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The common sentiment around AI in the 90s and early 2000s was that it didn't work; it had its hype, it had its heyday, but it seemed like a dead-end for the mos

• corethree 3y ago
  The parlor tricks are getting better. In terms of practicality you just need to look at AI art. That stuff is good enough to replace the real thing. In terms of actual sentience, understanding I had chatGPT answer questions in the following order: 1. Describe to me what happens when you throw sugar in coffee 2. Describe the same thing in terms of atoms. 3. Is this an example of entropy decreasing? 4. What if the arrow of time was reversed. Describe what happens again at the atomic level. 5. What if there were two regions in space one with increasing entropy and another with decreasing entropy. I place the coffee cup such that one half is in one region the other half is in the other region. What happens? Each answer displayed astonishing understanding of what occurs. This was the final answer to the fifth question: ----------------------------------------------- The scenario you've proposed is purely hypothetical and quite speculative because it defies our current understanding of the laws of physics, particularly the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which stipulates that entropy in an isolated system tends to increase. Nevertheless, it's a fascinating thought experiment. Here's what might happen if you had a cup of coffee straddling two such regions: The Increasing Entropy Region: Dissolution and Distribution: On this side, sugar would behave as it does in our observable universe. It would dissolve in the coffee and disperse randomly throughout the half of the liquid. Mixing and Thermal Energy: Molecules in this region would continue to collide and interact based on thermal motion, contributing to faster dissolution and dispersion of sugar. Sweetening: The coffee in this half would become sweet as the sugar molecules interact with the liquid and dissolve. The Decreasing Entropy Region: Reforming Crystals: On this side, dissolved sugar would spontaneously start forming sugar crystals, leading to a decreasing level of entropy. Unmixing: The sugar would start to separate from the coffee and move to form a distinct layer or solid chunks, further decreasing entropy in that half. Unsweetening: Any sweetness initially imparted to this side would disappear as sugar molecules revert to a more ordered state. Challenges: Interface: The most mysterious part would be at the interface where the two regions meet. Would a sugar molecule crossing from the increasing to the decreasing entropy region suddenly reverse its course? Would there be some form of "entropy gradient" or "entropy tension" at the boundary? This part is extremely speculative and likely paradoxical. Energy Conservation: Energy conservation laws might become complicated here. The energy required for sugar to crystallize in the decreasing entropy zone would have to come from somewhere, and how this balances with the increasing entropy side would pose a significant scientific puzzle. Thermodynamic Anomalies: The coffee cup itself would be under very peculiar thermodynamic conditions, subject to two entirely different sets of rules. The temperature might behave inconsistently across the boundary, and heat exchange would likely be disrupted in perplexing ways. Taste Experience: If you were to taste the coffee, each half of the cup would offer a radically different experience, one sweet and the other likely reverting back to its original unsweet state. Perceptual Paradox: From a human perception standpoint, witnessing sugar both dissolve and crystallize in the same cup of coffee would be a profound and likely disorienting experience. Time's Arrow: This set-up implicitly questions the nature of time itself. Time seems to behave differently on each side, challenging our deepest notions about causality, sequence, and even reality. Again, it's worth noting that this scenario conflicts with our current understanding of physics, but it's a fascinating avenue for speculative thought. Such a universe, if it could exist, would fundamentally challenge our understanding of physical laws and reality as we know it. ------------------------------------------------- This answer here is anything but a magic trick. It shows deep understanding of conceptual reality by answering complex questions that are unlikely to exist anywhere else on the internet. The AI literally talked about the mysterious interface without me prompting it at all. It knows the conceptual consequence of two regions of space side by side with differing levels of entropy. The answer is not simply a trick of the next best language token. Is it a practical answer? No. Because the question itself isn't practical. But a non-practical answer does not make this answer a parlor trick. The entire internet is dismissing this thing as a parlor trick because LLMs fail to add large numbers. I mean come on man. You don't need to be able to do math like a calculator in order to "understand" things. AI is not yet completely practical. That much is true. However, it is clearly No longer a parlor trick and it is getting closer and closer to transitioning into practical. When that day comes.... Good luck to us all.
