5 ms·

We've been here before: AI promised humanlike machines – in 1958

33 points by cdme 3y ago

nbzso 3y ago
I avoid the term AI. We have a machine learning. A lot of viable implementation of it. And text calculators which are predictive text lossy compressors. Done. No AI hype:)
anonzzzies 3y ago
It shouldn’t be this hyped up but the first ai boom was because a computer could learn ‘something’ without explicit programming. It was too primitive and computers were not powerful enough; the scientists (like Minsky) were too optimistic about the growth of computer power as well. The 80s revival with knowledge systems wasn’t actually ever feasible as AGI; everyone I spoke to then in the field (I started uni begin of the end 80s AI winter) had been saying for many years it was a dead end. So I feel outside the overhyping (some hype is warranted but this much?) could be less, this is different; it’s not a promise, I am chatting to my computer on my lap as if it was my human assistant; it gives me answers faster and usually better than most humans would. That’s simply not the same as we had in the previous instances. Knowledge systems did this too, but were encyclopedia’s; they couldn’t come up with stuff that wasn’t explicitly put in and categorized. You often controlled them by answering a tree structure of multiple choice screens (there are some nice episodes on the Computer Cronicles about this on Archive.org). Now you can have this knowledge base in your (vector) db, ask open questions in any language about it; it will answer human-like, lies/bluff and all.
- namaria 3y ago
  > it will answer human-like, lies/bluff and all. I'm not sure speed running the internet forum experience by using data centers with 10x the energy requirements of traditional ones is a net gain.
  - __loam 3y ago
    Imagine a search engine but there's no context and it's 5x more expensive to run and there's no ad revenue. I think in the long run, LLMs will be packaged with the OS (because only organizations like Microsoft and Apple have the resources to burn on them) and will run on local hardware (the consumer bears the cost of the computation).
  - MrSkyNet 3y ago
    Those data centers are easily converted to green energy. Google already is at 90%. The margin and market motivation to do so is high and those few companies have a lot of money. Nonetheless, we talk about an industry / society change; A change how we will write and operate and talk to computers. I woudl say its worth it
    - sgift 3y ago
      > Those data centers are easily converted to green energy. Energy which could be used for other things. I don't say it's bad to use power for AI, but just saying "well, it's green energy anyway" is short-sighted imho. At least as long as there are still any things not yet powered by green energy.
      - MrSkyNet 3y ago
        I do understand what it means to reinvest energy and i do believe its absolutly worth it in this case. The investment required for those data centers will act as stabilization of green energy investment and because known software companies are involved, for a better support on the software side
    - namaria 3y ago
      > Those data centers are easily converted to green energy. Energy is fungible. Exploding marginal energy requirements put enormous pressure on the grid tho. In the US several gas burning plants are being planned in the last few months given AI data center growth projections. This will have a definite impact in total emissions and push back any goals of holding on to the current 2C increase in global temperature.
- ehnto 3y ago
  Some of the hype is just VCs being excited about having somewhere to put their bets, and founders happy to gobble the money. But it does feel a bit more tangible this time, for one, people are using it daily at work for a huge swath of roles so it is providing real value. I am interested on if it will have diminishing returns for some roles, if the outputs aren't novel enough over a long period of time. Eg: it's used to write marketing copy, but I already see the "feel" of it getting criticized and a lack of novel tone when used daily.
- zone411 3y ago
  About Minsky being too optimistic: "I would tell Marvin this whole AI thing is just horrible. Why are we doing it? And he would say it will be effective for getting our grants, so shut up and just play along and in fact, it was true. It was very good for getting grants back in the early days, in the 70's was when I started at this, you would go to a grant making organization such as the Defense Department, you'd say we're going to build this super smart thing and if we don't do it, our enemies might and it'll get smarter than people and it was Okay, here's your money, here's your money, oh my God, you better... and so it was very effective. And actually, the whole thing started off as storytelling to get grants" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGqiswuJuQI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGqiswuJuQI
