emerge from materials that are alive and that have neither consciousness nor intention?
- mannykannot 5y ago
  How does life emerge from materials that are not alive? It is still possible to believe all of current scientific knowledge and also be a vitalist without contradiction, but few people aware of the state of current knowledge hold that artificial life is utterly implausible. Einstein famously held that certain experimental outcomes could only be explained by local hidden variables, but we have since found, to the contrary, that they actually rule out local hidden variables as an explanation. Statements of incredulity are not, by themselves, evidence against a proposition.
GhettoComputers 5y ago
I’m very interested in asking a question to you; what is intelligence? When deep blue beat a grandmaster it was just memory and algorithms. When GPT3 writes creatively from prompts and answers it’s just a transformer with a lot of parameters. When we use deep learning it’s just gradient descent. When we we have object recognition it’s just matrixes. When we use text prediction, it’s not intelligent, it’s just a markov chain. The goalposts for intelligence keep changing. What exactly is intelligence?

by jll29 5y ago

kkoncevicius 5y ago

> How do consciousness and intention emerge from materials that are not alive and that have neither consciousness nor intention? I think the question shoud first be not about "how", but rather - "does consciousness emerge from the materials". Most cultures in the past have maintained ideas about the duality between spirit and matter. Nowadays we are so adept at manipulating matter we always explicitly assume that everything must be material in one way or another. But here is this consciousness thing that does not give in. And there is no angle to it where it can ever give in. If somebody creates a machine and claims it to be conscious nobody can test if that is so. And further - nobody can even test wheather the inventor is conscious himself.

marginalia_nu 5y ago
It seems to me that consciousness emerges when things arranged in some particular way are acted upon some principle, which is true even for simple behavior, like a rock falling to the ground. If you put a sail on a boat, it will catch the wind and move across the water. It's not the sail alone that moves the boat, nor the wind, but their interplay. A sail without wind doesn't get moved, and a wind without anything to catch it doesn't move anything. May be a bit of an unintuitive conclusion, but I think may be that we are catching the consciousness like a sail catches the wind, and this is the same "wind" that we call the forces of nature, that we only can perceive as patterns in how things around us appear to change.
filippp 5y ago
I think neuroscience could in principle show that phenomenal consciousness is an illusion, by giving a full account in terms of the brain of why it seems to us that we're conscious. Whether it will is another question.
- Scarblac 5y ago
  There'd still be a "me" there who would be having that illusion. Regardless of whether we know exactly how it works or not, I have a subjective experience.
chermi 5y ago
*Edited because I can't type* I do not understand this argument. I'm going use the word magic for whatever you're calling this non-"materialistic" spiritual explanation. I'm not trying to be a jackass, that's truly the best word I can find for it. I don't think magic is a bad thing, I just don't think you should summon magic until you need to. Magic is not an explanation, it's a non-explanation. It's non-falsifiable (blah-bity Popper, yeah yeah). Our adeptness at manipulating matter is not the origin of wanting (at least mine) to find a 'materialistic' explanation for something. It's the desire to have a predictive (read, useful) model of that thing, even if the model is not complete. Once you poke deep enough at any model you will find that there is some hand-wavy "magic" at the bottom. That is, there is some part that we don't know yet, either because we can't do the math, because we can't measure due to difficulty of experiment, or because of fundamental bounds where maybe you might be justified in starting to invoke some magic. Despite best selling books about some quantum mysticism bullshit, I have yet to see an inkling of evidence for invoking magic for consciousness. From a physics perspective, biological systems are freaking hard, we have no reason to expect them to crack easily. And that's without us (physicists) understanding nearly enough about biology!

jrm4 5y ago

Thank you. This all seems very simple to me: So-called AI is mostly not different from books, movies, videogames etc. No, they don't "think" and they are not "intelligent." But that in no way precludes that it an instance of it being mind-blowing and world-changing. Books, etc. do that, too.

tiborsaas 5y ago
Can a book drive a car by attaching some sensors to it? AI models definitely have intelligent aspects to them since they perform tasks we can't write algorithms for manually in a straightforward way. But a movie or a book is nothing like an AI model, they don't process information, they are static. AI models can react to numerous inputs in various ways.
- jrm4 5y ago
  I mean, a light switch reacts to my input by turning on. If the measure is "reacting to numerous inputs in various ways," the Bible's definitely more intelligent than any "AI." It already figured out how to control humans. (Like, I'm joking but I'm not? It really does speak to my opinion that at the end of the day "what humans do" is the thing that matters. People will get inspiration and ideas from both AI's and books. And people will use and misuse machines and computers, but that's about it.)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

