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Why Watson and Siri Are Not Real AI
- lsnape 13y agosee also http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man-who-would-teach-machines-to-think/309529/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man-...
- tlarkworthy 13y agoOne hypothesis is real ai will be achieved by simulating biological brains, bottom up AI, instead of designing intelligent algorithms top down
- catshirt 13y agois there any more viable hypothesis? the brain is just a configuration of matter. seems like recreating this configuration is inevitable? and isn't it a safe assumption that if it's configured the same way it will behave the same way? once we can understand the system we can synthesize it in software. AI in the mean time, seems like a guessing game.
- arethuza 13y agoPersonally, having worked on AI research in the late 80s and early 90s I don't observe a lot of progress in replicating general intelligence. Of course, there has been a huge amount of progress in special purpose systems leveraging the huge amount of computing power we have now - but the fundamentals of general intelligence look as puzzling now as they did 20 years ago. I don't believe that we really have the right algorithms and it's simply a matter of scaling up the underlying hardware. I think the most likely way to achieve a "real" general intelligence will be by reverse engineering how functioning brains and minds work. At least is an area where continual, albeit rather slow, progress is being made - eventually we will know how the mind works (assuming that there isn't anything fundamentally weird going on - which seems unlikely). Once we understand how minds actually work I suspect there should be a good chance that we can upgrade/optimize these structures - either by architectural improvements or by throwing more resources at the areas that constrain current performance in biological brains. At that point things really could get rather exciting - but I don't expect this to happen in my lifetime (I'm in my 40s).
- catshirt 13y agothanks! i have no background in AI but this just makes sense to me. this is why blue brain project [0] etc are exciting. so far there is less tangible output than traditional AI research, but it seems to be the only front focusing on true "intelligence". [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Brain_Project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Brain_Project edit: i admit i didn't read the article before replying here. my thoughts were already better articulated; "They're not studying the mind and they're not trying to find out the principles of intelligence, so research may not be the right word for what drives people in the field that today is called artificial intelligence. They're doing product development."
- arethuza 13y agoI had no idea there was an EU "Human Brain Project": https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/ https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/ That looks rather cool!
- twobits 13y ago"but I don't expect this to happen in my lifetime (I'm in my 40s)." Why not? What fundamental things you think are lacking? I think we'll have ai in 10-20 years.
- chegra 13y agoThat is like trying to create a bird instead of understanding the principle of flight. By understanding the principle of intelligence we can do better than our current level intelligence. One contender for understanding this principle is AIXI: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=V6umr1OP8uo#t=1091 http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=V6u....
- mehwoot 13y agoWell if we spent 60 years failing to fly we probably would be looking at recreating what a bird does pretty closely.
- sgk284 13y agoWe may not need to replicate the mind. We've built planes that fly, yet don't flap like birds, and submarines that swim, yet don't have fins. I suspect whatever ultimately ends up being true general purpose useful AI may not look anything like a human brain, but achieve a similar and useful end result (much like planes and birds fly using very different mechanics, each having pros/cons and each being valuable).
- bnegreve 13y ago> Well, artificial intelligence is a slippery term. It could refer to just getting machines to do things that seem intelligent on the surface. But is "natural intelligence" any different?
- simonh 13y agoYes, because it is general purpose intelligence. Google Translate can't even play the simplest of games, let alone Chess or Jeopardy. Watson can't even begin to tackle translation or Chess. Deep Blue has absolutely no capability towards translation or playing Jeopardy. They are fixed-function, single-task algorithms optimized towards a single very tightly defined problem domain. That sort of research isn't going to get us to general purpose AI.
- stdbrouw 13y agoIsn't the brain itself a good mix of general-purpose and special-purpose intelligence?
- arethuza 13y agoThat sounds like Minsky's "Society of Mind": http://web.media.mit.edu/~push/ExaminingSOM.html http://web.media.mit.edu/~push/ExaminingSOM.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind
- icot 13y agoThis. And also, is it truly a general purpose intelligence, or a special-purpose one which evolved into general by just extending the domain of application? I'd say that most of what is considered intelligence comes from pattern matching plus inference; and there is a number of 'illusions' and cognitive biases that trick the mind because one of these processes fails. This may for example by finding patterns where there is none, which is quite normal.
- ivanca 13y agoCats cannot play the simplest of games; does that mean that they do not have general purpose intelligence? And I do think this research is going to take us there; what is winning a game more than translating your enemy actions into yours? Like translating a face gesture on a poker game (or translating a word) into a action such as doubling inside the game (or a http response).
- simonh 13y agoThis is why I am so skeptical of the claims of people like Ray Kurzweil. I honestly don't think we yet have even an outline of an idea of how a true artificial mind might be architected, let alone implemented. If we can't even design something, even in outline, how can we possibly predict how long it might take to build it?
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- logicallee 13y agoSkeptical or not, we've already sequenced a complete blueprint for it that is running on billions of copies of firmware in the wild. True, we can't even emulate the firmware ourselves. But we know it's possible and literally have a copy of the code that builds it. We just have to figure out how to emulate it. That puts a hard upper limit on how long all this can take. (It can't be "forever" since there is no requirement for the emulation to happen in real-time.) As far as processing speedups, meanwhile, we don't even have 3D chips yet, just a single layer of silicon. Recent innovation: http://www.kurzweilai.net/first-true-3d-microchip-created-cambridge-scientists http://www.kurzweilai.net/first-true-3d-microchip-created-ca... Given that a human brain is like 3 pounds of goo, and we have the genetic code that builds it, the rest is just biological reverse engineering + code refactoring of a binary blob without comments. I am not saying this process is easy, but the idea that we can't make some solid predictions is fairly weak. We already do genetic engineering. I wouldn't place much money on a true artificial mind still not existing in 40 years.
