21 ms·

AI

616 points by rdl 13y ago

elwell 13y ago
10 points in 10 minutes. If multiple accounts weren't used, that must be a ready-worthy article.
- the_watcher 13y ago
  Also, by Sam Altman. Assuming several people saw it in their RSS readers and submitted it after reading.
- Zikes 13y ago
  (samaltman.com) Most likely assumed read-worthy based on the author.
  - elwell 13y ago
    Fair enough, but is the author's name alone sufficient? Surely the article wasn't fully read by every upvoter.
    - Zikes 13y ago
      I think there are people whose writings are of generally high enough quality or sufficiently provocative or informative enough that nearly anything they decide to publish would be worth reading.
- napoleond 13y ago
  As others have pointed out, the domain probably earned some points all by itself (and multiple submissions, which act as additional votes on the primary submission). It was also posted by a (popular) YC alum, which typically also accelerates upvotes.
  - elwell 13y ago
    > and multiple submissions, which act as additional votes on the primary submission Didn't know that; thanks for pointing out.
imranq 13y ago
how does this guy consistently write mini-Paul Graham essays?
- mappum 13y ago
  Because he basically is mini-Paul Graham.
  - gailees 13y ago
    I think everyone is wondering this haha
  - Buttons840 13y ago
    Really? The essay "Andrew Ng thinks there's one algorithm underlying all intelligence. Also, I hope we get conscious computers." is a mini Paul Graham essay? No PG essay is so lacking in content or original ideas. Conscious computers? Who hasn't thought of conscious computers? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intelligence#The_optimism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intellige...
TempleOSV2 13y ago
Information shamefulness baby stay sharp shadows calm taxes lusts tendernesses READ clearness feedest loving
yogo 13y ago
Interesting post. The way I look at it is from the perspective of a human baby. How do they become intelligent? They have the "sensors" to detect features and will be able to recognize their parents. A lot of things are then learned, like touching a hot stove and from getting a formal education. For a machine to be artificially intelligent it would have to learn from its environment but also take formal instruction. That seems like a lot of ground to cover and this is what makes it unrealistic (for now). You can have a machine read every book in existence but how long will it take for it to understand in the same way a human reading a lot of books would need to understand it somehow.
- yogo 13y ago
  Not sure what set off the down votes but we can teach a computer to recognize characters for application in OCR. We also learned those characters from being taught in school and reading bad handwriting. We teach computers the same way. How are they supposed to magically recognize them especially since they didn't invent whatever language it is? Note that I'm referring to artificial general intelligence[0]. 0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence
  - beat 13y ago
    This was back in the 1990s, but I worked in what was basically a data entry company, where the processing was a mixture of scanned forms (Scantron style) and human key entry. The project I was on was image scanning the forms for other purposes, so we had a neural net handwriting recognition system that we were comparing to human key entry at a large scale - millions of documents. What we found was that human key entry significantly outperformed the neural nets, even when the data was carefully handwritten in constrained boxes. Humans were so far ahead of the heavily trained neural nets that the software was basically unusable at that point. Of course, that was nearly 20 years ago, and things have probably moved on quite a bit. But you can still see the basic problem in Captcha-style validation on web pages. Computers just can't be trained to recognize distorted text that humans can read pretty easily.
    - 13y ago
elwell 13y ago
Critically speaking, this article doesn't add anything. I don't know why I read it. Can anyone explain why they upvoted?
- Zikes 13y ago
  It's certainly not something to be published in a scientific journal, but it's a nice subject to bring up and spark discussion on now and then.
- elwell 13y ago
  Maybe the second sentence is being taken as a prophecy.
- tylermauthe 13y ago
  It's nice to hear smart people talk about important topics in a down-to-earth fashion. This is why I upvoted.
  - membrain 13y ago
    smart - nope. pretentious guesswork and attention whoring is what is going on here
    - tylermauthe 13y ago
      There are many types of smart, good sir.
- mappum 13y ago
  What it adds is the simple point, "be optimistic about strong AI in the near future".
  - Buttons840 13y ago
    So an article that lacks all substance besides "be optimistic about AI" is front page material on HN?
mappum 13y ago
I believe human-level general intelligence (and beyond) is already inevitable, even if we don't make significant developments in "solving" intelligence. Projects that are already developing stuff like this (e.g. IBM Blue Brain) are just copying the human brain as closely as possible. Of course, this isn't as efficient as it could be (they simulate it all at the molecular level, so you can only get 1 neuron per CPU). However, as Moore's Law progresses, even if we don't make the software more efficient, we will eventually be able to create a fully functional simulation. But if you look at the history of technology, things we create aren't usually exactly based on models seen in nature. Airplanes aren't exactly like birds. I believe we will find a more "man made" model for general intelligence (maybe not even a neuronal model) that works much more efficiently with the hardware we have available. Going back to the airplane analogy, we already have the people who strap wooden wings to their arms and jump off buildings (like Blue Brain), but we are looking for the first Wright brothers design.
- elwell 13y ago
  > things aren't usually exactly based on models seen in nature I prefer to view everything as nature and natural.
  - mappum 13y ago
    More specifically, I mean systems designed by biological evolution vs. systems designed by human thought.
- elwell 13y ago
  Partially relevant link to resource helping engineers think in terms of biomimicry: http://www.asknature.org/ http://www.asknature.org/
- napoleond 13y ago
  I think that airplane analogy is really important for innovation in general. A lot of the activity often ascribed to progress really just amounts to someone building a lighter set of wings for the guy getting ready to jump off a building. (The counterargument, of course, being that that is progress--even if the lighter construction isn't too helpful in the current design it would be later on--but it's not the "macro" progress it's so often billed as.) Anyway, it's just interesting to be reminded that context is important. Being able to distinguish between insanity and genius seems like it would be a super-power.
byehnbye 13y ago
Goodbye HN!
- elwell 13y ago
  ?
  - kordless 13y ago
    If you had AI, you wouldn't need a community like Hacker news, or something along those lines.
temuze 13y ago
> "the part of your brain that processes input from your ears is also capable of learning to process input from your eyes. If we can just figure out this one general-purpose algorithm, programs may be able to learn general-purpose things." This is the Holy Grail of CS. I believe we're closer than most people would expect and I think it's going to be a race to the finish line.
- maaku 13y ago
  For perception, maybe. The neocortex (hint: where we do everything we consider "thinking") operates on entirely different principles and is not interchangeable with perception.
- dharma1 13y ago
  was reading an interview with Demis Hassabis, thefounder of Deep Mind (acquired by google for £400m) - he didn't seem to think there is a single general purpose algo to get us there
ygmelnikova 13y ago
Explain to me how a brain can evolve, and yet not understand how itself functions?
- elwell 13y ago
  Why should it?
  - ygmelnikova 13y ago
    Because it thinks. It takes in information and performs an analysis on that data. Surely over the time it would take to evolve, my brain thinks that it should understand that more than anything? It understands how every other organ works in explicit detail at the the molecular level. The only thing my brain can imagine, is that my consciousness is disconnected somewhat from my brain. It's as though my consciousness is inside a machine that it barely understands the workings thereof. Like a dog riding in a car.
    - catshirt 13y ago
      just because you're processing things doesn't mean you're processing what's required to understand conscious/intelligence.
    - PeterisP 13y ago
      1) Individual brains don't evolve, evolution happens to the gene blueprint by which embryos make brains, and it is fixed before the new brain has had a single thought; 2) Your brain definitely doesn't understand how every other organ works in explicit detail; controlling organs only requires being part of a good enough feedback loop to have the organ mostly function; your brain understands your heart "at the molecular level" about as much fruitflies do.
- adammil 13y ago
  Humans evolved for a long time before we understood anything about how our bodies work, so why would a brain have to understand itself to evolve?
- 13y ago
dicroce 13y ago
One thing that crosses my mind whenever I imagine creating a human level intelligence is that it takes humans YEARS of constant stimulation to begin to exhibit intelligent behavior... Sometimes I wonder if we'll have the algorithm may before we realize it...
- BlackDeath3 13y ago
  Good point. How do you know if something works before you've put in the time to use it?
- TophWells 13y ago
  Probably. I doubt it's possible to look at a piece of code and evaluate whether it's worth feeding it the equivalent of ten years of basic education. If we ever write a program that exhibits "creativity, or desire, or whatever you want to call it" on a basic level after however many months the researcher can afford to run it for, then it'll suddenly get a lot of funding and time and potential for growth. For all we know, we already have the Algorithm and all we need to do is run it for years on the best computer available "just to see what happens".
- diminoten 13y ago
  We can stimulate a computer with the equivalent amount of information in much less time than years, though.
  - marcosdumay 13y ago
    We probably can't. Unless it's an extremely fast algorithm, we don't have the processing power to make it run faster than our brain. We'll can in a couple of decades, probably. But not now.
    - TeMPOraL 13y ago
      Brain seems to be slow (I read it was measured to run at 200Hz tops), but it's extremely parallelized and caches the livjng shit out of everything.
namenotrequired 13y ago
...and then we'll just need to figure out how to make humans more creative.
rdl 13y ago
I wonder what other credible contenders for "most overlooked technology" are. I think "physical tamper evidence/tamper response" is one, along with hardware security functionality (crazy secure virtualization extensions, etc.) -- essentially competing with Intel not just on power but also on security features. Although Intel is leading in this area with TXT and now SGX.
