6 ms·

Artificial Intelligence, Really, Is Pseudo-Intelligence

43 points by kevbin 12y ago

jasonlfunk 12y ago
I'm happy to see an article like this on HN. It is much closer to my thoughts on AI then the general optimistic inevitability of AI one usually sees in the tech community.
jostmey 12y ago
The authors comparison of intelligence to biological systems is absurd. Biological systems are more complicated than necessary. Let me say that again. Biological systems are overly complicated. This is because Natural selection has no regard for simplicity. Evolution is a blind process of trial and error that sticks to what works. So just because the gene networks of an amoeba are a confusing mess, which they are, does not imply that Intelligent machines have to be just as complicated. I wrote a post on this awhile ago: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wlFJtuBgnVkWm1nflKtJAy3bWCuvBAZDH-GlgadCTCc/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wlFJtuBgnVkWm1nflKtJAy3b...
- nyrulez 12y ago
  This argument would have merit if we were anywhere near biological intelligence in our "AI". We don't even understand how most of the brain works, what it does or how it does it. In fact if it was so simple even to re-create some aspect of the brain, we would have created the super-brain with the amount of resources we have at our disposal and time we have spent in the field of AI. It is like saying calculus is unnecessarily complex because all I can do is simple arithmetic.
  - tensor 12y ago
    Why is the brain the benchmark for "intelligence"? We already have machines that can run circles around the brain on very complex reasoning tasks. True, we don't have a talking robot that simulates humans, but in many other tasks we've met or exceeded what humans can do. I would argue that we already have intelligent machines. What we don't have is a human simulator.
    - bejuizb123 12y ago
      It is not a benchmark but a target to be reached. Once we have models of human simulation, we can treat the human brain as a benchmark.
    - nyrulez 12y ago
      You raise a valid point but for an orthogonal question. When I first saw a calculator, as a 5 year old, I thought it was the most amazing and intelligent thing ever. The original point discussed above was about how unnecessarily complex the brain is if its function/intelligence is so simple. We may or may not want to treat it as a benchmark, but the fact remains nobody understands it or can mimic its function even after trying for a very long time. (though believe me you, that's what most of AI is trying to do, even if in a simplistic way)
    - baddox 12y ago
      Haven't you heard? At the moment a computer exists which can outperform a human mind at a certain task, that task can no longer be considered a criterion for intelligence. Multiplying large numbers doesn't require intelligence. Chess doesn't require intelligence. Facial recognition doesn't require intelligence. Proving mathematical theorems doesn't require intelligence.
      - brianberns 12y ago
        There's a widely-accepted standard for judging intelligence called the Turing Test. Computers are still a long way from passing that test.
        nl 12y ago
        They aren't that far from passing it actually. One kinda sorta passed it earlier this year, by pretending to be a 13 yo boy. It was at the annual Turing Test event though[1]. Even if we ignore that, given the recent interest in using RNNs to generate natural language I'd say we are 18 months from being able to pass it reliably. [1]http://www.reading.ac.uk/news-and-events/releases/PR583836.aspx http://www.reading.ac.uk/news-and-events/releases/PR583836.a...
  - jostmey 12y ago
    Look, if Evolution can give rise to intelligence, which is nothing more than a drawn out process of trial and error, then perhaps creating intelligence is easy. The major roadblock standing in our way is a lack of computing power. The Human mind still vastly outstrips our fastest computers. Of course, there will be technical challenges in creating machines with human level intelligence, but once we have super fast computers I think it will be possible.
    - nyrulez 12y ago
      You assume a-priori how the brain was formed. Perhaps the burden of proof could be in the reverse direction. Ever considered that ? If it was just a drawn out process of trial and error, surely hundreds of top AI researchers with 10,000s of cores/petabytes of RAM at their disposal could have would have made massive strides with their non hit and trial, deliberate process. Surely copying something that is in front of you is easier than designing something like it from scratch ? I hope you agree. But we haven't been able to. And I don't imply that we will never be able to, at least hopefully copy or even enhance some of the interesting aspects. I find AI very exciting. But I would stop calling something we don't even understand "simple and generated from hit and trial".
      - nyrulez 12y ago
        Edit: Look I didn't want to challenge your optimism. It is refreshing to believe that. But I have dealt with enough AI to know that most people have no idea what AI is. There is not much collaboration happening between the neuroscientists, philosophers and AI researchers. Unless a single organization brings them together under one roof, we are very far away from what most people would call biological intelligence.
