6 ms·

A.I. (1981)

84 points by lioeters 3y ago

minsight 3y ago
https://archive.is/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1981/12/14/a-i https://archive.is/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1981/1...
karmakaze 3y ago
> Backgammon is now the first board or card game with, in effect, a machine world champion. Checkers, chess, go, and the rest will follow—and probably quite soon. I would have laughed at how technically uninformed this opinion seems to be. Funny how vague macroscopic reasoning fared better than a detailed bottom-up reasoning with quantification of the challenge. OTOH I'm sure the New Yorker also wrote a lot of interesting to think about and not so well founded articles that didn't fare well.
jhbadger 3y ago
It's a good reminder that until relatively recently, board games were considered major topics of AI research. And it was considered a major event when Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997. But now we just don't consider this AI for some reason.
- siva7 3y ago
  It just doesn't impress people anymore compared to what the recent AI wave is capable of
- Affric 3y ago
  It's a thought provoking question isn't it. We just take it for granted. We can think of AI as the quest for a computer program that is a complex adaptive system that can exchange information with us in an anthropomorphised manner. LLMs are much closer to such a technology than a program that can optimally play a board game by evaluating each position and pruning its model accordingly.
  - mdp2021 3y ago
    > that can exchange information with us in an anthropomorphised manner No, thank you. Let us just stick to "a system that can solve problems potentially replacing a professional", which also would imply "providing a professional output". That «anthropomorphised» could make one think of the joke (which exploits the gender-bent use of 'man' in demotic): Seller: "This computer reasons just like a man". Female customer: "Can I have one that just reasons?" Similarly, it should "exchange information well" - not "like a human".
    - Affric 3y ago
      By the tone of your comment it's my assumption that were you alive when "wer" replaced by the gendered use of "man" I am sure you would have been all over it. "Professional" and "well" are small targets for tech firms attempting to explain R&D to their share holders. The pursuit of artificial intelligence is something with far deeper roots and wider ranging consequences than most pedants can imagine.
      - mdp2021 3y ago
        > all over it Oh, the same as today, had it also happened around that time that licence got widespreadly felt as a prevailing right. > share holders If you want to sell, surely there is market for all kind of junk. We also have this need for the "real things" though. > pedants No, not pedantry: the difference is radical, between form and effectiveness. In AGI, it's the proper reasoning that makes the "real" difference - use of natural language could be useful. We want the consultant to be competent and smart, not dressed attractively and "smart".
        Affric 3y ago
        I had misunderstood your comment original comment. Upon rereading my original comment I take your point. Thank you for persisting.
- tnecniv 3y ago
  AI has always meant “things we don’t know how to do well.” Once we know how to do something well, we just refer to it by the name of the algorithm or family of algorithms.
  - ChatGTP 3y ago
    I thought we knew how to do art pretty well?
    - tnecniv 3y ago
      Not algorithmically.
      - ChatGTP 3y ago
        I thought that is what you meant actually. I see.
        bryanrasmussen 3y ago
        The problem is that the art produced by humans can conceivably have Mana https://medium.com/luminasticity/art-as-a-tool-for-storing-mana-69d90f1a014b https://medium.com/luminasticity/art-as-a-tool-for-storing-m... and so can art produced by AI, but as the AI produces more and more art the uniqueness of what is produced is decreased, causing a related decrease in the perception of Mana. The ability of AI to mass produce art reduces its value, turning what might seem to have artistic value into first design and ornamentation and finally just background noise.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - blharr 3y ago
    Even LLMs are starting to get this treatment, as they become less mystical and more familiar
- PakG1 3y ago
  I attended a lecture where the point was made that AI is just a name for whatever is the frontier of technology. At one point, barcode scanners were apparently called AI because it was this amazing development that would allow computers to see and this would change how they operated and potentially even influence how they would one day think. Whereas today, we think of barcode scanners as dumb technology. But it was AI back then. The frontier keeps shifting forward and so correspondingly does what we consider to be AI.
  - cezart 3y ago
    Could you please share the name of the lecture, university, maybe course and professor? Would be very interested to search for any related materials, since I had some similar intuition for a while now. The goalposts keep being moved.
    - PakG1 3y ago
      It was a symposium in Toronto put on by Ivey Business School (Western University). The lecturer who made this point during his address was Nicholas Berente from Mendoza College of Business (University of Notre Dame). https://mendoza.nd.edu/mendoza-directory/profile/nicholas-berente/ https://mendoza.nd.edu/mendoza-directory/profile/nicholas-be...
- empath75 3y ago