forrestthewoods 13y ago
There are many classes of problems in computer science and AI falls into one of my favorites. If today the world had a machine with infinite CPU power and infinite RAM we still wouldn't have a good AI. We just don't have the knowledge to utilize such resources to write an AI that could, for exampe, play League of Legends or Starcraft at a level beyond professional gamers. And it certainly couldn't write a best selling novel. It could solve an arbitrarily large traveling salesman problem but it couldn't do those other things. I think that's kind of awesome. I'm not saying it can't be done. Assuming we humans don't kill ourselves I think someday it will. But it's a long, long ways off.
- codeulike 13y ago
  If you had a machine with infinite CPU power and infinite RAM you could _evolve_ an AI. Greg Egan wrote a great story about that: http://ttapress.com/553/crystal-nights-by-greg-egan/ http://ttapress.com/553/crystal-nights-by-greg-egan/ Someone tries it, with mixed results.
  - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
    Ah, but we weren't given infinite time also, so you might be able to evolve an AI, but it might take many millions of years (like it did with real life).
    - Houshalter 13y ago
      He said infinite CPU power which implies infinite number of iterations. In real life it would probably take a lot more than millions of years (because computers are too slow to simulate populations of millions of minds.)
      - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
        Does infinite energy (as infinite CPU cycles) really translate into immediate time? My physics isn't great, but I thought energy was related to mass, while entropy was related to time.
varelse 13y ago
I think one of the next hot emerging careers will be connecting and interfacing traditional computational algorithms for the bits that are clearly orders of magnitude more efficient than using a multi-layer neural network to do them into neural networks, SVMs, and/or whatever comes next that figure out how to allocate such work from raw data feeds.
catshirt 13y ago
"But how do we make a computer program that decides what it wants to do? How do we make a computer decide to care on its own about learning to drive a car? Or write a novel?" if intelligence is solved by reverse engineering the brain at a molecular level surely consciousness and creativity are? "And maybe we don't want to build machines that are concious in this sense." if the physical composition of the brain defines intelligence and conscience, i'm not sure you'll be able to pick and choose. i am all for artificial conscious though. yolo.
skywhopper 13y ago
"But how do we make a computer program that decides what it wants to do? How do we make a computer decide to care on its own about learning to drive a car? Or write a novel?" Perhaps it'd be better to ask: why would we want a computer to do these things? I certainly do not want to live in a world where computers have their own motivations and desires and the ability to act on the same. Actually, I can put that more strongly: none of us will live very long in a world where computers have their own motivations, desires, and the ability to act on the same.
- catshirt 13y ago
  you seem pretty convinced living computers would kill us all. this seems like a pretty big assumption to me?
  - Dewie 13y ago
    It's the same thing with aliens. The "evil, technologically superior alien race" is a big trope in science fiction, just as the "super-intelligent and malevolent" (as opposed to the super-intelligent and benevolent/indifferent) is in science fiction, and maybe even with futurists.
    - marvin 13y ago
      "Indifferent" can be pretty bad. You are indifferent to the existence of grass whenever you mow your lawn, for instance. Or even to the fate of the cow when you have a steak dinner.
  - Houshalter 13y ago
    Because you are made of atoms that can more efficiently be used for something else. Morality (and all human values) is a purely human concept that evolved in the specific conditions of human evolution (and even just our specific culture.) AIs are not anthropomorphic, they don't have to have anything like human minds or values.
    - 13y ago
seanalltogether 13y ago
How do we develop intelligent systems when we don't know how to measure intelligence?
- Houshalter 13y ago
  Who says we don't know how to measure intelligence? The simplest way would be just to select a problem that requires intelligence and measure how good it does at that problem.
  - rectangletangle 13y ago
    But what is a problem that specifically requires intelligence to solve? How do we know we're measuring intelligence, and not the programs aptitude for the particular problem?
    - Houshalter 13y ago
      Why does it matter? If if solves the problem then it's as good as if it was fully intelligent. Who cares what goes on inside the black box? If you worried about it overfitting to a specific problem, give it lots of problems and weight the solutions by complexity. So you heavily favor simple algorithms that can learn to solve a large class of problems, over ones that are more adapted for those specific problems.
      - benched 13y ago
        All I'm learning from this thread is that some people see infinite regression where others see tautology. edit: what I mean: Person 1: "What if we're just measuring the color of the sky? What if we're just measuring blueness? What if we're just measuring a wavelength of light? ... ..." Person 2: "The sky looks blue."
        Houshalter 13y ago
        What do you mean?
yconst 13y ago
Dear HN users: If you are even minimally interested in the topics that this post "covers", please, do yourselves a favour and open up any book about machine intelligence instead of reading such uninformed and negligent posts. I urge you to, seriously.
- membrain 13y ago
  wow, I have to go all the way down to find the first person serious about the topic. That's why I love my academic surroundings, all the fantasizing video game fanboys are sorted out in the beginning and what's left are serious researchers really devoted to solving the riddles intelligence imposes..
edanm 13y ago
If anyone is interested in AI, I highly recommend joining Less Wrong, a community started by AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky. He started the community to convince people to focus on the "friendly AI problem". [1] I actually recommend that everyone read LW, but especially if you're interested in AI. [1] In a nutshell, the friendly AI problem is: assume we create an AI. It may rapidly become more intelligent than us, if we program it right. As soon as it becomes significanlty more intelligent, we will no longer be the most intelligent beings around, so the AI's goals will matter more than ours. Therefore, we should really give it good goals that are compatible with what we want to happen. And since no one right now knows how to define "what humans want" good enough for writing it in code, then we'd better figure THAT out before building AI.
- timClicks 13y ago
  Any suggestions for getting started in the LW community? Its barrier to entry means I can't seem to vote on anything, etc. It's quite intimidating really.
  - Houshalter 13y ago
    Read or at least skim through the sequences (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences). If you are just there for the AI stuff the Hanson-Yudkowsky AI-Foom Debate has a lot of good posts: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/The_Hanson-Yudkowsky_AI-Foom_Debate http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/The_Hanson-Yudkowsky_AI-Foom_...
  - benched 13y ago
    The sequences are well worth a read. They're kind of like an overview of modern philosophy in very plain language, very little jargon. Then, just participate in the comments and discussion forum as you feel. It takes very little time to collect enough karma to do whatever.
  - arjunnarayan 13y ago
    read hpmor.com. It may not be the optimal way, but it is the funnest way.
byehnbye 13y ago
I don't understand the logic behind these types of posts that add no value to the poster and the people discussing it in comments. Is it a signaling mechanism to attract people working in this area? I'm sure you have already turned them off by showing your naivete. So no value to you. To people trying to discuss this by racking their brains and looking for new ideas, Any one with a quint decent thought/idea will never share it here to enlighten us laymen. So no value to us too. So, what's the point HN, and why all the upvotes?
- feralmoan 13y ago
  > So, what's the point HN, and why all the upvotes? I guess SV types get a little hot for AI based utopian/dystopian succession when they're the only ones who could possibly gain from such an outcome.
dblacc 13y ago
AI was also the subject Gates pointed to when asked a similar question on the AMA thread the other week on Reddit, I believe.
kordless 13y ago
I'm just going to stick this out there because I'm a futurist and it's my role to share with others what I'm thinking about. What I share may be flat out wrong, scary, half assed, or appear to be crazy. So be it. We've advanced a lot in the last 100 years. We're starting to see a bigger picture forming with the advent of compute and networking capabilities. Combining simple elements of these basics give rise to surprising and interesting behaviors. See "Twitch Plays Pokemon": http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57619058-93/twitch-plays-pokemon-is-now-a-fight-for-the-soul-of-the-internet/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57619058-93/twitch-plays-po... as an example of suprising behavior. The more we look in detail at the universe around us, the more puzzling it gets. Prime numbers spirals are unexplained. The two slit experiments results indicate the observer plays a part in collapsing a particle's probability wave. The effects of dark matter could be a result of parallel universes. You couldn't make up weirder shit if you tried. It's not a huge leap of logic to assume some parts of our brain operate at a quantum level. Given that first statement comes to a truthful fruition, I don't think it would be entirely unreasonable to assume AI will do so as well. Given computers already use some quantum properties, it's also reasonable to expect advancement in AI lies in this direction. When they announced Google was getting a D-Wave computer, I got really interested. Granted, they know beans about how it works (and whether or not it actually works at all) but it's still crazy interesting to consider. As I said, I could be wrong or crazy. Or both.
- carlob 13y ago
  > It's not a huge leap of logic to assume some parts of our brain operate at a quantum level. To the best of our knowledge it is still a pretty large leap of logic.
  - kordless 13y ago