      - nl 12y ago
        Actually, we have made dramatic strides in AI. 2 years ago we couldn't classify multiple objects in a photo properly. Now we can, and within 2 years I would bet we will be approaching human performance on that task. Watson can do medical diagnosis better than most humans. We understand some parts of intelligence quite well, and others less so.
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  Natural selection does have a regard for simplicity, in that complexity has costs. Natural selection has very primitive hueuristics for achieving design: variance + selection. But once a superior arrangement is achieved, it succeeds. Presuming it provides an advantage in survival, reproduction, competition, etc. Examples of retrogressive complexity among natural systems include the many birds and insects which evolve toward flightless variants in island habitats. Flying is a useful, but complex, and very high-energy adaptation. Where it provides a capability to out-compete other life forms (better range, escape from predators, more food-gathering capability) it's useful, but given risks presented (including being blown off an island in a storm, say), it can also be maladaptive.
rdtsc 12y ago
This is a pretty short and simple article but I think it is interesting and has been striking at the core of controversy of what AI is. Is something that behaves like a human really intelligent? Google Search answers a lot of questions almost like a smart well educated person. Is it an intelligent entity? A computer plays chess better than humans. Is it intelligent? In this case I think the author wants the entity to behave like biological organisms to be considered intelligent. This includes autonomy and self-replication. I can see that. This sort of points to robotics as the field that will produce these entities. Or maybe computer viruses...? This is also a classic debate between behaviorists and those like Chomsky who want to understand the underlying processes of human cognition and intelligence. I can see both sides and maybe I like Chomsky's more idealistic view a bit better... Here are a few easy to read articles that talk about this: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/noam-chomsky-on-where-artificial-intelligence-went-wrong/261637/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/noam-c... http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/06/norvig-vs-chomsky-and-the-fight-for-the-future-of-ai http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/06/norvig-vs-chomsky-and-the-f... Another interesting one (a bit longer) in the same vein by David Deutsch (yes that Deutsch, the "multiple Universes physics guy") http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/david-deutsch-artificial-intelligence/ http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/david-deutsch-artificial-...
fogleman 12y ago
I agree that Watson is nothing like a true artificial intelligence. But I do not believe that this means we are unable to create such a thing. I think true AI will be a highly-parallel learning machine, possibly modeled off of something like the human brain. But I do not think that we need to fully understand the human brain to create an AI smarter than us. I think one of the big challenges may be in providing the proper sensors / inputs to this learning device. I think once we have a true AI, we won't really understand how it works, just as we can train a neural network but can't look at the network itself and make much sense from its parts. I think it's possible that the road to the singularity may be gradual, and we might not even realize when it happens. Edit: Today's xkcd is somewhat relevant: http://xkcd.com/1450/ http://xkcd.com/1450/
mbleigh 12y ago
This is quibbling semantics. I bet there are software simulations for amoeba behavior indistinguishable from the real thing. It's placing an inordinate degree of importance on physical reality. Is a perfect simulation different from the real thing? That is a fundamental philosophical question that can't simply be assumed to be no.
- bejuizb123 12y ago
  The reason why they are indistinguishable stems from our ignorance to learn about a deeper abstraction. We cannot simulate further than what we already know.
  - nl 12y ago
    What does that mean? We can tell when our simulations behaviour doesn't match the goal. But when it does, then what? You seem to imply there is some (actual, literal) magic we are missing.
    - bejuizb123 12y ago
      Not entirely. I am simply stating that, our simulations are indistinguishable because, 'we' are simulating them. The simulations aren't going to get any better than what 'we' understand. That being said, it doesn't imply we have a perfect understanding of the Amoeba down to the last particle of it. (since we absolutely have no idea what it is).
      - nl 12y ago
        our simulations are indistinguishable because, 'we' are simulating them. When we build bad simulations, then we can distinguishable them fine. Then we understand more, and do better, and then they become indistinguishable. The simulations aren't going to get any better than what 'we' understand. That's not entirely true. We simulate vision systems using RNNs, and we don't entirely understand how they learn.
