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What you wanted to know about AI

162 points by chriskanan 12y ago

pauletienney 12y ago
Indeed we are far far away from true AI (to me it implies self-consciousness). The point is even if it happens in 100 or 200 years, it will be a huge change in human history. I guess Gates, Hawking and Stark are talking about a further AI creation, they are kind of long-term thinking guys.
- frozenport 12y ago
  Hawking always had his eyes on the stars, perhaps he isnt qualified to comment on AI?
- mikejholly 12y ago
  Agreed. As someone who works in AI (and knows its limitations) it's frustrating to see the layperson getting nervous about AI after watching Chappie and hearing some of these quotes from Gates and the like. Human level AI is way way way out.
  - codezero 12y ago
    I think it's reasonable for the layperson to get a bit nervous. Even if it's 50 or 200 years, advanced, human-brain-like-or-better AI will happen. Imagine the public sentiment if mass media made people aware of the inevitability of the nuclear bomb 50 to 200 years in advance and people (not just the government) were actively working on developing it.
    - NhanH 12y ago
      In the analogy of nuclear bomb, it's more likely than not a public awareness of nuclear power would have prevented nuclear plant (the good thing), nuclear bomb (the bad thing) is extremely unlikely to not be developed anyway.
      - codezero 12y ago
        Maybe, it's hard to know for sure, just like it's hard to know now :) I think that had nuclear physics been more obvious 50-200 years earlier, it may have lead to a lot more practical private-sector development. In the case of power generation, this is seriously beneficial. How will private-sector AI turn out? Will they boot up sentient AIs in Docker, then discard them? Is that OK? Who even knows?
- moyix 12y ago
  Did you just include Tony Stark in a list of people worried about AI? ;)
  - Raphmedia 12y ago
    Tony Stark, Elon Musk ... Same person, different multi-verse.
- NhanH 12y ago
  Seems like it's a popular sentiment to think of Elon Musk as Tony Stark ;). I believe you mean to say "Gates, Hawking and Musk". Stark doesn't tend to talk about AI, he build them.
  - pauletienney 12y ago
    Was just a little joke ;)
- walod 12y ago
  It depends on what you mean by self-consciousness. On the one hand it can be processes for understanding oneself and modifying oneself to better survive in the environment, on the other you have the illusory "qualia" / subjective experience. It seems possible to me to have a self-improving process and an active process to evaluate the world state and self state without consciousness, and that this could result in something life-like. In this sense, is AI far away? It doesn't have to be necessarily. It doesn't make sense to me personally why we need subjective experience, nor what it is in a physical sense. We can have agency and variability of choice without it, but at the same time we know how powerful it is in humans. Until we know exactly how it functions, i don't think anyone can claim with any certainty if it will happen, or how far away it is.
- protonfish 12y ago
  I think you mean, simply, conscious or self-aware. A self-conscious AI would spend too much time worrying about what the other robots think of it.
- SimpleXYZ 12y ago
  I couldn't agree more. 100 or 200 years seems feasible.
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smilencetion 12y ago
Why SHE still keeps us alive ?
codyh1 12y ago
Human level AI seems to be a far reach but AI in specific domains seems to be the approaching intersection. What I mean by this is the self-driving car...very discrete skills but not any where near human level. Let's not forget google's "Find Mitten's the Cat" AI on videos.
- simonh 12y ago
  Computers have always been very good at performing very specific tasks in highly proscribed circumstances. What were learning to do is expand the circumstances within which the computer can operate, but as you say the tasks are still very highly specific. We could probably have programmed a computer to drive a car back in the 70s, within an extremely specific configuration of roads and with no traffic or pedestrians. Now self driving cars have very advanced sensors, can cope with other traffic, pedestrians and a much wider range of road geometries. But it's still only useful for driving a car, you couldn't take the same program and teach it to even controll a boat or a plane let alone play Jeopardy, predict the weather or trade on the stock market. Systems like this are going to be very useful, but they are not taking us on a path to develop strong general AI.
  - ghaff 12y ago
    >But it's still only useful for driving a car And it's still only useful for driving a car in a rather specific configuration of roads and a somewhat limited set of conditions. I'd argue that a car's ability to operate autonomously and rather reliably under those circumstances is leading a lot of folks to be very optimistic about how long it will be before I can summon robo-taxi with my smartphone.
pyrrhotech 12y ago
Tldr: current AI capabilities are exaggerated by cherry-picked sample data and fear fueled by famous smart people is unwarranted. Do Any of those cited give specific timelines? Even if we are very far away, do you really doubt that one day machines will have superhuman intelligence? I take that as pretty much a given, whether it's 50 or 500 years from now. What I'm not so sure of is whether fear is an appropriate response. Altman's bacteria handwashing analogy doesn't hold up. We don't care about bacteria because they have no central nervous system or consciousness on any level. However, we go out of our way to protect animals that can feel pain and experience emotions because it's what we've decided through our intelligence and higher reasoning is the moral thing to do. Stats show that the more intelligent and educated the human, the more likely he is to behave morally as our greatest moral philosophers define it. Why would super intelligent machines buck this trend?
- dannnn 12y ago
  > Do Any of those cited give specific timelines? Even if we are very far away, do you really doubt that one day machines will have superhuman intelligence? I take that as pretty much a given, whether it's 50 or 500 years from now Why? If you extrapolate from the amount of progress we have made toward AGI in the last 50 years (ie, none), then it's reasonable to argue that we still will have made no progress 50 and 500 years from now. There are intellectual problems that humans aren't capable of solving; it wouldn't make any sense to talk about "superhuman intelligence" if that wasn't the case. The currently available evidence suggests that "constructing an AGI" might very well be one of those problems.
  - weavejester 12y ago
    > If you extrapolate from the amount of progress we have made toward AGI in the last 50 years (ie, none) That's an odd way of defining progress. > There are intellectual problems that humans aren't capable of solving; it wouldn't make any sense to talk about "superhuman intelligence" if that wasn't the case. A superhuman intelligence doesn't necessarily have to come up with solutions humans would never think of, it just needs to come up with a solution in less time, or with less available data, or with fewer attempts.