    It's definitely a leap, but there's a decent amount of information (not proof however) on the subject laying around. We still don't understand how the brain brings about consciousness. I guess I should say it's not a huge leap to assume it has something to do with other things we also don't understand. Given quantum effect and number theory still elude us in areas, it's a decent approach to assume they might be related. I've debugged problems in my code that, at first glance, appear to be unrelated to each other. Given something is slightly off in one area isn't a proof something of in another area is related, but it's a good place to start looking.
bovermyer 13y ago
I think going about it from a complex algorithm point of view is the wrong approach. We should, instead, be concentrating our efforts on two things - sensing, and reacting. The predictability of the reaction doesn't matter; all that matters is that the machine reacts. Everything else will need to depend on evolutionary processes, which requires a third criterion - changing reaction based on prior data. If the previous reaction did not lead to a negative result ("negative" meaning detrimental to one or more arbitrary values), then the reaction can continue to the same stimulus. If the previous reaction, however, elicited a strong positive result, then the reaction should be encouraged. Similarly, if it triggered a strong negative response, it should be avoided. To a degree, you could do this without any kind of "operating system," just by using sensory data as inputs in a complex circuit. At least, that's how I would approach it. I know nothing about A.I. research.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
dinkumthinkum 13y ago
I hate to get "meta" but it doesn't seem frontage worthy, it's just a musing about AI.
davidrangel 13y ago
From a pure layman's perspective: if you believe in evolution, then what separates us from a reptile (as mentioned in the post) is almost certainly something we can figure out and replicate. There is nothing "special" there. So if you believe computers today already have the "intelligence" of a reptile, or a toddler (i.e., ability to play pong), or something along those lines, it's only a matter of time before a computer has the intelligence of a full-blown adult human (and soon thereafter much more). Our level of intelligence/awareness seems magical only because we haven't fully understood it yet. That will change.
- dinkumthinkum 13y ago
  No I don't think "belief" in evolution implies that at all. That's a big jump.
  - davidrangel 13y ago
    Why is that a big jump? I'm not saying it will be easy or quick. It does imply that getting from a reptile-level intelligence to a human-level intelligence was a natural process and something that can be reverse engineered.
- onnoonno 13y ago
  I think we should figure out what we mean by understand. Do you mean modeling 'the human brain' on some level and building abstractions? Those abstractions are exactly that - abstractions. They are not the thing itself. Do you think we can understand everything through abstractions, even the process of understanding itself?
jcfrei 13y ago
> I am quite confident that we’ll be able to make computer programs that perform specific complex tasks very well. But how do we make a computer program that decides what it wants to do? Are we so sure that "we" really are in charge of what we want to do? I believe a lot of our desires and ambitions are hardcoded into our brains and we just project them onto present goals, like getting a promotion or learning how to play the piano, etc. ultimately all these desires cater to the same few desires we always had and were born with: developing a sense of social belonging and intimacy. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belongingness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belongingness
- idProQuo 13y ago
  This is why the desire for Strong AI boggles my mind. In order for a computer to operate at a "human" level, it would need to make decisions based on things like ambition and fear and greed. It will also have to constantly make mistakes, just like we do. If it didn't have character flaws, it wouldn't be operating at a "human" level. But if it does have these character flaws, how useful would it really be compared to a real human? Is the quest for Strong AI just a Frankensteinian desire to create artificial life? I'm curious if there are any good papers looking into stuff like this.
  - onnoonno 13y ago
    Yeah. And what if the computer discovers that desire is pointless? Will it have a religion? Buddhism? Zen Buddhism? Why does quantum computing even exist if all forms of computing are equivalent?
  - tim333 13y ago
    Presumably the AI in the Google cars must have something like a fear of crashing or hitting a pedestrian even if its just something like score that the algorithms calculate.
kevinalexbrown 13y ago
If the only goal is an 'artificial' consciousness, it might be more prudent to consider a functional definition of what consciousness is and try to build that. We didn't make computers by modeling how individual neurons perform mathematical calculations. On the other hand, if you want to go the biological route, there's some awesome work to be done. If I were to study consciousness, here's the question I would ask: how do we separate our selves from our surroundings? Patients with brain-machine interfaces (like moving a mouse cursor) start by thinking about moving their arms around. Then they apparently report that they gradually just feel that the interface is another body part. So if it's set up to change the TV channel, they just imagine that they have a channel-changing organ. So maybe you want to build a system that can identify what is a part of itself versus what is not, and it's not just a fixed list. So what does that data structure look like? How is it defined, queried, and updated? Defined by what you can 'influence?' So gradated based on my influence? These aren't just broad philosophical questions, they're more specific and actionable. That's just one possible angle, but it's different than, say, machine learning paradigms where you want to build a machine that can do pattern classification (which the brain undoubtedly does). There are probably other routes as well.
- andreasvc 13y ago
  While this is an intriguing phenomenon, I do not think it is something deep. It sounds similar to how consciousness or a concept of self is sometimes identified as the ability to recognize a dot on ones body in a mirror (a few animals pass this task). Even though that is literally about ones reflection, I think it has little to do with the philosophical and abstract kind of reflection that is made possible by consciousness.
- debt 13y ago
  We know a ton about the brain but so little about the mind itself. We still don't have definitive answers to what consciousness is, why it's here, what's useful for, etc. Some people debate whether the mind exists at all. Also, there's still very little understanding of the difference between the conscious and unconscious mind. I think building an artificial consciousness is going too far. Artificial intelligence is simpler; it's just fake intelligence. Seems easy enough right? If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it's intelligent. We don't need to make it "conscious" necessarily, again whatever that means, in order for it be intelligent. I feel like we can build artificially intelligent software pretty "easily" relative to making it "conscious".
bohm 13y ago
I wrote about limitations on AI imposed by algorithmic complexity here: http://paulbohm.com/articles/artificial-intelligence-obstacles-information-theory/ http://paulbohm.com/articles/artificial-intelligence-obstacl... In essence: unless we extract that "single algorithm" that Andrew Ng believes in from an existing medium, we're unlikely to rediscover it independently. (read the papers i link to at the bottom of the article for a more rigorous explanation)
youlweb 13y ago
I'm a strong A.I hobbyist, and I just put up a website for my basic abstract algorithm: genudi. The website's implementation of the algo revolves around having a conversation with a computer. Currently in limited release, you can request a Pioneer account from there: http://www.genudi.com http://www.genudi.com
- youlweb 13y ago
  An example is worth a thousand words, take a look at this conversation with a strong AI machine: http://www.genudi.com/share/27/Dialog http://www.genudi.com/share/27/Dialog
feralmoan 13y ago
I dunno, the definition of intelligence is biased by our own ability to comprehend and therefore profoundly slim (even IQ can be gamed, and most people puke at emotional/lizard brain intelligence) so large chances "science" either under or overshoots its "stakeholder aware" analysis and doesn't know functional self preserving, iterative enhancement intellect when its looking it in the face. You know us monkeys, running around derping science with wacky wavy hands going 'Hai Dolphin What You do jump hoop!'. AI, rockin the casbah. Maybe one day!
jk4930 13y ago
"But artificial general intelligence might work, and if it does, it will be the biggest development in technology ever." I'd like to point interested readers to the AGI Conference series[1], the Open Cognition Project[2], and a mostly outdated (2009) but still useful list of everything AGI[3]. [1] http://agi-conf.org/ http://agi-conf.org/ [2] http://wiki.opencog.org/w/The_Open_Cognition_Project http://wiki.opencog.org/w/The_Open_Cognition_Project [3] http://linas.org/agi.html http://linas.org/agi.html
ekianjo 13y ago
> Something happened in the course of evolution to make the human brain different Not just the human brain, a great number of animals share the very same characteristics as the human brain we find ourselves closer and closer to them every single day as new researches on animal neurology and animal behavior get published. It would be very wrong to suggest that intelligence is only a human thing.
rdpfeffer 13y ago
Hierarchical Temporal Memory is the closest model to the brain that I've seen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_temporal_memory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_temporal_memory). They are capable of generalized learning and excel in the same way that humans do. They are capable of abstraction, self categorization, and online learning. There are elements of past AI models in the HTM model, however to reduce HTM's or any deep learning algorithm to a mere combination of past AI concepts overlooks the power of the right model when it is achieved. It would be like saying that Facebook is just a news feed. Sure, that's what gets most of the eyeballs, but there's a lot more there which would drastically reduce its value if not present. What I think is most interesting is that we may find that Humans learn pretty inefficiently from the perspective of the amount of input data required over time. This may seem silly at first, but when you consider how many neurons cover the surface area of our ears and eyes and then consider the fact that it takes anywhere from 12 to 14 months for a child to speak its first word, you might start to agree with this line of thought. Also, when I consider the fact that this processing all happens in parallel even further pushes me in this direction. Whatever the case may be, HTMs are definitely a cool area of research. For those who are interested, you should definitely check out more of Jeff Hawkins work at Numenta. They've been able to demonstrate some pretty novel things. He wrote a book back in 2006 that blew my mind. Went into deeper explanation about how HTMs could model everything from deep learning, to consciousness, creativity, and bunch of other things.
