4 ms·

I don't think anyone is saying "you can't call facial recognition AI." I think their point is that laypeople tend to move the goalpost of what's considered AI.

jodrellblank 1y ago
And my point is: so what? [edit: missed a bit; it's not 'moving the goalposts' because those things were never the goal of Artificial Intelligence!]. A hundred years ago tap water was a luxury. Fifty years ago drinkable tap water was a luxury. Do we constantly have to keep hearing that we can’t call anything today a “luxury” because in the past “luxury” was achieved already?
- potatoman22 1y ago
  I mean you can call it AI/a luxury still. Tap water is nice, pathfinding algorithms are nice. It doesn't matter to me if people use "AI" whenever they want. Sometimes it's a little silly, but harmless. It's like if someone called sliced bread a luxury: they're not wrong but it is a bit silly to say depending where you live.
  - jodrellblank 1y ago
    I'm fine with you calling sliced bread a luxury because it reminds you of how nice your life is compared to 'nasty, brutish and short'. What I wouldn't be fine with is you reading a car advert on HN talking about luxury climate control and posting "How dare you use the word 'luxury', luxury was solved with sliced bread, now you're moving the goal posts and it's not fair!". And then you posting that again when reading about a luxury hotel, and posting that again when reading about a luxury cruise, and posting it again when reading about a luxury concierge service, and constantly reminding everyone that "luxury was solved with sliced bread and that's all anyone ever wanted from luxury and when people in Biblical times dreamed of an afterlife of luxury with no work and no suffering, what they actually wanted was sliced bread and don't you dare suggest that luxury ever meant otherwise".
mjevans 1y ago
How about: We can call it 'AI' when it should have the same rights as any other intelligence. Human, or otherwise?
- shitpostbot 1y ago
  [dead]
- addaon 1y ago
  "Hey, we have a problem concerning semantics in a technical area. How can we make sure it never gets resolved?" "I know, let's add in a dependency on universal agreement on natural rights!"
  - mjevans 1y ago
    My point was to reserve the generic term for something that's really intelligent, and thus deserving of rights an intelligent being should have, rather than what things really are. 'Machine Learning', 'Neural Nets', 'Magic black box Chinese Room simulations' (with millions to billions of parameter weights). The public wants to hear the unspoken word General in the unqualified statement Artificial Intelligence. They correctly grammatically assume that this should refer to some synthetic entity created in a lab which has the ability to think. For the LLMs that are popular today, I prefer the more truthful phrases I've heard. 'Transformers' (transform an input prompt into a related output) or more loosely 'codecs' (mostly decoders) which synthesize an output based on a prompt and an internal cache of structures. I personally consider the compression of ideas into more generalized structures to be a big component of learning for humans too. However it isn't sufficient to simply learn, understanding is required. The output I've seen doesn't cross from tool to person.
goatlover 1y ago
Laypeople have always had in mind Data or Skynet for what's considered genuine AI. Spielberg's AI movie in 2001 involved androids where the main character was a robot child given the ability to form an emotional bond to a human mother, resulting in him wanting to become a real boy. The moving goalposts come from those hyping up each phase of AI as AGI being right around the corner, and then they get pushback on that.
zahlman 1y ago
I have always considered that the term AI was inaccurate and didn't describe an actual form of intelligence, regardless of the problem it was solving. It's great that we're now solving problems with computer algorithms that we used to think required actual intelligence. But that doesn't mean we're moving the goalposts on what intelligence is; it means we're admitting we're wrong about what can be achieved without it. An "artificial intelligence" is no more intelligent than an "artificial flower" is a flower. Making it into a more convincing simulacrum, or expanding the range of roles where it can adequately substitute for the real thing (or even vastly outperform the real thing), is not reifying it. Thankfully, we don't make the same linguistic mistake with "artificial sweeteners"; they do in fact sweeten, but I would have the same complaint if we said "artificial sugars" instead. The point of the Turing test and all the other contemporary discourse was never to establish a standard to determine whether a computing system could "think" or be "intelligent"; it was to establish that this is the wrong question. Intelligence is tightly coupled to volition and self-awareness (and expressing self-awareness in text does not demonstrate self-awareness; a book titled "I Am A Book" is not self-aware). No, I cannot rigorously prove that humans (or other life) are intelligent by this standard. It's an axiom that emerges from my own experience of observing my thoughts. I think, therefore I think.
- nativeit 1y ago
  I'm generally in agreement with you (I upvoted your comment), but think it's important not to distort--even unintentionally--the motivations, speech, or work of historical figures like Alan Turing. "I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?'" (Paraphrasing from the Wikipedia entry[1][2]) Turing reckons with the problem of formally defining "thought", so instead chooses to reframe the question, and invent an experiment that uses more specific, well-defined conditions and thresholds, arguing that this would be more likely to produce a concrete answer. This experiment is, of course, what he called the "Imitation Game", and having laid out its rules and conditions, he posed, "Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?" He then spends a large portion of the rest of the paper to address nine ostensible objections to the notion that machines could "think". All that said, there's plenty of room to debate whether or not Turing's experiment is/isn't flawed, whether subjective interpretations of a purely language-driven interaction is a valid model for "thinking" more broadly, and whether these ideas can/should be applied to contemporary technology. I personally think that Turing's experiment should simply be accepted for what it is, rather than being wielded dogmatically[3]--it's an exceptionally insightful contribution to a wider body of human knowledge and philosophy, but insufficient for establishing anything like "sentience" in machines. 1. It is insane that the original paper is behind a paywall. 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test 3. As I have seen frequently elsewhere, I am not suggesting the parent comment is doing so.