mnembrini 12y ago
Nice article. I'd like to point out that in the Pacman example the agent is only receiving a partial picture of the environment (details are in the video description), so it's unfair to criticize it for lack of planning. As to why this is the case you'd have to ask the researcher, but I think it's because the observation space would be too big for the machine running the agent (both memory and run time)
aamar 12y ago
There's some good comments about some new AI tools; it's a shame that the article's premise is a straw man. The fears of machine superintelligence are based on the belief that true AI is just around a corner. After all, we’re so advanced and the progress is only accelerating, it’s probably a few years away, at most. Analogously, public figures started warning us about climate change, so it must be just a few years before the earth is uninhabitable. It should be pretty obvious that if we start worrying about significant threats only a "few years" before they kill us, that will be as a rule too late. Carbon-driven global warming ("the greenhouse effect") was gathering support in the 60s, followed by consensus in the 80s. Yet we are just now experiencing the first years of growth without increased carbon output. The claim by the concerned parties with respect to harmful AI is that it may be a threat in the next 25 to 50 years: 2043 and 2065 are common estimates. "A few years" isn't a good way to characterize that, interpret Gates, etc., or a reasonable understanding of when we start worrying.
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  Agreed. If we are to worry about it, then we need to do it now, not when major corporations are 2 quarters away from mass producing said robots. By then the investment of those companies and governments would be too great to just suddenly terminate all the programs. Think about all the jobs lost, corporate lobbying, etc. It would be too late.
- pqomdv 12y ago
  The global warming comparison isn't very good. We had the capabilities for carbon output 50 years ago and it has slowly been increasing. But we don't yet have an AI. So there is no need to warn anyone, except out of irrational fear. Once we actually get it, it would make sense to start warning about its applications, so it doesn't get out of control. If I apply your analogy correctly, then warning about AI now, is the same as it would be warning about global warming in the 19th century. Not very logical and certainly very paranoid.
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davmre 12y ago
A lot of respected AI researchers and practitioners are writing these "AIs are really stupid" articles to rebut superintelligence fearmongering in the popular press. That's a valuable service, and everything this article says is correct. Deepmind's Atari network is not going to kick off the singularity. I worry that the flurry of articles like this, rational and well-reasoned all, will be seen as a "win" for the nothing-to-worry-about side of the argument and lead people to discount the entire issue. This article does a great job demonstrating the flaws in current AI techniques. It doesn't attempt to engage with the arguments of Stuart Russell, Nick Bostrom, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and others who are worried, not about current methods, but about what will happen when the time comes -- in ten, fifty, or a hundred years -- that AI does exceed general human intelligence. (refs: http://edge.org/conversation/the-myth-of-ai#26015 http://edge.org/conversation/the-myth-of-ai#26015, http://www.amazon.com/Superintelligence-Dangers-Strategies-Nick-Bostrom/dp/0199678111 http://www.amazon.com/Superintelligence-Dangers-Strategies-N...) This article rightly points out that advances like self-driving cars will have significant economic impact we'll need to deal with in the near future. That's not mutually exclusive with beginning to research ways to ensure that, as we start building more and more advanced systems, they are provably controllable and aligned with human values. These are two different problems to solve, on different timescales, both important and well worth the time and energy of smart people.
- AndrewKemendo 12y ago
  It doesn't attempt to engage with the arguments of Stuart Russell, Nick Bostrom, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and others who are worried, not about current methods, but about what will happen when the time comes -- in ten, fifty, or a hundred years -- that AI does exceed general human intelligence. That's because it would be arguing a straw-man. So there is no reason to engage the argument.
  - davmre 12y ago
    I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "straw man" here. The usual meaning is that to attack a straw man means to argue against a position that no one actually holds, but which is easier to attack than your opponent's actual position. The concerns about the long-term future of AI are real, actual beliefs held by serious people. At this point there's a respectable literature on the potential dangers of unconstrained, powerful optimizing agents; I linked a couple of examples. These arguments are well thought through and worth engaging. By contrast, this article and many others are implicitly arguing against an actual straw man position, the position of "let's shut down AI research before it kills us all in six months", which no serious person on either side of this debate really holds (though it's understandable how someone who only read the discussion in the mainstream press could come to think this way).
moyix 12y ago
Argh. From the article: > The fears of machine superintelligence are based on the belief that true AI is just around a corner. After all, we’re so advanced and the progress is only accelerating, it’s probably a few years away, at most. Versus MIRI [1], quoting Nick Bostrom, whose book is arguably what most recently sparked all of the current discussion of AI risk: > If what readers take away from language like “impending” and “soon” is that Bostrom is unusually confident that AGI will come early, or that Bostrom is confident we’ll build a general AI this century, then they’ll be getting the situation exactly backwards. > [...] > > My own view is that the median numbers reported in the expert survey do not have enough probability mass on later arrival dates. A 10% probability of HLMI [human-level machine intelligence] not having been developed by 2075 or even 2100 (after conditionalizing on “human scientific activity continuing without major negative disruption”) seems too low. > > Historically, AI researchers have not had a strong record of being able to predict the rate of advances in their own field or the shape that such advances would take. On the one hand, some tasks, like chess playing, turned out to be achievable by means of surprisingly simple programs; and naysayers who claimed that machines would “never” be able to do this or that have repeatedly been proven wrong. On the other hand, the more typical errors among practitioners have been to underestimate the difficulties of getting a system to perform robustly on real-world tasks, and to overestimate the advantages of their own particular pet project or technique. I agree with the meat of the article, though – recent AI progress has surely been oversold by the media. It's really frustrating to see people continually arguing against strawmen when there are some perfectly lovely arguments to grapple with instead! Aside: is there some kind of law we could coin that if a rebuttal to AI risk starts off by referencing Skynet and Terminator, we can safely assume it's not going to be worth reading? [1] https://intelligence.org/2015/01/08/brooks-searle-agi-volition-timelines/ https://intelligence.org/2015/01/08/brooks-searle-agi-voliti...