        12y ago
nl 12y ago
Ha! Artificial intelligence us always whatever we can't work out what to do. As a general principle, if someone claims X is not AI, then they need to define a test they will accept as a true test of AI. "The agency and awareness of an amoeba" is achievable now[1]. [1] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/weve-put-worms-mind-lego-robot-body-180953399/ http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/weve-put-worms-mind...
baddox 12y ago
What an astonishingly vapid and frustrating article. We need to get past these semantic arguments about what constitutes "intelligence." The "do submarines swim" analogy is cliched, but perfectly appropriate. It doesn't matter how you define "swim." Submarines are better at certain tasks than human bodies on their own. Likewise, computer systems that we label "AI" systems are better at certain tasks than human bodies (brains) on their own. The author seems to use "intelligence" and "autonomy" interchangeably, which is troubling, mostly because he makes no attempt at actually defining either. His claim that amoebas and plants "exhibit an intelligence, an autonomy, an originality, that far outstrips even the most powerful computers" is ludicrous under any remotely plausible definitions of the terms. If humans genetically engineer an amoeba or a plant to change its behavior, is the magical "autonomy" suddenly gone? Also, his argument is ridiculous even as semantic arguments go, since "artificial" isn't supposed to mean "synthetic." The standard dictionary definitions are "made by humans" and "false or pretending."
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
yk 12y ago
My problem with the article is, it never explains the difference between "processing" information and "having" information. And I think that the entire argument hangs on this distinction. The author essentially claims, that a amoeba has some essence of live which a computer can not posess, but fails to show that the distinction is important beyond semantics. ( To clarify, I think that this is an entirely defendable position, it is just one of the questions where details of definitions really matter.)
snyp 12y ago
I don't think the author has enough knowledge about what is actually going on in the field of AI to provide reasonable arguments, all she/he spoke about was Watson and Clocks, i think she/he must understand there is more to AI than what comes on the news.
zefei 12y ago
To say something is pseudo-intelligence or true intelligence, one has to define intelligence rigorously. That is more philosophical than people think, because how little we scientifically understand about intelligence, or consciousness, or even life. For most of people, the intuition of intelligence is a bit naive, and nowadays intuition is often at the opposite of the truth. It often is along the line of "looking intelligent and knowing what it is doing”. Something like turing test describes the first part intuitively. But we soon found out that we wouldn’t call something “intelligent” even it passes turing test since the machine is unlikely to know why it is saying something, hence the latter part. But again, this is about consciousness or “strong AI”, which is even further away from our understanding than “intelligence”. How do we know that the machines that “look intelligent” don’t “know what they are doing”? Consciousness is very hard to define and even harder to inspect, and maybe someday machines begin to have consciousness even before we realize it? In fact, we already did this to most animals, thinking they are not intelligent or self-conscious while they are. But to me, the psychology behind these definitions is very interesting and maybe quite important. No matter how we try to define intelligence, we wouldn’t call machines intelligent until they very much behave like us. Because to most people, intelligence is what defines humans, so they intuitively use their feelings of “does that feel human” to benchmark intelligence. And psychologically, we are exceptionally good at telling something “not human” from “feeling/looking/speaking like human”. But this is a very narrow and, if I dare to say, ignorant and self-centric view, because it implicitly relies on the thinking of “we are far more intelligent than any other life form, and human's intelligence is the only way intelligence can be work”. Think about it, if there’s a super-intelligent being that observes our world, maybe to it, human’s intelligence is as primitive as fish, and trees aren’t far behind; and maybe, entities such like countries or the internet are actually of more intelligent “life” forms, just we haven’t realized that yet because they don’t look like us at all; and maybe, on the scale of intelligence from 0 to that super-intelligent, humans, birds and machines are clustered in a small range, though significantly larger than zero, still not far from it. Although the research on human brains and a lot of our own stuff inspired the research of AI quite a lot, it is perfectly possible that we create something truly intelligent or conscious without us understanding human intelligence or consciousness fully. We can have a different kind of “intelligence”, and our researches are well on their way toward that. It’s very hard to see because we don’t understand intelligence, and maybe our hardware isn’t powerful enough to fully utilize our theories.