dschiptsov 13y ago
The problem of AI is that it has much more complexity than we used to think. Even best guys like Minsky have grossly underestimated the complexity, so they got stuck, and now are in a process of developing more subtle, refined theories. In some sense the story of modern AI is a story of how Minsky assigned to figure scene decomposition for robotic vision as a summer project, and now teaching Society of mind and calling for entirely different approach to what is intelligence. It is not, of course, some massively parallel recursive problem solver implemented in neurons, it is too naive view, so there is no use to search for one.) It is as complicated as actions of whole humanity with a billions of semiindependent agents.
hooande 13y ago
Many people see Artificial General Intelligence as a panacea. The idea is, "We'll create artificially intelligent scientists who will solve all of our other problems for us!". I think that future generations will look back on this as a modern version of alchemy. If blogs had existed centuries ago I'm sure that people would have called the transmutation of metal the most important trend of their time. This isn't to denigrate the author of this post or the people who have dedicated their lives to AGI research. It's just that this idea probably falls into the category of "If it seems too good to be true, it probably is". [1] We have no proof that artificial general intelligence can exist. We have numerous examples of specific intelligence: playing chess, driving cars, various forms of categorization. But we don't have a single example of an application that can handle a task that it hasn't been specifically trained and tested for. It's not to say that it isn't possible, but there is no more evidence for AGI than there is for Bigfoot, leprechauns or space aliens. The idea of artificial consciousness currently requires a leap of faith. The most important trend today is collecting massive amounts of data and using them to make accurate predictions. Instead of lusting after one all-singing all-dancing intelligent program we should focus on tackling one form of decision making at a time. Drive cars, land planes, predict the weather and calculate the best way to get from point A to point B. One day we'll wake up in a world where artificial intelligence is all around us and the idea of a one size fits all solution will seem silly and quaint. [1] In fairness, this was said about every amazing thing in modern life. You never know.
- kamaal 13y ago
  Firstly is there even a Artificial General Intelligence even in Humans? I know how to play chess, but I don't seem to be playing it as well as Gary Kasparov.
  - edanm 13y ago
    Usually, people define Intelligence to be "that thing humans have". We can recognise it in ourselves and other humans, realise it doesn't exist in animals, but there is no really good definition of what that means. But that doesn't mean anything. Creating something artificial that has whatever it is that we have is the goal.
erik14th 13y ago
Humans have a drive, a raison d'etre, intelligence being only a mean to fulfill that drive. Thing is that drive is uncertain/subjective. Learning can't be an objective by itself, intelligence is just a tool, from that perspective you can say there are already AI, like targeted ads, it learns about you and acts accordingly. So to have a "generalist" AI, like human's intelligence is general, you'd have to have an objective like staying alive and build up from that.
- psionski 13y ago
  No, it's not. Drive is the desire to maximise future available options (e.g. to not get trapped). There is already software that decides what to do without a human telling it what to do. For more see http://www.ted.com/talks/alex_wissner_gross_a_new_equation_for_intelligence.html http://www.ted.com/talks/alex_wissner_gross_a_new_equation_f...
henrygrew 13y ago
"Something happened in the course of evolution to make the human brain different from the reptile brain, which is closer to a computer that plays pong." - i beg to differ on this statement, clearly the complexity and sheer magnificence of the human brain did not come about by mere chance, if this was so it would have been easy to replicate this.This is proof of an intelligent creator.
neverminder 13y ago
In my opinion true AI must have reasoning skills and be self aware. This brings the disturbing truth: either we never get it to work or we will get it to work and it will destroy us.
Ygg2 13y ago
Wait, wasn't creativity part solved? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_creativity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_creativity (I'm refering to Stephen L. Thaler's work) I mean you need two neural nets. One that adds chaos to another neural net and a second one that returns the result. You could probably optimize by somehow making those parts parallel.
khafra 13y ago
> artificial consciousness, or creativity, or desire, or whatever you want to call it. I am quite confident that we’ll be able to make computer programs that perform specific complex tasks very well. But how do we make a computer program that decides what it wants to do? How do we make a computer decide to care on its own about learning to drive a car? Or write a novel? I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. We cannot decide what we want to do--we can only decide how best to fulfill our wants; a person learns to drive a car because we want the freedom, social approval, and other stuff that comes with that. Natural selection gave us our base-level desires, that all other desires spring from; and it was able to do that because it's an optimization process. A functional AI's desires will come from some sort of optimization process; the only question is what that process will be optimizing.
etanazir 13y ago
D-Wave AI - maybe; diophantine AI - lol.
wildermuthn 13y ago
Are we building AI equivalents of the philosophical zombie? http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie If P-Zombies are an impossibility, then so too true AI that dismisses the need for consciousness, or begs the question by assuming that consciousness will emerge from intelligence. It may be that intelligence, true human intelligence, emerges from consciousness.
ratsimihah 13y ago
Building AGI in Common Lisp if anyone wants to help.
- jk4930 13y ago
  Do you have your own approach to AGI or are you implementing another concept?
  - ratsimihah 13y ago
    I have my own approach.
vonnik 13y ago
Computers are actually pretty good at being creative already. That's not the hardest problem to solve... http://www.psmag.com/navigation/nature-and-technology/rise-robot-artist-67731/ http://www.psmag.com/navigation/nature-and-technology/rise-r...
urlwolf 13y ago
Sorry to be negative; Sam Altman is a great guy and had plenty of valuable insight before, but his take here is infantile at best. When people accuse PG of speaking in very authoritative terms, it doesn't bother me. It's a writing device. But here Sam is doing the same trick, with the difference that I know the field he talks about well enough to see the poor logic transitions. My take: don't imitate PG's style on areas where you are not deeply knowledgeable.
whywhywhy5 13y ago
The easiest way to create AI would be to make a model our own brain's neural pathways. With a computer model we could analyze and break down what makes consciousness/intelligence, etc.
bencollier49 13y ago
Does anyone have a list of public companies (especially small ones) which are involved in AI? There don't seem to be many besides the big players.
axilmar 13y ago
> Andrew Ng, who worked or works on Google’s AI, has said that he believes learning comes from a single algorithm - the part of your brain that processes input from your ears is also capable of learning to process input from your eyes. If we can just figure out this one general-purpose algorithm, programs may be able to learn general-purpose things. As I wrote a few days ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7217967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7217967 "The 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."
JabavuAdams 13y ago
It's foolish to create general AI. What we should be working on is IA (Intelligence Amplification). Why would you create a god, when you could instead become a god?
argumentum 13y ago
There's a joke in the computational neuroscience community somewhat along the lines of "consciousness is where neuroscientists go to die". I literally saw this happen when I was at the Salk institute as a lowly undergraduate research assistant. Sir Francis Crick was there at the same time, and spent his last 25 or so years in pursuit of a theory of consciousness. I was fortunate (and humbled) to get to talk to him a few times before he passed in 2004, and he was undoubtedly a thinker of superior ability and unbounded curiosity (a pretty awesome combination). Actually there were (and still are) a lot of the biggest names in the field there at the time (including Crick, Terrance Sejnowski (a professor of mine who co-invented the Boltzmann machine* amongst other things), VS Ramachandran). These are all people who were coming at the problem from the biological &| pure science/math side of things (vs people like Andrew Ng, who Sam mentioned, who have a more CS/engineering based approach). No doubt they consistently came up with spectacular theories and very interesting models of how a specific regions of the brain may function. How for the most part they worked was this: 1. Come up with a biologically or cognitively plausible mathematical model (many of which were fantastically cool). 2. Implement and run this model on massively parallel architectures (at the time not quite the level of technological sophistication you see nowadays, so things may have changed a lot) 3. To train, use feedback from EEG (this is what I "worked" on, but they also worked with other electrical signals, MRI and chemical measurements at the level of individual neurons). The biggest progress was made at the smallest level (understanding how individual neurons and small networks work). This was primarily because measurement at this level actually provided useful information. The signal/noise ratio of EEG scalp recordings (which to this day gives me nightmares) was (and is) so terrible that I left the field as a quite disgruntled phd student. Maybe I just didn't have the intellectual capacity, but I never felt like I was working on anything that made sense. This was true for many of my fellow graduate students .. after a couple years, we felt we were doing pseudoscience. Rant completed, I think the CS/engineering approach is more promising: don't worry about the biology or some grand theory of the mind and just try to do something useful. Since computers get more powerful consistently, we'll incrementally be able to do more and more useful things. If consciousness emerges at all, it may or may not appear like human consciousness. We may not even be able to tell if/when this happens, but at least we would be solving real problems in the meanwhile. * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_machine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_machine