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 12y ago
  The smart guys (professors and such) have brought this on themselves by pretentiously labeling their field Artificial Intelligence. Excitable fools would move on to the next thing if it were called Computational Rationality or something similarly boring.
foobarqux 12y ago
> The fears of machine superintelligence are based on the belief that true AI is just around a corner. No, the fear of AGI is that the time between when we first start to see promising progess in AI to the point where AI is out of our control would be so short that we would not be able to react to prevent it.
- maaaats 12y ago
  But the fear and thoughts should instead be directed to how one can solve the economical an social challenges that arise when AI removes a lot of jobs. That is the issue here, not some Skynet-thingy destroying humanity.
  - foobarqux 12y ago
    They are both legitimate problems.
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  >the time between when we first start to see promising progess in AI to the point where AI is out of our control would be so short that we would not be able to react to prevent it. That seems pretty absurd to me. A human-level AGI is going to require a sizable amount of time and data to train, so that it knows something rather than nothing. In fact, getting to the point where self-improvement becomes viable will take a good deal longer than training/educational periods for most other tasks. The information complexity is just higher. So while AI safety should be taken seriously, we do need to "sober up" by remembering that an AGI has to obey the rules of information theory.
  - foobarqux 12y ago
    What's absurd is to have a strong conviction about inviolable restrictions on systems that haven't been imagined yet. The examples you cite aren't even compelling on their face. For instance if you include whole-brain emulations in AGI (and we should because the consequences are essentially the same) it would take zero time to train. But even without whole-brain emulations a child learns rapidly from its environment alone. An AGI could conceivably do the same but faster, and moreover could take advantage of access to the Internet. I don't know what information theory has to do with any of that.
mbrock 12y ago
To me, algorithmic trading and investing is already a pretty big scary AI proposition. And it's happening all over, for real profit. Privatization and algorithmification (or whatever) of large scale human decision making seems like an enormous change. And the computers don't have to "think" in order to do this. The next step in this scenario would be policy decision making based on AI techniques. Statistical measuring, machine learning, etc in order to decide on political details, gerrymandering, etc. In other words, computers don't need to grow sentient and godlike. We could just delegate power to them anyway. Maybe they'll be a bit stupid; so are we, just in different ways. And they won't understand human concerns in any deep way. But they'll be efficient and profitable. You could already look at the international market as a kind of machine or distributed algorithm. With human "computers." Replace these computers with robots, per standard capitalist efficiency procedures, and voila, the world is run by machines.
- fiatmoney 12y ago
  "policy decision making based on ... statistical measuring" is > 2000 years old. The modern version based on a mathematical understanding of statistics & sampling, as opposed to collecting aggregates large enough that you can just treat the error as 0, is ~80 years old.
  - mbrock 12y ago
    Yeah, it's quite fascinating. Like the "Cybersyn Project" in Chile. [0] Project Cybersyn was a Chilean project from 1971–1973 (during the government of President Salvador Allende) aimed at constructing a distributed decision support system to aid in the management of the national economy. The project consisted of four modules: an economic simulator, custom software to check factory performance, an operations room, and a national network of telex machines that were linked to one mainframe computer. [0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
    - fiatmoney 12y ago
      Cybersyn was kind of a joke; it was a Star Trek set hooked up to telexes where aides manually aggregated information in the same way leaders get their briefings the world over.
themgt 12y ago
I've begun to think about AI more in terms of "artificial will" than "artificial intelligence". Intelligence and will seem mostly orthogonal, in that advanced computational reductionism appears capable of extremely intelligent behavior without anywhere near the amount of self-determinism shown by insects. Whether artificial will is something that can be implemented in a turing machine and run on silicon seems an open question. I believe the concept, when deeply considered, is almost precisely antithetical to the goal of programming languages. The goal of artificial will is to give control to the program, not the programmer. Perhaps that's possible in a turing machine, but I have a feeling the "natural language" in which to express such a program would be like an inside-out LSD trip.
- deleted 12y ago
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- tmerr 12y ago
  If you knew how the atoms were arranged in an animal simulating the animal's behavior would be as simple as simulating each individual atom. In practice that's not tractable but it shows that in theory, since the behavior of atoms is computable (blah blah quantum physics shut up), anything an animal can do can be simulated by a turing machine including will. Just because it's not simple to express in a programming language doesn't mean it not possible.
jallmann 12y ago
When I started school, my dream was to figure out a theory to underpin a grand unified model of artificial intelligence. Imagine my disappointment once I started studying the subject in detail. Most functional AI nowadays consists of algorithms that are carefully tuned to solve a very specific problem in a narrowly defined environment. All the research nowadays is pushing the boundaries of a local optimum. Right now, true AI is a pipe dream without a fundamental shift in how we approach AI-type problems. And no, machine learning/deep learning is not that shift; it is just another flavor of the same statistics that everybody already uses. What concerns me is not Skynet; what concerns me is the exasperating over-confidence that some people have in our current AI capabilities, on Hacker News and elsewhere. Too often, we discuss such technology as a miracle tonic to various economic or social woes, but without acknowledging the current state of the technology and its limitations (or being completely ignorant of such), we might as well be discussing Star Trek transporters. And usually, the discussion veers into Star Trek territory. Proponents of self-driving cars: I AM LOOKING AT YOU. Take self-driving cars: at least with humans, our failure modes are well-known. We cannot say the same for most software, especially software that relies on a fundamentally heuristic layer as input to the control system. To that mix, add extremely dynamic and completely unpredictable driving conditions -- tread lightly.