jodrellblank 1y ago

And my point is: so what? [edit: missed a bit; it's not 'moving the goalposts' because those things were never the goal of Artificial Intelligence!]. A hundred years ago tap water was a luxury. Fifty years ago drinkable tap water was a luxury. Do we constantly have to keep hearing that we can’t call anything today a “luxury” because in the past “luxury” was achieved already?

potatoman22 1y ago
I mean you can call it AI/a luxury still. Tap water is nice, pathfinding algorithms are nice. It doesn't matter to me if people use "AI" whenever they want. Sometimes it's a little silly, but harmless. It's like if someone called sliced bread a luxury: they're not wrong but it is a bit silly to say depending where you live.
- jodrellblank 1y ago
  I'm fine with you calling sliced bread a luxury because it reminds you of how nice your life is compared to 'nasty, brutish and short'. What I wouldn't be fine with is you reading a car advert on HN talking about luxury climate control and posting "How dare you use the word 'luxury', luxury was solved with sliced bread, now you're moving the goal posts and it's not fair!". And then you posting that again when reading about a luxury hotel, and posting that again when reading about a luxury cruise, and posting it again when reading about a luxury concierge service, and constantly reminding everyone that "luxury was solved with sliced bread and that's all anyone ever wanted from luxury and when people in Biblical times dreamed of an afterlife of luxury with no work and no suffering, what they actually wanted was sliced bread and don't you dare suggest that luxury ever meant otherwise".

mjevans 1y ago

How about: We can call it 'AI' when it should have the same rights as any other intelligence. Human, or otherwise?

shitpostbot 1y ago
[dead]
addaon 1y ago
"Hey, we have a problem concerning semantics in a technical area. How can we make sure it never gets resolved?" "I know, let's add in a dependency on universal agreement on natural rights!"
- mjevans 1y ago
  My point was to reserve the generic term for something that's really intelligent, and thus deserving of rights an intelligent being should have, rather than what things really are. 'Machine Learning', 'Neural Nets', 'Magic black box Chinese Room simulations' (with millions to billions of parameter weights). The public wants to hear the unspoken word General in the unqualified statement Artificial Intelligence. They correctly grammatically assume that this should refer to some synthetic entity created in a lab which has the ability to think. For the LLMs that are popular today, I prefer the more truthful phrases I've heard. 'Transformers' (transform an input prompt into a related output) or more loosely 'codecs' (mostly decoders) which synthesize an output based on a prompt and an internal cache of structures. I personally consider the compression of ideas into more generalized structures to be a big component of learning for humans too. However it isn't sufficient to simply learn, understanding is required. The output I've seen doesn't cross from tool to person.

goatlover 1y ago

Laypeople have always had in mind Data or Skynet for what's considered genuine AI. Spielberg's AI movie in 2001 involved androids where the main character was a robot child given the ability to form an emotional bond to a human mother, resulting in him wanting to become a real boy. The moving goalposts come from those hyping up each phase of AI as AGI being right around the corner, and then they get pushback on that.

zahlman 1y ago

I have always considered that the term AI was inaccurate and didn't describe an actual form of intelligence, regardless of the problem it was solving. It's great that we're now solving problems with computer algorithms that we used to think required actual intelligence. But that doesn't mean we're moving the goalposts on what intelligence is; it means we're admitting we're wrong about what can be achieved without it. An "artificial intelligence" is no more intelligent than an "artificial flower" is a flower. Making it into a more convincing simulacrum, or expanding the range of roles where it can adequately substitute for the real thing (or even vastly outperform the real thing), is not reifying it. Thankfully, we don't make the same linguistic mistake with "artificial sweeteners"; they do in fact sweeten, but I would have the same complaint if we said "artificial sugars" instead. The point of the Turing test and all the other contemporary discourse was never to establish a standard to determine whether a computing system could "think" or be "intelligent"; it was to establish that this is the wrong question. Intelligence is tightly coupled to volition and self-awareness (and expressing self-awareness in text does not demonstrate self-awareness; a book titled "I Am A Book" is not self-aware). No, I cannot rigorously prove that humans (or other life) are intelligent by this standard. It's an axiom that emerges from my own experience of observing my thoughts. I think, therefore I think.

nativeit 1y ago
I'm generally in agreement with you (I upvoted your comment), but think it's important not to distort--even unintentionally--the motivations, speech, or work of historical figures like Alan Turing. "I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?'" (Paraphrasing from the Wikipedia entry[1][2]) Turing reckons with the problem of formally defining "thought", so instead chooses to reframe the question, and invent an experiment that uses more specific, well-defined conditions and thresholds, arguing that this would be more likely to produce a concrete answer. This experiment is, of course, what he called the "Imitation Game", and having laid out its rules and conditions, he posed, "Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?" He then spends a large portion of the rest of the paper to address nine ostensible objections to the notion that machines could "think". All that said, there's plenty of room to debate whether or not Turing's experiment is/isn't flawed, whether subjective interpretations of a purely language-driven interaction is a valid model for "thinking" more broadly, and whether these ideas can/should be applied to contemporary technology. I personally think that Turing's experiment should simply be accepted for what it is, rather than being wielded dogmatically[3]--it's an exceptionally insightful contribution to a wider body of human knowledge and philosophy, but insufficient for establishing anything like "sentience" in machines. 1. It is insane that the original paper is behind a paywall. 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test 3. As I have seen frequently elsewhere, I am not suggesting the parent comment is doing so.