- DanBC 13y ago> I wouldn't place much money on a true artificial mind still not existing in 40 years. We said that in the 50s, and every decade since then. While we understand a lot more about the brain there are still gaps in knowledge and ability to scan a working brain. It may turn out to be a system with sensitive dependance on initial conditions. There are about 85 billion neurons in a human brain. (In transistors that's only about 45 or so Intel's 10-core Xeon Westmere-EX.) that number is a relatively new refinement of the old 100bn number. Not finding out how many neurons we have until the 21st centuary makes me think that there is enty of work left. We don't even know why Golgi Stains miss neurons.
- tiatia 13y agoTwo AI Pioneers. Two Bizarre Suicides. What Really Happened? http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-02/ff_aimystery http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-02/ff_aimyst... BTW, I wonder how much AI is based on "facts". I someone tells me, he slept bad last night, then there are so many assumptions I make subconscious. I assume he lives in a House/Apartment, he slept in a bed, he slept on the bed, on a mattress, the mattress is on the bed and not the bed on the mattress, he sleeps on it based on gravity etc. etc. etc. To make meaning out of sentences you have to know a lot. Your first years in live may be nothing but acquiring this knowledge.
- icebraining 13y agoThat idea has been kicking in the AI community for a long time. One of the biggest projects for encoding every day knowledge in a machine readable way is Cyc: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc
- richardwhiuk 13y agoAI is repeatedly redefined to exclude things that we can do, that were previously considered AI. Examples include image and character recognition, speech recognition, machine translation. Each time we say 'oh well that's not actually the machine thinking it's just doing a search of a database / applying statistics / guessing' so it's not AI. Except we don't really know what it would mean for a machine to think, or understand text.
- panacea 13y agoAnd the domain of things we can empirically do better in the discrete task realm keeps diminishing ie. 'design', unsolvable capchas. If we keep throwing morsels of cognitive capability to the machine, we're left wondering why the fuck we couldn't predict and develop Flappy Birds as a killer start-up.
- cubancigar11 13y agoThis is where I find X-Men to be an awesome concept. What we are chasing in AI right now is Magneto (the might), but every time we reach there, we compare ourselves with Prof. X (the intellect). I actually like this direction. Intellect is about predicting problems, and might is about solving them. It is better for humanity to stay on the intellectual side and let machines handle the hard work. Imagine a choice between AI propelled super efficient kill-bots vs. Skynet, if you will.
- glomph 13y agoI think Douglas Hofstadter has kept his idea of what AI is more constant than most folks.
- Zenst 13y agoMe personaly, I define AI as a system that can be fed non-biased input and learn from that input to derive conclusions that we as humans can relate too. So feeding a system lots of cat pictures (ie biased-input) to teach it what a cat is for me is not AI. But a system which you feed in lots of random pictures and it learns by itself what a cat is, that would be AI, least for me. What will be really interesting is a system which you can feed in all the childrens section and see what comes out at the end, would be most insightful into how we teach children and what we teach them. So a completely different area of AI use from that alone - learning how to learn better.
- mathattack 13y agoI might say though, that 30 to 40 years ago, when the field was really young, artificial intelligence wasn't about making money, and the people in the field weren't driven by developing products. It was about understanding how the mind works and trying to get computers to do things that the mind can do. The mind is very fluid and flexible, so how do you get a rigid machine to do very fluid things? That's a beautiful paradox and very exciting, philosophically. Unfortunately all these well intentioned AI professors built nothing and the field devolved into LISP hacking. Now our choice is "accurate model" or "useful expert system". At the time it bothered me that we couldn't do both. Now I realize that it's ok for the model to be imperfect if the results are useful. The general thread also convinces me that Skynet type AI is still far off.
- aaron695 13y agoNormal FUD. It's doesn't answer the fundamental point everyone brings up about how we just keep refine what AI is, the interview just avoids it with fluff. Who says Watson doesn't understand? Why can't it have some sort of conciseness albeit at a very very low level. Do we really need the singularity to happen for true AI.
- qbrass 13y agoIf you ask Ken Jennings what his favorite song is, he'll probably tell you, or he'll say that he doesn't have a favorite. If you ask Watson the same question, it will probably give you a reference to someone being asked that question in a magazine.
- TheCoelacanth 13y agoThis is completely moving the goalposts. Of course Watson and Siri are AI. They aren't strong AI, but they are definitely AI.
- axilmar 13y agoThe way intelligence works, in my opinion, is this: 1) experiences are stored in the brain. Experiences contain inputs from the 5 senses as well as the sense of danger/satisfaction at that point. 2) at each given moment, the brain takes the current input and matches it against the stored experiences. If there is a match (up to a threshold), then the sense of danger/satisfaction is recalled. Thus the entity is able to 'predict', up to a specific point, if the outcome of the current situation is bad or good for it, and react accordingly. The key thing to the above is that the whole process is fused together: the steps for adding new experiences, matching new experiences and recalling reactions is fused together in big pile of neurons.
- KaoruAoiShiho 13y agoSurprised at the traction that this interview is gaining. This isn't all that different from the amatuer blog post from a few days ago saying the same thing where everyone educated the poster on the subject of modern AI development. Almost all the comments from that thread can be applied to here. People with this point of view suffer from a fundamental misunderstanding of what natural intelligence is in my opinion.