10 ms·
The Stupidity of Computers
- sp332 13y agoELIZA was actually an AI platform, which made it possible to write all kinds of AI bots. The "doctor" program was a tiny example program, like a hello-world for the platform which was capable of much more. Here's a description of how ELIZA worked: https://csee.umbc.edu/courses/331/papers/eliza.html https://csee.umbc.edu/courses/331/papers/eliza.html
- agentultra 13y agoThe stupidity of computers is starting to get frustrating. As a software developer working on a distributed storage system, I've profiled my placement algorithm and after some thought have decided there is a better strategy based on a common use-case scenario. I create a branch in my repository and try out my changes. In the mean time my colleagues have made changes to the development branch I diverged from. My computer cannot seem to be able to run the differential of the profiling function against my diverged branches and tell me whether my changes validate my assumptions from a simple query (nor whether the combined changes would continue to validate my assumptions before I merge them... it couldn't even construct the profiling function for me). Ontologies seem like just the tip of the iceberg. It seems more likely to me that instead of a general-AI we're more likely to be able to map and simulate a human brain within a computer.
- tmikaeld 13y agoHmm... Wall of text.. ok, challenge accepted! read scroll read scroll read scroll read MORE!?... scroll NOT MORE I GET IT! ...computers are stupid but at least they don't give up!
- shangxiao 13y agoThe HN-stasi have spoken: "Your text shall be white!"
- shawabawa3 13y agoYep... really interesting article but just too long
- timje1 13y agoAfter all, who has five minutes to spare these days to enrich their knowledge of the world around us? Everyone knows that if the information is important enough, the author will find a way to fit it into 140 characters. Well 110, with 30 characters worth of tags.
- hoektoe 13y agoI was just gave up looking for the words that appear the most..
- moron4hire 13y agoI thought it was a very well-written, engaging, and complete overview of the state of "general" AI. There is a lot of field to cover. I don't really see anything that you could cut here.
- tmikaeld 13y agoI didn't think it was a bad article, my only point was that robots and AI never give up - but humans do!
- danso 13y ago> Consider how difficult it is to get a computer to do anything. To take a simple example, let’s say we would like to ask a computer to find the most commonly occurring word on a web page, perhaps as a hint to what the page might be about. Um, has the OP ever tried getting a human to easily perform such a task?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- brudgers 13y agoPointing out the problems with the proposition just illustrates the author's point about the semantic gulf. It's relatively easy for a human to not only see the problem but to point it out snarkily. But short of singularity we may not see a computer doing so in the near future. Abandoning meta-snark despite it's pleasures, what is interesting is the way in which the semi-absurd example implied a relevant example which I now realize was why I wasn't bothered by the semi absurdity. I didn't really take the words literally. What was evoked seems to have been the idea of how unlikely it would be that a computer could read the pseudo code and determine that it found the most frequent words on a page without being given the answer ahead of time.
- danso 13y agoI wasn't (only) meaning to be snarky, but the proposition he makes is itself a bit of snark and, more to the point, begs the question. If you're assuming that, given a non-trivial webpage, all educated adult humans will agree as to what it's about...well, how can the computational scientist argue against that? If anything, the author himself should be keenly aware of how humans fail at general interpretation, even after having 12 years of education (K-12)...unless he's never had a comments section for his articles.
- girvo 13y agoMeta: your comment finally solidified the proper meaning and usage of "begs the question". I'd sort of understood it, but hadn't seen it used in modern text like that.
- tlarkworthy 13y agoThe never ending language learner (NELL) is able to build ontologies largely unsupervised with 87% accuracy from a base set of seed facts and access to the internet, indefinitely. [1] Whilst it is unable to assign one symbol with multiple nouns, I think these are more engineering issues than anything. The overall architecture of NELL can be made smarter with horizontally scalable knowledge inference additions. I think articles like this are going to be out of date fairly soon (if not already out of date privately). [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never-Ending_Language_Learning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never-Ending_Language_Learning
- 3rd3 13y ago> Accumulated errors, such as the deduction that Internet cookies were a kind of baked good, led NELL to deduce from the phrases "I deleted my Internet cookies" and "I deleted my files" that "computer files" also belonged in the baked goods category. That is hilarious! By the way, there is another intersting never ending lerner which is based on random images from the internet: http://www.neil-kb.com/ http://www.neil-kb.com/
- blueblob 13y agoThanks both of you for these, very interesting. I am looking at this problem on my own at the moment and didn't find either on my own.