- AndrewKemendo 12y ago
  What concerns me is not Skynet; what concerns me is the exasperating over-confidence that some people have in our current AI capabilities, on Hacker News and elsewhere. Yes exactly!! Each AI winter is preceded by unrealistic expectations. If the unrealistic expectations this time are resoundingly fearful, I worry that the next AI winter will be even worse - like create legislation and basically kill the field worse.
- foreigner 12y ago
  The key to self-driving cars is to realize that they don't have to be perfect - they just have to be better than us. It's not that the AI driver so good - it's that human drivers are SO BAD! I agree with you that AI is a pipe dream but I do think self-driving cars will succeed. I don't think the computers will ever match our judgement but it's trivially easy for them to beat us on attention span and reaction time, which will make them better drivers.
dataker 12y ago
As a contributor to several ML projects, I am happy the mainstream media and 'thought leaders' haven't found out and picked on early projects like OpenCog or DeepDive. We could've seen a tremendous amount of pseudoscience BS that would've undermined important initiatives.
ccvannorman 12y ago
The most common misconception about AI is that it will "mimic human level intelligence or better". Human intelligence is an infinitesimally small sliver of possible conscious entities with agency, and whatever "wakes up" enough for headlines to declare AI is real will almost certainly be worlds apart from us.
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blixt 12y ago
I would agree with this article that every independent solution today does not have the slightest chance to be iteratively improved to some kind of real intelligence. Even the "generic" game playing AI is very limited outside the scope of a pixel buffer and some digital output signals. However, I don't understand how the arguments correlate to "there is no need to worry about AI". The real worry should come from the fact that there are now many, many more people looking at the problem of AI than before, and it's a competition that now has serious money behind it. The article mentioned the infinite monkey theorem as a counterargument, but ironically that is exactly how I think we will stumble upon generic intelligence. The more people that work on it and have the confidence, belief, and money to actually try out random things, the more likely it is that someone out there will discover the step change that will, in a day, take AI from deep prediction algorithms to eerily deliberate behavior. Even if no one manages to shortcut our way to generic intelligence, we sure as hell will brute force it. While we're extremely early in the world of simulating organic brains, they exist. People have constructed virtual organic bodies controlled by virtual electric currents from virtual neurons in virtual brains. It's happening today, and as capacity, domain knowledge, and most importantly awareness increases, more and more people will work on the problem and bigger and bigger brains will be simulated. I really don't see how we can question whether we will eventually reach human level intelligence running on computers. The only way I see generic machine intelligence not happening is by making people believe it is so impossible that no one ever tries to do it. And maybe that was the purpose of this article.
- blixt 12y ago
  Here's one project simulating the C. elegans (earth worm) in a virtual environment. If they (or any other project out there working on similar problems) can prove that the simplest organic life form can be simulated in a computer, I think that's a big initial step towards brute forced brain simulation. http://www.openworm.org/ http://www.openworm.org/
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  >I would agree with this article that every independent solution today does not have the slightest chance to be iteratively improved to some kind of real intelligence. Even the "generic" game playing AI is very limited outside the scope of a pixel buffer and some digital output signals. Why do people who are laypersons to machine learning continue to insist, despite what those in the field say, that we are learning nothing about the principles of general-domain learning from current developments? I think DeepMind is making genuine discoveries: they're certainly able to build things nobody was able to build before.
ikeboy 12y ago
>It is telling that among people who actually do machine learning most aren’t afraid of superhuman AI (even if they believe it’s possible). http://futureoflife.org/misc/open_letter#signatories http://futureoflife.org/misc/open_letter#signatories
jcoffland 12y ago
I'm always glad to see someone cutting through the hype. Way too many people gobble up the missinformation pumped out but academia and corporations who's main goal is to increase their own funding. Add to that the wild speculative fiction of the likes of Ray Kurzweil and pop science "news" who again are mostly interested in entertaining and shocking you to increase they're own popularity and thus revenue. There's just not enough incentive to think critically and too few of the readership are inclined to cut through the crap. It's not even socially acceptable to think critically. It's such a downer. You're better off just agreeing and not pointing out your friend's gulibility if you want to continue to have friends.
sushirain 12y ago
“A woman holding a teddy bear in front of a mirror”. Hilarious. The jokes will not last long.
kamaal 12y ago
I'm not sure why this is so difficult. AI simply going to be a highly context sensitive answering machine which will rely and pick its answers from a massive knowledge graph(which it can grow as it spends more time interacting with assisted learning). If there is no context, it will just pickup the most commonly expected answer based on weights and priorities. This is exactly what human mind does as well. Everything else is parsing the sensor inputs in a language that makes sense to the AI answering machine. So its knowledge category and context. Form a big enough and comprehensive graph of interconnected elements, and traversing that graph is what AI will do eventually. Apart from growing the graph and using the knowledge within the graph to improve itself.
ilaksh 12y ago
Study AGI approaches like OpenCog, HTM, etc. and look at mainstream deep learning objectively. Lose your supernatural beliefs about the mind or human exceptionalism. What do people do? Advanced pattern-based behavior generation and unsupervised hierarchical spatial temporal pattern learning and abstraction. Logic and reasoning. Attention and goals. I believe we will start to see somewhat convincing human-like conversational interface, speaking and movement from machines in lesx than five years. I don't even believe these things require real breakthroughs necessarily -- we can probably mostly combine existing techniques.