calhoun137 12y ago
This article makes a number of very bold claims about poorly defined concepts, and provides zero evidence to back anything it says up.
mcphage 12y ago
That's okay, natural intelligence is really only pseudo-intelligence, too.
Xcelerate 12y ago
"But it's striking that even the simplest forms of life — the amoeba, for example — exhibit an intelligence, an autonomy, an originality, that far outstrips even the most powerful computers. A single cell has a life story; it turns the medium in which it finds itself into an environment and it organizes that environment into a place of value." As someone who does work in this field, we're not that far away from a fully atomistic simulation of a single cell (with a couple assumptions about reactive force fields, quantum cut-off, numerical stability, time scales, yada yada...)
Patrick_Devine 12y ago
The brain is clearly marvelous, but it's not magic. It's a physical object with rules which govern it just like anything else. To think that we won't be able to crack the AI nut just smacks of insecurity on the part of the OP. We are, whether anyone wants to accept it or not, just meat robots.
- 3rd3 12y ago
  I think a wide-spread problem in this discussion is that people misinterpret the word 'just'. It clearly means "just meat, no magic". But what people mistakenly understand is "just meat, inferior to magic".
ChuckMcM 12y ago
Man that comment thread takes me right back to Freshman philosophy class. I particularly appreciated the notion of an Amoeba having 'agency'. Caveat the mechanical reconstruction and processing of the organics of DNA, systems have been built and discussed in Artificial Life conferences that not only have the 'agency' of an Amoeba but emergent behaviors in flocking, social adaptation, and mutual defense. And what does that say about intelligence? Pretty much nothing, just like all mass being attracted to all other mass clearly demonstrates the concept of gravity but says nothing at all about what gravity is. But it is a lot of fun to speculate about.
sysk 12y ago
I'm starting to believe (hard) AI should get the same status as politics and religion on HN. Those comment threads debating the true nature of AI are getting repetitive.
stiff 12y ago
The whole article is based on a false premise - behaviour of unicellular organisms is now understood very well by biologists and it is clear they are nothing more than automatons, basically. A simple explanation of amoebas behaviour can be found here[1], for example: When an amoeba encounters a chemical that attracts it, the chemoattractant binds to receptors on the amoeba's surface. The receptor then activates a protein called a G-protein, which activates a protein called PLC. The PLC modifies other molecules to create short-lived messengers that will activate other pathways necessary for movement by the cell. The story is pretty similar for any other behaviour they exhibit, its just a simple chain of chemical reactions triggered by an impulse from an environment. In contrast to many more complicated organisms where we hypothetically know the same to be the case (like humans?), in unicellular organisms we actually traced many of such pathways. People very emotionally cling to their beliefs about intelligence, and this blinds them to simple logic. This is the same thing at operation that caused the backslash against evolution theory. In the end I don't see why such determinism would sadden anyone, our everyday experience is what it is and its nature is not changed by learning that we react, in the end, somewhat automatically. [1] http://www.ehow.com/info_8517923_ways-amoeba-sees-responds.html http://www.ehow.com/info_8517923_ways-amoeba-sees-responds.h...
esfandia 12y ago
I think the author should be using the term "agency" instead of "intelligence", and then I might agree. The amoeba or the most basic animal doesn't have much intelligence, but it has drive and desire to survive and reproduce. That's not true in artificially intelligent beings. And while you could hard-code such drive (see the Belief-Desire-Intention frameworks in the multi-agent systems literature), ultimately it will still always be "pseudo" by definition. The notion of survival in a machine will only ever be a trick designed by a human to get a machine to do something for us, not something innate. Maybe one day we'll implement some Adam and Eve robots with an initial hard-coded survival DNA, that the robots will abide by and transmit to their children robots. Then those children robots will evolve and one day think of building thinking machines (maybe out of some organic material) to work for them and will think of faking some survival code (maybe using some sort of protein?) in them to create pseudo-agency... ;)
- baddox 12y ago
  I'm surprised whenever I see what seems to be belief in dualism in ostensibly serious scientific discussion about humans. This author goes so far as to attribute dualism to amoebas.

