7 ms·

Why is it nonsense?

api 13y ago
There are very, very few people who are capable of arguing against an idea on its merit if that idea clashes strongly with their worldview. Usually the cognitive dissonance of a differing worldview eclipses understanding to the point that anything with a wildly different context is just "insane."
astrodust 13y ago
"Intelligence" as we have come to understand it is not some magical thing, not some exotic element that's impossible to fabricate. In fact, it's probably something mundane and insultingly simple when we get to the core of it. Reproducing intelligence is mostly a matter of finding the correct formula, the right structures, the right technology. After that it will be boring, ordinary, even disposable. This doesn't sit well with some people who reject that on an emotional level even if they can't figure out any concrete reason why. It just can't be. We already have enough hardware to fake intelligence, to make a believable Turing Test candidate that could win, but we've yet to figure out how. That much will become clear in the coming decades, guaranteed. If you look at the progression in computer chess programs, where they were pathetic for the longest time until things came together and the performance of them rose exponentially, matching and then eclipsing grandmasters, it's inevitable that the same pattern will play out in the artificial intelligence space.
- briantakita 13y ago
  > "Intelligence" as we have come to understand it is not some magical thing I agree that intelligence can be replicated. My preferred definition of intelligence is broad. Intelligence is a system that has i/o & a feedback cycle. Thus, I think all matter & concepts have intelligence. Of course, there are higher forms of intelligence, such as human intelligence (which is not limited to the brain as we have a complete nervous system & more generally, autonomous cells). I still think it's magical, however. Even if we understand all of the rules & procedures, the experience of it all coming together fills me with awe. It's like playing a game where you understand the rules, yet you can achieve zen & a higher consciousness when playing. Another example is Fractals. The driving equation is simple, yet infinite complexity & beauty is created. > Reproducing intelligence is mostly a matter of finding the correct formula, the right structures, the right technology. After that it will be boring, ordinary, even disposable. This doesn't sit well with some people who reject that on an emotional level even if they can't figure out any concrete reason why. It just can't be. Animals & possibly lower life forms have evolved emotions. It's an important part of what drives us to do whatever we do. I would not be surprised if AI will need emotions to reach higher intelligence. I have also been driven to honor all life & intelligence. I see the interconnections within the system of existence & aspire to respect all of it's parts. When I hold such a mindset, I'm at my best.
  - Crito 13y ago
    Emotion may be necessary for human-like intelligent systems, however I think you've missed his point. He's not saying that emotion will not be created or emerge in synthetic intelligent systems; rather he's saying that emotional arguments, rather than logical arguments, are rubbish. In other words, "I don't want this to be true, because I don't like the implications, therefore I think that it is not true" is not sound. Whether or not emotion plays an important role in intelligence is irrelevant.
    - briantakita 13y ago
      > he's saying that emotional arguments, rather than logical arguments, are rubbish. That's true if the system in question is entirely based on logic. That means it's probably a static (non-creative) system, as emotions often are involved in creative systems. Note that creating a logical system is itself a creative system. Side note: part of arguments are about framing the system. Often times, disagreements arise because the parties aren't even talking about the same system. A party will often be focused on a subsystem or an entirely different system.
- joedavison 13y ago
  And what about concepts like art, love, beauty, morality? Are these also simply "computations" of some sort? I believe your argument holds true for all intelligence that relies on logic. However, I would put forth that the full definition of "intelligence" includes logic, and also something else, let's call it "beyond logic". For example, see Gödel's incompleteness theorems [1]. You will find that there are statements that can be "true but unprovable". Statements that are "true but unprovable" cannot be computed. But that doesn't make them untrue. Therefore, there are limits to artificial intelligence. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems#Relationship_with_computability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...
  - AndrewKemendo 13y ago
    >And what about concepts like art, love, beauty, morality? Are these also simply "computations" of some sort? Yes. I would argue that they are no more abstract than any other pattern recognition and the fact that they can be differentiated by perception makes them computable. You fundamentally ask the "Qualia" question, which for my part at least is well understood to be an emergent property of having perception. The Godel question is always brought up as though it is some kind of trump card - though it is not. It simply states that, we don't think that the universe can simulate itself without inconsistency. Call that a limit if you want but AI is complete well before we have a consistent universal model. If I were you I would be more worried about the münchhausen trilemma
  - habitue 13y ago
    The point isn't that everything can be proven, the point is that human brains have no special abilities that can't be emulated by computers. If you emulate every neuron and neurotransmitter in the brain with a sufficiently powerful computer, you will get an intelligence that has the same perception of love, beauty, blah blah blah that people think somehow set them apart from all other matter in the universe. In addition, once you have it modeled, its possible invent a computer that loves more deeply than any human ever could. Who understands and appreciates the human concept of beauty better than any human ever could etc. We know these things are emergent properties of very slow meat processors, and therefore can be recreated again on very fast silicon processors.
- hyperbovine 13y ago
