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There's this belief that if we come up with a problem hard enough for computers that humans can already do, where there's no obvious search or brute force strat

There's this belief that if we come up with a problem hard enough for computers that humans can already do, where there's no obvious search or brute force strategy, we'll be forced to make something like a generalized human, and then have it solve the problem. Of course, the issue is that the way we actually solve these problems is by coming up with a clever search or brute force strategy (chess, self-driving, poker), and yet we're no really closer to a generalized AI. Part of this is philosophical -- we can't define things like consciousness or intelligence in concrete terms, and so we have no real goals to work towards. We keep hoping that stumbling around in one of these other areas will lead us in the right direction, but so far, it just hasn't. The goalposts aren't moving, we simply haven't found where they are. In my opinion, we won't ever have generalized AI. Or at least, we might not ever agree that we have it. If 3,000 years of philosophers bickering hasn't given us any true insights yet, it's probably not going to suddenly show up now. But for now, weeeeee!!! Enjoy the funding before the next AI winter kicks in! Look at all the cool new progress happening! But to paraphrase someone who's name I forgot, "If your goal is to drive from San Francisco to the Moon, making it to Boston sure looks like you've made a lot of progress."

mdp2021 4y ago
> define things like... intelligence in concrete terms Who told you we cannot.
- olddustytrail 4y ago
  You kind of did, by failing to do so.
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    I do not think it dutiful to repeat myself in each post. (And honestly, while the base attitude of course remains to be "helpful", for current lack of a better term, sometimes - fortunately very occasionally - to provide a proper "complete" reply ceases to be economically viable.)
- saghm 4y ago
  I think there are potential concrete definitions, but people disagree on which (if any) are correct
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    > but people disagree Oh, but there is no need for such """correctness""". The way is also well defined negatively - the lacks express their presence clearly -, and this page provides already a few examples: -- "A is taller than B, B plays basketball, who is taller?" If the system does not reply "A", then it does not understand the question; by a general consideration, it may be evident that it was designed to "guess" instead of "know", and there lies very patently the structural fault. -- "A just left the house and is now in the market, where is A?" If the system does not understand "states", etc. If it cannot build a world representation, etc. -- "A fell from the flying helicopter, how is A?" If the system does not understand "falling from an height", etc. If it cannot "tell itself a story" (Prof. Patrick Winston), etc. The latter tells you about the logical relations between those "definitions" (of conjunction, so that (¬Av¬B)→¬C ). Prof. Winston defines "intelligence" as "the ability to tell oneself stories, which will also reveal outcomes of experiences you have not concretely lived". The definition may leave gaps when taken alone (especially if by somebody who confuses indications and definitions), but the lack of what is intended with such idea has full impact (no """inner storytelling""" - actually, I would say, no "productive engine" -, no "intelligence").
6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago
I agree with most of your comment and it’s a point well made. It’s frustrating to see all the “moving the goalposts” comments all the time when it’s just a problem of not knowing the right goalposts. > In my opinion, we won't ever have generalized AI. Or at least, we might not ever agree that we have it. But I disagree here. Eventually we’ll have something that can do everything we can do, just better, and at that point we might still be unable to draw a line, but we’ll at least be able to agree that a superset of human intelligence counts as AGI.
darawk 4y ago
I think it should be pretty clear at this point that we can at least achieve "generalized AI" to the extent that we as humans have it. There is no reason whatsoever to think we can't build a machine at least as intelligent as we are.
- cinntaile 4y ago
  I don't think there is any scientific consensus around this.
  - darawk 4y ago
    All of the arguments against it are completely non-serious. I don't think there are many real AI researchers that disagree with the thesis that it is in principle possible to build a machine as intelligent as a human. There is broad disagreement on how close we are to it, or whether or not the current track that ML research is on is sufficient to get us there.
    - cinntaile 4y ago
      > There is broad disagreement on how close we are to it, or whether or not the current track that ML research is on is sufficient to get us there. So we don't know, it just sounds plausible.
      - thfuran 4y ago
        Exceedingly, overwhelmingly plausible.
    - drdeca 4y ago
      I agree that the arguments for it being impossible are, rather unconvincing. However, I do think there is an important difference between "in principle" and "in practice". I agree that there does not seem to be any fundamental obstacle that would necessarily prevent it. But at the same time, I'm not convinced it will ever be achieved.
mountainriver 4y ago
Huh? We’ve made demonstrable progress towards GAI, massive leaps in the last five years. If you don’t think GPT, DALL-E, muZero are evident of that then you are lost in cynicism. We don’t need to define consciousness or intelligence concretely to have things that most people would agree are intelligent.
- Jasper_ 4y ago
  There were a lot of people that thought ELIZA was intelligent. There's some in-roads in finding specialized models that work very well, up until they don't, and when they fail, they fail hard, showing us just how different their processing can be from our own mental models. My own personal definitions of intelligence cover some amount of self-reinforced learning. That is, if I tell an AI how to do something, it will think about how to do it, Google for the answer, watch and understand a YouTube tutorial, and try to follow along with it, and if it doesn't understand a part it has the ability to rewatch and try again. I've never seen a jaguar in person; I've maybe seen 10 minutes total of videos and photos of one, and yet I can imagine one running through a field, chasing down a predator, and eating its corpse. Current AI need to be trained on gigabytes of data manually labeled "jaguar" to identify a single one. Why can't an AI, after seeing something it doesn't recognize, ask a question like "what is that"? Just a few years ago, there was that Minecraft AI challenge that failed spectacularly -- the task was to watch 50 hours of video of someone else playing the game, and then do it themselves. I could probably do that after ten minutes.
  - sdenton4 4y ago
    In twenty years, we're going to look at classifiers in the same way we look at pre-Google search engines. They are buggy as hell because the classification problem is incredibly ill posed. DALL-E2 is a fantastic example of zero-shot learning working spectacularly well. It's able to combine various concepts interchangeably.
  - mountainriver 4y ago
    Modern models can do few shot learning, and MuZero proved the ability to learn a game quickly using self-play. They aren't human level yet in all tasks but we are getting demonstrably closer. I would spend more time studying what exists today and less time critiquing

mdp2021 4y ago

> define things like... intelligence in concrete terms Who told you we cannot.