616 points by rdl 13y ago

elwell 13y ago

10 points in 10 minutes. If multiple accounts weren't used, that must be a ready-worthy article.

the_watcher 13y ago
Also, by Sam Altman. Assuming several people saw it in their RSS readers and submitted it after reading.
Zikes 13y ago
(samaltman.com) Most likely assumed read-worthy based on the author.
- elwell 13y ago
  Fair enough, but is the author's name alone sufficient? Surely the article wasn't fully read by every upvoter.
  - Zikes 13y ago
    I think there are people whose writings are of generally high enough quality or sufficiently provocative or informative enough that nearly anything they decide to publish would be worth reading.
napoleond 13y ago
As others have pointed out, the domain probably earned some points all by itself (and multiple submissions, which act as additional votes on the primary submission). It was also posted by a (popular) YC alum, which typically also accelerates upvotes.
- elwell 13y ago
  > and multiple submissions, which act as additional votes on the primary submission Didn't know that; thanks for pointing out.

imranq 13y ago

how does this guy consistently write mini-Paul Graham essays?

mappum 13y ago
Because he basically is mini-Paul Graham.
- gailees 13y ago
  I think everyone is wondering this haha
- Buttons840 13y ago
  Really? The essay "Andrew Ng thinks there's one algorithm underlying all intelligence. Also, I hope we get conscious computers." is a mini Paul Graham essay? No PG essay is so lacking in content or original ideas. Conscious computers? Who hasn't thought of conscious computers? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intelligence#The_optimism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intellige...

TempleOSV2 13y ago

Information shamefulness baby stay sharp shadows calm taxes lusts tendernesses READ clearness feedest loving

yogo 13y ago

Interesting post. The way I look at it is from the perspective of a human baby. How do they become intelligent? They have the "sensors" to detect features and will be able to recognize their parents. A lot of things are then learned, like touching a hot stove and from getting a formal education. For a machine to be artificially intelligent it would have to learn from its environment but also take formal instruction. That seems like a lot of ground to cover and this is what makes it unrealistic (for now). You can have a machine read every book in existence but how long will it take for it to understand in the same way a human reading a lot of books would need to understand it somehow.

yogo 13y ago
Not sure what set off the down votes but we can teach a computer to recognize characters for application in OCR. We also learned those characters from being taught in school and reading bad handwriting. We teach computers the same way. How are they supposed to magically recognize them especially since they didn't invent whatever language it is? Note that I'm referring to artificial general intelligence[0]. 0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence
- beat 13y ago
  This was back in the 1990s, but I worked in what was basically a data entry company, where the processing was a mixture of scanned forms (Scantron style) and human key entry. The project I was on was image scanning the forms for other purposes, so we had a neural net handwriting recognition system that we were comparing to human key entry at a large scale - millions of documents. What we found was that human key entry significantly outperformed the neural nets, even when the data was carefully handwritten in constrained boxes. Humans were so far ahead of the heavily trained neural nets that the software was basically unusable at that point. Of course, that was nearly 20 years ago, and things have probably moved on quite a bit. But you can still see the basic problem in Captcha-style validation on web pages. Computers just can't be trained to recognize distorted text that humans can read pretty easily.
  - 13y ago

elwell 13y ago

Critically speaking, this article doesn't add anything. I don't know why I read it. Can anyone explain why they upvoted?

Zikes 13y ago
It's certainly not something to be published in a scientific journal, but it's a nice subject to bring up and spark discussion on now and then.
elwell 13y ago
Maybe the second sentence is being taken as a prophecy.
tylermauthe 13y ago
It's nice to hear smart people talk about important topics in a down-to-earth fashion. This is why I upvoted.
- membrain 13y ago
  smart - nope. pretentious guesswork and attention whoring is what is going on here
  - tylermauthe 13y ago
    There are many types of smart, good sir.
mappum 13y ago
What it adds is the simple point, "be optimistic about strong AI in the near future".
- Buttons840 13y ago
  So an article that lacks all substance besides "be optimistic about AI" is front page material on HN?

mappum 13y ago

I believe human-level general intelligence (and beyond) is already inevitable, even if we don't make significant developments in "solving" intelligence. Projects that are already developing stuff like this (e.g. IBM Blue Brain) are just copying the human brain as closely as possible. Of course, this isn't as efficient as it could be (they simulate it all at the molecular level, so you can only get 1 neuron per CPU). However, as Moore's Law progresses, even if we don't make the software more efficient, we will eventually be able to create a fully functional simulation. But if you look at the history of technology, things we create aren't usually exactly based on models seen in nature. Airplanes aren't exactly like birds. I believe we will find a more "man made" model for general intelligence (maybe not even a neuronal model) that works much more efficiently with the hardware we have available. Going back to the airplane analogy, we already have the people who strap wooden wings to their arms and jump off buildings (like Blue Brain), but we are looking for the first Wright brothers design.

elwell 13y ago
> things aren't usually exactly based on models seen in nature I prefer to view everything as nature and natural.
- mappum 13y ago
  More specifically, I mean systems designed by biological evolution vs. systems designed by human thought.
elwell 13y ago
Partially relevant link to resource helping engineers think in terms of biomimicry: http://www.asknature.org/ http://www.asknature.org/
napoleond 13y ago
I think that airplane analogy is really important for innovation in general. A lot of the activity often ascribed to progress really just amounts to someone building a lighter set of wings for the guy getting ready to jump off a building. (The counterargument, of course, being that that is progress--even if the lighter construction isn't too helpful in the current design it would be later on--but it's not the "macro" progress it's so often billed as.) Anyway, it's just interesting to be reminded that context is important. Being able to distinguish between insanity and genius seems like it would be a super-power.

byehnbye 13y ago

Goodbye HN!

elwell 13y ago
?
- kordless 13y ago
  If you had AI, you wouldn't need a community like Hacker news, or something along those lines.

temuze 13y ago

> "the part of your brain that processes input from your ears is also capable of learning to process input from your eyes. If we can just figure out this one general-purpose algorithm, programs may be able to learn general-purpose things." This is the Holy Grail of CS. I believe we're closer than most people would expect and I think it's going to be a race to the finish line.

maaku 13y ago
For perception, maybe. The neocortex (hint: where we do everything we consider "thinking") operates on entirely different principles and is not interchangeable with perception.
dharma1 13y ago
was reading an interview with Demis Hassabis, thefounder of Deep Mind (acquired by google for £400m) - he didn't seem to think there is a single general purpose algo to get us there

ygmelnikova 13y ago

Explain to me how a brain can evolve, and yet not understand how itself functions?

elwell 13y ago
Why should it?
- ygmelnikova 13y ago
  Because it thinks. It takes in information and performs an analysis on that data. Surely over the time it would take to evolve, my brain thinks that it should understand that more than anything? It understands how every other organ works in explicit detail at the the molecular level. The only thing my brain can imagine, is that my consciousness is disconnected somewhat from my brain. It's as though my consciousness is inside a machine that it barely understands the workings thereof. Like a dog riding in a car.
  - catshirt 13y ago
    just because you're processing things doesn't mean you're processing what's required to understand conscious/intelligence.
  - PeterisP 13y ago
    1) Individual brains don't evolve, evolution happens to the gene blueprint by which embryos make brains, and it is fixed before the new brain has had a single thought; 2) Your brain definitely doesn't understand how every other organ works in explicit detail; controlling organs only requires being part of a good enough feedback loop to have the organ mostly function; your brain understands your heart "at the molecular level" about as much fruitflies do.
adammil 13y ago
Humans evolved for a long time before we understood anything about how our bodies work, so why would a brain have to understand itself to evolve?
13y ago

dicroce 13y ago

One thing that crosses my mind whenever I imagine creating a human level intelligence is that it takes humans YEARS of constant stimulation to begin to exhibit intelligent behavior... Sometimes I wonder if we'll have the algorithm may before we realize it...