  > If you look at the progression in computer chess programs, where they were pathetic for the longest time until things came together and the performance of them rose exponentially, matching and then eclipsing grandmasters, it's inevitable that the same pattern will play out in the artificial intelligence space. Chess programs started beating grandmasters when they built computers big enough to recurse a few dozen levels down the dynamic programming tree. Other than a few brainy programming optimizations and some well-chosen search heuristics (like e.g. learning all of Kasparov's opening repertoire) it was all brawn as far as I know. With its countable state space and discrete, turn-based dynamics, chess actually strikes me as one of the easier AI problems you can pose. If you want a sense of how truly far away we are from real AI go check out what they are doing in computer vision. Classification performance on tasks that a four-year-old could execute without error is in the single digits in some cases (http://image-net.org/challenges/LSVRC/2012/analysis/ http://image-net.org/challenges/LSVRC/2012/analysis/). It is indeed difficult to imagine a human-like AI in this domain without some sort of singularity occurring, but no one I talk to thinks that such a thing is near.
  - Houshalter 13y ago
    I disagree strongly. He was using chess as an example of how progress can increase exponentially, not how artificial intelligence is close. Object recognition is another good example with major breakthroughs in recent years leading to massive improvements. They are already very close to, and in some cases exceeding, human ability. Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
- clavalle 13y ago
  Let's say I accept that higher, human-like, intelligence is reproducible. It still doesn't follow that beyond that is some sort of yet in-conceived 'super intelligence'; that intelligent machines can outstrip humanity in any meaningful way and build even more intelligent machines than themselves and on and on in a virtuous cycle as the Singularity predicts.
  - fixermark 13y ago
    Given that we have assumed human-like intelligence is reproducible, let's assume only slightly further that intelligence can be represented as some pattern, P, that can be reproduced in media other than human brains (I'm assuming you are meaning "reproducible" in terms of "reproducible within a machine", not the uninteresting meaning of "Every human born has reproduced intelligence"). If P exists, we have all kinds of faster, better, more durable strata we could encode it into than the one evolution happened to hit upon, and that encoding alone could be considered 'super intelligence' in the sense that it would easily out-think you and I. That may not necessarily imply that P can be improved upon exponentially (but if I were your stock advisor---or for that matter, licensed to be so---I'd humbly suggest that wagering against the _total possibility_ that something can be improved tends to be a losing wager). But it wouldn't take too many improvements to get orders of magnitude past our slower-than-a-speeding-bullet organic thought machinery. It's worth noting that Kurzweil's book doesn't necessarily predict infinite, unbounded growth in intelligence (I'd assume that what we'd call "intelligence" is susceptible to the S-curve of diminishing returns like other technologies). But one doesn't need infinite, unbounded intelligence growth to build something that fundamentally transforms the world we live in.
    - clavalle 13y ago
      > encoding alone could be considered 'super intelligence' in the sense that it would easily out-think you and I. >But it wouldn't take too many improvements to get orders of magnitude past our slower-than-a-speeding-bullet organic thought machinery. These are HUGE leaps to make. Not to mention that thinking faster =\= thinking better, which is to say that there is no reason to assume that faster intelligence would not be understandable to the human brain.
Crito 13y ago
I see little justification in the article for the assertion that creativity/imagination^ is something unique and distinct from other aspects of intelligence. Any system that explores solutions will need to speculate on which branch of decisions will have the greatest chances of yielding a desirable outcome. Any system with enough power to fully explore all possibilities will have enough power to discover other possibilities that it lacks the power to fully explore within it's SLAs. Different intelligent systems that employ different pruning techniques or heuristics will have different "creativities". The more sophisticated the intelligent system, the greater the range of 'creative' thought. I've seen little reason to think that creativity is some sort of "special sauce" that would not become commoditized as the rest of intelligence is commoditized. Why shouldn't it? ^ Imagination without creativity is merely simulation, something that nobody doubts is mechanical. I therefore conclude that the author is actually identifying creativity as special.
- briantakita 13y ago
  There's a couple of ways I see to go with this discussion. I'll explore both... 1. We are in a temporal frame. The evolution of intelligence has gotten us to this point. Right now, high creativity is unique to humans. I agree that the possibility exists for humans to create creative beings. 2. The definition of creativity is broad at the moment. Pursuits that are defined as "creative" are also changing. As we learn more about creativity (zoom into the definition), we will identify more nuances of creativity. Indeed, it may loop back to a fundamental notion of cognition which itself may be related to a fundamental notion of self-perpetuating systems creating the best possible outcome for it's lineage. I suspect that creativity is akin to a driving force. So in a fractal system, "creativity" or "emotional drive" is the equation which creates/generates the fractal over time.
  - Crito 13y ago
    I think that it is easiest (and therefore best ;) to define creativity by what we can observe about it, without any internal knowledge about it. So basically "creativity" is some sort of black-box that generates novel outcomes (for a broad sense of outcomes). On the face of it, I think that for this definition of creativity, I think you could do by simply logically exploring problem spaces that have not been explored before, or by exploring branches in problem spaces that have not been explored before. Maybe throw in a source of randomness when deciding what to explore, to explore possibilities that may not otherwise make sense but could nevertheless lead to interesting outcomes. (The equivalent of a chemist randomly fucking around in his backyard shed). Some of my friends and I practice a sort of very limited mechanical creativity in the form of a drinking game. We invent new "startup ideas" by ad libbing into the phrase "The ____ of ____", where both blanks are existing companies. We then explore that idea and speculate on what such a company would actually entail. "The Twitter of Githubs", maybe that's a company build around the idea of sharing code snippets, like gists? Not a very interesting idea, but I'm sober at the moment. ;)