162 points by chriskanan 12y ago

Indeed we are far far away from true AI (to me it implies self-consciousness). The point is even if it happens in 100 or 200 years, it will be a huge change in human history. I guess Gates, Hawking and Stark are talking about a further AI creation, they are kind of long-term thinking guys.

frozenport 12y ago
Hawking always had his eyes on the stars, perhaps he isnt qualified to comment on AI?
mikejholly 12y ago
Agreed. As someone who works in AI (and knows its limitations) it's frustrating to see the layperson getting nervous about AI after watching Chappie and hearing some of these quotes from Gates and the like. Human level AI is way way way out.
- codezero 12y ago
  I think it's reasonable for the layperson to get a bit nervous. Even if it's 50 or 200 years, advanced, human-brain-like-or-better AI will happen. Imagine the public sentiment if mass media made people aware of the inevitability of the nuclear bomb 50 to 200 years in advance and people (not just the government) were actively working on developing it.
  - NhanH 12y ago
    In the analogy of nuclear bomb, it's more likely than not a public awareness of nuclear power would have prevented nuclear plant (the good thing), nuclear bomb (the bad thing) is extremely unlikely to not be developed anyway.
    - codezero 12y ago
      Maybe, it's hard to know for sure, just like it's hard to know now :) I think that had nuclear physics been more obvious 50-200 years earlier, it may have lead to a lot more practical private-sector development. In the case of power generation, this is seriously beneficial. How will private-sector AI turn out? Will they boot up sentient AIs in Docker, then discard them? Is that OK? Who even knows?
moyix 12y ago
Did you just include Tony Stark in a list of people worried about AI? ;)
- Raphmedia 12y ago
  Tony Stark, Elon Musk ... Same person, different multi-verse.
NhanH 12y ago
Seems like it's a popular sentiment to think of Elon Musk as Tony Stark ;). I believe you mean to say "Gates, Hawking and Musk". Stark doesn't tend to talk about AI, he build them.
- pauletienney 12y ago
  Was just a little joke ;)
walod 12y ago
It depends on what you mean by self-consciousness. On the one hand it can be processes for understanding oneself and modifying oneself to better survive in the environment, on the other you have the illusory "qualia" / subjective experience. It seems possible to me to have a self-improving process and an active process to evaluate the world state and self state without consciousness, and that this could result in something life-like. In this sense, is AI far away? It doesn't have to be necessarily. It doesn't make sense to me personally why we need subjective experience, nor what it is in a physical sense. We can have agency and variability of choice without it, but at the same time we know how powerful it is in humans. Until we know exactly how it functions, i don't think anyone can claim with any certainty if it will happen, or how far away it is.
protonfish 12y ago
I think you mean, simply, conscious or self-aware. A self-conscious AI would spend too much time worrying about what the other robots think of it.
SimpleXYZ 12y ago
I couldn't agree more. 100 or 200 years seems feasible.