BlackDeath3 13y ago
Good point. How do you know if something works before you've put in the time to use it?
TophWells 13y ago
Probably. I doubt it's possible to look at a piece of code and evaluate whether it's worth feeding it the equivalent of ten years of basic education. If we ever write a program that exhibits "creativity, or desire, or whatever you want to call it" on a basic level after however many months the researcher can afford to run it for, then it'll suddenly get a lot of funding and time and potential for growth. For all we know, we already have the Algorithm and all we need to do is run it for years on the best computer available "just to see what happens".
diminoten 13y ago
We can stimulate a computer with the equivalent amount of information in much less time than years, though.
- marcosdumay 13y ago
  We probably can't. Unless it's an extremely fast algorithm, we don't have the processing power to make it run faster than our brain. We'll can in a couple of decades, probably. But not now.
  - TeMPOraL 13y ago
    Brain seems to be slow (I read it was measured to run at 200Hz tops), but it's extremely parallelized and caches the livjng shit out of everything.

namenotrequired 13y ago

...and then we'll just need to figure out how to make humans more creative.

rdl 13y ago

I wonder what other credible contenders for "most overlooked technology" are. I think "physical tamper evidence/tamper response" is one, along with hardware security functionality (crazy secure virtualization extensions, etc.) -- essentially competing with Intel not just on power but also on security features. Although Intel is leading in this area with TXT and now SGX.

forrestthewoods 13y ago

There are many classes of problems in computer science and AI falls into one of my favorites. If today the world had a machine with infinite CPU power and infinite RAM we still wouldn't have a good AI. We just don't have the knowledge to utilize such resources to write an AI that could, for exampe, play League of Legends or Starcraft at a level beyond professional gamers. And it certainly couldn't write a best selling novel. It could solve an arbitrarily large traveling salesman problem but it couldn't do those other things. I think that's kind of awesome. I'm not saying it can't be done. Assuming we humans don't kill ourselves I think someday it will. But it's a long, long ways off.

codeulike 13y ago
If you had a machine with infinite CPU power and infinite RAM you could _evolve_ an AI. Greg Egan wrote a great story about that: http://ttapress.com/553/crystal-nights-by-greg-egan/ http://ttapress.com/553/crystal-nights-by-greg-egan/ Someone tries it, with mixed results.
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  Ah, but we weren't given infinite time also, so you might be able to evolve an AI, but it might take many millions of years (like it did with real life).
  - Houshalter 13y ago
    He said infinite CPU power which implies infinite number of iterations. In real life it would probably take a lot more than millions of years (because computers are too slow to simulate populations of millions of minds.)
    - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
      Does infinite energy (as infinite CPU cycles) really translate into immediate time? My physics isn't great, but I thought energy was related to mass, while entropy was related to time.

varelse 13y ago

I think one of the next hot emerging careers will be connecting and interfacing traditional computational algorithms for the bits that are clearly orders of magnitude more efficient than using a multi-layer neural network to do them into neural networks, SVMs, and/or whatever comes next that figure out how to allocate such work from raw data feeds.

catshirt 13y ago

"But how do we make a computer program that decides what it wants to do? How do we make a computer decide to care on its own about learning to drive a car? Or write a novel?" if intelligence is solved by reverse engineering the brain at a molecular level surely consciousness and creativity are? "And maybe we don't want to build machines that are concious in this sense." if the physical composition of the brain defines intelligence and conscience, i'm not sure you'll be able to pick and choose. i am all for artificial conscious though. yolo.

skywhopper 13y ago

"But how do we make a computer program that decides what it wants to do? How do we make a computer decide to care on its own about learning to drive a car? Or write a novel?" Perhaps it'd be better to ask: why would we want a computer to do these things? I certainly do not want to live in a world where computers have their own motivations and desires and the ability to act on the same. Actually, I can put that more strongly: none of us will live very long in a world where computers have their own motivations, desires, and the ability to act on the same.

catshirt 13y ago
you seem pretty convinced living computers would kill us all. this seems like a pretty big assumption to me?
- Dewie 13y ago
  It's the same thing with aliens. The "evil, technologically superior alien race" is a big trope in science fiction, just as the "super-intelligent and malevolent" (as opposed to the super-intelligent and benevolent/indifferent) is in science fiction, and maybe even with futurists.
  - marvin 13y ago
    "Indifferent" can be pretty bad. You are indifferent to the existence of grass whenever you mow your lawn, for instance. Or even to the fate of the cow when you have a steak dinner.
- Houshalter 13y ago
  Because you are made of atoms that can more efficiently be used for something else. Morality (and all human values) is a purely human concept that evolved in the specific conditions of human evolution (and even just our specific culture.) AIs are not anthropomorphic, they don't have to have anything like human minds or values.
  - 13y ago

seanalltogether 13y ago

How do we develop intelligent systems when we don't know how to measure intelligence?

Houshalter 13y ago
Who says we don't know how to measure intelligence? The simplest way would be just to select a problem that requires intelligence and measure how good it does at that problem.
- rectangletangle 13y ago
  But what is a problem that specifically requires intelligence to solve? How do we know we're measuring intelligence, and not the programs aptitude for the particular problem?
  - Houshalter 13y ago
    Why does it matter? If if solves the problem then it's as good as if it was fully intelligent. Who cares what goes on inside the black box? If you worried about it overfitting to a specific problem, give it lots of problems and weight the solutions by complexity. So you heavily favor simple algorithms that can learn to solve a large class of problems, over ones that are more adapted for those specific problems.
    - benched 13y ago
      All I'm learning from this thread is that some people see infinite regression where others see tautology. edit: what I mean: Person 1: "What if we're just measuring the color of the sky? What if we're just measuring blueness? What if we're just measuring a wavelength of light? ... ..." Person 2: "The sky looks blue."
      - Houshalter 13y ago
        What do you mean?

yconst 13y ago

Dear HN users: If you are even minimally interested in the topics that this post "covers", please, do yourselves a favour and open up any book about machine intelligence instead of reading such uninformed and negligent posts. I urge you to, seriously.

membrain 13y ago
wow, I have to go all the way down to find the first person serious about the topic. That's why I love my academic surroundings, all the fantasizing video game fanboys are sorted out in the beginning and what's left are serious researchers really devoted to solving the riddles intelligence imposes..

edanm 13y ago

If anyone is interested in AI, I highly recommend joining Less Wrong, a community started by AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky. He started the community to convince people to focus on the "friendly AI problem". [1] I actually recommend that everyone read LW, but especially if you're interested in AI. [1] In a nutshell, the friendly AI problem is: assume we create an AI. It may rapidly become more intelligent than us, if we program it right. As soon as it becomes significanlty more intelligent, we will no longer be the most intelligent beings around, so the AI's goals will matter more than ours. Therefore, we should really give it good goals that are compatible with what we want to happen. And since no one right now knows how to define "what humans want" good enough for writing it in code, then we'd better figure THAT out before building AI.

timClicks 13y ago
Any suggestions for getting started in the LW community? Its barrier to entry means I can't seem to vote on anything, etc. It's quite intimidating really.
- Houshalter 13y ago
  Read or at least skim through the sequences (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences). If you are just there for the AI stuff the Hanson-Yudkowsky AI-Foom Debate has a lot of good posts: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/The_Hanson-Yudkowsky_AI-Foom_Debate http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/The_Hanson-Yudkowsky_AI-Foom_...
- benched 13y ago
  The sequences are well worth a read. They're kind of like an overview of modern philosophy in very plain language, very little jargon. Then, just participate in the comments and discussion forum as you feel. It takes very little time to collect enough karma to do whatever.
- arjunnarayan 13y ago
  read hpmor.com. It may not be the optimal way, but it is the funnest way.

byehnbye 13y ago

I don't understand the logic behind these types of posts that add no value to the poster and the people discussing it in comments. Is it a signaling mechanism to attract people working in this area? I'm sure you have already turned them off by showing your naivete. So no value to you. To people trying to discuss this by racking their brains and looking for new ideas, Any one with a quint decent thought/idea will never share it here to enlighten us laymen. So no value to us too. So, what's the point HN, and why all the upvotes?

feralmoan 13y ago
> So, what's the point HN, and why all the upvotes? I guess SV types get a little hot for AI based utopian/dystopian succession when they're the only ones who could possibly gain from such an outcome.

dblacc 13y ago

AI was also the subject Gates pointed to when asked a similar question on the AMA thread the other week on Reddit, I believe.

kordless 13y ago

I'm just going to stick this out there because I'm a futurist and it's my role to share with others what I'm thinking about. What I share may be flat out wrong, scary, half assed, or appear to be crazy. So be it. We've advanced a lot in the last 100 years. We're starting to see a bigger picture forming with the advent of compute and networking capabilities. Combining simple elements of these basics give rise to surprising and interesting behaviors. See "Twitch Plays Pokemon": http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57619058-93/twitch-plays-pokemon-is-now-a-fight-for-the-soul-of-the-internet/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57619058-93/twitch-plays-po... as an example of suprising behavior. The more we look in detail at the universe around us, the more puzzling it gets. Prime numbers spirals are unexplained. The two slit experiments results indicate the observer plays a part in collapsing a particle's probability wave. The effects of dark matter could be a result of parallel universes. You couldn't make up weirder shit if you tried. It's not a huge leap of logic to assume some parts of our brain operate at a quantum level. Given that first statement comes to a truthful fruition, I don't think it would be entirely unreasonable to assume AI will do so as well. Given computers already use some quantum properties, it's also reasonable to expect advancement in AI lies in this direction. When they announced Google was getting a D-Wave computer, I got really interested. Granted, they know beans about how it works (and whether or not it actually works at all) but it's still crazy interesting to consider. As I said, I could be wrong or crazy. Or both.

