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I will continually push back at the concept of 'Artificial Intelligence'. It's a science fiction conceit, a fantasy, and I don't think it is ever possible to ac

by oska 4y ago

I will continually push back at the concept of 'Artificial Intelligence'. It's a science fiction conceit, a fantasy, and I don't think it is ever possible to achieve (creation of an actual artificial intelligence). And people who do think tat are, imo, fantasists. That being said, in the field of machine learning there are significant things being achieved. I was wowed by DeepMind's AlphaZero and its achievements in 'teaching itself' and playing Go, at a level never seen before. I'm impressed by what Tesla is doing with self-driving. I'm less impressed by OpenAI's GPT-x because I don't think it's very useful technology (despite all the, imo, foolish talk of it doing away with all sorts of knowledge jobs and being able to 'tutor' ppl) but I do recognise that it also marks a step up in machine learning in the area of LLMs. None of this is 'Artificial Intelligence' however, and it is both silly and dangerous to conceptualise it as such.

red75prime 4y ago
> It's a science fiction conceit What is the human brain then? I'm afraid you are bound to push so far that humans are no longer qualify as intelligent.
maxdoop 4y ago
This begs several questions -- one of which being, "what is intelligence, then?"
adamhp 4y ago
You can kind of prove it is possible, can't you? I mean, we have ourselves, which we're sort of claiming is the ground truth comparison to "intelligence". You can then see that the average human actually have limited intelligence, when you look at say, savants or hyper-intelligent people. Then it must be that some physical structure of people's bodies enables this higher degree of intelligence, and removes the "limit" so-to-speak. The average brain has 86 billion neurons, which we know are mostly responsible for piecing together consciousness. We also have extensive studies on all the ways we are actually really bad at processing input (a by-product of our primate ancestral heritage). There are entire textbooks on all of the different biases we have built-in. And there are clear and obvious limits to our perception, as well (I'm thinking of the five senses here). Imagine you're neither constrained on the input side or the processing side of this equation. It becomes kind of a mathematical inevitability that we will be able to create artificial intelligence. When anything can be tokenized and act as an "input", and we can run that through something that can process it in the same way that our brains can, only scaled up 10-fold (or more)... If there is one thing we're good at, it is thinking that we are the center of the universe. I think that is blinding people to the possibility of AI. We can't fathom it, for lots of good and bad monkey reasons.
random_cynic 4y ago
> I'm less impressed by OpenAI's GPT-x because I don't think it's very useful technology Living in that sort of bubble must be very uncomfortable. Companies from virtually every category are pouring money in OpenAI starting with Microsoft. Just go and take a look at their partners and which field they belong to.
- oska 4y ago
  This area - so-called 'AI' - has a long history of malinvestment. And remarkable that you cite Microsoft's involvement as some sort of standard of significance. A company that has a long history of non-innovation, alongside its disgraceful history of suffocating and extinguishing actual innovation. Founded by one of the most remarkably unimaginative and predatory individuals in the software industry. I'd suggest seeing Microsoft investing in anything is only a good sign of a potential future rort (Gates' whole history of making money).
  - random_cynic 4y ago
    It's remarkable that you skipped past "companies from every category" and jumped straight into your ramblings about Microsoft. I don't care about Microsoft, I used them as an example to disprove your bollocks claim about GPT-x not being useful. As I said, take a look at the list of their current partners. One option would certainly be that you're the only one with insight and all these companies are led by morons with no vision or foresight or the alternative could be that you're just wrong and too egotistic to admit that a piece of technology is better than you in many aspects.
    - oska 4y ago
      Suggest you lay off the personal attacks and review the site's Guidelines [1]. I'd already passed over and chosen to ignore your opening attack in your first comment but you've ramped it up with this reply. Finally, maybe rather than just saying that 'all sorts of entities are investing in this hoopla', try to make an actual case yourself as to what the value case in this technology is. We should try to think for ourselves here, not just follow the (investing) herd. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
cmccart 4y ago
Could you please elaborate on the distinction that you see between "artificial" intelligence and whatever it is that we as humans possess? Furthermore, what specific aspects of this intelligence are unachievable by an AI? Is it a "human intelligence is non-computational" line of thinking?
- oska 4y ago
  Machines are not alive, they are constructed and for them to develop intelligence the capacity would either need to be constructed too (how?) or it would need to appear as an 'emergent quality'. I think the latter is the line that believers in the concept of 'AI' mostly take but I see it as magical thinking as we have had no indications of such emergent behaviour in our experience with the machines we have constructed, nor are there any good reasons as far as I can see as to why we might hope or expect it to appear. I see it only as a part of the long history of humans and human cultures projecting their own intelligence and agency onto inanimate objects. Again, 'magical thinking'. I acknowledge and am mostly fine with the idea that machines can 'learn'. But they learn (the game of Go, navigating a car in the real world, etc) under our direction and training (even if they potentially go on to surpass our abilities in these tasks). They don't have any agency; they don't have any curiosity; they don't have any 'spirit of consciousness'; they are not intelligent. They have simply been trained and learnt to perform a task. It's a great mistake to confuse this with intelligence. And the field itself is acknowledging this mistake as it matures, with the ongoing change of nomenclature from 'Artificial intelligence' to 'machine learning'.

