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Robots Can’t Dance: Why the singularity is greatly exaggerated

39 points by joosters 12y ago

onion2k 12y ago
Robots don't actually need to be creative; robots only need to approximate creativity well enough that humans can't tell. After that point robots will always look creative even if they're not. The weight of a little randomness and a lot of brute force will do the rest.
- pjc50 12y ago
  We're kind of on the edge of this with algorithmically-optimised clickbait headlines. There's still a human in the loop at the moment, but the more metrics-driven the process is the more likely parts of it are to be automated.
  - tempodox 12y ago
    That's actually a nice idea for a satire (and what can be more satirical than real life?). Do you know of any artificial headline generators? If not, it's high time we built one. I bet we could make cartloads of money with it.
- radarsat1 12y ago
  You could replace the word "creative" with the word "intelligence" in that statement.
- tempodox 12y ago
  I beg to differ. The hallmark of real intelligence / creativity will always be that they are eventually unforeseeable and uncontrollable. If you build something like that, you better have some “ethical subroutines” in store.
  - onion2k 12y ago
    The hallmark of real intelligence / creativity will always be that they are eventually unforeseeable and uncontrollable. Imagine three different computers. Each one is an identical black box that connected to a printer, and every 5 minutes it prints out an entirely new work of art that, subjectively speaking, is quite nice to look at. You are told the following; 1. One computer is genuinely intelligent in exactly the same way as a human is. The clever engineers have replicated human creativity perfectly and given it the personality of a competent artist. It 'thinks up' just one print and prints it each time. 2. The next computer generates 100 different pieces and then pushes each of them to Amazon Turk for evaluation by 100 different people. It prints the one with the highest score. 3. The last computer has a set of reasonable rules based on a set of the sum of knowledge from Harvard University's Art Society. It uses those rules to pick the best picture out of 100,000,000,000 different pieces it generates completely at random for each print. How can you tell the difference between which is which? The point being until you see the result there is no way to know. You have no control over the 3 boxes and you can't see what's happening inside. As far as you're concerned each computer could be any of the different types. They would all be creating a new work of art each time but only one would be "creative" in the human sense, but they're all being creative in the sense they're creating, appraising, and choosing a new solution.
    - tempodox 12y ago
      You're imposing a set of rules and just assume an intelligent entity would heed them. My point is, if you're dealing with true intelligence / creativity, you can't be sure a priori which rules it would play by. After all, creativity is the antithesis to predictability.
- snowwrestler 12y ago
  > Robots don't actually need to be creative; robots only need to approximate creativity well enough that humans can't tell. It's at least up for debate whether these are actually two different things, and therefore whether what you're describing is actually any easier.
- mcguire 12y ago
  Humans only need to approximate creativity well enough that other humans can't tell.
  - tempodox 12y ago
    Just our good luck that some of us are intelligent enough to pull that off :)
    - mcguire 12y ago
      Quit bragging. Hmph.
marktangotango 12y ago
>> “No, you’re missing that a fundamental aspect of intelligence is experience and that requires embodiment.” He knew that to understand the world you needed to be inside the world, you needed to experience its behaviors and responses to you. Well, he was right. We may be making progress in being able to do things like recognize a cat in a photograph. But there’s a huge gulf between that and doing something creative. I'm not sure if I agree with this, but it is a compelling argument. Could experience be simulated the first time, hence bootstrapping the AI's?
- vidarh 12y ago
  There are tons of people working on giving robots the ability of collecting experience through embodiment in robots. It may be a compelling argument for why the various timelines thrown around for the singularity will be off, but it's a speed bump, not a road block.
  - stephanfroede 12y ago
    So goes the argumentation since 1960.
    - lmm 12y ago
      By the standards of 1960 we already have AI. After all, computers can beat the best humans at chess.
      - crististm 12y ago
        by some definition of AI
      - stephanfroede 12y ago
        A chess board is a closed system with fixed rules, as far as I know you only need a lot of computing power to apply the min-max algorithm to solve any chess game. In a chess game there are no probalities, AI is about to independently recognizing patterns in noise and develop assumptions out of it. The trick human brains are applying here is called intuition.
Beltiras 12y ago
Why is it that we give humans a lot of time doing trial and error and acknowledge them as masters of some art but then when a machine process fails to deliver on it's first baby steps declare that the endeavor is impossible? Creativity is experimentation coupled with the insight of previous work. Computers can do the experimentation, they just need longer horizons of insight to be able to moderate. On the other hand thou: AGI is a far way off. I'm not expecting anything HAL-like within my lifetime. Unless my lifespan will be artificially prolonged.
- darkmighty 12y ago
  I absolutely agree. Take this assertion from the article: "But it would be looking for patterns that are already existent. It wouldn’t be able to find that new thing that was totally out of left field. That’s what I think of as creativity—somebody comes up with something really new and clever." -- I find this disingenuous. Creativity is just the outcome of our particular experiences, it's a way to parse our hundreds of thousands of hours of experience we get even at an early age into a new combination. There's no small algorithm that without a mountain of data ("experience") will generate clever insights from simple requests.
  - Beltiras 12y ago
    To say nothing of the fact that billions of years of evolution imparts a large set of choices made for us. It didn't take 16 years to get a teenage virtuoso violinist, it took 3 billion years of evolution.
    - ObviousScience 12y ago
      It's absolutely fantastic that < 100 years of purposeful hardware research and < 1 year of training can compete with 3 billion years of meandering hardware building and 16 years of training, to the point that the latter feels the need to insist that the former will never be as good. Given our current trajectory, it wouldn't be shocking if at 150-200 years of hardware research and with <5 years of training, the intentionally created thing surpassed the evolved one. Ed: I rolled software in with hardware.
jkot 12y ago
Would human creativity pass turing test?
stephanfroede 12y ago
The singularity is a linear projection of computing power, in this projection anything that is questioning the singularity is pro-actively ignored. What puzzles me most, is why it is ignored. For me it does not make sense to hope that just the amount of simulated neuronal complexity will be enough, that suddenly out of the complexity something intelligent emerges. The whole approach is flawed. Something very essential is missing, that is a proven model how brains work and why they work, down to the last quantum state.
- icebraining 12y ago