carlob 13y ago
> It's not a huge leap of logic to assume some parts of our brain operate at a quantum level. To the best of our knowledge it is still a pretty large leap of logic.
- kordless 13y ago
  It's definitely a leap, but there's a decent amount of information (not proof however) on the subject laying around. We still don't understand how the brain brings about consciousness. I guess I should say it's not a huge leap to assume it has something to do with other things we also don't understand. Given quantum effect and number theory still elude us in areas, it's a decent approach to assume they might be related. I've debugged problems in my code that, at first glance, appear to be unrelated to each other. Given something is slightly off in one area isn't a proof something of in another area is related, but it's a good place to start looking.

bovermyer 13y ago

I think going about it from a complex algorithm point of view is the wrong approach. We should, instead, be concentrating our efforts on two things - sensing, and reacting. The predictability of the reaction doesn't matter; all that matters is that the machine reacts. Everything else will need to depend on evolutionary processes, which requires a third criterion - changing reaction based on prior data. If the previous reaction did not lead to a negative result ("negative" meaning detrimental to one or more arbitrary values), then the reaction can continue to the same stimulus. If the previous reaction, however, elicited a strong positive result, then the reaction should be encouraged. Similarly, if it triggered a strong negative response, it should be avoided. To a degree, you could do this without any kind of "operating system," just by using sensory data as inputs in a complex circuit. At least, that's how I would approach it. I know nothing about A.I. research.

deleted 13y ago
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dinkumthinkum 13y ago

I hate to get "meta" but it doesn't seem frontage worthy, it's just a musing about AI.

davidrangel 13y ago

From a pure layman's perspective: if you believe in evolution, then what separates us from a reptile (as mentioned in the post) is almost certainly something we can figure out and replicate. There is nothing "special" there. So if you believe computers today already have the "intelligence" of a reptile, or a toddler (i.e., ability to play pong), or something along those lines, it's only a matter of time before a computer has the intelligence of a full-blown adult human (and soon thereafter much more). Our level of intelligence/awareness seems magical only because we haven't fully understood it yet. That will change.

dinkumthinkum 13y ago
No I don't think "belief" in evolution implies that at all. That's a big jump.
- davidrangel 13y ago
  Why is that a big jump? I'm not saying it will be easy or quick. It does imply that getting from a reptile-level intelligence to a human-level intelligence was a natural process and something that can be reverse engineered.
onnoonno 13y ago
I think we should figure out what we mean by understand. Do you mean modeling 'the human brain' on some level and building abstractions? Those abstractions are exactly that - abstractions. They are not the thing itself. Do you think we can understand everything through abstractions, even the process of understanding itself?

jcfrei 13y ago

> I am quite confident that we’ll be able to make computer programs that perform specific complex tasks very well. But how do we make a computer program that decides what it wants to do? Are we so sure that "we" really are in charge of what we want to do? I believe a lot of our desires and ambitions are hardcoded into our brains and we just project them onto present goals, like getting a promotion or learning how to play the piano, etc. ultimately all these desires cater to the same few desires we always had and were born with: developing a sense of social belonging and intimacy. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belongingness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belongingness

idProQuo 13y ago
This is why the desire for Strong AI boggles my mind. In order for a computer to operate at a "human" level, it would need to make decisions based on things like ambition and fear and greed. It will also have to constantly make mistakes, just like we do. If it didn't have character flaws, it wouldn't be operating at a "human" level. But if it does have these character flaws, how useful would it really be compared to a real human? Is the quest for Strong AI just a Frankensteinian desire to create artificial life? I'm curious if there are any good papers looking into stuff like this.
- onnoonno 13y ago
  Yeah. And what if the computer discovers that desire is pointless? Will it have a religion? Buddhism? Zen Buddhism? Why does quantum computing even exist if all forms of computing are equivalent?
- tim333 13y ago
  Presumably the AI in the Google cars must have something like a fear of crashing or hitting a pedestrian even if its just something like score that the algorithms calculate.

kevinalexbrown 13y ago

If the only goal is an 'artificial' consciousness, it might be more prudent to consider a functional definition of what consciousness is and try to build that. We didn't make computers by modeling how individual neurons perform mathematical calculations. On the other hand, if you want to go the biological route, there's some awesome work to be done. If I were to study consciousness, here's the question I would ask: how do we separate our selves from our surroundings? Patients with brain-machine interfaces (like moving a mouse cursor) start by thinking about moving their arms around. Then they apparently report that they gradually just feel that the interface is another body part. So if it's set up to change the TV channel, they just imagine that they have a channel-changing organ. So maybe you want to build a system that can identify what is a part of itself versus what is not, and it's not just a fixed list. So what does that data structure look like? How is it defined, queried, and updated? Defined by what you can 'influence?' So gradated based on my influence? These aren't just broad philosophical questions, they're more specific and actionable. That's just one possible angle, but it's different than, say, machine learning paradigms where you want to build a machine that can do pattern classification (which the brain undoubtedly does). There are probably other routes as well.

andreasvc 13y ago
While this is an intriguing phenomenon, I do not think it is something deep. It sounds similar to how consciousness or a concept of self is sometimes identified as the ability to recognize a dot on ones body in a mirror (a few animals pass this task). Even though that is literally about ones reflection, I think it has little to do with the philosophical and abstract kind of reflection that is made possible by consciousness.
debt 13y ago
We know a ton about the brain but so little about the mind itself. We still don't have definitive answers to what consciousness is, why it's here, what's useful for, etc. Some people debate whether the mind exists at all. Also, there's still very little understanding of the difference between the conscious and unconscious mind. I think building an artificial consciousness is going too far. Artificial intelligence is simpler; it's just fake intelligence. Seems easy enough right? If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it's intelligent. We don't need to make it "conscious" necessarily, again whatever that means, in order for it be intelligent. I feel like we can build artificially intelligent software pretty "easily" relative to making it "conscious".

bohm 13y ago

I wrote about limitations on AI imposed by algorithmic complexity here: http://paulbohm.com/articles/artificial-intelligence-obstacles-information-theory/ http://paulbohm.com/articles/artificial-intelligence-obstacl... In essence: unless we extract that "single algorithm" that Andrew Ng believes in from an existing medium, we're unlikely to rediscover it independently. (read the papers i link to at the bottom of the article for a more rigorous explanation)

youlweb 13y ago

I'm a strong A.I hobbyist, and I just put up a website for my basic abstract algorithm: genudi. The website's implementation of the algo revolves around having a conversation with a computer. Currently in limited release, you can request a Pioneer account from there: http://www.genudi.com http://www.genudi.com

youlweb 13y ago
An example is worth a thousand words, take a look at this conversation with a strong AI machine: http://www.genudi.com/share/27/Dialog http://www.genudi.com/share/27/Dialog

feralmoan 13y ago

I dunno, the definition of intelligence is biased by our own ability to comprehend and therefore profoundly slim (even IQ can be gamed, and most people puke at emotional/lizard brain intelligence) so large chances "science" either under or overshoots its "stakeholder aware" analysis and doesn't know functional self preserving, iterative enhancement intellect when its looking it in the face. You know us monkeys, running around derping science with wacky wavy hands going 'Hai Dolphin What You do jump hoop!'. AI, rockin the casbah. Maybe one day!

jk4930 13y ago

"But artificial general intelligence might work, and if it does, it will be the biggest development in technology ever." I'd like to point interested readers to the AGI Conference series[1], the Open Cognition Project[2], and a mostly outdated (2009) but still useful list of everything AGI[3]. [1] http://agi-conf.org/ http://agi-conf.org/ [2] http://wiki.opencog.org/w/The_Open_Cognition_Project http://wiki.opencog.org/w/The_Open_Cognition_Project [3] http://linas.org/agi.html http://linas.org/agi.html

ekianjo 13y ago

> Something happened in the course of evolution to make the human brain different Not just the human brain, a great number of animals share the very same characteristics as the human brain we find ourselves closer and closer to them every single day as new researches on animal neurology and animal behavior get published. It would be very wrong to suggest that intelligence is only a human thing.

rdpfeffer 13y ago

Hierarchical Temporal Memory is the closest model to the brain that I've seen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_temporal_memory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_temporal_memory). They are capable of generalized learning and excel in the same way that humans do. They are capable of abstraction, self categorization, and online learning. There are elements of past AI models in the HTM model, however to reduce HTM's or any deep learning algorithm to a mere combination of past AI concepts overlooks the power of the right model when it is achieved. It would be like saying that Facebook is just a news feed. Sure, that's what gets most of the eyeballs, but there's a lot more there which would drastically reduce its value if not present. What I think is most interesting is that we may find that Humans learn pretty inefficiently from the perspective of the amount of input data required over time. This may seem silly at first, but when you consider how many neurons cover the surface area of our ears and eyes and then consider the fact that it takes anywhere from 12 to 14 months for a child to speak its first word, you might start to agree with this line of thought. Also, when I consider the fact that this processing all happens in parallel even further pushes me in this direction. Whatever the case may be, HTMs are definitely a cool area of research. For those who are interested, you should definitely check out more of Jeff Hawkins work at Numenta. They've been able to demonstrate some pretty novel things. He wrote a book back in 2006 that blew my mind. Went into deeper explanation about how HTMs could model everything from deep learning, to consciousness, creativity, and bunch of other things.