Why is it nonsense?

api 13y ago

There are very, very few people who are capable of arguing against an idea on its merit if that idea clashes strongly with their worldview. Usually the cognitive dissonance of a differing worldview eclipses understanding to the point that anything with a wildly different context is just "insane."

astrodust 13y ago

"Intelligence" as we have come to understand it is not some magical thing, not some exotic element that's impossible to fabricate. In fact, it's probably something mundane and insultingly simple when we get to the core of it. Reproducing intelligence is mostly a matter of finding the correct formula, the right structures, the right technology. After that it will be boring, ordinary, even disposable. This doesn't sit well with some people who reject that on an emotional level even if they can't figure out any concrete reason why. It just can't be. We already have enough hardware to fake intelligence, to make a believable Turing Test candidate that could win, but we've yet to figure out how. That much will become clear in the coming decades, guaranteed. If you look at the progression in computer chess programs, where they were pathetic for the longest time until things came together and the performance of them rose exponentially, matching and then eclipsing grandmasters, it's inevitable that the same pattern will play out in the artificial intelligence space.

briantakita 13y ago
> "Intelligence" as we have come to understand it is not some magical thing I agree that intelligence can be replicated. My preferred definition of intelligence is broad. Intelligence is a system that has i/o & a feedback cycle. Thus, I think all matter & concepts have intelligence. Of course, there are higher forms of intelligence, such as human intelligence (which is not limited to the brain as we have a complete nervous system & more generally, autonomous cells). I still think it's magical, however. Even if we understand all of the rules & procedures, the experience of it all coming together fills me with awe. It's like playing a game where you understand the rules, yet you can achieve zen & a higher consciousness when playing. Another example is Fractals. The driving equation is simple, yet infinite complexity & beauty is created. > Reproducing intelligence is mostly a matter of finding the correct formula, the right structures, the right technology. After that it will be boring, ordinary, even disposable. This doesn't sit well with some people who reject that on an emotional level even if they can't figure out any concrete reason why. It just can't be. Animals & possibly lower life forms have evolved emotions. It's an important part of what drives us to do whatever we do. I would not be surprised if AI will need emotions to reach higher intelligence. I have also been driven to honor all life & intelligence. I see the interconnections within the system of existence & aspire to respect all of it's parts. When I hold such a mindset, I'm at my best.
- Crito 13y ago
  Emotion may be necessary for human-like intelligent systems, however I think you've missed his point. He's not saying that emotion will not be created or emerge in synthetic intelligent systems; rather he's saying that emotional arguments, rather than logical arguments, are rubbish. In other words, "I don't want this to be true, because I don't like the implications, therefore I think that it is not true" is not sound. Whether or not emotion plays an important role in intelligence is irrelevant.
  - briantakita 13y ago
    > he's saying that emotional arguments, rather than logical arguments, are rubbish. That's true if the system in question is entirely based on logic. That means it's probably a static (non-creative) system, as emotions often are involved in creative systems. Note that creating a logical system is itself a creative system. Side note: part of arguments are about framing the system. Often times, disagreements arise because the parties aren't even talking about the same system. A party will often be focused on a subsystem or an entirely different system.
joedavison 13y ago
And what about concepts like art, love, beauty, morality? Are these also simply "computations" of some sort? I believe your argument holds true for all intelligence that relies on logic. However, I would put forth that the full definition of "intelligence" includes logic, and also something else, let's call it "beyond logic". For example, see Gödel's incompleteness theorems [1]. You will find that there are statements that can be "true but unprovable". Statements that are "true but unprovable" cannot be computed. But that doesn't make them untrue. Therefore, there are limits to artificial intelligence. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems#Relationship_with_computability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...
- AndrewKemendo 13y ago