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smilencetion 12y ago

Why SHE still keeps us alive ?

codyh1 12y ago

Human level AI seems to be a far reach but AI in specific domains seems to be the approaching intersection. What I mean by this is the self-driving car...very discrete skills but not any where near human level. Let's not forget google's "Find Mitten's the Cat" AI on videos.

simonh 12y ago
Computers have always been very good at performing very specific tasks in highly proscribed circumstances. What were learning to do is expand the circumstances within which the computer can operate, but as you say the tasks are still very highly specific. We could probably have programmed a computer to drive a car back in the 70s, within an extremely specific configuration of roads and with no traffic or pedestrians. Now self driving cars have very advanced sensors, can cope with other traffic, pedestrians and a much wider range of road geometries. But it's still only useful for driving a car, you couldn't take the same program and teach it to even controll a boat or a plane let alone play Jeopardy, predict the weather or trade on the stock market. Systems like this are going to be very useful, but they are not taking us on a path to develop strong general AI.
- ghaff 12y ago
  >But it's still only useful for driving a car And it's still only useful for driving a car in a rather specific configuration of roads and a somewhat limited set of conditions. I'd argue that a car's ability to operate autonomously and rather reliably under those circumstances is leading a lot of folks to be very optimistic about how long it will be before I can summon robo-taxi with my smartphone.

pyrrhotech 12y ago

Tldr: current AI capabilities are exaggerated by cherry-picked sample data and fear fueled by famous smart people is unwarranted. Do Any of those cited give specific timelines? Even if we are very far away, do you really doubt that one day machines will have superhuman intelligence? I take that as pretty much a given, whether it's 50 or 500 years from now. What I'm not so sure of is whether fear is an appropriate response. Altman's bacteria handwashing analogy doesn't hold up. We don't care about bacteria because they have no central nervous system or consciousness on any level. However, we go out of our way to protect animals that can feel pain and experience emotions because it's what we've decided through our intelligence and higher reasoning is the moral thing to do. Stats show that the more intelligent and educated the human, the more likely he is to behave morally as our greatest moral philosophers define it. Why would super intelligent machines buck this trend?

dannnn 12y ago
> Do Any of those cited give specific timelines? Even if we are very far away, do you really doubt that one day machines will have superhuman intelligence? I take that as pretty much a given, whether it's 50 or 500 years from now Why? If you extrapolate from the amount of progress we have made toward AGI in the last 50 years (ie, none), then it's reasonable to argue that we still will have made no progress 50 and 500 years from now. There are intellectual problems that humans aren't capable of solving; it wouldn't make any sense to talk about "superhuman intelligence" if that wasn't the case. The currently available evidence suggests that "constructing an AGI" might very well be one of those problems.
- weavejester 12y ago
  > If you extrapolate from the amount of progress we have made toward AGI in the last 50 years (ie, none) That's an odd way of defining progress. > There are intellectual problems that humans aren't capable of solving; it wouldn't make any sense to talk about "superhuman intelligence" if that wasn't the case. A superhuman intelligence doesn't necessarily have to come up with solutions humans would never think of, it just needs to come up with a solution in less time, or with less available data, or with fewer attempts.

mnembrini 12y ago

Nice article. I'd like to point out that in the Pacman example the agent is only receiving a partial picture of the environment (details are in the video description), so it's unfair to criticize it for lack of planning. As to why this is the case you'd have to ask the researcher, but I think it's because the observation space would be too big for the machine running the agent (both memory and run time)

aamar 12y ago

There's some good comments about some new AI tools; it's a shame that the article's premise is a straw man. The fears of machine superintelligence are based on the belief that true AI is just around a corner. After all, we’re so advanced and the progress is only accelerating, it’s probably a few years away, at most. Analogously, public figures started warning us about climate change, so it must be just a few years before the earth is uninhabitable. It should be pretty obvious that if we start worrying about significant threats only a "few years" before they kill us, that will be as a rule too late. Carbon-driven global warming ("the greenhouse effect") was gathering support in the 60s, followed by consensus in the 80s. Yet we are just now experiencing the first years of growth without increased carbon output. The claim by the concerned parties with respect to harmful AI is that it may be a threat in the next 25 to 50 years: 2043 and 2065 are common estimates. "A few years" isn't a good way to characterize that, interpret Gates, etc., or a reasonable understanding of when we start worrying.

