8 ms·

Why would a computer pass the turing test? We haven't made much progress in building intelligent machines since the late AI winter.

by jhuni 15y ago

batista 15y ago
You are forgetting Clippy, the Office assistant.
glenra 15y ago
> We haven't made much progress in building intelligent machines since the late AI winter. We haven't? We got the AI winter because DARPA was for a while willing to fund projects that made outrageous promises, so they got outrageous promises that nobody could possibly deliver on and eventually gave up. I mean, they were funding people who wanted to do things like build semi-autonomous robots that could drive a car to deliver supplies or fly a plane to do air reconnoissance or wheel around to sweep a field for mines. They funded claims that computers would be able to do speaker-independent voice recognition. Computer programs could beat the best human players at a game of chess. Or imagine a computer program that had enough common knowledge indexed and accessible that it could win contests that involve wordplay and trivia questions. Wait, all that stuff has happened already, much of it just in the last few years. The real problem with AI is it's defined to be "stuff we can't do yet". As soon as we manage to do one of those things, it stops being called "AI". In short, I like Kurzweil's odds on this one. 2029 is a long time away in computer years and we've made a heck of a lot of progress. And he's right that humans think linearly. Exponential growth curves just aren't intuitive to us, so we underestimate what a reasonable amount of progress on a long-term goal looks like. (IBM's win at Jeopardy, Apple's Siri launch, and Google's self-driving cars are all things that happened since Ray made his prediction. Are these not AI progress?)
- jhuni 15y ago
  I am not easily impressed. We wouldn't have any need for driverless cars in the first place, if we just had well designed designed cities. Furthermore, Siri and Watson are just symbol shifting applications which work for iOS and SUSE Linux. They are not much more impressive then similar symbol shifting applications that we available a few decades ago. I don't believe that the von neumann architecture, of which all the applications you mentioned are a part, is ever going to yield anything more then applications with sophisticated symbol shuffling systems which are actually totally stupid behind the scenes. At least before the AI winter, we had impressive AI hardware, including the Lisp machines. Now just because we have done a pretty poor job doesn't mean things have to continue to be this way in the future. DARPA is currently working to develop memristors, which may become the future of AI. Sadly, DARPA isn't getting nearly enough funding. http://www.engadget.com/2009/07/14/are-memristors-the-future-of-artifical-intelligence-darpa-think/ http://www.engadget.com/2009/07/14/are-memristors-the-future... To be realistic, Ray Kurzweil's conviction that there will be strong AI in his lifetime is just wishful thinking. Feel free to prove me wrong.
  - wlievens 15y ago
    > To be realistic, Ray Kurzweil's conviction that there will be strong AI in his lifetime is just wishful thinking. Feel free to prove me wrong. Well that's what the bet is about.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
  - glenra 15y ago
    if "sophisticated symbol shuffling" is sufficient to beat the world's best chess players, the world's best Jeopardy players, beat the world's best pilots, and safely drive a car while following all the rules of the road, what makes you think it's not sufficient to hold a human-like conversation? I'm pretty sure people are also what you would call "actually totally stupid behind the scenes" - the main difference is that we didn't design human brains so we aren't (yet) able to understand much of what they're doing. But understanding isn't even necessary for replication. The fact that people can think proves thinking is possible for mechanical systems; in the worst case we'll re-implement a human brain without understanding it. > At least before the AI winter, we had impressive AI hardware, including the Lisp machines. Oof. You're talking about machines with less processing power than an iPhone. Yeah, my dad programmed Shakey the Robot in Lisp on pretty good hardware for the time. If you told Shakey to "push the block off the platform" it could do the task, but would take 20 minutes of thinking about it beforehand. Whereas the Google cars can drive in real time at freeway speeds and robots made by high school kids today can play soccer. How is that not more impressive? Given how pathetic the Lisp machines were compared to what we've got now, what makes them so impressive to you?
    - jhuni 15y ago
      > "sophisticated symbol shuffling" is sufficient to beat the world's best chess players Try to beat even amateur players in 19x19 go. Von Neumann machines are inherently stupid, the domains you mention have very simple rules which allow symbol shifting systems to succeed. You may be able to convince a gullible person of the intelligence of a machine, but that is just cheating the test. > Oof. You're talking about machines with less processing power than an iPhone. I tend to agree with John McCarthy that "the computers of 30 years ago were fast enough if only we knew how to program them. Of course, quite apart from the ambitions of AI researchers, computers will keep getting faster." [1] The computers of the late eighties were a sufficiently fast platform for AI if just knew how to program intelligent behaviours in them properly. As such, the Lisp machine hardware was adequately fast, and since the software on them had considerable advantages over what we have today, they were able to do many things at about the same level as modern computers. > The fact that people can think proves thinking is possible for mechanical systems; in the worst case we'll re-implement a human brain without understanding it. The human brain has over a septillion atoms [2]. Someday we will duplicate the behaviour of these atoms in a computer, but I don't see that happening anytime soon. In general, I highly doubt there will be significant technological progress well our system of production for profit continues to produce recessions, depressions, and winters. > Given how pathetic the Lisp machines were compared to what we've got now, what makes them so impressive to you? The Lisp machines had a consistency and clarity of behaviour that resulted from the use of Lisp all the way down that is absolutely unmatched. You could modify the behaviour of any object in memory down to the machine level using just Lisp. Every object was stored in a single address space. What modern computer system compares to the Lisp machines in these respects? I would love to know, I will be the first to adopt a sanely designed computer platform for my own uses. However, what I have seen so far is that companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google are actively trying to replace the programmable computer with displays for external cloud services. The prevalence of these private corporations which are devoted to the pursuit of short-term profit, as opposed to government research agencies such as DARPA, has significantly held back technological progress. [1] http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/whatisai/node1.html http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/whatisai/node1.html [2] http://www.quora.com/Human-Brain/How-many-atoms-are-in-the-human-brain http://www.quora.com/Human-Brain/How-many-atoms-are-in-the-h...
baddox 15y ago
Using any functional, practical definition of "artificial intelligence" that I've ever heard, we have certainly made a lot of progress since the late AI winter. It sounds like you're using the unfortunate definition that essentially defines any task as "not requiring intelligence" the instant a machine is able to perform it well. This has been done with voice recognition, facial recognition, music composition, etc., and is actually one of the main reasons we even had the AI winter.
- jhuni 15y ago
  What I meant to state in my post is that so far I have not seen "a lot of progress." Feel free to show me anything that may change my mind.
- Dylan16807 15y ago
  I don't think that's a very good argument. Okay, so let's say we used to think it took intelligence to recognize voice/face. Then we figured out a way to do it! Oh man, intelligence, right? Well, no. We realized that you can stick the voice through a spectrograph and measure the peaks, that's certainly not intelligence. And that you can detect the edges of bits of faces pretty easily and then compare various ratios for similarity. That's clever on the part of the algorithm designers but nothing intellect-related. I've never heard anyone say that music requires intelligence. Creativity maybe. But I can make a very simple program that has a bunch of hard-coded music patterns that it picks from and nests randomly. It can 'creatively' output trillions of different songs and clearly has nothing even approaching intelligence. Intelligence is not about what an algorithm can mechanically do. It's about comprehensive world-modeling that can predict and communicate with other agents. If something can be coded in a month by a grad student to run on an 8086 then I feel comfortable saying it's not AI. Edit: added the word mechanically to be clearer
  - glenra 15y ago
    When it comes to face/voice recognition, what makes you think people are doing anything more clever? Our brains seem to have edge and shape detection modules too, do they not? Is it not knowing the algorithm that makes what we do seem "intelligent?