  >And what about concepts like art, love, beauty, morality? Are these also simply "computations" of some sort? Yes. I would argue that they are no more abstract than any other pattern recognition and the fact that they can be differentiated by perception makes them computable. You fundamentally ask the "Qualia" question, which for my part at least is well understood to be an emergent property of having perception. The Godel question is always brought up as though it is some kind of trump card - though it is not. It simply states that, we don't think that the universe can simulate itself without inconsistency. Call that a limit if you want but AI is complete well before we have a consistent universal model. If I were you I would be more worried about the münchhausen trilemma
- habitue 13y ago
  The point isn't that everything can be proven, the point is that human brains have no special abilities that can't be emulated by computers. If you emulate every neuron and neurotransmitter in the brain with a sufficiently powerful computer, you will get an intelligence that has the same perception of love, beauty, blah blah blah that people think somehow set them apart from all other matter in the universe. In addition, once you have it modeled, its possible invent a computer that loves more deeply than any human ever could. Who understands and appreciates the human concept of beauty better than any human ever could etc. We know these things are emergent properties of very slow meat processors, and therefore can be recreated again on very fast silicon processors.
hyperbovine 13y ago
> If you look at the progression in computer chess programs, where they were pathetic for the longest time until things came together and the performance of them rose exponentially, matching and then eclipsing grandmasters, it's inevitable that the same pattern will play out in the artificial intelligence space. Chess programs started beating grandmasters when they built computers big enough to recurse a few dozen levels down the dynamic programming tree. Other than a few brainy programming optimizations and some well-chosen search heuristics (like e.g. learning all of Kasparov's opening repertoire) it was all brawn as far as I know. With its countable state space and discrete, turn-based dynamics, chess actually strikes me as one of the easier AI problems you can pose. If you want a sense of how truly far away we are from real AI go check out what they are doing in computer vision. Classification performance on tasks that a four-year-old could execute without error is in the single digits in some cases (http://image-net.org/challenges/LSVRC/2012/analysis/ http://image-net.org/challenges/LSVRC/2012/analysis/). It is indeed difficult to imagine a human-like AI in this domain without some sort of singularity occurring, but no one I talk to thinks that such a thing is near.
- Houshalter 13y ago
  I disagree strongly. He was using chess as an example of how progress can increase exponentially, not how artificial intelligence is close. Object recognition is another good example with major breakthroughs in recent years leading to massive improvements. They are already very close to, and in some cases exceeding, human ability. Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
clavalle 13y ago
Let's say I accept that higher, human-like, intelligence is reproducible. It still doesn't follow that beyond that is some sort of yet in-conceived 'super intelligence'; that intelligent machines can outstrip humanity in any meaningful way and build even more intelligent machines than themselves and on and on in a virtuous cycle as the Singularity predicts.
- fixermark 13y ago
  Given that we have assumed human-like intelligence is reproducible, let's assume only slightly further that intelligence can be represented as some pattern, P, that can be reproduced in media other than human brains (I'm assuming you are meaning "reproducible" in terms of "reproducible within a machine", not the uninteresting meaning of "Every human born has reproduced intelligence"). If P exists, we have all kinds of faster, better, more durable strata we could encode it into than the one evolution happened to hit upon, and that encoding alone could be considered 'super intelligence' in the sense that it would easily out-think you and I. That may not necessarily imply that P can be improved upon exponentially (but if I were your stock advisor---or for that matter, licensed to be so---I'd humbly suggest that wagering against the _total possibility_ that something can be improved tends to be a losing wager). But it wouldn't take too many improvements to get orders of magnitude past our slower-than-a-speeding-bullet organic thought machinery. It's worth noting that Kurzweil's book doesn't necessarily predict infinite, unbounded growth in intelligence (I'd assume that what we'd call "intelligence" is susceptible to the S-curve of diminishing returns like other technologies). But one doesn't need infinite, unbounded intelligence growth to build something that fundamentally transforms the world we live in.
  - clavalle 13y ago
    > encoding alone could be considered 'super intelligence' in the sense that it would easily out-think you and I. >But it wouldn't take too many improvements to get orders of magnitude past our slower-than-a-speeding-bullet organic thought machinery. These are HUGE leaps to make. Not to mention that thinking faster =\= thinking better, which is to say that there is no reason to assume that faster intelligence would not be understandable to the human brain.