43 points by kevbin 12y ago

I'm happy to see an article like this on HN. It is much closer to my thoughts on AI then the general optimistic inevitability of AI one usually sees in the tech community.

jostmey 12y ago

The authors comparison of intelligence to biological systems is absurd. Biological systems are more complicated than necessary. Let me say that again. Biological systems are overly complicated. This is because Natural selection has no regard for simplicity. Evolution is a blind process of trial and error that sticks to what works. So just because the gene networks of an amoeba are a confusing mess, which they are, does not imply that Intelligent machines have to be just as complicated. I wrote a post on this awhile ago: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wlFJtuBgnVkWm1nflKtJAy3bWCuvBAZDH-GlgadCTCc/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wlFJtuBgnVkWm1nflKtJAy3b...

nyrulez 12y ago
This argument would have merit if we were anywhere near biological intelligence in our "AI". We don't even understand how most of the brain works, what it does or how it does it. In fact if it was so simple even to re-create some aspect of the brain, we would have created the super-brain with the amount of resources we have at our disposal and time we have spent in the field of AI. It is like saying calculus is unnecessarily complex because all I can do is simple arithmetic.
- tensor 12y ago
  Why is the brain the benchmark for "intelligence"? We already have machines that can run circles around the brain on very complex reasoning tasks. True, we don't have a talking robot that simulates humans, but in many other tasks we've met or exceeded what humans can do. I would argue that we already have intelligent machines. What we don't have is a human simulator.
  - bejuizb123 12y ago
    It is not a benchmark but a target to be reached. Once we have models of human simulation, we can treat the human brain as a benchmark.
  - nyrulez 12y ago
    You raise a valid point but for an orthogonal question. When I first saw a calculator, as a 5 year old, I thought it was the most amazing and intelligent thing ever. The original point discussed above was about how unnecessarily complex the brain is if its function/intelligence is so simple. We may or may not want to treat it as a benchmark, but the fact remains nobody understands it or can mimic its function even after trying for a very long time. (though believe me you, that's what most of AI is trying to do, even if in a simplistic way)
  - baddox 12y ago
    Haven't you heard? At the moment a computer exists which can outperform a human mind at a certain task, that task can no longer be considered a criterion for intelligence. Multiplying large numbers doesn't require intelligence. Chess doesn't require intelligence. Facial recognition doesn't require intelligence. Proving mathematical theorems doesn't require intelligence.
    - brianberns 12y ago
      There's a widely-accepted standard for judging intelligence called the Turing Test. Computers are still a long way from passing that test.
      - nl 12y ago
        They aren't that far from passing it actually. One kinda sorta passed it earlier this year, by pretending to be a 13 yo boy. It was at the annual Turing Test event though[1]. Even if we ignore that, given the recent interest in using RNNs to generate natural language I'd say we are 18 months from being able to pass it reliably. [1]http://www.reading.ac.uk/news-and-events/releases/PR583836.aspx http://www.reading.ac.uk/news-and-events/releases/PR583836.a...
- jostmey 12y ago
  Look, if Evolution can give rise to intelligence, which is nothing more than a drawn out process of trial and error, then perhaps creating intelligence is easy. The major roadblock standing in our way is a lack of computing power. The Human mind still vastly outstrips our fastest computers. Of course, there will be technical challenges in creating machines with human level intelligence, but once we have super fast computers I think it will be possible.
  - nyrulez 12y ago
    You assume a-priori how the brain was formed. Perhaps the burden of proof could be in the reverse direction. Ever considered that ? If it was just a drawn out process of trial and error, surely hundreds of top AI researchers with 10,000s of cores/petabytes of RAM at their disposal could have would have made massive strides with their non hit and trial, deliberate process. Surely copying something that is in front of you is easier than designing something like it from scratch ? I hope you agree. But we haven't been able to. And I don't imply that we will never be able to, at least hopefully copy or even enhance some of the interesting aspects. I find AI very exciting. But I would stop calling something we don't even understand "simple and generated from hit and trial".
    - nyrulez 12y ago
      Edit: Look I didn't want to challenge your optimism. It is refreshing to believe that. But I have dealt with enough AI to know that most people have no idea what AI is. There is not much collaboration happening between the neuroscientists, philosophers and AI researchers. Unless a single organization brings them together under one roof, we are very far away from what most people would call biological intelligence.
    - nl 12y ago
      Actually, we have made dramatic strides in AI. 2 years ago we couldn't classify multiple objects in a photo properly. Now we can, and within 2 years I would bet we will be approaching human performance on that task. Watson can do medical diagnosis better than most humans. We understand some parts of intelligence quite well, and others less so.
dredmorbius 12y ago
Natural selection does have a regard for simplicity, in that complexity has costs. Natural selection has very primitive hueuristics for achieving design: variance + selection. But once a superior arrangement is achieved, it succeeds. Presuming it provides an advantage in survival, reproduction, competition, etc. Examples of retrogressive complexity among natural systems include the many birds and insects which evolve toward flightless variants in island habitats. Flying is a useful, but complex, and very high-energy adaptation. Where it provides a capability to out-compete other life forms (better range, escape from predators, more food-gathering capability) it's useful, but given risks presented (including being blown off an island in a storm, say), it can also be maladaptive.