  Is it really necessary? As far as I know, the theories about generating lift were still being heavily debated long after the Wright brothers flew. People often simply try things until they work, then go back and try to understand why they work. Having a decent theory helps, but I'm skeptical that a complete understanding of the issue is required to make it work.
  - stephanfroede 12y ago
    The difference is the plane did fly without the understanding after little research, but we are trying to make the machines intelligent since decades. Something is missing, imo.
    - icebraining 12y ago
      Little research? We had been trying to make heavier-than-air machines for centuries, if not millennia. Even the specific concept of the modern airplane as a fixed-wing flying machine with separate systems for lift, propulsion, and control was put forward in 1799, more than a century before the Wright brothers flight. If we talk about flying machines in general, the Bamboo-copter[1] is 2400 years old. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo-copter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo-copter
      - stephanfroede 12y ago
        It was in my best intend to ignore all attempts before the Wright brothers to try to fly. It is the same here, we have the wish to make intelligent machines, but we may lack an engine to do that. Besides the airplane design it was also the availability of powerful engines and other features to go the skies. (I did read the Wikipedia article): in that sense I afraid we are more at stadium of Da Vincis concepts than an aeroplane.
arvinjoar 12y ago
Misleading title, robots can actually be great dancers[1]. The problem with AI is that it's a moving target, as soon as there's an advance we tend to go "well that's still pretty mechanical", forgetting that we're also just mechanical systems (probably). Granted, AI and AGI isn't really the same thing, but it seems like we always make the assumption that an AGI has to work like a human internally. To me that seems like a good source of inspiration, but it's probably not a requirement. In the end, I think we'll figure out that for all our "creative genius", we're still just monkeys who see and do, and sometimes we do something new. [1] = http://youtu.be/ww9ClmCWBr0 http://youtu.be/ww9ClmCWBr0
- Bjoern 12y ago
  More on the topic of Dancing Robots, HRP-4C from AIST & Kawada https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcZJqiUrbnI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcZJqiUrbnI
- stephanfroede 12y ago
  You touched the core of the discussion, imo, that is there are two schools of thaught involved. One sees the universe and anything else as a machine -> determinism The others are seeing the universe as a discrete continuum -> indeterminism That is also my fundamental criticism at the current approach, it is not even considering the possibility that the whole approach could be wrong. I think intelligent machines are possible, but not without much more fundamental understanding. Hyping, cheering deep learning and all this stuff, is just irrational and illogical.
  - aninhumer 12y ago
    Surely the more relevant dichotomy here is monism(materialism) vs dualism? For those who find determinism unsatifying, I doubt indeterminism feels like much of an improvement.
    - stephanfroede 12y ago
      Dualism is a part of it, but dualism is more an ethical question. Indeterminism is more about emergence, quantum fields and such things. How the universe works. My impression is that a lot of science that is applied to intelligent machines is based on a deterministic physical model based on Newton and LaPlace. The Bayesian networks was pioneered 200 years ago by LaPlace for example. But how is Einsteins relativity theory applied? Or quantum fields? There are two different models of the universe involved the "old" deterministic model and the "new" indeterministic model (see Karl Popper -> Open Universe -> http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/288137.The_Open_Universe http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/288137.The_Open_Universe). May be it make sense to bring some newer approaches into the game, instead of reapplying again and again the same approach.
ilitirit 12y ago
Consider the following definition for a Technological Singularity (TS): A TS is an event that occurs when AI advances to the point where its humans can't keep up with understanding and/or predicting it's decision-making process and/or the results thereof. Using this definition, it would appear that, like physical singularities (black holes) TS can occur on a large or small scale (micro black holes can pop in and out of existence, with little to no effect on the macro world). So, let's say we develop an AI that can teach itself to play Go. After a while, not even the smartest humans can beat it. Indeed, the smartest humans can't even understand* why it plays in the way that it does. If this counts as a TS, where does creativity come into play? *(Something similar has happened before, but it was discovered that the neural network was using physical electrical effects that occurred in the actual hardware when certain pieces of code was run. When a human tried to analyse the actual code, it made no sense.)
- JonnieCache 12y ago
  >Something similar has happened before, but it was discovered that the neural network was using physical electrical effects that occurred in the actual hardware when certain pieces of code was run. Link?
  - ilitirit 12y ago
    It seems that evolution had not merely selected the best code for the task, it had also advocated those programs which took advantage of the electromagnetic quirks of that specific microchip environment. The five separate logic cells were clearly crucial to the chip's operation, but they were interacting with the main circuitry through some unorthodox method-- most likely via the subtle magnetic fields that are created when electrons flow through circuitry, an effect known as magnetic flux. There was also evidence that the circuit was not relying solely on the transistors' absolute ON and OFF positions like a typical chip; it was capitalizing upon analogue shades of gray along with the digital black and white. http://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ http://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/
    - 12y ago
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reacweb 12y ago
You humans can't appreciate the dance of robots.
arethuza 12y ago
On a related topic - I can recommend the new movie Ex Machina: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_Machina_%28film%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_Machina_%28film%29 About the only thing I feel safe commenting on without fear of spoilers is where the outdoor scenes were filmed - Norway - which looked stunning.
VMG 12y ago
> We can build a classifier that would look at lots of pairs of successful movies and do some kind of inference on it so that it could learn what would be successful again. But it would be looking for patterns that are already existent. It wouldn’t be able to find that new thing that was totally out of left field. Just a baseless assertion without any evidence. There is no reason to assume you couldn't build a system that emulates whatever the human brain is doing there.
- crististm 12y ago
  I can think of one: you can't simulate an atom. If you read too much into supercomputing and think that they can simulate atoms, then go tell CERN to stop searching for sub-particles and simulate them instead. Otherwise, I think you know what I mean. Besides, a real system depends on initial conditions. You can't simulate those.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago
    You are confused about the order in which these things happen: 1. We form a hypothesis about how something works. 2. We do experiments to try to falsify said hypothesis. 3. If a certain amount of experimentation fails to falsify the hypothesis, we conclude tentatively that the hypothesis is a correct model of reality, namely, we promote it to a theory. 4. We use that theory to simulate the real thing computationally. (4) is the whole point of doing steps (1) to (3) - and all VMG is saying is that there is no reason to assume that (1) to (3) couldn't lead to (4) with regards to the brain, just as there is no reason to do so with regards to atoms, which in turn is why we do operate CERN instead of just asserting that atoms cannot be understood.
    - crististm 12y ago
      Yes you are correct in 1-4 but I think that your hypothesis is wrong wrt to simulation: You don't know the initial conditions which are a _huge_ part in determining the outcome of the simulation. Maybe you will limit your precision to Plank constant. Can you measure with that precision?
blueskin_ 12y ago
Nothing about the singularity specifically requires creative AI; indeed, a large part of it is enhancing the existing potential of humans; replacing them outright is not necessarily the case. As it is, an article titled about AI and creativity without the gratuitous "singularity won't happen" would be more accurate, but so much less sensational and clickbait-y that it might not even be able to justify its own publishing, I guess. Also, had to laugh at gratuitous misuse of "supercomputers". Yet another layman grasping at concepts they don't understand... yawn. Such an interesting coincidence that someone who says "AI can't be creative" also happens to be an artist... Reminds me of Roger Ebert dismissing the potential of games vs. movies as he felt threatened by them. As it is, that is one of the most gross and ignorant misunderstandings of singularity, that people will be somehow marginalised or not valued rather than the main point being the next logical step of tools (post-)humans use for their own benefit. Edit: Oh, look, that whole "...the greatest scientists are also artists." canard again. Why am I not surprised? There have been maybe two or three who were exceptional or even widely appreciated in both, which is indicative of a "renaissance man" who is proficient in many fields and not an overall tendency/requirement. While many are skilled in nonscientific fields too, I would hardly call Hawking, Feynman or Dawkins an artist just because they were good at speeches, lectures or books, for example. I would also remind everyone that predictions of the future are so often pessimistic... "This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." -- Western Union internal memo, 1876. "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." -- Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895. "Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value." -- Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre. (Apocryphal; thanks for pointing this out to me as I was not aware; left in for completeness' sake) "Everything that can be invented has been invented." -- Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899. "No flying machine will ever fly from New York to Paris." -- Orville Wright. "Professor Goddard does not know the relation between action and reaction and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react. He seems to lack the basic knowledge ladled out daily in high schools." -- 1921 New York Times editorial about Robert Goddard's revolutionary rocket work.
- icebraining 12y ago
  "Everything that can be invented has been invented." -- Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899. Poor man, constantly libeled due to lazy book writers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Holland_Duell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Holland_Duell
minthd 12y ago
"But generating is fairly easy and testing pretty hard." This is the reason he thinks computers won't be creatives. But testing theories in science or math can be automated(in most cases). So technological creativity is possible ,and that what's the singularity talks about(although the testing can be quite lengthy and expensive ,which might really slow the singularity maybe to the point of no singularity at all). And as for artistic creativity - that depends on if we can build some model on how humans evaluate art in general. Who knows, maybe we can build a good model of that. We've certainly improved from say 100-200 years ago where most artists we're considered geniuses, to today ,where a large percent of commercial art is at least is generated or least guided by knowledge on how to create good stories, etc.
- thibauts 12y ago
  > But testing theories in science or math can be automated(in most cases). [...] (although the testing can be quite lengthy and expensive ,which might really slow the singularity maybe to the point of no singularity at all). So we would be back to the problem being raw computing power. > And as for artistic creativity - that depends on if we can build some model on how humans evaluate art in general. I'm pretty sure that's culture and social experience in general that allow us to evaluate art. Not sure robots will be able to do that soon, as it seems to be a product of our intricate biological structure. > [...] to today ,where a large percent of commercial art is at least is generated or least guided by knowledge on how to create good stories, etc. So maybe robots are not as much becoming humans as we're becoming robots.
  - haliax 12y ago
    "seems to be a product of our intricate biological structure" How do you know?
    - thibauts 12y ago
      "seems". I guess that's the most resonable assumption. What else ?
  - minthd 12y ago
eli_gottlieb 12y ago
Excuse me, this is headdesk-worthy clickbait material. wham Cognition! wham Is! wham Lawful! If you can scientifically characterize human creativity, then you can program an algorithm to behave creatively. If you believe you cannot program an algorithm to behave creatively, then this is because you don't understand creativity as a cognitive function. Why is it that as soon as someone says "AI" everyone turns off their normal scientific/naturalist worldview and starts going yippity-skip-de-doo in fairyland!?
- krapp 12y ago
  >Why is it that as soon as someone says "AI" everyone turns off their normal scientific/naturalist worldview and starts going yippity-skip-de-doo in fairyland!? Despite claiming to be rational, people are still uncomfortable with the idea that they're meat machines.
  - eli_gottlieb 12y ago
    Well what else do they expect to be? If non-physical souls existed, they would have to work on some principle too. Reality always bottoms out somewhere.
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crusso 12y ago
The whole point of the Singularity is that the technology will progress to a point where AI techniques will advance to produce something that is creative and intelligent enough to advance itself. Obviously, we haven't hit that point yet - so we don't know what those advances are. Before penicillin was discovered, doctors couldn't conceive of curing many serious and deadly infections.
- simonh 12y ago