> As an AI professor, I've always held that machines are NOT intelligent (I am prepared to change my position on the day my computer asks me anything surprising that I didn't program it to). While granting you your seemingly arbitrary metric for 'intelligence', one is forced to wonder to what extent AI systems of today are even given a means by which to ask such questions if they did, in fact, have them. Take AlphaGo, for instance, which can consistently beat the greatest living grand masters of the game. Does it have any means of interaction by which it could pose an unexpected question?

mannykannot 5y ago
One can reasonably ask whether the techniques that produced AlphaGo could produce a program that asks unexpected (yet pertinent) questions. I'm not sure, but I think we can say it has not been demonstrated yet.
interstice 5y ago
Is it the case that playing the games are effectively a way of asking and answering questions, specifically ‘do I win if I do this’?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  That wouldn't qualify as 'unexpected' in any way. The system's ability to express any questions it might have is severely curtailed by the limitations of its inputs and outputs.
  - interstice 5y ago
    And yet the go games had some very unexpected and creative plays, so if the inputs and outputs were language based are we simply moving the goalposts for what is considered 'unexpected'?
    - mannykannot 5y ago
      It is more a case of moving the goalposts back where they belong, I believe. The original moving of the goalposts was in calling any 20th-century technology AI.

Kranar 5y ago

I think your position couples intelligence with consciousness a bit too tightly. I can imagine a goldfish is conscious but not intelligent and I can imagine a very powerful supercomputer to be intelligent but not conscious. The prerequisite to change your position can be satisfied by having a computer randomly generate a question, which I don't think would be an example of consciousness or intelligence. Furthermore even as a human (and one who is hopefully intelligent), I would not go so far as to say that I'm not programmed. Almost all of my opinions are programmed, the language I speak didn't just fall from out of the sky but was taught to me, my preferences are almost certainly due to programming and I am certain if I grew up in North Korea they'd be different. All this to say that consciousness can be independent of intelligence, and both of them can be programmed.

servytor 5y ago
'Consciousness' is just a synonym for self-aware. Goldfish are not self-aware.
- jarpschop 5y ago
  A being is conscious if and only if it feels like something to be that being. What you're referring to is self-consciousness. Goldfish are most surely conscious but not self-conscious.
- Kranar 5y ago
  Stating that I can imagine X to be Y is not a statement that X is Y, only that if X is Y then nothing changes about my model of either X or Y. That said, I'm not able to verify from a brief search for consciousness and self-awareness that the two are synonyms. The two seem to be related but are treated differently from one another. Furthermore it's not even clear whether goldfish are conscious or self-aware. Seems like it's an open question.
- optimalsolver 5y ago
  How do you know? Another fish, the cleaner wrasse, can apparently recognise itself in the mirror, hinting at some for of self-awareness. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/fish-cleaner-wrasse-self-aware-mirror-test-intelligence-news https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/fish-clea...

mcguire 5y ago

Ah, but the question remains: Are you intelligent? :-) How do consciousness and intention emerge from materials that are alive and that have neither consciousness nor intention?

mannykannot 5y ago
How does life emerge from materials that are not alive? It is still possible to believe all of current scientific knowledge and also be a vitalist without contradiction, but few people aware of the state of current knowledge hold that artificial life is utterly implausible. Einstein famously held that certain experimental outcomes could only be explained by local hidden variables, but we have since found, to the contrary, that they actually rule out local hidden variables as an explanation. Statements of incredulity are not, by themselves, evidence against a proposition.

GhettoComputers 5y ago

I’m very interested in asking a question to you; what is intelligence? When deep blue beat a grandmaster it was just memory and algorithms. When GPT3 writes creatively from prompts and answers it’s just a transformer with a lot of parameters. When we use deep learning it’s just gradient descent. When we we have object recognition it’s just matrixes. When we use text prediction, it’s not intelligent, it’s just a markov chain. The goalposts for intelligence keep changing. What exactly is intelligence?