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    This is probably still true. Currently this doesn't get as much media hype for some reason. But definitely the military is all in on the current hype-wave. Because is it really 'hype' if an AI fighter pilot can beat human F-16 fighter pilots? This has already been done and old news. Games, poker, go, StarCraft, -- all have 'game' logic that can also be used on battlefields. Robots, logistics, fighter plane drones, battlefield 'perceptual' analysis, etc... There are companies building these things now, they aren't hype. Just like Darpa Funded the internet, in the future when the military has huge AI components, we'll be looking back on today fondly like the good old days before there were thousands of autonomous drones tracking us all the time..
xkcd1963 3y ago
eye roll I tell you, the amount of hype nowaydays is shameful display of rational thought
- coldtea 3y ago
  It always is rational, until the hype cycle is over, and those believing in it go on about how they always knew it wasn't all that it was hyped up to be.
sigmoid10 3y ago
This article tries to seem like an enlightened sceptic, but it's actually really cringe because of it's lack of insight into the real progress since then. Then again I don't know what people would expect from a politics editor with a liberal arts background.
- stuaxo 3y ago
  What's their background got to do with it? Edit: actually read the article, and it just seems to note the cyclical nature of AI, which the lay person may not be aware of.
- coldtea 3y ago
  >but it's actually really cringe because of it's lack of insight into the real progress since then Looks to me to have a good enough understanding of the "real progress since then".
  - sigmoid10 3y ago
    The article literally writes >the Perceptron would lead to machines that “will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence.” More than six decades later, similar claims are being made about current artificial intelligence. So, what’s changed in the intervening years? In some ways, not much. Which shows the author's complete lack of understanding of the basics. In ML reasearch, it has become very clear that compute is everything and architectures are actually not that important. So what has changed? And why is today fundamentally different, despite us still using the same perceptron architecture with a few tweaks? Look at the Kurzweil curve [1]. The available compute power has allowed existing architectures to flourish beyond what was possible in the 60s. Do you think it's a coincidence that computers in the early 2010s were suddenly able to distinguish pictures of cats and dogs reliably, when that was utterly impossible just a decade earlier? Or perhaps you think it's weird that GPT3/4 capability level models arrived in the 2020s? Just look at the curve (which was made in the early 2000s btw) to find out why. [1] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ec0712f88e81651845998f2/1598538084191-81G58RVP0IDI8XIFOW5U/kurzweil-2.fw.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ec0712f88e816...
Manheim 3y ago
We need thoughts like this, even though it doesn't bring any new information. The question the author puts forth is basically; will it work this time?". This is a q. that many seems to believe the answer to is, "yes". I am one of those. However, distinguishing between truly autonomous AI systems and those that are simply high-performing can become challenging. The line between the two might become blurred when performance reaches a level that seems autonomous. In this context I believe that another "AI winter" will be hard to identify in the future.
- bondarchuk 3y ago
  It's not even a question of "will it work this time?" as if we are uncertain about some future capability. We already know that it works right now. There are demonstrable capabilities you can just go out and use this very moment that are beyond the most optimistic hopes of 10 years ago in both the text and image domain (and video but that's unreleased). There is some tendency to discount the current state of AI because it doesn't match the level of hype - ignoring the fact that hype is non-linear and it makes no sense to speak of an appropriate level of hype anyway. All that stuff is just pop culture. If you can look past it and objectively view the current state of the art through the lens of 10 or even 5 years ago (gpt-2 era) IMHO you'll see we have enough progress to last 10 or 20 years without declaring a "winter" even if from here on out progress will be slow.