  Quite. I have no time for exaggerated singularitarian nonsense about strong AI being inevitable in a few decades. We don't even have the primitive fundamental concepts required to even begin to outline the actual design of such a thing. Therefore any attempt to estimate a timeline for its development is a blind guess. On the other hand, just because we can't design or build one now doesn't mean we never will. Lord Kelvin was clearly wrong that heavier than air craft were impossible because birds. They are physical, mechanical systems that are heavier than air and yet fly. Therefore such systems are self evidently possible. So it is with strong AI. Physical systems that exhibit human intelligence or exist - us. Therefore physical systems like us are possible. Here again the example of birds is instructive. Birds fly, but constructing a machine that flies I. The same way as birds is incredibly hard. Far, far harder than building rockets, propeller driven planes and even jets. There's no law of he usiverse that says our first strong AI will be designed along the same architectural lines as the human brain or that itse performance envelope will be similar to ours. At this stage, as the OP says, we don't know.
benkant 12y ago
Ignoring the singularity talk because I think it's become meaningless, but Jürgen Schmidhuber would disagree with the conclusion that machines can't be creative, or at least that it's beyond algorithms. He has a formal theory of creativity [0] which claims to explain, among other things, music, humour, beauty [1] and fun. It centres around compression and Kolmogorov complexity. There's a great video in the first link. These are hard problems, but it's shortsighted to consider it impossible for us to build machines with approximate behaviour. Often with this class of criticism you'll have arguments along the lines of "sure the submarine moves through the water, but is it swimming?" Apologies to Dijkstra. [0] http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html [1] http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/beauty.html http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/beauty.html
tempodox 12y ago
My singularity is certainly not exaggerated, but I, being a 100% non-robotic entity, can assure all of you that I can't dance at all.
sxp 12y ago
Computers have already passed a domain specific Turing Test by composing music that is as good as human composed music [1]. The phrase "robots can't [do X]" should always be suffixed with a "yet". There was a paper a few years back demonstrating a system that could compose an image based on text by finding images of the desired objects and composing them together. It's just a step away from creating a system that can generate paintings in the same style as great artists based purely on a text description. [1] http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/triumph-of-the-cyborg-composer-8507 http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/triumph-of-the-cyborg...
- olavk 12y ago
  Have blind tests been performed, where musicians could't distinguish between music composed by computers and music composed by humans?
  - tessierashpool 12y ago
    yes, and the software did quite well, but see my post above for caveats.
- tessierashpool 12y ago
  I've studied with Dr. David Cope, the guy you referenced as having proved that "computers have already... [composed] music that is as good as human composed music," and I've looked at the code in question. He's achieved something remarkable, sure, but nothing which even remotely validates your claim. Emily Howell (the software in question) mostly just mixes and matches fragments of existing scores, normalized by key signature. There's a bit more to it than that, but nowhere near enough to justify a claim like "computers out-compose human musicians." It doesn't do much more than Beethoven's own experiments in aleatoric music in the early 1800s. Edit: ok, that last sentence re Beethoven's a little unfair, but imagine Beethoven with modern processing power and you're not far off.
thibauts 12y ago
I think at least one side of creativity can be summed up as "producing new combinations of things we already know". In this context art would be more than creativity : means of suggesting new unexpected combinations of ideas in the minds of others. There is a social sharing side to this equation. This in my opinion is what AI won't get soon, as it requires embodiment, and more specifically human embodiment. It is already difficult to communicate with other animal species that share many biological structures with us and thus ways to experience the world. How could it be easy to make a machine that produces meaning, as in combinations of ideas that make sense in the context of human experience ? What will save us is the building of machines that will collect, store, process and repurpose meaning in a meaningful way (no pun). Like, linking pieces of data to emotional states. Yet they won't get it.
dominotw 12y ago
forget dancing. Even simple human tasks like tying shoelaces is borderline impossible for machines.
stephanfroede 12y ago
Joke: may be you need a quantum singularity to get the intelligent machine singularity... No I do not think that we do have black holes in our brains, and no we are not connected by worm holes...but it is nice idea. Likeminded people are connected by tiny worm holes.
Animats 12y ago
Well, to address the title of the article, robot motion usually doesn't look very good for a known reason. The motion control systems used are usually positional. Most robotic control systems have a processor or PLC for each joint, and that processor usually accepts position goals, not force goals. Then there's some central coordinator issuing positional commands. This is simple to code, and many robotics frameworks have that hierarchical approach more or less nailed into them. That hierarchical approach is not very good for dynamic motion. For that, you need force control and coordination in force space. I used to work on this; here's the first anti-slip control for legged robots, from 1995: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc5n0iTw-NU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc5n0iTw-NU). That was picked up by a grad student at McGill, who put it into their running quadruped Scout II. Then his professor, Martin Buehler, left McGill for Boston Dynamics and became the head engineer on BigDog. All the actuators on BigDog are run by one CPU, which is a Pentium 4 class machine running QNX. The balance servoloop runs at 100Hz, and the hydraulic valve control loop runs at 1KHz. This allows for coordinated force control across all actuators, which is why BigDog is so agile. The Atlas robot version 1 is basically a modified BigDog, although version 2 seems to have been redesigned above the hips, with onboard power. The motion in the DARPA Humanoid Challenge looked so bad last time because most of the participants using the Atlas robot were using a Windows DLL provided by Boston Dynamics. That DLL was just intended to provide some basic functionality to get participants started. Functions provided included "walk slowly" and "stand stably while arms do something". They didn't have the running, balance recovery, or slip control capabilities Boston Dynamics put into Big Dog. Expect much better performance in round 2 next winter. Until recently, most robotics simulators were hopeless about force accuracy or friction. Most of them used physics engines borrowed from video game technology, where nobody cares about force accuracy or friction as long as things blow up prettily. This was recognized as a problem by DARPA, and they funded Dr. Mike Sherman at Stanford to put a serious dynamics simulator into Gazebo. Sherman previously had a commercial company, Symbolic Dynamics, building dynamics simulators for industry, and did know how to get the dynamics right. So now you can simulate force-controlled robots in Gazebo. (Unfortunately, it took two decades to get this right, so I've moved on to other things, after a detour through physics engines for animation.) Anyway, that's why robots can't dance very well yet. That problem is being fixed.
mcguire 12y ago
"It would instantly generate all possible combinations of movies and there will be some good ones. But recognizing them, that’s the hard part." By his definition, the vast majority of people are not intelligent.