Why would a computer pass the turing test? We haven't made much progress in building intelligent machines since the late AI winter.

by jhuni 15y ago

Why would a computer pass the turing test? We haven't made much progress in building intelligent machines since the late AI winter.

batista 15y ago

You are forgetting Clippy, the Office assistant.

glenra 15y ago

> We haven't made much progress in building intelligent machines since the late AI winter. We haven't? We got the AI winter because DARPA was for a while willing to fund projects that made outrageous promises, so they got outrageous promises that nobody could possibly deliver on and eventually gave up. I mean, they were funding people who wanted to do things like build semi-autonomous robots that could drive a car to deliver supplies or fly a plane to do air reconnoissance or wheel around to sweep a field for mines. They funded claims that computers would be able to do speaker-independent voice recognition. Computer programs could beat the best human players at a game of chess. Or imagine a computer program that had enough common knowledge indexed and accessible that it could win contests that involve wordplay and trivia questions. Wait, all that stuff has happened already, much of it just in the last few years. The real problem with AI is it's defined to be "stuff we can't do yet". As soon as we manage to do one of those things, it stops being called "AI". In short, I like Kurzweil's odds on this one. 2029 is a long time away in computer years and we've made a heck of a lot of progress. And he's right that humans think linearly. Exponential growth curves just aren't intuitive to us, so we underestimate what a reasonable amount of progress on a long-term goal looks like. (IBM's win at Jeopardy, Apple's Siri launch, and Google's self-driving cars are all things that happened since Ray made his prediction. Are these not AI progress?)

