4 ms·

> a common theme was when I studied ML in uni in the AI winter of the 90s, that beating Go surely would mean human level intelligence The goalposts haven't mov

> a common theme was when I studied ML in uni in the AI winter of the 90s, that beating Go surely would mean human level intelligence The goalposts haven't moved. If AI researchers thought that general intelligence would be required to beat a human in Go, then they were simply wrong. AlphaGo is not a general-purpose intelligence. It only does one thing. It plays Go.

tluyben2 5y ago
> then they were simply wrong. Sure, point is that every definition we come up with gets beaten and then we were wrong with that definition in the first place; defining what agi means seems hard.
- robbedpeter 5y ago
  Defining intelligence in a way that captures everything relevant and isn't self referential is extremely difficult. Dr. Marcus Hutter's AIXI is a solid mathematical treatise that reduces intelligence to the concept of information compression, and you can exhaustively construct a logical extrapolation from aixi to any particular feature of intelligence at higher levels, but it's similar to string theory in that it's all-encompassing in scope. It's not useful in narrowing the solution space if you want to build a high level intelligent system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIXI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIXI
- omnicognate 5y ago
  That isn't "moving the goalposts", though. That phrasing is commonly used to imply that people who are skeptical of the imminence of AGI are being unreasonable. The fact that we can't yet define general intelligence convincingly is a large part of the reason I'm skeptical that we're close to achieving it.
  - tluyben2 5y ago
    I think we are very far off achieving it as well. But I do feel goalposts were moved and continuing that might be a way we will achieve it without noticing; like alien intelligence, we might create something we don’t recognise as general while it already is. But not soon either way I would think. Like aliens, I hope within my lifetime but I would put both at close to 0.
  - FabHK 5y ago
    That reminds me of Moravec's paradox: What we thought was hard and difficult (and indicative of intelligence), such as playing Chess and computing derivatives, is actually quite easy, while a lot of things that we consider trivially easy (distinguish a dog from a cat, pick up an egg, read some squiggly text) are quite hard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox One of my favourite demonstration of that was the 2015 DARPA robot challenge, where one robot after the other failed at such difficult tasks as walking and opening a door. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0TaYhjpOfo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0TaYhjpOfo
- adrianN 5y ago
  The Turing Test still stands imo. The chinese room argument against it is not convincing to me.
  - tluyben2 5y ago
    I do think some known weaknesses do make it problematic though; some intelligent behaviour might be not human; aka maybe the player is a generally super intelligent computer but it’s answers are so out there the other players do not recognise it as intelligence. Or the human player is so weird, the answers are mistaken for a computer. Or, the most likely and I have played this many times, lately with gpt3; human behaviour often is not intelligent, at all. And while computers are not intelligent, in a scenario against someone who just responds with emoji’s and such (so, a currently normal convo on the internet), the interrogator might appoint humanness to the wrong side many or all times. As we already know that people who do not know they are chatting to a bot, think it is a human. While I do not think that is intelligence, it does making testing for it slightly broken. It will come down to ‘I will know it when I see it’ by elitists for exactly the above. So in short ; I do think the Chinese room argument against it is quite a good one where even the elitist people can fall for if the ‘con’ is elaborate enough (as in; if gpt gets more data, more efficient learning and learns to know when it cannot answer and has to look it up, like calculations). Or maybe then it is intelligent? (To be clear; I don’t think so; I think we need a better tests and definitions).
  - blackbrokkoli 5y ago
    Which one? Turing himself revised it, like, four times. The version where humans can't tell which one chat member is non-human has been beaten several times (with tricks like mimicking a 13 year old foreign boy, iirc). The version where you replace an arbitrary member of a chat with a human is something mostly about speech pattern matching and plausible speech, can't imagine that GTP3 or whatever comes next is too bad at that. If you do it like in Ex Machina, as in chatting in person it's mostly about building a very expensive robot that overcomes uncanny valley. I think the sad state is that the Turing Test is too diluted to be useful as a marker...
    - adrianN 5y ago
- toisanji 5y ago
  The goalpost hasn’t been moving https://blog.jtoy.net/the-human-mind-is-an-autonomous-interlinked-model-building-database/ https://blog.jtoy.net/the-human-mind-is-an-autonomous-interl...
virgilp 5y ago
Is the Turing test "simply wrong"? Or do we need to further qualify it, as in "a GPT-3 chatbot is human-level only if it can fool any human for a long period of time, not if it can fool _some_ humans for a relatively short period of time"? I think it's fair to say that the goalposts are moving (as they should).
- bangkoksbest 5y ago
  Or maybe the Turing test is the right test but interpreted more literally: it is passed when the society that invented it genuinely believes it to have been passed. Hammering out the specific criteria ahead of time will only lead to frustration as it becomes clear that is not what the surrounding society actually holds as qualifying. The reason the goal posts move is that we fundamental misjudge what it is we find to be human intelligence, and given that we have a nasty habit of denying this quality to other humans, let alone animals, it's entirely possible we will never genuinely grant it to technical artefacts that we devise.