  Sort of "god in the gaps". Once something is understood, all the intelligence goes away. And I mean that in a literal as well as a figurative sense. A lot of anti-AI rhetoric, both the rhetoric saying that it's not possible, or that whatever new AI thing "isn't real AI", or the rhetoric that says AI is dangerous, I'm fairly sure is rooted in a probably vague sense in most people that _what they are_ is not a collection of atoms, that their conscious experience of the world is not some emergent property of neurons, but that they are, deep down, a spiritual, immaterial being, which also holds up the possibility of being _eternal_. As AI sort of chips away at the frontiers of intelligence, and shows that deep down, our experience of the world, our consciousness, all of it is an ugly bag of party tricks, it provokes a profound sense of _unease_. You're not just sort of threatening to dethrone humanity's place in the center of the universe, it's also in a sense stealing _eternal life_ from people. That's fairly heavy. It's also why people who work on AI or work with AI tend to also be intensely interested in life extension.
  - Vecr 3y ago
    I think the life extension stuff is probably not going to work, not because it can't (i.e. is not physically possible or so unreliable or slow not to be practical) but because all or most of the current AI researchers will die first. Maybe people will keep working on it after that but how people think can change quickly. The progress of technology (especially in the exact direction you want) is not something to be taken for granted.
    - weard_beard 3y ago
      Ironically it is a problem that could be solved by having AI work on it.
  - jhbadger 3y ago
    I also see a lot of contradictory arguments: AI is not impressive while at the same time dangerous and should be stopped.
- GaggiX 3y ago
  This phenomenon is known as https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
  - OJFord 3y ago
    ...'AI effect'. (It's unfortunately clipped on mobile!)
- dbish 3y ago
  The other major vocabulary/semantic shift is that we're comfortable calling applied ML -> AI. Until recently, you would always say ML for applied products, AI was either research or fraud/exaggeration or very least meant you had some futuristic vision, you wouldn't use it for things you were generally applying right now in your product. I technically had a "focus in AI" in my grad degree and even my advisor said to label it as "ML" in my resume otherwise experts would think I was just a fraudster or not knowledgeable at least (~10 years ago).
lioeters 3y ago
> The next generation of personal computers should give their users the most advanced computer languages. > But someday, according to Minsky, the most useful programs for personal computers will be based on artificial-intelligence programs that write programs of their own. The idea is for an ordinary person — not a programmer — to describe what he wants a program to do in informal terms, perhaps simply by showing the program-writing program some examples. > Then it will write a computer program to do what was described — a process that will be much cheaper than hiring a professional programmer.
- djbusby 3y ago
  I mean, I'm a programmer but also I had GPT make some asn.1 to DER code for me. Which was cheaper than hiring myself to build from scratch or re-read the spec and code up the tools. It was even easier than researching and testing an external package.
  - selcuka 3y ago
    GPT, Copilot, etc. are glorified auto-complete tools. There is nothing wrong with using them, and they are useful. They still need a programmer to give proper instructions, though. I don't think an end user can prompt them to write anything remotely sophisticated the current technology. When these tools are able to detect ambiguity in specifications and start asking the right questions to clarify those ambiguities, they will also start being useful for non-programmers.
    - serf 3y ago
      chatgpt will easily create complete autohotkey scripts with no expert knowledge other than "make an autohotkey script that.." and just good rudimentary step-by-step explanation of what the script must do. that has pretty broad applications for all sorts of non-programmers. yeah, you're right if the goalpost is "please make a HIPAA compliant DBS from scratch for use in California", but most non-programmers aren't really interested in specification compliant programs that meet meticulous measures of rigor; they just want things that simplify their routine when cashing out a customer, organizing their pirated movies, perusing porn sites, whatever it is that people do. Programming as a metaphor for telling a machine what to do was a great gatekeeper for people for many years, chatgpt and the like are reducing the 'fee to entry' immensely for non-technical people, and I say that as someone who is witnessing non-technical people in my life accomplish things they would have never tried previously.
jaqalopes 3y ago
> I could hardly believe this finish, yet the program certainly earned its victory. … Only one thing marred the scene. Villa, who only a day earlier had reached the summit of his backgammon career in winning the world title, was disconsolate. This seems to be the pattern for the human champions who are the first to lose to computers. What a truly singular moment in existence to experience. Both a personal loss and a loss for the whole human species, and you have to bear it alone.
pfrrp 3y ago
> I came across the theories of B. F. Skinner, which I thought were terrible, because they were an attempt to fit curves to behavior without any internal ideas. Anyone guess what he would think about the current generation of popular tools?