39 points by joosters 12y ago

Robots don't actually need to be creative; robots only need to approximate creativity well enough that humans can't tell. After that point robots will always look creative even if they're not. The weight of a little randomness and a lot of brute force will do the rest.

pjc50 12y ago
We're kind of on the edge of this with algorithmically-optimised clickbait headlines. There's still a human in the loop at the moment, but the more metrics-driven the process is the more likely parts of it are to be automated.
- tempodox 12y ago
  That's actually a nice idea for a satire (and what can be more satirical than real life?). Do you know of any artificial headline generators? If not, it's high time we built one. I bet we could make cartloads of money with it.
radarsat1 12y ago
You could replace the word "creative" with the word "intelligence" in that statement.
tempodox 12y ago
I beg to differ. The hallmark of real intelligence / creativity will always be that they are eventually unforeseeable and uncontrollable. If you build something like that, you better have some “ethical subroutines” in store.
- onion2k 12y ago
  The hallmark of real intelligence / creativity will always be that they are eventually unforeseeable and uncontrollable. Imagine three different computers. Each one is an identical black box that connected to a printer, and every 5 minutes it prints out an entirely new work of art that, subjectively speaking, is quite nice to look at. You are told the following; 1. One computer is genuinely intelligent in exactly the same way as a human is. The clever engineers have replicated human creativity perfectly and given it the personality of a competent artist. It 'thinks up' just one print and prints it each time. 2. The next computer generates 100 different pieces and then pushes each of them to Amazon Turk for evaluation by 100 different people. It prints the one with the highest score. 3. The last computer has a set of reasonable rules based on a set of the sum of knowledge from Harvard University's Art Society. It uses those rules to pick the best picture out of 100,000,000,000 different pieces it generates completely at random for each print. How can you tell the difference between which is which? The point being until you see the result there is no way to know. You have no control over the 3 boxes and you can't see what's happening inside. As far as you're concerned each computer could be any of the different types. They would all be creating a new work of art each time but only one would be "creative" in the human sense, but they're all being creative in the sense they're creating, appraising, and choosing a new solution.
  - tempodox 12y ago
    You're imposing a set of rules and just assume an intelligent entity would heed them. My point is, if you're dealing with true intelligence / creativity, you can't be sure a priori which rules it would play by. After all, creativity is the antithesis to predictability.
snowwrestler 12y ago
> Robots don't actually need to be creative; robots only need to approximate creativity well enough that humans can't tell. It's at least up for debate whether these are actually two different things, and therefore whether what you're describing is actually any easier.
mcguire 12y ago
Humans only need to approximate creativity well enough that other humans can't tell.
- tempodox 12y ago
  Just our good luck that some of us are intelligent enough to pull that off :)
  - mcguire 12y ago
    Quit bragging. Hmph.

marktangotango 12y ago

>> “No, you’re missing that a fundamental aspect of intelligence is experience and that requires embodiment.” He knew that to understand the world you needed to be inside the world, you needed to experience its behaviors and responses to you. Well, he was right. We may be making progress in being able to do things like recognize a cat in a photograph. But there’s a huge gulf between that and doing something creative. I'm not sure if I agree with this, but it is a compelling argument. Could experience be simulated the first time, hence bootstrapping the AI's?

vidarh 12y ago
There are tons of people working on giving robots the ability of collecting experience through embodiment in robots. It may be a compelling argument for why the various timelines thrown around for the singularity will be off, but it's a speed bump, not a road block.
- stephanfroede 12y ago
  So goes the argumentation since 1960.
  - lmm 12y ago
    By the standards of 1960 we already have AI. After all, computers can beat the best humans at chess.
    - crististm 12y ago
      by some definition of AI
    - stephanfroede 12y ago
      A chess board is a closed system with fixed rules, as far as I know you only need a lot of computing power to apply the min-max algorithm to solve any chess game. In a chess game there are no probalities, AI is about to independently recognizing patterns in noise and develop assumptions out of it. The trick human brains are applying here is called intuition.

Beltiras 12y ago

Why is it that we give humans a lot of time doing trial and error and acknowledge them as masters of some art but then when a machine process fails to deliver on it's first baby steps declare that the endeavor is impossible? Creativity is experimentation coupled with the insight of previous work. Computers can do the experimentation, they just need longer horizons of insight to be able to moderate. On the other hand thou: AGI is a far way off. I'm not expecting anything HAL-like within my lifetime. Unless my lifespan will be artificially prolonged.

darkmighty 12y ago
I absolutely agree. Take this assertion from the article: "But it would be looking for patterns that are already existent. It wouldn’t be able to find that new thing that was totally out of left field. That’s what I think of as creativity—somebody comes up with something really new and clever." -- I find this disingenuous. Creativity is just the outcome of our particular experiences, it's a way to parse our hundreds of thousands of hours of experience we get even at an early age into a new combination. There's no small algorithm that without a mountain of data ("experience") will generate clever insights from simple requests.
- Beltiras 12y ago
  To say nothing of the fact that billions of years of evolution imparts a large set of choices made for us. It didn't take 16 years to get a teenage virtuoso violinist, it took 3 billion years of evolution.
  - ObviousScience 12y ago
    It's absolutely fantastic that < 100 years of purposeful hardware research and < 1 year of training can compete with 3 billion years of meandering hardware building and 16 years of training, to the point that the latter feels the need to insist that the former will never be as good. Given our current trajectory, it wouldn't be shocking if at 150-200 years of hardware research and with <5 years of training, the intentionally created thing surpassed the evolved one. Ed: I rolled software in with hardware.

jkot 12y ago

Would human creativity pass turing test?