  - Manheim 3y ago
    I agree, there has been exponential progress in the last two decades, and all indications suggest that this trend will persist. My point is that while autonomous AI may still be far off, it will become increasingly challenging to differentiate between an autonomous AI that operates and reprograms itself without human intervention, and a highly advanced AI system.
fredwu 3y ago
Was reading to see what insights the author has, then all of a sudden the article just ended... Not sure if I got the point of the article.
- IshKebab 3y ago
  I agree. History of AI that we all know. Modern AI sometimes gets things wrong in interesting ways. The end. It didn't even get to its own point (which is also wrong - we definitely haven't been here before).
jonnycomputer 3y ago
Except we have human-like machines now. I run a llm on my laptop which can write poetry, talk about the history of the Vikings, play games, tell jokes, hold conversations, bullshit when it doesn't know something, and make mistakes. All very human-like. Does some human-like things better than humans. Other human-like things not as well. Goal-post moving? Sure. But I think it just betrays a deep discomfort with what has been achieved. Kind of like the meme that it's all just a giant plagiarism machine.
- Aardwolf 3y ago
  More human like than in 1958 for sure, but back then they'd have said that e.g. playing chess is human like. And there's still a lot of opportunities to get more human like today: it can't empty the dishwasher or drive a car yet even if you'd give it arms, legs and eyes.
  - bheadmaster 3y ago
    > it can't empty the dishwasher This video [0] at 1:25 suggests that it can. At least in some near future. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq1QZB5baNw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq1QZB5baNw
    - keithalewis 3y ago
      I find your ideas intriguing and would like to purchase some tulip bulbs.
    - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
      Holy Shit, is that video real? This isn't faked, or we are going to find out it was ultra staged? That robot seems like a leap. Of course, they don't show it moving around. But arms and hands seem like better than other demo videos.
  - pydry 3y ago
    There's a weird dystopianness about having a machine that can write songs and poetry years or maybe decades before having one that can clean a toilet. It doesnt help that the automated future imagined in the past would "free up" people so that they could spend all of their time writing songs and poetry.
joegibbs 3y ago
Is there a term for this kind of fallacy? The one where someone claims that something that’s being done now has been failed before, and so doing it again means it’s a failure now as well. It’s obvious that modern AI is far, far superior to ELIZA or 50s perceptrons. It reminds me of people who said space travel will never be possible, or heavier than air flight might be developed in ten million years.
- Jensson 3y ago
  History shows that AI will get overhyped every time we make a breakthrough.
- sgt101 3y ago
  But also the folks who predicted that we would be manning space stations in Saturn's orbit by now - when no human has left low earth orbit for 50 years or so. I think intelligence is similar; the work of yesteryear pointed towards the possibilities of "flight", LLM's provided the same sort of boost as the space race of the 50's and 60's. I am not sure where the analogy ends and if a "moonshot" will happen - or if things will stall at some point. At the moment I am thinking that a stall might happen. Auto regressive techniques have given us a very very clever hans, reinforcement learning seems to have disappeared from sight, graph networks are giving us fantastic tools (weather, biology) but nothing that appears or claims to have cognition.
  - bondarchuk 3y ago
    >nothing that appears or claims to have cognition Keep in mind LLMs are explicitly trained to avoid claiming they have cognition.
    - sgt101 3y ago
      Someone forgot to tell Anthropic about that...
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    But we could have. If the US had kept funding Nasa at the same pace as during the space race, we probably could have moon colonies and ships heading to Saturn. It isn't a technology problem, it is a funding problem.
hulitu 3y ago
> We've been here before: AI promised humanlike machines – in 1958 But this time is for real. /s