- adwf 13y agoYes 87% is quite impressive, but that remaining 13% is all important. The errors sadly propagate (as above); more importantly, the errors tend to strike randomly also. eg. A human might not be expected to know too much medical terminology, hence could easily get names/locations/functions of muscles and organs mixed up. Whereas a computer might be brilliant at that, but then suddenly not know what a door knob is (door handle? door knob of butter? etc...) So ultimately to make a computer seem intelligent the problem is two-fold: Getting a high percentage of right answers, whilst also getting the "right" wrong answers. Afterall, we don't criticize a human too much for not knowing something like the exact geographic location of a small African nation. But we definitely would if they thought that it was on Mars! It's exactly the same with computers, they're just far more likely to make wildly incorrect mistakes than understandably incorrect ones. So finding a way to mitigate computer mistakes, to make them milder, is every bit as important as eliminating them entirely - a potentially impossible task.
- david927 13y agoI've never heard of the magazine n+1, but if this is typical of it, I'm deeply impressed. Particularly, some of the author's conclusions are brilliant. His only failure is when he tries to prognosticate. Ontologies are reductive only when they're not contextual, for example.
- kpennell 13y agoI had a subscription for a couple years and liked it quite a bit. Much of the writing is impeccably crafted. As though the author rewrote the piece 8 times to say exactly what they wanted to say.
- platz 13y agon+1 is great. Sometimes it's a nice antidote to tech since they are also very interested in literature and culture. Their print version isn't half bad, either.
- mjn 13y agoI generally like the magazine. It isn't mainly about technology, though, if that's what you're looking for: it's more of a literature/theory/politics/arts/culture magazine. Articles mainly about science/technology are maybe one per issue on average, though usually pretty good ones (with some misses). Another new-ish magazine that I mentally place in vaguely the same genre is The New Inquiry: http://thenewinquiry.com http://thenewinquiry.com
- dclara 13y agoMainly not about tech? It's such a perfect summaries of what's happening in the tech history for information processing. Like to see more of this kind.
- mjn 13y agoThis article is; I just meant that the magazine overall is not mainly about tech. Here's their latest ToC, for example: http://nplusonemag.com/print-issue-18/ http://nplusonemag.com/print-issue-18/
- shangxiao 13y agoIf you're like me and did not previously know about SHRDLU, then I highly recommend watching this demonstration: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo4RvYJYOzI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo4RvYJYOzI
- wazoox 13y agoI've learned about it in a 1977 magazine about robots, when I was 6 (that I probably still have lying around somewhere), and I've been fascinated by computers ever since, and a great admirer of Terry Winograd.
- utopkara 13y agoSome coconut farmers use trained monkeys to harvest crops. I am sure a monkey would make a weak opponent in a fencing match, but they are pretty good with planning and motor skills in addition to being great climbers. In this sense, computers (and AI) of our time is very useful. Furthermore, computers and programs are super flexible and they do not have hard coded limits to their capabilities as humans and monkeys have. As humans, we might be the all powerful masters for now, but compared to the improving AI we'll soon be what the SHRDLU is to Watson.
- yetanotherphd 13y agoIs there anything that grasshoppers eat that isn't kosher? Maybe Watson is much smarter than we think.
- maxerickson 13y agoThey aren't careful eaters, so some grasshoppers almost certainly eat things that aren't kosher.
- michaelwww 13y agoMy first experience with AI was playing against a chess computer in the 1980's and losing. I was young, didn't understand computers, and wasn't a very good chess player, but after I kept losing I had this eerie feeling about the machine, like it was an actual sentient being. I've been aware of the power of anthropomorphism ever since and noticed the readiness for humans to do ascribe feelings and thoughts to things that don't actually have them. The computer is the medium and tool for capturing the intelligence and data of the programmers behind it, so I think the right question is asking if Watson is self-aware. There is no evidence to support that and it is doubtful it will happen any time soon, but that's almost irrelevant. The combination of the user, the computer, the programmers behind them and the world's data working together is a new kind of intelligence and is almost frightening in it's power.