Crito 13y ago

I see little justification in the article for the assertion that creativity/imagination^ is something unique and distinct from other aspects of intelligence. Any system that explores solutions will need to speculate on which branch of decisions will have the greatest chances of yielding a desirable outcome. Any system with enough power to fully explore all possibilities will have enough power to discover other possibilities that it lacks the power to fully explore within it's SLAs. Different intelligent systems that employ different pruning techniques or heuristics will have different "creativities". The more sophisticated the intelligent system, the greater the range of 'creative' thought. I've seen little reason to think that creativity is some sort of "special sauce" that would not become commoditized as the rest of intelligence is commoditized. Why shouldn't it? ^ Imagination without creativity is merely simulation, something that nobody doubts is mechanical. I therefore conclude that the author is actually identifying creativity as special.

briantakita 13y ago
There's a couple of ways I see to go with this discussion. I'll explore both... 1. We are in a temporal frame. The evolution of intelligence has gotten us to this point. Right now, high creativity is unique to humans. I agree that the possibility exists for humans to create creative beings. 2. The definition of creativity is broad at the moment. Pursuits that are defined as "creative" are also changing. As we learn more about creativity (zoom into the definition), we will identify more nuances of creativity. Indeed, it may loop back to a fundamental notion of cognition which itself may be related to a fundamental notion of self-perpetuating systems creating the best possible outcome for it's lineage. I suspect that creativity is akin to a driving force. So in a fractal system, "creativity" or "emotional drive" is the equation which creates/generates the fractal over time.
- Crito 13y ago
  I think that it is easiest (and therefore best ;) to define creativity by what we can observe about it, without any internal knowledge about it. So basically "creativity" is some sort of black-box that generates novel outcomes (for a broad sense of outcomes). On the face of it, I think that for this definition of creativity, I think you could do by simply logically exploring problem spaces that have not been explored before, or by exploring branches in problem spaces that have not been explored before. Maybe throw in a source of randomness when deciding what to explore, to explore possibilities that may not otherwise make sense but could nevertheless lead to interesting outcomes. (The equivalent of a chemist randomly fucking around in his backyard shed). Some of my friends and I practice a sort of very limited mechanical creativity in the form of a drinking game. We invent new "startup ideas" by ad libbing into the phrase "The ____ of ____", where both blanks are existing companies. We then explore that idea and speculate on what such a company would actually entail. "The Twitter of Githubs", maybe that's a company build around the idea of sharing code snippets, like gists? Not a very interesting idea, but I'm sober at the moment. ;)