stephanfroede 12y ago

The singularity is a linear projection of computing power, in this projection anything that is questioning the singularity is pro-actively ignored. What puzzles me most, is why it is ignored. For me it does not make sense to hope that just the amount of simulated neuronal complexity will be enough, that suddenly out of the complexity something intelligent emerges. The whole approach is flawed. Something very essential is missing, that is a proven model how brains work and why they work, down to the last quantum state.

icebraining 12y ago
Is it really necessary? As far as I know, the theories about generating lift were still being heavily debated long after the Wright brothers flew. People often simply try things until they work, then go back and try to understand why they work. Having a decent theory helps, but I'm skeptical that a complete understanding of the issue is required to make it work.
- stephanfroede 12y ago
  The difference is the plane did fly without the understanding after little research, but we are trying to make the machines intelligent since decades. Something is missing, imo.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    Little research? We had been trying to make heavier-than-air machines for centuries, if not millennia. Even the specific concept of the modern airplane as a fixed-wing flying machine with separate systems for lift, propulsion, and control was put forward in 1799, more than a century before the Wright brothers flight. If we talk about flying machines in general, the Bamboo-copter[1] is 2400 years old. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo-copter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo-copter
    - stephanfroede 12y ago
      It was in my best intend to ignore all attempts before the Wright brothers to try to fly. It is the same here, we have the wish to make intelligent machines, but we may lack an engine to do that. Besides the airplane design it was also the availability of powerful engines and other features to go the skies. (I did read the Wikipedia article): in that sense I afraid we are more at stadium of Da Vincis concepts than an aeroplane.

arvinjoar 12y ago

Misleading title, robots can actually be great dancers[1]. The problem with AI is that it's a moving target, as soon as there's an advance we tend to go "well that's still pretty mechanical", forgetting that we're also just mechanical systems (probably). Granted, AI and AGI isn't really the same thing, but it seems like we always make the assumption that an AGI has to work like a human internally. To me that seems like a good source of inspiration, but it's probably not a requirement. In the end, I think we'll figure out that for all our "creative genius", we're still just monkeys who see and do, and sometimes we do something new. [1] = http://youtu.be/ww9ClmCWBr0 http://youtu.be/ww9ClmCWBr0

Bjoern 12y ago
More on the topic of Dancing Robots, HRP-4C from AIST & Kawada https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcZJqiUrbnI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcZJqiUrbnI
stephanfroede 12y ago
You touched the core of the discussion, imo, that is there are two schools of thaught involved. One sees the universe and anything else as a machine -> determinism The others are seeing the universe as a discrete continuum -> indeterminism That is also my fundamental criticism at the current approach, it is not even considering the possibility that the whole approach could be wrong. I think intelligent machines are possible, but not without much more fundamental understanding. Hyping, cheering deep learning and all this stuff, is just irrational and illogical.
- aninhumer 12y ago
  Surely the more relevant dichotomy here is monism(materialism) vs dualism? For those who find determinism unsatifying, I doubt indeterminism feels like much of an improvement.
  - stephanfroede 12y ago
    Dualism is a part of it, but dualism is more an ethical question. Indeterminism is more about emergence, quantum fields and such things. How the universe works. My impression is that a lot of science that is applied to intelligent machines is based on a deterministic physical model based on Newton and LaPlace. The Bayesian networks was pioneered 200 years ago by LaPlace for example. But how is Einsteins relativity theory applied? Or quantum fields? There are two different models of the universe involved the "old" deterministic model and the "new" indeterministic model (see Karl Popper -> Open Universe -> http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/288137.The_Open_Universe http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/288137.The_Open_Universe). May be it make sense to bring some newer approaches into the game, instead of reapplying again and again the same approach.

ilitirit 12y ago

Consider the following definition for a Technological Singularity (TS): A TS is an event that occurs when AI advances to the point where its humans can't keep up with understanding and/or predicting it's decision-making process and/or the results thereof. Using this definition, it would appear that, like physical singularities (black holes) TS can occur on a large or small scale (micro black holes can pop in and out of existence, with little to no effect on the macro world). So, let's say we develop an AI that can teach itself to play Go. After a while, not even the smartest humans can beat it. Indeed, the smartest humans can't even understand* why it plays in the way that it does. If this counts as a TS, where does creativity come into play? *(Something similar has happened before, but it was discovered that the neural network was using physical electrical effects that occurred in the actual hardware when certain pieces of code was run. When a human tried to analyse the actual code, it made no sense.)

JonnieCache 12y ago
>Something similar has happened before, but it was discovered that the neural network was using physical electrical effects that occurred in the actual hardware when certain pieces of code was run. Link?
- ilitirit 12y ago
  It seems that evolution had not merely selected the best code for the task, it had also advocated those programs which took advantage of the electromagnetic quirks of that specific microchip environment. The five separate logic cells were clearly crucial to the chip's operation, but they were interacting with the main circuitry through some unorthodox method-- most likely via the subtle magnetic fields that are created when electrons flow through circuitry, an effect known as magnetic flux. There was also evidence that the circuit was not relying solely on the transistors' absolute ON and OFF positions like a typical chip; it was capitalizing upon analogue shades of gray along with the digital black and white. http://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ http://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/
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reacweb 12y ago

You humans can't appreciate the dance of robots.

arethuza 12y ago

On a related topic - I can recommend the new movie Ex Machina: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_Machina_%28film%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_Machina_%28film%29 About the only thing I feel safe commenting on without fear of spoilers is where the outdoor scenes were filmed - Norway - which looked stunning.