A.I. (1981)

84 points by lioeters 3y ago

https://archive.is/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1981/12/14/a-i https://archive.is/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1981/1...

karmakaze 3y ago

> Backgammon is now the first board or card game with, in effect, a machine world champion. Checkers, chess, go, and the rest will follow—and probably quite soon. I would have laughed at how technically uninformed this opinion seems to be. Funny how vague macroscopic reasoning fared better than a detailed bottom-up reasoning with quantification of the challenge. OTOH I'm sure the New Yorker also wrote a lot of interesting to think about and not so well founded articles that didn't fare well.

jhbadger 3y ago

It's a good reminder that until relatively recently, board games were considered major topics of AI research. And it was considered a major event when Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997. But now we just don't consider this AI for some reason.

siva7 3y ago
It just doesn't impress people anymore compared to what the recent AI wave is capable of
Affric 3y ago
It's a thought provoking question isn't it. We just take it for granted. We can think of AI as the quest for a computer program that is a complex adaptive system that can exchange information with us in an anthropomorphised manner. LLMs are much closer to such a technology than a program that can optimally play a board game by evaluating each position and pruning its model accordingly.
- mdp2021 3y ago
  > that can exchange information with us in an anthropomorphised manner No, thank you. Let us just stick to "a system that can solve problems potentially replacing a professional", which also would imply "providing a professional output". That «anthropomorphised» could make one think of the joke (which exploits the gender-bent use of 'man' in demotic): Seller: "This computer reasons just like a man". Female customer: "Can I have one that just reasons?" Similarly, it should "exchange information well" - not "like a human".
  - Affric 3y ago
    By the tone of your comment it's my assumption that were you alive when "wer" replaced by the gendered use of "man" I am sure you would have been all over it. "Professional" and "well" are small targets for tech firms attempting to explain R&D to their share holders. The pursuit of artificial intelligence is something with far deeper roots and wider ranging consequences than most pedants can imagine.
    - mdp2021 3y ago
      > all over it Oh, the same as today, had it also happened around that time that licence got widespreadly felt as a prevailing right. > share holders If you want to sell, surely there is market for all kind of junk. We also have this need for the "real things" though. > pedants No, not pedantry: the difference is radical, between form and effectiveness. In AGI, it's the proper reasoning that makes the "real" difference - use of natural language could be useful. We want the consultant to be competent and smart, not dressed attractively and "smart".
      - Affric 3y ago
        I had misunderstood your comment original comment. Upon rereading my original comment I take your point. Thank you for persisting.
tnecniv 3y ago
AI has always meant “things we don’t know how to do well.” Once we know how to do something well, we just refer to it by the name of the algorithm or family of algorithms.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  I thought we knew how to do art pretty well?
  - tnecniv 3y ago
    Not algorithmically.
    - ChatGTP 3y ago
      I thought that is what you meant actually. I see.
      - bryanrasmussen 3y ago
        The problem is that the art produced by humans can conceivably have Mana https://medium.com/luminasticity/art-as-a-tool-for-storing-mana-69d90f1a014b https://medium.com/luminasticity/art-as-a-tool-for-storing-m... and so can art produced by AI, but as the AI produces more and more art the uniqueness of what is produced is decreased, causing a related decrease in the perception of Mana. The ability of AI to mass produce art reduces its value, turning what might seem to have artistic value into first design and ornamentation and finally just background noise.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- blharr 3y ago
  Even LLMs are starting to get this treatment, as they become less mystical and more familiar
PakG1 3y ago
I attended a lecture where the point was made that AI is just a name for whatever is the frontier of technology. At one point, barcode scanners were apparently called AI because it was this amazing development that would allow computers to see and this would change how they operated and potentially even influence how they would one day think. Whereas today, we think of barcode scanners as dumb technology. But it was AI back then. The frontier keeps shifting forward and so correspondingly does what we consider to be AI.
- cezart 3y ago
  Could you please share the name of the lecture, university, maybe course and professor? Would be very interested to search for any related materials, since I had some similar intuition for a while now. The goalposts keep being moved.
  - PakG1 3y ago
    It was a symposium in Toronto put on by Ivey Business School (Western University). The lecturer who made this point during his address was Nicholas Berente from Mendoza College of Business (University of Notre Dame). https://mendoza.nd.edu/mendoza-directory/profile/nicholas-berente/ https://mendoza.nd.edu/mendoza-directory/profile/nicholas-be...
empath75 3y ago
Sort of "god in the gaps". Once something is understood, all the intelligence goes away. And I mean that in a literal as well as a figurative sense. A lot of anti-AI rhetoric, both the rhetoric saying that it's not possible, or that whatever new AI thing "isn't real AI", or the rhetoric that says AI is dangerous, I'm fairly sure is rooted in a probably vague sense in most people that _what they are_ is not a collection of atoms, that their conscious experience of the world is not some emergent property of neurons, but that they are, deep down, a spiritual, immaterial being, which also holds up the possibility of being _eternal_. As AI sort of chips away at the frontiers of intelligence, and shows that deep down, our experience of the world, our consciousness, all of it is an ugly bag of party tricks, it provokes a profound sense of _unease_. You're not just sort of threatening to dethrone humanity's place in the center of the universe, it's also in a sense stealing _eternal life_ from people. That's fairly heavy. It's also why people who work on AI or work with AI tend to also be intensely interested in life extension.
- Vecr 3y ago
  I think the life extension stuff is probably not going to work, not because it can't (i.e. is not physically possible or so unreliable or slow not to be practical) but because all or most of the current AI researchers will die first. Maybe people will keep working on it after that but how people think can change quickly. The progress of technology (especially in the exact direction you want) is not something to be taken for granted.
  - weard_beard 3y ago
    Ironically it is a problem that could be solved by having AI work on it.
- jhbadger 3y ago
  I also see a lot of contradictory arguments: AI is not impressive while at the same time dangerous and should be stopped.
GaggiX 3y ago
This phenomenon is known as https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
- OJFord 3y ago
  ...'AI effect'. (It's unfortunately clipped on mobile!)
dbish 3y ago
The other major vocabulary/semantic shift is that we're comfortable calling applied ML -> AI. Until recently, you would always say ML for applied products, AI was either research or fraud/exaggeration or very least meant you had some futuristic vision, you wouldn't use it for things you were generally applying right now in your product. I technically had a "focus in AI" in my grad degree and even my advisor said to label it as "ML" in my resume otherwise experts would think I was just a fraudster or not knowledgeable at least (~10 years ago).