rdtsc 12y ago

This is a pretty short and simple article but I think it is interesting and has been striking at the core of controversy of what AI is. Is something that behaves like a human really intelligent? Google Search answers a lot of questions almost like a smart well educated person. Is it an intelligent entity? A computer plays chess better than humans. Is it intelligent? In this case I think the author wants the entity to behave like biological organisms to be considered intelligent. This includes autonomy and self-replication. I can see that. This sort of points to robotics as the field that will produce these entities. Or maybe computer viruses...? This is also a classic debate between behaviorists and those like Chomsky who want to understand the underlying processes of human cognition and intelligence. I can see both sides and maybe I like Chomsky's more idealistic view a bit better... Here are a few easy to read articles that talk about this: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/noam-chomsky-on-where-artificial-intelligence-went-wrong/261637/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/noam-c... http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/06/norvig-vs-chomsky-and-the-fight-for-the-future-of-ai http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/06/norvig-vs-chomsky-and-the-f... Another interesting one (a bit longer) in the same vein by David Deutsch (yes that Deutsch, the "multiple Universes physics guy") http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/david-deutsch-artificial-intelligence/ http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/david-deutsch-artificial-...

fogleman 12y ago

I agree that Watson is nothing like a true artificial intelligence. But I do not believe that this means we are unable to create such a thing. I think true AI will be a highly-parallel learning machine, possibly modeled off of something like the human brain. But I do not think that we need to fully understand the human brain to create an AI smarter than us. I think one of the big challenges may be in providing the proper sensors / inputs to this learning device. I think once we have a true AI, we won't really understand how it works, just as we can train a neural network but can't look at the network itself and make much sense from its parts. I think it's possible that the road to the singularity may be gradual, and we might not even realize when it happens. Edit: Today's xkcd is somewhat relevant: http://xkcd.com/1450/ http://xkcd.com/1450/

mbleigh 12y ago

This is quibbling semantics. I bet there are software simulations for amoeba behavior indistinguishable from the real thing. It's placing an inordinate degree of importance on physical reality. Is a perfect simulation different from the real thing? That is a fundamental philosophical question that can't simply be assumed to be no.

bejuizb123 12y ago
The reason why they are indistinguishable stems from our ignorance to learn about a deeper abstraction. We cannot simulate further than what we already know.
- nl 12y ago
  What does that mean? We can tell when our simulations behaviour doesn't match the goal. But when it does, then what? You seem to imply there is some (actual, literal) magic we are missing.
  - bejuizb123 12y ago
    Not entirely. I am simply stating that, our simulations are indistinguishable because, 'we' are simulating them. The simulations aren't going to get any better than what 'we' understand. That being said, it doesn't imply we have a perfect understanding of the Amoeba down to the last particle of it. (since we absolutely have no idea what it is).
    - nl 12y ago
      our simulations are indistinguishable because, 'we' are simulating them. When we build bad simulations, then we can distinguishable them fine. Then we understand more, and do better, and then they become indistinguishable. The simulations aren't going to get any better than what 'we' understand. That's not entirely true. We simulate vision systems using RNNs, and we don't entirely understand how they learn.
      - 12y ago

nl 12y ago

Ha! Artificial intelligence us always whatever we can't work out what to do. As a general principle, if someone claims X is not AI, then they need to define a test they will accept as a true test of AI. "The agency and awareness of an amoeba" is achievable now[1]. [1] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/weve-put-worms-mind-lego-robot-body-180953399/ http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/weve-put-worms-mind...