VMG 12y ago

> We can build a classifier that would look at lots of pairs of successful movies and do some kind of inference on it so that it could learn what would be successful again. But it would be looking for patterns that are already existent. It wouldn’t be able to find that new thing that was totally out of left field. Just a baseless assertion without any evidence. There is no reason to assume you couldn't build a system that emulates whatever the human brain is doing there.

crististm 12y ago
I can think of one: you can't simulate an atom. If you read too much into supercomputing and think that they can simulate atoms, then go tell CERN to stop searching for sub-particles and simulate them instead. Otherwise, I think you know what I mean. Besides, a real system depends on initial conditions. You can't simulate those.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago
  You are confused about the order in which these things happen: 1. We form a hypothesis about how something works. 2. We do experiments to try to falsify said hypothesis. 3. If a certain amount of experimentation fails to falsify the hypothesis, we conclude tentatively that the hypothesis is a correct model of reality, namely, we promote it to a theory. 4. We use that theory to simulate the real thing computationally. (4) is the whole point of doing steps (1) to (3) - and all VMG is saying is that there is no reason to assume that (1) to (3) couldn't lead to (4) with regards to the brain, just as there is no reason to do so with regards to atoms, which in turn is why we do operate CERN instead of just asserting that atoms cannot be understood.
  - crististm 12y ago
    Yes you are correct in 1-4 but I think that your hypothesis is wrong wrt to simulation: You don't know the initial conditions which are a _huge_ part in determining the outcome of the simulation. Maybe you will limit your precision to Plank constant. Can you measure with that precision?

blueskin_ 12y ago

Nothing about the singularity specifically requires creative AI; indeed, a large part of it is enhancing the existing potential of humans; replacing them outright is not necessarily the case. As it is, an article titled about AI and creativity without the gratuitous "singularity won't happen" would be more accurate, but so much less sensational and clickbait-y that it might not even be able to justify its own publishing, I guess. Also, had to laugh at gratuitous misuse of "supercomputers". Yet another layman grasping at concepts they don't understand... yawn. Such an interesting coincidence that someone who says "AI can't be creative" also happens to be an artist... Reminds me of Roger Ebert dismissing the potential of games vs. movies as he felt threatened by them. As it is, that is one of the most gross and ignorant misunderstandings of singularity, that people will be somehow marginalised or not valued rather than the main point being the next logical step of tools (post-)humans use for their own benefit. Edit: Oh, look, that whole "...the greatest scientists are also artists." canard again. Why am I not surprised? There have been maybe two or three who were exceptional or even widely appreciated in both, which is indicative of a "renaissance man" who is proficient in many fields and not an overall tendency/requirement. While many are skilled in nonscientific fields too, I would hardly call Hawking, Feynman or Dawkins an artist just because they were good at speeches, lectures or books, for example. I would also remind everyone that predictions of the future are so often pessimistic... "This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." -- Western Union internal memo, 1876. "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." -- Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895. "Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value." -- Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre. (Apocryphal; thanks for pointing this out to me as I was not aware; left in for completeness' sake) "Everything that can be invented has been invented." -- Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899. "No flying machine will ever fly from New York to Paris." -- Orville Wright. "Professor Goddard does not know the relation between action and reaction and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react. He seems to lack the basic knowledge ladled out daily in high schools." -- 1921 New York Times editorial about Robert Goddard's revolutionary rocket work.

icebraining 12y ago
"Everything that can be invented has been invented." -- Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899. Poor man, constantly libeled due to lazy book writers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Holland_Duell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Holland_Duell

minthd 12y ago

"But generating is fairly easy and testing pretty hard." This is the reason he thinks computers won't be creatives. But testing theories in science or math can be automated(in most cases). So technological creativity is possible ,and that what's the singularity talks about(although the testing can be quite lengthy and expensive ,which might really slow the singularity maybe to the point of no singularity at all). And as for artistic creativity - that depends on if we can build some model on how humans evaluate art in general. Who knows, maybe we can build a good model of that. We've certainly improved from say 100-200 years ago where most artists we're considered geniuses, to today ,where a large percent of commercial art is at least is generated or least guided by knowledge on how to create good stories, etc.

thibauts 12y ago
> But testing theories in science or math can be automated(in most cases). [...] (although the testing can be quite lengthy and expensive ,which might really slow the singularity maybe to the point of no singularity at all). So we would be back to the problem being raw computing power. > And as for artistic creativity - that depends on if we can build some model on how humans evaluate art in general. I'm pretty sure that's culture and social experience in general that allow us to evaluate art. Not sure robots will be able to do that soon, as it seems to be a product of our intricate biological structure. > [...] to today ,where a large percent of commercial art is at least is generated or least guided by knowledge on how to create good stories, etc. So maybe robots are not as much becoming humans as we're becoming robots.
- haliax 12y ago
  "seems to be a product of our intricate biological structure" How do you know?
  - thibauts 12y ago
    "seems". I guess that's the most resonable assumption. What else ?
- minthd 12y ago

eli_gottlieb 12y ago

Excuse me, this is headdesk-worthy clickbait material. wham Cognition! wham Is! wham Lawful! If you can scientifically characterize human creativity, then you can program an algorithm to behave creatively. If you believe you cannot program an algorithm to behave creatively, then this is because you don't understand creativity as a cognitive function. Why is it that as soon as someone says "AI" everyone turns off their normal scientific/naturalist worldview and starts going yippity-skip-de-doo in fairyland!?

krapp 12y ago
>Why is it that as soon as someone says "AI" everyone turns off their normal scientific/naturalist worldview and starts going yippity-skip-de-doo in fairyland!? Despite claiming to be rational, people are still uncomfortable with the idea that they're meat machines.
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  Well what else do they expect to be? If non-physical souls existed, they would have to work on some principle too. Reality always bottoms out somewhere.