olddustytrail 4y ago
You kind of did, by failing to do so.
- mdp2021 4y ago
  I do not think it dutiful to repeat myself in each post. (And honestly, while the base attitude of course remains to be "helpful", for current lack of a better term, sometimes - fortunately very occasionally - to provide a proper "complete" reply ceases to be economically viable.)
saghm 4y ago
I think there are potential concrete definitions, but people disagree on which (if any) are correct
- mdp2021 4y ago
  > but people disagree Oh, but there is no need for such """correctness""". The way is also well defined negatively - the lacks express their presence clearly -, and this page provides already a few examples: -- "A is taller than B, B plays basketball, who is taller?" If the system does not reply "A", then it does not understand the question; by a general consideration, it may be evident that it was designed to "guess" instead of "know", and there lies very patently the structural fault. -- "A just left the house and is now in the market, where is A?" If the system does not understand "states", etc. If it cannot build a world representation, etc. -- "A fell from the flying helicopter, how is A?" If the system does not understand "falling from an height", etc. If it cannot "tell itself a story" (Prof. Patrick Winston), etc. The latter tells you about the logical relations between those "definitions" (of conjunction, so that (¬Av¬B)→¬C ). Prof. Winston defines "intelligence" as "the ability to tell oneself stories, which will also reveal outcomes of experiences you have not concretely lived". The definition may leave gaps when taken alone (especially if by somebody who confuses indications and definitions), but the lack of what is intended with such idea has full impact (no """inner storytelling""" - actually, I would say, no "productive engine" -, no "intelligence").

6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago

I agree with most of your comment and it’s a point well made. It’s frustrating to see all the “moving the goalposts” comments all the time when it’s just a problem of not knowing the right goalposts. > In my opinion, we won't ever have generalized AI. Or at least, we might not ever agree that we have it. But I disagree here. Eventually we’ll have something that can do everything we can do, just better, and at that point we might still be unable to draw a line, but we’ll at least be able to agree that a superset of human intelligence counts as AGI.

darawk 4y ago

I think it should be pretty clear at this point that we can at least achieve "generalized AI" to the extent that we as humans have it. There is no reason whatsoever to think we can't build a machine at least as intelligent as we are.

cinntaile 4y ago
I don't think there is any scientific consensus around this.
- darawk 4y ago
  All of the arguments against it are completely non-serious. I don't think there are many real AI researchers that disagree with the thesis that it is in principle possible to build a machine as intelligent as a human. There is broad disagreement on how close we are to it, or whether or not the current track that ML research is on is sufficient to get us there.
  - cinntaile 4y ago
    > There is broad disagreement on how close we are to it, or whether or not the current track that ML research is on is sufficient to get us there. So we don't know, it just sounds plausible.
    - thfuran 4y ago
      Exceedingly, overwhelmingly plausible.
  - drdeca 4y ago
    I agree that the arguments for it being impossible are, rather unconvincing. However, I do think there is an important difference between "in principle" and "in practice". I agree that there does not seem to be any fundamental obstacle that would necessarily prevent it. But at the same time, I'm not convinced it will ever be achieved.

mountainriver 4y ago

Huh? We’ve made demonstrable progress towards GAI, massive leaps in the last five years. If you don’t think GPT, DALL-E, muZero are evident of that then you are lost in cynicism. We don’t need to define consciousness or intelligence concretely to have things that most people would agree are intelligent.

Jasper_ 4y ago
There were a lot of people that thought ELIZA was intelligent. There's some in-roads in finding specialized models that work very well, up until they don't, and when they fail, they fail hard, showing us just how different their processing can be from our own mental models. My own personal definitions of intelligence cover some amount of self-reinforced learning. That is, if I tell an AI how to do something, it will think about how to do it, Google for the answer, watch and understand a YouTube tutorial, and try to follow along with it, and if it doesn't understand a part it has the ability to rewatch and try again. I've never seen a jaguar in person; I've maybe seen 10 minutes total of videos and photos of one, and yet I can imagine one running through a field, chasing down a predator, and eating its corpse. Current AI need to be trained on gigabytes of data manually labeled "jaguar" to identify a single one. Why can't an AI, after seeing something it doesn't recognize, ask a question like "what is that"? Just a few years ago, there was that Minecraft AI challenge that failed spectacularly -- the task was to watch 50 hours of video of someone else playing the game, and then do it themselves. I could probably do that after ten minutes.
- sdenton4 4y ago
  In twenty years, we're going to look at classifiers in the same way we look at pre-Google search engines. They are buggy as hell because the classification problem is incredibly ill posed. DALL-E2 is a fantastic example of zero-shot learning working spectacularly well. It's able to combine various concepts interchangeably.
- mountainriver 4y ago
  Modern models can do few shot learning, and MuZero proved the ability to learn a game quickly using self-play. They aren't human level yet in all tasks but we are getting demonstrably closer. I would spend more time studying what exists today and less time critiquing