higherpurpose 12y ago
Agreed. If we are to worry about it, then we need to do it now, not when major corporations are 2 quarters away from mass producing said robots. By then the investment of those companies and governments would be too great to just suddenly terminate all the programs. Think about all the jobs lost, corporate lobbying, etc. It would be too late.
pqomdv 12y ago
The global warming comparison isn't very good. We had the capabilities for carbon output 50 years ago and it has slowly been increasing. But we don't yet have an AI. So there is no need to warn anyone, except out of irrational fear. Once we actually get it, it would make sense to start warning about its applications, so it doesn't get out of control. If I apply your analogy correctly, then warning about AI now, is the same as it would be warning about global warming in the 19th century. Not very logical and certainly very paranoid.
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davmre 12y ago

A lot of respected AI researchers and practitioners are writing these "AIs are really stupid" articles to rebut superintelligence fearmongering in the popular press. That's a valuable service, and everything this article says is correct. Deepmind's Atari network is not going to kick off the singularity. I worry that the flurry of articles like this, rational and well-reasoned all, will be seen as a "win" for the nothing-to-worry-about side of the argument and lead people to discount the entire issue. This article does a great job demonstrating the flaws in current AI techniques. It doesn't attempt to engage with the arguments of Stuart Russell, Nick Bostrom, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and others who are worried, not about current methods, but about what will happen when the time comes -- in ten, fifty, or a hundred years -- that AI does exceed general human intelligence. (refs: http://edge.org/conversation/the-myth-of-ai#26015 http://edge.org/conversation/the-myth-of-ai#26015, http://www.amazon.com/Superintelligence-Dangers-Strategies-Nick-Bostrom/dp/0199678111 http://www.amazon.com/Superintelligence-Dangers-Strategies-N...) This article rightly points out that advances like self-driving cars will have significant economic impact we'll need to deal with in the near future. That's not mutually exclusive with beginning to research ways to ensure that, as we start building more and more advanced systems, they are provably controllable and aligned with human values. These are two different problems to solve, on different timescales, both important and well worth the time and energy of smart people.

AndrewKemendo 12y ago
It doesn't attempt to engage with the arguments of Stuart Russell, Nick Bostrom, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and others who are worried, not about current methods, but about what will happen when the time comes -- in ten, fifty, or a hundred years -- that AI does exceed general human intelligence. That's because it would be arguing a straw-man. So there is no reason to engage the argument.
- davmre 12y ago
  I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "straw man" here. The usual meaning is that to attack a straw man means to argue against a position that no one actually holds, but which is easier to attack than your opponent's actual position. The concerns about the long-term future of AI are real, actual beliefs held by serious people. At this point there's a respectable literature on the potential dangers of unconstrained, powerful optimizing agents; I linked a couple of examples. These arguments are well thought through and worth engaging. By contrast, this article and many others are implicitly arguing against an actual straw man position, the position of "let's shut down AI research before it kills us all in six months", which no serious person on either side of this debate really holds (though it's understandable how someone who only read the discussion in the mainstream press could come to think this way).

moyix 12y ago

Argh. From the article: > The fears of machine superintelligence are based on the belief that true AI is just around a corner. After all, we’re so advanced and the progress is only accelerating, it’s probably a few years away, at most. Versus MIRI [1], quoting Nick Bostrom, whose book is arguably what most recently sparked all of the current discussion of AI risk: > If what readers take away from language like “impending” and “soon” is that Bostrom is unusually confident that AGI will come early, or that Bostrom is confident we’ll build a general AI this century, then they’ll be getting the situation exactly backwards. > [...] > > My own view is that the median numbers reported in the expert survey do not have enough probability mass on later arrival dates. A 10% probability of HLMI [human-level machine intelligence] not having been developed by 2075 or even 2100 (after conditionalizing on “human scientific activity continuing without major negative disruption”) seems too low. > > Historically, AI researchers have not had a strong record of being able to predict the rate of advances in their own field or the shape that such advances would take. On the one hand, some tasks, like chess playing, turned out to be achievable by means of surprisingly simple programs; and naysayers who claimed that machines would “never” be able to do this or that have repeatedly been proven wrong. On the other hand, the more typical errors among practitioners have been to underestimate the difficulties of getting a system to perform robustly on real-world tasks, and to overestimate the advantages of their own particular pet project or technique. I agree with the meat of the article, though – recent AI progress has surely been oversold by the media. It's really frustrating to see people continually arguing against strawmen when there are some perfectly lovely arguments to grapple with instead! Aside: is there some kind of law we could coin that if a rebuttal to AI risk starts off by referencing Skynet and Terminator, we can safely assume it's not going to be worth reading? [1] https://intelligence.org/2015/01/08/brooks-searle-agi-volition-timelines/ https://intelligence.org/2015/01/08/brooks-searle-agi-voliti...