tluyben2 5y ago

> then they were simply wrong. Sure, point is that every definition we come up with gets beaten and then we were wrong with that definition in the first place; defining what agi means seems hard.

robbedpeter 5y ago
Defining intelligence in a way that captures everything relevant and isn't self referential is extremely difficult. Dr. Marcus Hutter's AIXI is a solid mathematical treatise that reduces intelligence to the concept of information compression, and you can exhaustively construct a logical extrapolation from aixi to any particular feature of intelligence at higher levels, but it's similar to string theory in that it's all-encompassing in scope. It's not useful in narrowing the solution space if you want to build a high level intelligent system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIXI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIXI
omnicognate 5y ago
That isn't "moving the goalposts", though. That phrasing is commonly used to imply that people who are skeptical of the imminence of AGI are being unreasonable. The fact that we can't yet define general intelligence convincingly is a large part of the reason I'm skeptical that we're close to achieving it.
- tluyben2 5y ago
  I think we are very far off achieving it as well. But I do feel goalposts were moved and continuing that might be a way we will achieve it without noticing; like alien intelligence, we might create something we don’t recognise as general while it already is. But not soon either way I would think. Like aliens, I hope within my lifetime but I would put both at close to 0.
- FabHK 5y ago
  That reminds me of Moravec's paradox: What we thought was hard and difficult (and indicative of intelligence), such as playing Chess and computing derivatives, is actually quite easy, while a lot of things that we consider trivially easy (distinguish a dog from a cat, pick up an egg, read some squiggly text) are quite hard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox One of my favourite demonstration of that was the 2015 DARPA robot challenge, where one robot after the other failed at such difficult tasks as walking and opening a door. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0TaYhjpOfo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0TaYhjpOfo
adrianN 5y ago
The Turing Test still stands imo. The chinese room argument against it is not convincing to me.
- tluyben2 5y ago
  I do think some known weaknesses do make it problematic though; some intelligent behaviour might be not human; aka maybe the player is a generally super intelligent computer but it’s answers are so out there the other players do not recognise it as intelligence. Or the human player is so weird, the answers are mistaken for a computer. Or, the most likely and I have played this many times, lately with gpt3; human behaviour often is not intelligent, at all. And while computers are not intelligent, in a scenario against someone who just responds with emoji’s and such (so, a currently normal convo on the internet), the interrogator might appoint humanness to the wrong side many or all times. As we already know that people who do not know they are chatting to a bot, think it is a human. While I do not think that is intelligence, it does making testing for it slightly broken. It will come down to ‘I will know it when I see it’ by elitists for exactly the above. So in short ; I do think the Chinese room argument against it is quite a good one where even the elitist people can fall for if the ‘con’ is elaborate enough (as in; if gpt gets more data, more efficient learning and learns to know when it cannot answer and has to look it up, like calculations). Or maybe then it is intelligent? (To be clear; I don’t think so; I think we need a better tests and definitions).
- blackbrokkoli 5y ago
  Which one? Turing himself revised it, like, four times. The version where humans can't tell which one chat member is non-human has been beaten several times (with tricks like mimicking a 13 year old foreign boy, iirc). The version where you replace an arbitrary member of a chat with a human is something mostly about speech pattern matching and plausible speech, can't imagine that GTP3 or whatever comes next is too bad at that. If you do it like in Ex Machina, as in chatting in person it's mostly about building a very expensive robot that overcomes uncanny valley. I think the sad state is that the Turing Test is too diluted to be useful as a marker...
  - adrianN 5y ago
toisanji 5y ago
The goalpost hasn’t been moving https://blog.jtoy.net/the-human-mind-is-an-autonomous-interlinked-model-building-database/ https://blog.jtoy.net/the-human-mind-is-an-autonomous-interl...

virgilp 5y ago

Is the Turing test "simply wrong"? Or do we need to further qualify it, as in "a GPT-3 chatbot is human-level only if it can fool any human for a long period of time, not if it can fool _some_ humans for a relatively short period of time"? I think it's fair to say that the goalposts are moving (as they should).

bangkoksbest 5y ago
Or maybe the Turing test is the right test but interpreted more literally: it is passed when the society that invented it genuinely believes it to have been passed. Hammering out the specific criteria ahead of time will only lead to frustration as it becomes clear that is not what the surrounding society actually holds as qualifying. The reason the goal posts move is that we fundamental misjudge what it is we find to be human intelligence, and given that we have a nasty habit of denying this quality to other humans, let alone animals, it's entirely possible we will never genuinely grant it to technical artefacts that we devise.