  • mythhabit 3y ago
    Talking about mixing coffee with sugar/milk and reversing the arrow of time (ie. entropy) is a widely talked about example. That said, I agree with your arguments and conclusions. Humans are not able to do this kind of reasoning until they have had some education on the topic - and when they reason they get feedback to reinforce their conclusions if others agree or they get a more rigorous proof. We could do the exact same thing with an LLM. Would that potentially make a reasoning AI? For me the jury is still out, albeit I think we need better algorithms for it to be feasible.
    • corethree 3y ago
      > Talking about mixing coffee with sugar/milk and reversing the arrow of time (ie. entropy) is a widely talked about example. But the interface is unique. That is not a topic widely talked about at all. Question: Instead of two regions add a third region where entropy of the particles entering the region will always stays the same no matter what. Place the coffee cup such that it is in all 3 regions equally. Describe atomically what happens. Answer: -------------------------------------- In this fictional universe where regions have varying entropy behavior, the coffee cup sits at a tri-junction: a third of it is in a region of increasing entropy (Region A), another third in a region of decreasing entropy (Region B), and the last third in a region where entropy remains constant (Region C). In the Atomic Realm: Region A (Increasing Entropy): Sugar molecules randomly move throughout the coffee, driven by thermal motion. They strike water molecules and dissolve over time, eventually reaching a state of homogeneous distribution. The entropy of the system in this portion of the cup increases as expected. Region B (Decreasing Entropy): Astonishingly, sugar crystals spontaneously form in the coffee. Sugar molecules collide with water molecules and join an ever-growing crystalline lattice. Over time, the sugar becomes a distinct entity in the coffee, and the entropy of this system decreases. Region C (Constant Entropy): The sugar neither dissolves nor crystallizes. Instead, sugar molecules and water molecules co-exist in a dynamic but unchanging equilibrium. At the atomic level, every dissolution event is perfectly balanced by a crystallization event, maintaining constant entropy. The Tri-Junction: Molecular Exchange: Some molecules, through Brownian motion, will wander across the boundary lines dividing the three regions. Entropic currents from Region A and B cross into Region C and are balanced out, maintaining a zero net change in entropy in that region. Special quantum-entangled pairs straddle the boundaries, existing in superpositions of increased, decreased, and unchanged entropy states. Entropic Flux and Balance: A constant entropic flux is established between the three regions. The entropic gradient tensor now has a third component, and the entropic flux density vector also adjusts to a tri-vector to balance out the exchange between the three regions. Localized Time Anomalies: At the atomic level, it's as if time runs forward in Region A, backward in Region B, and is somehow "static" or cyclical in Region C. Particles appear to remember both their past and future states in Region C, generating a unique form of atomic "temporal coherence." Causality and Quantum Superposition: Despite these anomalies, causality is preserved. Particles that cross into different regions adapt to the local entropy behavior and exhibit quantum behaviors that align with the local direction of time. In essence, the tri-junction becomes a hotbed of bizarre but mathematically consistent phenomena, a place where the fabric of spacetime and the fundamental laws of thermodynamics seem to negotiate a delicate truce. As for the cup of coffee, one-third of it will end up well-mixed, one-third will have sugar crystals, and the last third will remain an intriguing paradox of thermodynamics. You might call it the most scientifically fascinating cup of coffee ever brewed. ------------------------------------------------- This isn't a parlor trick regurgitation. It's displaying understanding of the concepts by speculating on new concepts via composition of several other concepts.
• ibarearer 3y ago
  I hate this sentiment. We might learn that human thought and reasoning are parlor tricks too once we understand them better. Anything we start to understand loses its mystery
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • bentcorner 3y ago
    "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I know nothing about AI but it seems like we're approaching it from the other end - the human mind seems like magic and when we approximate it using technology it feels like we'll reach a moment of "that's all it is?" and refuse to believe we actually did it because we doubt ourselves. Along the same lines, if achieving equal human rights for all humans were a trip to the corner store, the fight for AI rights is going to be like Mount Everest.
    • __loam 3y ago
      It would certainly be neat if we approximated the mind using technology. It's a real shame we haven't done that. And no, computer programs don't have or deserve to have rights.
    • Xcelerate 3y ago
      > the fight for AI rights is going to be like Mount Everest. I used to think this and worried that AI would never have rights (see, e.g., sibling comment to mine), but these days I tend to think the fight will be very brief and heavily in the favor of AI. It could be the first time in history that rights are achieved so quickly that there isn’t much of a struggle at all. That said, I find it extremely depressing that the default human viewpoint is “it’s a machine and doesn’t deserve rights”. Hopefully AI will have a superior system of morality to ours as well.