baddox 12y ago

What an astonishingly vapid and frustrating article. We need to get past these semantic arguments about what constitutes "intelligence." The "do submarines swim" analogy is cliched, but perfectly appropriate. It doesn't matter how you define "swim." Submarines are better at certain tasks than human bodies on their own. Likewise, computer systems that we label "AI" systems are better at certain tasks than human bodies (brains) on their own. The author seems to use "intelligence" and "autonomy" interchangeably, which is troubling, mostly because he makes no attempt at actually defining either. His claim that amoebas and plants "exhibit an intelligence, an autonomy, an originality, that far outstrips even the most powerful computers" is ludicrous under any remotely plausible definitions of the terms. If humans genetically engineer an amoeba or a plant to change its behavior, is the magical "autonomy" suddenly gone? Also, his argument is ridiculous even as semantic arguments go, since "artificial" isn't supposed to mean "synthetic." The standard dictionary definitions are "made by humans" and "false or pretending."

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

yk 12y ago

My problem with the article is, it never explains the difference between "processing" information and "having" information. And I think that the entire argument hangs on this distinction. The author essentially claims, that a amoeba has some essence of live which a computer can not posess, but fails to show that the distinction is important beyond semantics. ( To clarify, I think that this is an entirely defendable position, it is just one of the questions where details of definitions really matter.)

snyp 12y ago

I don't think the author has enough knowledge about what is actually going on in the field of AI to provide reasonable arguments, all she/he spoke about was Watson and Clocks, i think she/he must understand there is more to AI than what comes on the news.

zefei 12y ago

To say something is pseudo-intelligence or true intelligence, one has to define intelligence rigorously. That is more philosophical than people think, because how little we scientifically understand about intelligence, or consciousness, or even life. For most of people, the intuition of intelligence is a bit naive, and nowadays intuition is often at the opposite of the truth. It often is along the line of "looking intelligent and knowing what it is doing”. Something like turing test describes the first part intuitively. But we soon found out that we wouldn’t call something “intelligent” even it passes turing test since the machine is unlikely to know why it is saying something, hence the latter part. But again, this is about consciousness or “strong AI”, which is even further away from our understanding than “intelligence”. How do we know that the machines that “look intelligent” don’t “know what they are doing”? Consciousness is very hard to define and even harder to inspect, and maybe someday machines begin to have consciousness even before we realize it? In fact, we already did this to most animals, thinking they are not intelligent or self-conscious while they are. But to me, the psychology behind these definitions is very interesting and maybe quite important. No matter how we try to define intelligence, we wouldn’t call machines intelligent until they very much behave like us. Because to most people, intelligence is what defines humans, so they intuitively use their feelings of “does that feel human” to benchmark intelligence. And psychologically, we are exceptionally good at telling something “not human” from “feeling/looking/speaking like human”. But this is a very narrow and, if I dare to say, ignorant and self-centric view, because it implicitly relies on the thinking of “we are far more intelligent than any other life form, and human's intelligence is the only way intelligence can be work”. Think about it, if there’s a super-intelligent being that observes our world, maybe to it, human’s intelligence is as primitive as fish, and trees aren’t far behind; and maybe, entities such like countries or the internet are actually of more intelligent “life” forms, just we haven’t realized that yet because they don’t look like us at all; and maybe, on the scale of intelligence from 0 to that super-intelligent, humans, birds and machines are clustered in a small range, though significantly larger than zero, still not far from it. Although the research on human brains and a lot of our own stuff inspired the research of AI quite a lot, it is perfectly possible that we create something truly intelligent or conscious without us understanding human intelligence or consciousness fully. We can have a different kind of “intelligence”, and our researches are well on their way toward that. It’s very hard to see because we don’t understand intelligence, and maybe our hardware isn’t powerful enough to fully utilize our theories.

calhoun137 12y ago

This article makes a number of very bold claims about poorly defined concepts, and provides zero evidence to back anything it says up.

mcphage 12y ago

That's okay, natural intelligence is really only pseudo-intelligence, too.