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crusso 12y ago

The whole point of the Singularity is that the technology will progress to a point where AI techniques will advance to produce something that is creative and intelligent enough to advance itself. Obviously, we haven't hit that point yet - so we don't know what those advances are. Before penicillin was discovered, doctors couldn't conceive of curing many serious and deadly infections.

simonh 12y ago
Quite. I have no time for exaggerated singularitarian nonsense about strong AI being inevitable in a few decades. We don't even have the primitive fundamental concepts required to even begin to outline the actual design of such a thing. Therefore any attempt to estimate a timeline for its development is a blind guess. On the other hand, just because we can't design or build one now doesn't mean we never will. Lord Kelvin was clearly wrong that heavier than air craft were impossible because birds. They are physical, mechanical systems that are heavier than air and yet fly. Therefore such systems are self evidently possible. So it is with strong AI. Physical systems that exhibit human intelligence or exist - us. Therefore physical systems like us are possible. Here again the example of birds is instructive. Birds fly, but constructing a machine that flies I. The same way as birds is incredibly hard. Far, far harder than building rockets, propeller driven planes and even jets. There's no law of he usiverse that says our first strong AI will be designed along the same architectural lines as the human brain or that itse performance envelope will be similar to ours. At this stage, as the OP says, we don't know.

benkant 12y ago

Ignoring the singularity talk because I think it's become meaningless, but Jürgen Schmidhuber would disagree with the conclusion that machines can't be creative, or at least that it's beyond algorithms. He has a formal theory of creativity [0] which claims to explain, among other things, music, humour, beauty [1] and fun. It centres around compression and Kolmogorov complexity. There's a great video in the first link. These are hard problems, but it's shortsighted to consider it impossible for us to build machines with approximate behaviour. Often with this class of criticism you'll have arguments along the lines of "sure the submarine moves through the water, but is it swimming?" Apologies to Dijkstra. [0] http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html [1] http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/beauty.html http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/beauty.html

tempodox 12y ago

My singularity is certainly not exaggerated, but I, being a 100% non-robotic entity, can assure all of you that I can't dance at all.

sxp 12y ago

Computers have already passed a domain specific Turing Test by composing music that is as good as human composed music [1]. The phrase "robots can't [do X]" should always be suffixed with a "yet". There was a paper a few years back demonstrating a system that could compose an image based on text by finding images of the desired objects and composing them together. It's just a step away from creating a system that can generate paintings in the same style as great artists based purely on a text description. [1] http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/triumph-of-the-cyborg-composer-8507 http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/triumph-of-the-cyborg...

olavk 12y ago
Have blind tests been performed, where musicians could't distinguish between music composed by computers and music composed by humans?
- tessierashpool 12y ago
  yes, and the software did quite well, but see my post above for caveats.
tessierashpool 12y ago
I've studied with Dr. David Cope, the guy you referenced as having proved that "computers have already... [composed] music that is as good as human composed music," and I've looked at the code in question. He's achieved something remarkable, sure, but nothing which even remotely validates your claim. Emily Howell (the software in question) mostly just mixes and matches fragments of existing scores, normalized by key signature. There's a bit more to it than that, but nowhere near enough to justify a claim like "computers out-compose human musicians." It doesn't do much more than Beethoven's own experiments in aleatoric music in the early 1800s. Edit: ok, that last sentence re Beethoven's a little unfair, but imagine Beethoven with modern processing power and you're not far off.

thibauts 12y ago

I think at least one side of creativity can be summed up as "producing new combinations of things we already know". In this context art would be more than creativity : means of suggesting new unexpected combinations of ideas in the minds of others. There is a social sharing side to this equation. This in my opinion is what AI won't get soon, as it requires embodiment, and more specifically human embodiment. It is already difficult to communicate with other animal species that share many biological structures with us and thus ways to experience the world. How could it be easy to make a machine that produces meaning, as in combinations of ideas that make sense in the context of human experience ? What will save us is the building of machines that will collect, store, process and repurpose meaning in a meaningful way (no pun). Like, linking pieces of data to emotional states. Yet they won't get it.

dominotw 12y ago

forget dancing. Even simple human tasks like tying shoelaces is borderline impossible for machines.

stephanfroede 12y ago

Joke: may be you need a quantum singularity to get the intelligent machine singularity... No I do not think that we do have black holes in our brains, and no we are not connected by worm holes...but it is nice idea. Likeminded people are connected by tiny worm holes.

Animats 12y ago

Well, to address the title of the article, robot motion usually doesn't look very good for a known reason. The motion control systems used are usually positional. Most robotic control systems have a processor or PLC for each joint, and that processor usually accepts position goals, not force goals. Then there's some central coordinator issuing positional commands. This is simple to code, and many robotics frameworks have that hierarchical approach more or less nailed into them. That hierarchical approach is not very good for dynamic motion. For that, you need force control and coordination in force space. I used to work on this; here's the first anti-slip control for legged robots, from 1995: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc5n0iTw-NU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc5n0iTw-NU). That was picked up by a grad student at McGill, who put it into their running quadruped Scout II. Then his professor, Martin Buehler, left McGill for Boston Dynamics and became the head engineer on BigDog. All the actuators on BigDog are run by one CPU, which is a Pentium 4 class machine running QNX. The balance servoloop runs at 100Hz, and the hydraulic valve control loop runs at 1KHz. This allows for coordinated force control across all actuators, which is why BigDog is so agile. The Atlas robot version 1 is basically a modified BigDog, although version 2 seems to have been redesigned above the hips, with onboard power. The motion in the DARPA Humanoid Challenge looked so bad last time because most of the participants using the Atlas robot were using a Windows DLL provided by Boston Dynamics. That DLL was just intended to provide some basic functionality to get participants started. Functions provided included "walk slowly" and "stand stably while arms do something". They didn't have the running, balance recovery, or slip control capabilities Boston Dynamics put into Big Dog. Expect much better performance in round 2 next winter. Until recently, most robotics simulators were hopeless about force accuracy or friction. Most of them used physics engines borrowed from video game technology, where nobody cares about force accuracy or friction as long as things blow up prettily. This was recognized as a problem by DARPA, and they funded Dr. Mike Sherman at Stanford to put a serious dynamics simulator into Gazebo. Sherman previously had a commercial company, Symbolic Dynamics, building dynamics simulators for industry, and did know how to get the dynamics right. So now you can simulate force-controlled robots in Gazebo. (Unfortunately, it took two decades to get this right, so I've moved on to other things, after a detour through physics engines for animation.) Anyway, that's why robots can't dance very well yet. That problem is being fixed.

mcguire 12y ago

"It would instantly generate all possible combinations of movies and there will be some good ones. But recognizing them, that’s the hard part." By his definition, the vast majority of people are not intelligent.