33 points by cdme 3y ago

I avoid the term AI. We have a machine learning. A lot of viable implementation of it. And text calculators which are predictive text lossy compressors. Done. No AI hype:)

anonzzzies 3y ago

It shouldn’t be this hyped up but the first ai boom was because a computer could learn ‘something’ without explicit programming. It was too primitive and computers were not powerful enough; the scientists (like Minsky) were too optimistic about the growth of computer power as well. The 80s revival with knowledge systems wasn’t actually ever feasible as AGI; everyone I spoke to then in the field (I started uni begin of the end 80s AI winter) had been saying for many years it was a dead end. So I feel outside the overhyping (some hype is warranted but this much?) could be less, this is different; it’s not a promise, I am chatting to my computer on my lap as if it was my human assistant; it gives me answers faster and usually better than most humans would. That’s simply not the same as we had in the previous instances. Knowledge systems did this too, but were encyclopedia’s; they couldn’t come up with stuff that wasn’t explicitly put in and categorized. You often controlled them by answering a tree structure of multiple choice screens (there are some nice episodes on the Computer Cronicles about this on Archive.org). Now you can have this knowledge base in your (vector) db, ask open questions in any language about it; it will answer human-like, lies/bluff and all.

namaria 3y ago
> it will answer human-like, lies/bluff and all. I'm not sure speed running the internet forum experience by using data centers with 10x the energy requirements of traditional ones is a net gain.
- __loam 3y ago
  Imagine a search engine but there's no context and it's 5x more expensive to run and there's no ad revenue. I think in the long run, LLMs will be packaged with the OS (because only organizations like Microsoft and Apple have the resources to burn on them) and will run on local hardware (the consumer bears the cost of the computation).
- MrSkyNet 3y ago
  Those data centers are easily converted to green energy. Google already is at 90%. The margin and market motivation to do so is high and those few companies have a lot of money. Nonetheless, we talk about an industry / society change; A change how we will write and operate and talk to computers. I woudl say its worth it
  - sgift 3y ago
    > Those data centers are easily converted to green energy. Energy which could be used for other things. I don't say it's bad to use power for AI, but just saying "well, it's green energy anyway" is short-sighted imho. At least as long as there are still any things not yet powered by green energy.
    - MrSkyNet 3y ago
      I do understand what it means to reinvest energy and i do believe its absolutly worth it in this case. The investment required for those data centers will act as stabilization of green energy investment and because known software companies are involved, for a better support on the software side
  - namaria 3y ago
    > Those data centers are easily converted to green energy. Energy is fungible. Exploding marginal energy requirements put enormous pressure on the grid tho. In the US several gas burning plants are being planned in the last few months given AI data center growth projections. This will have a definite impact in total emissions and push back any goals of holding on to the current 2C increase in global temperature.
ehnto 3y ago
Some of the hype is just VCs being excited about having somewhere to put their bets, and founders happy to gobble the money. But it does feel a bit more tangible this time, for one, people are using it daily at work for a huge swath of roles so it is providing real value. I am interested on if it will have diminishing returns for some roles, if the outputs aren't novel enough over a long period of time. Eg: it's used to write marketing copy, but I already see the "feel" of it getting criticized and a lack of novel tone when used daily.
zone411 3y ago
About Minsky being too optimistic: "I would tell Marvin this whole AI thing is just horrible. Why are we doing it? And he would say it will be effective for getting our grants, so shut up and just play along and in fact, it was true. It was very good for getting grants back in the early days, in the 70's was when I started at this, you would go to a grant making organization such as the Defense Department, you'd say we're going to build this super smart thing and if we don't do it, our enemies might and it'll get smarter than people and it was Okay, here's your money, here's your money, oh my God, you better... and so it was very effective. And actually, the whole thing started off as storytelling to get grants" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGqiswuJuQI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGqiswuJuQI
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  This is probably still true. Currently this doesn't get as much media hype for some reason. But definitely the military is all in on the current hype-wave. Because is it really 'hype' if an AI fighter pilot can beat human F-16 fighter pilots? This has already been done and old news. Games, poker, go, StarCraft, -- all have 'game' logic that can also be used on battlefields. Robots, logistics, fighter plane drones, battlefield 'perceptual' analysis, etc... There are companies building these things now, they aren't hype. Just like Darpa Funded the internet, in the future when the military has huge AI components, we'll be looking back on today fondly like the good old days before there were thousands of autonomous drones tracking us all the time..

xkcd1963 3y ago

eye roll I tell you, the amount of hype nowaydays is shameful display of rational thought

coldtea 3y ago
It always is rational, until the hype cycle is over, and those believing in it go on about how they always knew it wasn't all that it was hyped up to be.

sigmoid10 3y ago

This article tries to seem like an enlightened sceptic, but it's actually really cringe because of it's lack of insight into the real progress since then. Then again I don't know what people would expect from a politics editor with a liberal arts background.

stuaxo 3y ago
What's their background got to do with it? Edit: actually read the article, and it just seems to note the cyclical nature of AI, which the lay person may not be aware of.
coldtea 3y ago
>but it's actually really cringe because of it's lack of insight into the real progress since then Looks to me to have a good enough understanding of the "real progress since then".
- sigmoid10 3y ago
  The article literally writes >the Perceptron would lead to machines that “will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence.” More than six decades later, similar claims are being made about current artificial intelligence. So, what’s changed in the intervening years? In some ways, not much. Which shows the author's complete lack of understanding of the basics. In ML reasearch, it has become very clear that compute is everything and architectures are actually not that important. So what has changed? And why is today fundamentally different, despite us still using the same perceptron architecture with a few tweaks? Look at the Kurzweil curve [1]. The available compute power has allowed existing architectures to flourish beyond what was possible in the 60s. Do you think it's a coincidence that computers in the early 2010s were suddenly able to distinguish pictures of cats and dogs reliably, when that was utterly impossible just a decade earlier? Or perhaps you think it's weird that GPT3/4 capability level models arrived in the 2020s? Just look at the curve (which was made in the early 2000s btw) to find out why. [1] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ec0712f88e81651845998f2/1598538084191-81G58RVP0IDI8XIFOW5U/kurzweil-2.fw.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ec0712f88e816...