Xcelerate 12y ago

"But it's striking that even the simplest forms of life — the amoeba, for example — exhibit an intelligence, an autonomy, an originality, that far outstrips even the most powerful computers. A single cell has a life story; it turns the medium in which it finds itself into an environment and it organizes that environment into a place of value." As someone who does work in this field, we're not that far away from a fully atomistic simulation of a single cell (with a couple assumptions about reactive force fields, quantum cut-off, numerical stability, time scales, yada yada...)

Patrick_Devine 12y ago

The brain is clearly marvelous, but it's not magic. It's a physical object with rules which govern it just like anything else. To think that we won't be able to crack the AI nut just smacks of insecurity on the part of the OP. We are, whether anyone wants to accept it or not, just meat robots.

3rd3 12y ago
I think a wide-spread problem in this discussion is that people misinterpret the word 'just'. It clearly means "just meat, no magic". But what people mistakenly understand is "just meat, inferior to magic".

ChuckMcM 12y ago

Man that comment thread takes me right back to Freshman philosophy class. I particularly appreciated the notion of an Amoeba having 'agency'. Caveat the mechanical reconstruction and processing of the organics of DNA, systems have been built and discussed in Artificial Life conferences that not only have the 'agency' of an Amoeba but emergent behaviors in flocking, social adaptation, and mutual defense. And what does that say about intelligence? Pretty much nothing, just like all mass being attracted to all other mass clearly demonstrates the concept of gravity but says nothing at all about what gravity is. But it is a lot of fun to speculate about.

sysk 12y ago

I'm starting to believe (hard) AI should get the same status as politics and religion on HN. Those comment threads debating the true nature of AI are getting repetitive.

stiff 12y ago

The whole article is based on a false premise - behaviour of unicellular organisms is now understood very well by biologists and it is clear they are nothing more than automatons, basically. A simple explanation of amoebas behaviour can be found here[1], for example: When an amoeba encounters a chemical that attracts it, the chemoattractant binds to receptors on the amoeba's surface. The receptor then activates a protein called a G-protein, which activates a protein called PLC. The PLC modifies other molecules to create short-lived messengers that will activate other pathways necessary for movement by the cell. The story is pretty similar for any other behaviour they exhibit, its just a simple chain of chemical reactions triggered by an impulse from an environment. In contrast to many more complicated organisms where we hypothetically know the same to be the case (like humans?), in unicellular organisms we actually traced many of such pathways. People very emotionally cling to their beliefs about intelligence, and this blinds them to simple logic. This is the same thing at operation that caused the backslash against evolution theory. In the end I don't see why such determinism would sadden anyone, our everyday experience is what it is and its nature is not changed by learning that we react, in the end, somewhat automatically. [1] http://www.ehow.com/info_8517923_ways-amoeba-sees-responds.html http://www.ehow.com/info_8517923_ways-amoeba-sees-responds.h...

esfandia 12y ago

I think the author should be using the term "agency" instead of "intelligence", and then I might agree. The amoeba or the most basic animal doesn't have much intelligence, but it has drive and desire to survive and reproduce. That's not true in artificially intelligent beings. And while you could hard-code such drive (see the Belief-Desire-Intention frameworks in the multi-agent systems literature), ultimately it will still always be "pseudo" by definition. The notion of survival in a machine will only ever be a trick designed by a human to get a machine to do something for us, not something innate. Maybe one day we'll implement some Adam and Eve robots with an initial hard-coded survival DNA, that the robots will abide by and transmit to their children robots. Then those children robots will evolve and one day think of building thinking machines (maybe out of some organic material) to work for them and will think of faking some survival code (maybe using some sort of protein?) in them to create pseudo-agency... ;)

baddox 12y ago
I'm surprised whenever I see what seems to be belief in dualism in ostensibly serious scientific discussion about humans. This author goes so far as to attribute dualism to amoebas.