- zhemao 13y agoAccording to Wikipedia all insects except locusts are non-kosher and some grasshoppers are omnivorous. So there must be some grasshoppers that don't "keep kosher". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosher#Prohibited_foods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosher#Prohibited_foods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grasshopper#Diet_and_digestion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grasshopper#Diet_and_digestion
- tim333 13y agoGood article but I disagree with his basic conclusion. To illustrate what I mean a couple of quotes: "... will increase the hold that formal ontologies have on us. They will be constructed by governments, by corporations, and by us in unequal measure,..." "We will define and regiment our lives, including our social lives and our perceptions of ourselves, in ways that are conducive to what a computer can “understand.” Their dumbness will become ours." I think the opposite is in fact happening, that academically for example there was a fixed system, in the UK for example you did GCSEs, A Levels, bachelor’s degree etc., which was something like a formal ontology constructed by government - physics shall be divided form chemistry and both shall be graded from A to E. Now we have all kinds of new forms of education like online courses, Wikipedia and so on so you can pretty much find an educational form to fit what you want to do. We're moving more from a formal approved ontology to many competing ones where you can choose. I'm not sure where posting on Hacker News fits into this. Maybe it is regimenting our lives, including our social lives and our perceptions of ourselves, in ways that are conducive to what a computer can understand!
- evunveot 13y agoA reductive ontology of the world emerges, containing aspects both obvious and dubious. Now I'm contemplating what an opposite-of-reductive ontology would look like (if that even makes semantic sense). An ontology that enriches rather than simplifies. It's hard to think about.
- dsego 13y agoWhat about this? Building Brains to Understand the World's Data (google tech talk): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4y43qwS8fl4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4y43qwS8fl4 The result is http://www.groksolutions.com/ http://www.groksolutions.com/
- TrainedMonkey 13y agoWhat I got out of the article is that computers are good at doing what they are programmed to do. Problem is not bad computers, but rather the fact that we do not know how to program computer for general intelligence.
- skywhopper 13y agoThere are real, absolute limits on what you can program a set of transistors and logic gates to do. Changing those limits will require changing what a "computer" is. At which point, we'll probably call it something else.
- platz 13y agoCouldn't you make the same argument about the absolute limits of neurons and synapses?
- TrainedMonkey 13y agoDitto, computers are for one still improving. Who knows what the limits are. What I think is the problem is that humans do not have a clear explanation for how our intelligence works. Is it really that much of a wonder we can't emulate it?
- Falling3 13y agoWhat are these limits and how do you know they exist?
- gtirloni 13y agoCan we create digital logic circuitry that embodies ALL the functionality of a neuron, including interconnections (and here you have to compensate circuitry limitations that the neurons don't have) in the same size? I think you can start from there to understand current technology's limitations. I agree we will likely not be calling these things "computers", if we ever invent them.
- bad_alloc 13y agoI always wonder why computers should be intelligent. In essence they can add numbers pretty quickly. If you interpret the result of many such additions in a certain way you get a text, a video or an operating system. Wouldn't it make more sense to build a machine for thinking instead of reusing one we built for calculating?
- mjn 13y agoThat's one of the core high-level AI debates going back decades, whether a fundamentally different hardware substrate is needed for intelligent machines, or if it's instead more of a 'software' problem. Biologically-inspired AI tends to want to build things that look more like networks of neurons as the hardware substrate (among other things), while some other branches of AI find existing computing hardware to be generally fine as a substrate. Imo it comes down to more of a pragmatic question than a philosophical one, though. Unless we actually discover a super-Turing computational system, any machine will be doing some kind of computation that in principle could be performed by any other Turing-equivalent machine. Of course not all Turing-equivalent machines are equally easy to build everything on top of, which is where the "equivalent in principle" part falls short. But alternate hardware models (assuming not super-Turing ones) don't in themselves get you anything that in some inherent or philosophical sense can't be done by a pile of NAND gates.
- Raphael 13y agoArithmetic can simulate physics. Wouldn't it make more sense to simulate the thinking machine in a standard computer?
- Houshalter 13y agoSpecial purpose hardware is faster than software, but it's generally much more expensive. It also doesn't allow for much experimentation or change. A general purpose computer can emulate anything any other computer can do, and designing software is much easier than designing hardware.
- skywhopper 13y agoHumans have enough trouble understanding human language, especially in textual form. Context, body language, facial expression, shared experiences, cultural memes, power relationships, and internal motivations all play a role in how lanugage must be interpreted. Ambiguity, emotion, connotation, and double-meanings all play critical roles. It's highly unlikely (I would say impossible) that computers can ever be made to fully understand human language. To the extent that humans and computers are able to communicate with each other, it will be via a cooperatively developed human-computer language that will be influenced as much by the computers as by the humans. That shared compromise is true today via programming languages and the stilted way we must interact with Google Voice Search and Siri. And while those contours will change over the forthcoming decades, it will continue to be true for all time. As humans augment themselves with digital computing power and as computer technology itself evolves, things will become very different, but the fundamental disconnect will always be there.