• Gigachad 3y ago
  >That's what ultimately depresses me about AI. It's still just a parlor trick. I find this to be quite comforting. It means we haven't completely uprooted all of society overnight and have time to stop and think about what this new technology can do for us and what it means for the future.
• BoiledCabbage 3y ago
  > That's what ultimately depresses me about AI. It's still just a parlor trick. We haven't actually taught computers to think, to reason, to be innovative. And what do you feel when we make these parlor tricks more capable than us at the majority of tasks? And what do you feel when we understand it well enough to realize we're the same type of parlor tricks? To me it seems like you're most interested in a magic 'aha' moment and will miss or not be prepared for how the road in front of us likely unfolds.
  • tsunamifury 3y ago
    He will go on saying it’s a trick. It’s a form of denial I’m seeing everywhere now when faced with something so genuinely terrifying or identity challenging you can’t process it.
    • emodendroket 3y ago
      Perhaps I can say you're motivated by an Oedipus complex and we can keep the chain going of ad hominem with a thin psychobabble veneer to make it appear serious.
      • boredninja 3y ago
        [dead]
  • emodendroket 3y ago
    > And what do you feel when we make these parlor tricks more capable than us at the majority of tasks? This seems like the logical fallacy of "begging the question" since it is far from apparent to me that they are "more capable than us at the majority of tasks."
    • adastra22 3y ago
      AI systems are vastly better than humans at a wide variety of tasks. Better at handwriting recognition, better at scheduling, better at playing games, better at speech recognition and transcription, etc.
• KirillPanov 3y ago
  This is why they've called it AI winter the past three times. It's a season. Like the seasons, the cycle repeats.
  • array-species 3y ago
    This time it's nuclear winter. Examples: Graphics User Interface. The iPhone seated mobile compute as a permanent fixture, it and Android bringing internet and computing to billions of humans for the first time. Not just the wealthy industrials. Or IBM DB2 for SQL. Or Ford's Model T. Or the Gutenberg. None of these were the first first. Maybe even on the n-th iteration 2 decades after coming out of DARPA or global university research, something is just ready for commercialized prime time. Computing was solved by Lady Ada and Babbage. It's all electrical engineering, software, fabrication, productization, mfg, displays, sensors etc. after that. Semiconductor was a big deal in making it happen. But that's almost besides the point of the theory of compute if it can be solved in other novel ways using alternative material science.
  • tsunamifury 3y ago
    What a tired and lame take. 100m people used this latest iteration. It’s hardly a winter.
    • __loam 3y ago
      The crash is gonna be wild when people realize all these companies are blowing smoke. We did get Google out of the last crash though I guess.
      • boredninja 3y ago
        [dead]
    • KirillPanov 3y ago
      What a tired and lame retort.
    • worksonmine 3y ago
• echelon 3y ago
  You say all that. Meanwhile teenagers are finding love on character.ai.
• flatline 3y ago
  There is a famous Dijkstra quote, “The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.” Do the intrinsic properties of the system really matter at the end of the day if it performs as well as we do at some task? Heck they’ve been doing many things better for decades, but those are the types of tasks we take it for granted that a machine should be able to do. Solve differential equations. Play chess. But now computers are doing “human” tasks competently. Writing creative fiction. Generating graphical art. We don’t have a good working definition or metric for intelligence. Surely it is not a monolithic property. Animals exhibit many traits we associate with intelligence. Some of the stuff GPT 3+ generates sounds pretty intelligent. It is the type of things an intelligence may have produced, because it was trained to do just that. If we look at intelligence as a cluster of traits, or behaviors, I think we are surrounded by intelligence - human, artificial, or otherwise. Doesn’t have to be an AGI to fall in that category. It doesn’t even have to be particularly impressive.
  • emodendroket 3y ago
    Sure, it's neat that it can do those things... still I don't think that I'm exactly ready to toss aside books written by humans in favor of AI-generated alternatives.