Manheim 3y ago

We need thoughts like this, even though it doesn't bring any new information. The question the author puts forth is basically; will it work this time?". This is a q. that many seems to believe the answer to is, "yes". I am one of those. However, distinguishing between truly autonomous AI systems and those that are simply high-performing can become challenging. The line between the two might become blurred when performance reaches a level that seems autonomous. In this context I believe that another "AI winter" will be hard to identify in the future.

bondarchuk 3y ago
It's not even a question of "will it work this time?" as if we are uncertain about some future capability. We already know that it works right now. There are demonstrable capabilities you can just go out and use this very moment that are beyond the most optimistic hopes of 10 years ago in both the text and image domain (and video but that's unreleased). There is some tendency to discount the current state of AI because it doesn't match the level of hype - ignoring the fact that hype is non-linear and it makes no sense to speak of an appropriate level of hype anyway. All that stuff is just pop culture. If you can look past it and objectively view the current state of the art through the lens of 10 or even 5 years ago (gpt-2 era) IMHO you'll see we have enough progress to last 10 or 20 years without declaring a "winter" even if from here on out progress will be slow.
- Manheim 3y ago
  I agree, there has been exponential progress in the last two decades, and all indications suggest that this trend will persist. My point is that while autonomous AI may still be far off, it will become increasingly challenging to differentiate between an autonomous AI that operates and reprograms itself without human intervention, and a highly advanced AI system.

fredwu 3y ago

Was reading to see what insights the author has, then all of a sudden the article just ended... Not sure if I got the point of the article.

IshKebab 3y ago
I agree. History of AI that we all know. Modern AI sometimes gets things wrong in interesting ways. The end. It didn't even get to its own point (which is also wrong - we definitely haven't been here before).

jonnycomputer 3y ago

Except we have human-like machines now. I run a llm on my laptop which can write poetry, talk about the history of the Vikings, play games, tell jokes, hold conversations, bullshit when it doesn't know something, and make mistakes. All very human-like. Does some human-like things better than humans. Other human-like things not as well. Goal-post moving? Sure. But I think it just betrays a deep discomfort with what has been achieved. Kind of like the meme that it's all just a giant plagiarism machine.

Aardwolf 3y ago
More human like than in 1958 for sure, but back then they'd have said that e.g. playing chess is human like. And there's still a lot of opportunities to get more human like today: it can't empty the dishwasher or drive a car yet even if you'd give it arms, legs and eyes.
- bheadmaster 3y ago
  > it can't empty the dishwasher This video [0] at 1:25 suggests that it can. At least in some near future. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq1QZB5baNw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq1QZB5baNw
  - keithalewis 3y ago
    I find your ideas intriguing and would like to purchase some tulip bulbs.
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    Holy Shit, is that video real? This isn't faked, or we are going to find out it was ultra staged? That robot seems like a leap. Of course, they don't show it moving around. But arms and hands seem like better than other demo videos.
- pydry 3y ago
  There's a weird dystopianness about having a machine that can write songs and poetry years or maybe decades before having one that can clean a toilet. It doesnt help that the automated future imagined in the past would "free up" people so that they could spend all of their time writing songs and poetry.

joegibbs 3y ago

Is there a term for this kind of fallacy? The one where someone claims that something that’s being done now has been failed before, and so doing it again means it’s a failure now as well. It’s obvious that modern AI is far, far superior to ELIZA or 50s perceptrons. It reminds me of people who said space travel will never be possible, or heavier than air flight might be developed in ten million years.

Jensson 3y ago
History shows that AI will get overhyped every time we make a breakthrough.
sgt101 3y ago
But also the folks who predicted that we would be manning space stations in Saturn's orbit by now - when no human has left low earth orbit for 50 years or so. I think intelligence is similar; the work of yesteryear pointed towards the possibilities of "flight", LLM's provided the same sort of boost as the space race of the 50's and 60's. I am not sure where the analogy ends and if a "moonshot" will happen - or if things will stall at some point. At the moment I am thinking that a stall might happen. Auto regressive techniques have given us a very very clever hans, reinforcement learning seems to have disappeared from sight, graph networks are giving us fantastic tools (weather, biology) but nothing that appears or claims to have cognition.
- bondarchuk 3y ago
  >nothing that appears or claims to have cognition Keep in mind LLMs are explicitly trained to avoid claiming they have cognition.
  - sgt101 3y ago
    Someone forgot to tell Anthropic about that...
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  But we could have. If the US had kept funding Nasa at the same pace as during the space race, we probably could have moon colonies and ships heading to Saturn. It isn't a technology problem, it is a funding problem.

hulitu 3y ago

> We've been here before: AI promised humanlike machines – in 1958 But this time is for real. /s