lioeters 3y ago

> The next generation of personal computers should give their users the most advanced computer languages. > But someday, according to Minsky, the most useful programs for personal computers will be based on artificial-intelligence programs that write programs of their own. The idea is for an ordinary person — not a programmer — to describe what he wants a program to do in informal terms, perhaps simply by showing the program-writing program some examples. > Then it will write a computer program to do what was described — a process that will be much cheaper than hiring a professional programmer.

djbusby 3y ago
I mean, I'm a programmer but also I had GPT make some asn.1 to DER code for me. Which was cheaper than hiring myself to build from scratch or re-read the spec and code up the tools. It was even easier than researching and testing an external package.
- selcuka 3y ago
  GPT, Copilot, etc. are glorified auto-complete tools. There is nothing wrong with using them, and they are useful. They still need a programmer to give proper instructions, though. I don't think an end user can prompt them to write anything remotely sophisticated the current technology. When these tools are able to detect ambiguity in specifications and start asking the right questions to clarify those ambiguities, they will also start being useful for non-programmers.
  - serf 3y ago
    chatgpt will easily create complete autohotkey scripts with no expert knowledge other than "make an autohotkey script that.." and just good rudimentary step-by-step explanation of what the script must do. that has pretty broad applications for all sorts of non-programmers. yeah, you're right if the goalpost is "please make a HIPAA compliant DBS from scratch for use in California", but most non-programmers aren't really interested in specification compliant programs that meet meticulous measures of rigor; they just want things that simplify their routine when cashing out a customer, organizing their pirated movies, perusing porn sites, whatever it is that people do. Programming as a metaphor for telling a machine what to do was a great gatekeeper for people for many years, chatgpt and the like are reducing the 'fee to entry' immensely for non-technical people, and I say that as someone who is witnessing non-technical people in my life accomplish things they would have never tried previously.

jaqalopes 3y ago

> I could hardly believe this finish, yet the program certainly earned its victory. … Only one thing marred the scene. Villa, who only a day earlier had reached the summit of his backgammon career in winning the world title, was disconsolate. This seems to be the pattern for the human champions who are the first to lose to computers. What a truly singular moment in existence to experience. Both a personal loss and a loss for the whole human species, and you have to bear it alone.

pfrrp 3y ago

> I came across the theories of B. F. Skinner, which I thought were terrible, because they were an attempt to fit curves to behavior without any internal ideas. Anyone guess what he would think about the current generation of popular tools?