    • jack_pp 3y ago
      Writers have started using AI-generated ideas to help them write books. Same with code. Sure it might not write your product code from start to finish with no help but it will speed up your dev speed significantly for certain tasks. Just because we haven't reached singularity doesn't mean what we have now is useless and putting it down as a "parlor trick" as grandparent said seems to me very unwise.
      • emodendroket 3y ago
        Ad copy has served a similar purpose but nobody would claim ad copy has (or could) supplant creative writing because of that.
• nologic01 3y ago
  AI is not a parlor trick. AI is a branch of statistics. Nobody said that statistics must limit itself to quasi-linear models of numerical data. It was just a limitation of computational resources (initially "AI" was developed by human computers). The trick is to get people not to associate the dictum "lies, damn lies and statistics" with "hallucinations, damn hallucinations and AI".
  • array-species 3y ago
    statistics are based.
  • Sparkyte 3y ago
    AI he referred to was of that time.
  • sacado2 3y ago
    AI is not only a branch of statistics. Symbolic AI has nothing to do with stats.
• usgroup 3y ago
  Not really sure how you can consider ChatGPT a parlour trick. It has been around a relatively short time but for me its replaced a large proportion of my Google searches already. I do not see how its utility can be denied whether it reasons or not (whatever that means).
  • ben_w 3y ago
    In fairness, Page Rank and indexing are also… well, perhaps too big for a parlour, but they're (very good) tricks. Is ChatGPT playing a trick on us by mimicking the sentience of the humans whose writings it ingested, or is the trick that by doing so it began to actually think like us and so simulates a conscious mind within? I lean towards the former; but we don't know what sentience even is yet, so we can't prove it.
• prmoustache 3y ago
  > , but they're still just that: parlor tricks It isn't that much different than human behaviors. People tend to repeat stuff they have seen done by our parents, sibling, friends, medias. Listen to people smalltalking in the streets, repeating the same things all over again every day. The easy success of marketing, politicians, dictators. The power of marketing and success of consumption society. Racism, bigotry, religions, addictions. All these are easily explained because people barely think. They just respond to internal and external stimulus with recipes they have been taught to follow without giving a second thought.
• worksonmine 3y ago
  > That's what ultimately depresses me about AI. It's still just a parlor trick. We haven't actually taught computers to think, to reason, to be innovative. If you think about it we've gone the other way. We're teaching/conditioning humans to think less and react more. This has only gotten worse the last few years and I don't see any shift coming soon. Humanity unfortunately seems just as simple as the algorithm, use the right inputs, in the right context and you can make most of us act just like you want.
• imiric 3y ago
  The reason ML took off in the 2010s is because hardware finally became powerful enough to brute force classical solutions. If anything, this lends credence to the idea that these are more than just "parlor tricks", but that with sufficient hardware we can approximate the value of intelligence. We've certainly experienced the leaps in just the last few years when more hardware is thrown at the problem. Imagine what can be accomplished in the next decade or two based on this growth alone. We don't necessarily have to replicate the way the human brain works, but as long as the machine is capable of performing quasi-cognitive tasks, there will be immense value (and disruption) to society.
• sacado2 3y ago
  You seem to be conflating AI (in general) and strong AI. They are not the same thing at all. There have been industrial uses of AI techniques (I'm going by the definition from the 1956 Dartmouth workshop) for decades. And what's said in that video is a good example. We take recommendation modules for granted nowadays. They are applied AI. Disappointing for sure, if you're still waiting for a sentient robot, but they do something we thought was limited to humans back in the day: going to a bookstore, and having the owner tell you "hey, I know you enjoy mystery novels taking place in England, I might have something new for you".
• JeremyNT 3y ago
  > That's what ultimately depresses me about AI. It's still just a parlor trick. We haven't actually taught computers to think, to reason, to be innovative. Deep learning is definitely having its day, but I suppose this too will pass unless we can unlock certain ways to make AI reliable and responsible. Or... to just start understanding it in general. Isn't this just semantics, and the expectations that go with them, really? If the marketing language surrounding ML wasn't so hyperbolic and sci-fi-y ("artificial intelligence"? "neural network"? give me a break!) I think we all could agree that what we can achieve now is really interesting and impressive in its own right. Even if these models aren't on a path to some kind of "thinking computer" as you envision it, their "parlor tricks" are doing things I would've relegated to the realm of sci-fi even a decade ago, much less 25 years ago.