jhuni 15y ago
I am not easily impressed. We wouldn't have any need for driverless cars in the first place, if we just had well designed designed cities. Furthermore, Siri and Watson are just symbol shifting applications which work for iOS and SUSE Linux. They are not much more impressive then similar symbol shifting applications that we available a few decades ago. I don't believe that the von neumann architecture, of which all the applications you mentioned are a part, is ever going to yield anything more then applications with sophisticated symbol shuffling systems which are actually totally stupid behind the scenes. At least before the AI winter, we had impressive AI hardware, including the Lisp machines. Now just because we have done a pretty poor job doesn't mean things have to continue to be this way in the future. DARPA is currently working to develop memristors, which may become the future of AI. Sadly, DARPA isn't getting nearly enough funding. http://www.engadget.com/2009/07/14/are-memristors-the-future-of-artifical-intelligence-darpa-think/ http://www.engadget.com/2009/07/14/are-memristors-the-future... To be realistic, Ray Kurzweil's conviction that there will be strong AI in his lifetime is just wishful thinking. Feel free to prove me wrong.
- wlievens 15y ago
  > To be realistic, Ray Kurzweil's conviction that there will be strong AI in his lifetime is just wishful thinking. Feel free to prove me wrong. Well that's what the bet is about.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
- glenra 15y ago
  if "sophisticated symbol shuffling" is sufficient to beat the world's best chess players, the world's best Jeopardy players, beat the world's best pilots, and safely drive a car while following all the rules of the road, what makes you think it's not sufficient to hold a human-like conversation? I'm pretty sure people are also what you would call "actually totally stupid behind the scenes" - the main difference is that we didn't design human brains so we aren't (yet) able to understand much of what they're doing. But understanding isn't even necessary for replication. The fact that people can think proves thinking is possible for mechanical systems; in the worst case we'll re-implement a human brain without understanding it. > At least before the AI winter, we had impressive AI hardware, including the Lisp machines. Oof. You're talking about machines with less processing power than an iPhone. Yeah, my dad programmed Shakey the Robot in Lisp on pretty good hardware for the time. If you told Shakey to "push the block off the platform" it could do the task, but would take 20 minutes of thinking about it beforehand. Whereas the Google cars can drive in real time at freeway speeds and robots made by high school kids today can play soccer. How is that not more impressive? Given how pathetic the Lisp machines were compared to what we've got now, what makes them so impressive to you?
  - jhuni 15y ago
    > "sophisticated symbol shuffling" is sufficient to beat the world's best chess players Try to beat even amateur players in 19x19 go. Von Neumann machines are inherently stupid, the domains you mention have very simple rules which allow symbol shifting systems to succeed. You may be able to convince a gullible person of the intelligence of a machine, but that is just cheating the test. > Oof. You're talking about machines with less processing power than an iPhone. I tend to agree with John McCarthy that "the computers of 30 years ago were fast enough if only we knew how to program them. Of course, quite apart from the ambitions of AI researchers, computers will keep getting faster." [1] The computers of the late eighties were a sufficiently fast platform for AI if just knew how to program intelligent behaviours in them properly. As such, the Lisp machine hardware was adequately fast, and since the software on them had considerable advantages over what we have today, they were able to do many things at about the same level as modern computers. > The fact that people can think proves thinking is possible for mechanical systems; in the worst case we'll re-implement a human brain without understanding it. The human brain has over a septillion atoms [2]. Someday we will duplicate the behaviour of these atoms in a computer, but I don't see that happening anytime soon. In general, I highly doubt there will be significant technological progress well our system of production for profit continues to produce recessions, depressions, and winters. > Given how pathetic the Lisp machines were compared to what we've got now, what makes them so impressive to you? The Lisp machines had a consistency and clarity of behaviour that resulted from the use of Lisp all the way down that is absolutely unmatched. You could modify the behaviour of any object in memory down to the machine level using just Lisp. Every object was stored in a single address space. What modern computer system compares to the Lisp machines in these respects? I would love to know, I will be the first to adopt a sanely designed computer platform for my own uses. However, what I have seen so far is that companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google are actively trying to replace the programmable computer with displays for external cloud services. The prevalence of these private corporations which are devoted to the pursuit of short-term profit, as opposed to government research agencies such as DARPA, has significantly held back technological progress. [1] http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/whatisai/node1.html http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/whatisai/node1.html [2] http://www.quora.com/Human-Brain/How-many-atoms-are-in-the-human-brain http://www.quora.com/Human-Brain/How-many-atoms-are-in-the-h...

baddox 15y ago

Using any functional, practical definition of "artificial intelligence" that I've ever heard, we have certainly made a lot of progress since the late AI winter. It sounds like you're using the unfortunate definition that essentially defines any task as "not requiring intelligence" the instant a machine is able to perform it well. This has been done with voice recognition, facial recognition, music composition, etc., and is actually one of the main reasons we even had the AI winter.

jhuni 15y ago
What I meant to state in my post is that so far I have not seen "a lot of progress." Feel free to show me anything that may change my mind.
Dylan16807 15y ago
I don't think that's a very good argument. Okay, so let's say we used to think it took intelligence to recognize voice/face. Then we figured out a way to do it! Oh man, intelligence, right? Well, no. We realized that you can stick the voice through a spectrograph and measure the peaks, that's certainly not intelligence. And that you can detect the edges of bits of faces pretty easily and then compare various ratios for similarity. That's clever on the part of the algorithm designers but nothing intellect-related. I've never heard anyone say that music requires intelligence. Creativity maybe. But I can make a very simple program that has a bunch of hard-coded music patterns that it picks from and nests randomly. It can 'creatively' output trillions of different songs and clearly has nothing even approaching intelligence. Intelligence is not about what an algorithm can mechanically do. It's about comprehensive world-modeling that can predict and communicate with other agents. If something can be coded in a month by a grad student to run on an 8086 then I feel comfortable saying it's not AI. Edit: added the word mechanically to be clearer
- glenra 15y ago
  When it comes to face/voice recognition, what makes you think people are doing anything more clever? Our brains seem to have edge and shape detection modules too, do they not? Is it not knowing the algorithm that makes what we do seem "intelligent?