- Houshalter 13y agoA human-computer language is an interesting idea, but it defeats much of the purpose of natural language. The convenience of being able to talk to a computer normally, or to process large amounts of text data that wasn't intended to be read by the computer. And there is so much data to learn from written in natural language and there would be very little in the new language.
- jotm 13y agoComputers aren't stupid, they're only really good at math. And trying to understand human language using math is hard.
- enupten 13y agoTechically they are terrible at Math too. All they are good at is doing as they're told.
- Houshalter 13y agoTrying to understand human language using anything is hard. There isn't an alternative, non-math solution or we would be using it. Calling it math is a needless abstraction.
- dmunoz 13y ago> Amazon also had your entire purchasing history, and its servers could instantly compute recommendations you would be likely to accept. I wish. I have long been surprised at how poor Amazon recommendations are given that they have a large pool of actionable data: things I have actually purchased. What else could be a stronger signal? I have even informed them which purchases not to use as a basis for recommendations, or when recommendations they have made are not interesting (at least, those that are made from my page while signed in, no ability to do so with the emails they send). I preorder plenty of technical books, so Amazon could easily suck more money out of me if they kept me informed on up and coming books by authors I have purchased from, or in the specific area I purchase in. Instead, I seem to get weekly emails about the latest "popular" books in a very general area (e.g. programming).
- ca98am79 13y agoI had the exact opposite reaction - I was surprised at how accurate their recommendations were, at least for instant video.
- adwf 13y agoYeah, I have a long purchasing history of sci-fi novels. But then I buy a book about UX and another about value investing, suddenly my recommendations are all replaced by Warren Buffet and web design books... Sci-fi novels are an area where I need a large amount of discoverability to find new authors - recommendations are very useful. Not so much when I break my trend and buy a stock market textbook.
- slaman 13y agoDid you find a good book on UX? I'd be interested in the title!
- adwf 13y agoSure, it was Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug. Quite good, although just a basic short intro book on web usability. I'm generally hopeless at design, so it's given me quite a few ideas. Namely remove 80% of the wall of text on my site! I've also picked up The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman. Haven't got around to reading it yet as it's not about the web, more just everyday design and usability, but it came highly recommended.
- arocks 13y agoSurprising that the article doesn't talk about the modern day equivalent of Ask Jeeves: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=How+old+is+President+Clinton%3F http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=How+old+is+President+Cl...
- dchichkov 13y agoI'd like to place a bet, but unfortunately, there's no point in placing a bet stating that by a certain date AIs would beat median human intelligence by huge margins. It would be like placing a bet on a prediction of any other extinction event. Impossible to collect, even if the prediction is right. On the other hand, just for the fun of it, a couple of other predictions. Here: "true, human level AIs would not be developed until 8Tb RAM sticks would become a commodity". Another: "true, high fidelity, multi-censorial brain-computer interface will never be built".
- Houshalter 13y agoIt is possible to bet on the apocalypse, though it's not very practical: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ie/the_apocalypse_bet/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/ie/the_apocalypse_bet/
- keeperofdakeys 13y agoIt'll be interesting to see what happens with neural networks. Whether copying the brain is the "shortcut" to true AI, or in fact the only way to achieve it.
- jplur 13y agoWell written article. I wrote a long comment about my views, sat for a bit, re-read the article, then deleted my banter because it wasn't adding anything interesting, but I do want to say these themes have been on my mind lately and I appreciate seeing them discussed so well.
- kijin 13y agoAs an Aspie, I like the fact that my computer is "stupid". It understands my commands literally and executes them exactly the way I specified them, down to the last typo. It doesn't try to second-guess my intentions, read my body language, or do any of the thousand other things that neurotypical people do to drive me crazy. After a full, stressful day of interacting with people, interacting with the "stupid" Terminal is a breath of fresh air. I'm sure a lot of other autistic people like computers for the same reason. If my computer ever began to interpret my words and actions like an actual specimen of homo sapiens does, I'd probably throw it on the ground and destroy it with a jackhammer. When I buy an Intel processor, it's because I want it to crunch numbers for me, not because I want a clone of that thing in the movie "Her".
- colund 13y agoMy smart far-away and very old relative once said during the dot com boom: "computers are just tools, nothing else, people seem to see something magical in computers that is just not there". She was a very clever old lady. Still I love their logical magic and hope computers will never cease to amaze me.