by oska 4y ago

red75prime 4y ago

> It's a science fiction conceit What is the human brain then? I'm afraid you are bound to push so far that humans are no longer qualify as intelligent.

maxdoop 4y ago

This begs several questions -- one of which being, "what is intelligence, then?"

adamhp 4y ago

You can kind of prove it is possible, can't you? I mean, we have ourselves, which we're sort of claiming is the ground truth comparison to "intelligence". You can then see that the average human actually have limited intelligence, when you look at say, savants or hyper-intelligent people. Then it must be that some physical structure of people's bodies enables this higher degree of intelligence, and removes the "limit" so-to-speak. The average brain has 86 billion neurons, which we know are mostly responsible for piecing together consciousness. We also have extensive studies on all the ways we are actually really bad at processing input (a by-product of our primate ancestral heritage). There are entire textbooks on all of the different biases we have built-in. And there are clear and obvious limits to our perception, as well (I'm thinking of the five senses here). Imagine you're neither constrained on the input side or the processing side of this equation. It becomes kind of a mathematical inevitability that we will be able to create artificial intelligence. When anything can be tokenized and act as an "input", and we can run that through something that can process it in the same way that our brains can, only scaled up 10-fold (or more)... If there is one thing we're good at, it is thinking that we are the center of the universe. I think that is blinding people to the possibility of AI. We can't fathom it, for lots of good and bad monkey reasons.

random_cynic 4y ago

> I'm less impressed by OpenAI's GPT-x because I don't think it's very useful technology Living in that sort of bubble must be very uncomfortable. Companies from virtually every category are pouring money in OpenAI starting with Microsoft. Just go and take a look at their partners and which field they belong to.

oska 4y ago
This area - so-called 'AI' - has a long history of malinvestment. And remarkable that you cite Microsoft's involvement as some sort of standard of significance. A company that has a long history of non-innovation, alongside its disgraceful history of suffocating and extinguishing actual innovation. Founded by one of the most remarkably unimaginative and predatory individuals in the software industry. I'd suggest seeing Microsoft investing in anything is only a good sign of a potential future rort (Gates' whole history of making money).
- random_cynic 4y ago
  It's remarkable that you skipped past "companies from every category" and jumped straight into your ramblings about Microsoft. I don't care about Microsoft, I used them as an example to disprove your bollocks claim about GPT-x not being useful. As I said, take a look at the list of their current partners. One option would certainly be that you're the only one with insight and all these companies are led by morons with no vision or foresight or the alternative could be that you're just wrong and too egotistic to admit that a piece of technology is better than you in many aspects.
  - oska 4y ago
    Suggest you lay off the personal attacks and review the site's Guidelines [1]. I'd already passed over and chosen to ignore your opening attack in your first comment but you've ramped it up with this reply. Finally, maybe rather than just saying that 'all sorts of entities are investing in this hoopla', try to make an actual case yourself as to what the value case in this technology is. We should try to think for ourselves here, not just follow the (investing) herd. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

cmccart 4y ago

Could you please elaborate on the distinction that you see between "artificial" intelligence and whatever it is that we as humans possess? Furthermore, what specific aspects of this intelligence are unachievable by an AI? Is it a "human intelligence is non-computational" line of thinking?

oska 4y ago
Machines are not alive, they are constructed and for them to develop intelligence the capacity would either need to be constructed too (how?) or it would need to appear as an 'emergent quality'. I think the latter is the line that believers in the concept of 'AI' mostly take but I see it as magical thinking as we have had no indications of such emergent behaviour in our experience with the machines we have constructed, nor are there any good reasons as far as I can see as to why we might hope or expect it to appear. I see it only as a part of the long history of humans and human cultures projecting their own intelligence and agency onto inanimate objects. Again, 'magical thinking'. I acknowledge and am mostly fine with the idea that machines can 'learn'. But they learn (the game of Go, navigating a car in the real world, etc) under our direction and training (even if they potentially go on to surpass our abilities in these tasks). They don't have any agency; they don't have any curiosity; they don't have any 'spirit of consciousness'; they are not intelligent. They have simply been trained and learnt to perform a task. It's a great mistake to confuse this with intelligence. And the field itself is acknowledging this mistake as it matures, with the ongoing change of nomenclature from 'Artificial intelligence' to 'machine learning'.