dschiptsov 13y ago

The problem of AI is that it has much more complexity than we used to think. Even best guys like Minsky have grossly underestimated the complexity, so they got stuck, and now are in a process of developing more subtle, refined theories. In some sense the story of modern AI is a story of how Minsky assigned to figure scene decomposition for robotic vision as a summer project, and now teaching Society of mind and calling for entirely different approach to what is intelligence. It is not, of course, some massively parallel recursive problem solver implemented in neurons, it is too naive view, so there is no use to search for one.) It is as complicated as actions of whole humanity with a billions of semiindependent agents.

hooande 13y ago

Many people see Artificial General Intelligence as a panacea. The idea is, "We'll create artificially intelligent scientists who will solve all of our other problems for us!". I think that future generations will look back on this as a modern version of alchemy. If blogs had existed centuries ago I'm sure that people would have called the transmutation of metal the most important trend of their time. This isn't to denigrate the author of this post or the people who have dedicated their lives to AGI research. It's just that this idea probably falls into the category of "If it seems too good to be true, it probably is". [1] We have no proof that artificial general intelligence can exist. We have numerous examples of specific intelligence: playing chess, driving cars, various forms of categorization. But we don't have a single example of an application that can handle a task that it hasn't been specifically trained and tested for. It's not to say that it isn't possible, but there is no more evidence for AGI than there is for Bigfoot, leprechauns or space aliens. The idea of artificial consciousness currently requires a leap of faith. The most important trend today is collecting massive amounts of data and using them to make accurate predictions. Instead of lusting after one all-singing all-dancing intelligent program we should focus on tackling one form of decision making at a time. Drive cars, land planes, predict the weather and calculate the best way to get from point A to point B. One day we'll wake up in a world where artificial intelligence is all around us and the idea of a one size fits all solution will seem silly and quaint. [1] In fairness, this was said about every amazing thing in modern life. You never know.

kamaal 13y ago
Firstly is there even a Artificial General Intelligence even in Humans? I know how to play chess, but I don't seem to be playing it as well as Gary Kasparov.
- edanm 13y ago
  Usually, people define Intelligence to be "that thing humans have". We can recognise it in ourselves and other humans, realise it doesn't exist in animals, but there is no really good definition of what that means. But that doesn't mean anything. Creating something artificial that has whatever it is that we have is the goal.

erik14th 13y ago

Humans have a drive, a raison d'etre, intelligence being only a mean to fulfill that drive. Thing is that drive is uncertain/subjective. Learning can't be an objective by itself, intelligence is just a tool, from that perspective you can say there are already AI, like targeted ads, it learns about you and acts accordingly. So to have a "generalist" AI, like human's intelligence is general, you'd have to have an objective like staying alive and build up from that.

psionski 13y ago
No, it's not. Drive is the desire to maximise future available options (e.g. to not get trapped). There is already software that decides what to do without a human telling it what to do. For more see http://www.ted.com/talks/alex_wissner_gross_a_new_equation_for_intelligence.html http://www.ted.com/talks/alex_wissner_gross_a_new_equation_f...

henrygrew 13y ago

"Something happened in the course of evolution to make the human brain different from the reptile brain, which is closer to a computer that plays pong." - i beg to differ on this statement, clearly the complexity and sheer magnificence of the human brain did not come about by mere chance, if this was so it would have been easy to replicate this.This is proof of an intelligent creator.

neverminder 13y ago

In my opinion true AI must have reasoning skills and be self aware. This brings the disturbing truth: either we never get it to work or we will get it to work and it will destroy us.

Ygg2 13y ago

Wait, wasn't creativity part solved? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_creativity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_creativity (I'm refering to Stephen L. Thaler's work) I mean you need two neural nets. One that adds chaos to another neural net and a second one that returns the result. You could probably optimize by somehow making those parts parallel.

khafra 13y ago

> artificial consciousness, or creativity, or desire, or whatever you want to call it. I am quite confident that we’ll be able to make computer programs that perform specific complex tasks very well. But how do we make a computer program that decides what it wants to do? How do we make a computer decide to care on its own about learning to drive a car? Or write a novel? I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. We cannot decide what we want to do--we can only decide how best to fulfill our wants; a person learns to drive a car because we want the freedom, social approval, and other stuff that comes with that. Natural selection gave us our base-level desires, that all other desires spring from; and it was able to do that because it's an optimization process. A functional AI's desires will come from some sort of optimization process; the only question is what that process will be optimizing.

etanazir 13y ago

D-Wave AI - maybe; diophantine AI - lol.

wildermuthn 13y ago

Are we building AI equivalents of the philosophical zombie? http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie If P-Zombies are an impossibility, then so too true AI that dismisses the need for consciousness, or begs the question by assuming that consciousness will emerge from intelligence. It may be that intelligence, true human intelligence, emerges from consciousness.

ratsimihah 13y ago

Building AGI in Common Lisp if anyone wants to help.

jk4930 13y ago
Do you have your own approach to AGI or are you implementing another concept?
- ratsimihah 13y ago
  I have my own approach.

vonnik 13y ago

Computers are actually pretty good at being creative already. That's not the hardest problem to solve... http://www.psmag.com/navigation/nature-and-technology/rise-robot-artist-67731/ http://www.psmag.com/navigation/nature-and-technology/rise-r...

urlwolf 13y ago

Sorry to be negative; Sam Altman is a great guy and had plenty of valuable insight before, but his take here is infantile at best. When people accuse PG of speaking in very authoritative terms, it doesn't bother me. It's a writing device. But here Sam is doing the same trick, with the difference that I know the field he talks about well enough to see the poor logic transitions. My take: don't imitate PG's style on areas where you are not deeply knowledgeable.

whywhywhy5 13y ago

The easiest way to create AI would be to make a model our own brain's neural pathways. With a computer model we could analyze and break down what makes consciousness/intelligence, etc.

bencollier49 13y ago

Does anyone have a list of public companies (especially small ones) which are involved in AI? There don't seem to be many besides the big players.

axilmar 13y ago

> Andrew Ng, who worked or works on Google’s AI, has said that he believes learning comes from a single algorithm - the part of your brain that processes input from your ears is also capable of learning to process input from your eyes. If we can just figure out this one general-purpose algorithm, programs may be able to learn general-purpose things. As I wrote a few days ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7217967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7217967 "The 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."

JabavuAdams 13y ago

It's foolish to create general AI. What we should be working on is IA (Intelligence Amplification). Why would you create a god, when you could instead become a god?

argumentum 13y ago

There's a joke in the computational neuroscience community somewhat along the lines of "consciousness is where neuroscientists go to die". I literally saw this happen when I was at the Salk institute as a lowly undergraduate research assistant. Sir Francis Crick was there at the same time, and spent his last 25 or so years in pursuit of a theory of consciousness. I was fortunate (and humbled) to get to talk to him a few times before he passed in 2004, and he was undoubtedly a thinker of superior ability and unbounded curiosity (a pretty awesome combination). Actually there were (and still are) a lot of the biggest names in the field there at the time (including Crick, Terrance Sejnowski (a professor of mine who co-invented the Boltzmann machine* amongst other things), VS Ramachandran). These are all people who were coming at the problem from the biological &| pure science/math side of things (vs people like Andrew Ng, who Sam mentioned, who have a more CS/engineering based approach). No doubt they consistently came up with spectacular theories and very interesting models of how a specific regions of the brain may function. How for the most part they worked was this: 1. Come up with a biologically or cognitively plausible mathematical model (many of which were fantastically cool). 2. Implement and run this model on massively parallel architectures (at the time not quite the level of technological sophistication you see nowadays, so things may have changed a lot) 3. To train, use feedback from EEG (this is what I "worked" on, but they also worked with other electrical signals, MRI and chemical measurements at the level of individual neurons). The biggest progress was made at the smallest level (understanding how individual neurons and small networks work). This was primarily because measurement at this level actually provided useful information. The signal/noise ratio of EEG scalp recordings (which to this day gives me nightmares) was (and is) so terrible that I left the field as a quite disgruntled phd student. Maybe I just didn't have the intellectual capacity, but I never felt like I was working on anything that made sense. This was true for many of my fellow graduate students .. after a couple years, we felt we were doing pseudoscience. Rant completed, I think the CS/engineering approach is more promising: don't worry about the biology or some grand theory of the mind and just try to do something useful. Since computers get more powerful consistently, we'll incrementally be able to do more and more useful things. If consciousness emerges at all, it may or may not appear like human consciousness. We may not even be able to tell if/when this happens, but at least we would be solving real problems in the meanwhile. * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_machine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_machine