0xdeadbeefbabe 12y ago
The smart guys (professors and such) have brought this on themselves by pretentiously labeling their field Artificial Intelligence. Excitable fools would move on to the next thing if it were called Computational Rationality or something similarly boring.

foobarqux 12y ago

> The fears of machine superintelligence are based on the belief that true AI is just around a corner. No, the fear of AGI is that the time between when we first start to see promising progess in AI to the point where AI is out of our control would be so short that we would not be able to react to prevent it.

maaaats 12y ago
But the fear and thoughts should instead be directed to how one can solve the economical an social challenges that arise when AI removes a lot of jobs. That is the issue here, not some Skynet-thingy destroying humanity.
- foobarqux 12y ago
  They are both legitimate problems.
eli_gottlieb 12y ago
>the time between when we first start to see promising progess in AI to the point where AI is out of our control would be so short that we would not be able to react to prevent it. That seems pretty absurd to me. A human-level AGI is going to require a sizable amount of time and data to train, so that it knows something rather than nothing. In fact, getting to the point where self-improvement becomes viable will take a good deal longer than training/educational periods for most other tasks. The information complexity is just higher. So while AI safety should be taken seriously, we do need to "sober up" by remembering that an AGI has to obey the rules of information theory.
- foobarqux 12y ago
  What's absurd is to have a strong conviction about inviolable restrictions on systems that haven't been imagined yet. The examples you cite aren't even compelling on their face. For instance if you include whole-brain emulations in AGI (and we should because the consequences are essentially the same) it would take zero time to train. But even without whole-brain emulations a child learns rapidly from its environment alone. An AGI could conceivably do the same but faster, and moreover could take advantage of access to the Internet. I don't know what information theory has to do with any of that.

mbrock 12y ago

To me, algorithmic trading and investing is already a pretty big scary AI proposition. And it's happening all over, for real profit. Privatization and algorithmification (or whatever) of large scale human decision making seems like an enormous change. And the computers don't have to "think" in order to do this. The next step in this scenario would be policy decision making based on AI techniques. Statistical measuring, machine learning, etc in order to decide on political details, gerrymandering, etc. In other words, computers don't need to grow sentient and godlike. We could just delegate power to them anyway. Maybe they'll be a bit stupid; so are we, just in different ways. And they won't understand human concerns in any deep way. But they'll be efficient and profitable. You could already look at the international market as a kind of machine or distributed algorithm. With human "computers." Replace these computers with robots, per standard capitalist efficiency procedures, and voila, the world is run by machines.

fiatmoney 12y ago
"policy decision making based on ... statistical measuring" is > 2000 years old. The modern version based on a mathematical understanding of statistics & sampling, as opposed to collecting aggregates large enough that you can just treat the error as 0, is ~80 years old.
- mbrock 12y ago
  Yeah, it's quite fascinating. Like the "Cybersyn Project" in Chile. [0] Project Cybersyn was a Chilean project from 1971–1973 (during the government of President Salvador Allende) aimed at constructing a distributed decision support system to aid in the management of the national economy. The project consisted of four modules: an economic simulator, custom software to check factory performance, an operations room, and a national network of telex machines that were linked to one mainframe computer. [0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
  - fiatmoney 12y ago
    Cybersyn was kind of a joke; it was a Star Trek set hooked up to telexes where aides manually aggregated information in the same way leaders get their briefings the world over.

themgt 12y ago

I've begun to think about AI more in terms of "artificial will" than "artificial intelligence". Intelligence and will seem mostly orthogonal, in that advanced computational reductionism appears capable of extremely intelligent behavior without anywhere near the amount of self-determinism shown by insects. Whether artificial will is something that can be implemented in a turing machine and run on silicon seems an open question. I believe the concept, when deeply considered, is almost precisely antithetical to the goal of programming languages. The goal of artificial will is to give control to the program, not the programmer. Perhaps that's possible in a turing machine, but I have a feeling the "natural language" in which to express such a program would be like an inside-out LSD trip.

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tmerr 12y ago
If you knew how the atoms were arranged in an animal simulating the animal's behavior would be as simple as simulating each individual atom. In practice that's not tractable but it shows that in theory, since the behavior of atoms is computable (blah blah quantum physics shut up), anything an animal can do can be simulated by a turing machine including will. Just because it's not simple to express in a programming language doesn't mean it not possible.

jallmann 12y ago

When I started school, my dream was to figure out a theory to underpin a grand unified model of artificial intelligence. Imagine my disappointment once I started studying the subject in detail. Most functional AI nowadays consists of algorithms that are carefully tuned to solve a very specific problem in a narrowly defined environment. All the research nowadays is pushing the boundaries of a local optimum. Right now, true AI is a pipe dream without a fundamental shift in how we approach AI-type problems. And no, machine learning/deep learning is not that shift; it is just another flavor of the same statistics that everybody already uses. What concerns me is not Skynet; what concerns me is the exasperating over-confidence that some people have in our current AI capabilities, on Hacker News and elsewhere. Too often, we discuss such technology as a miracle tonic to various economic or social woes, but without acknowledging the current state of the technology and its limitations (or being completely ignorant of such), we might as well be discussing Star Trek transporters. And usually, the discussion veers into Star Trek territory. Proponents of self-driving cars: I AM LOOKING AT YOU. Take self-driving cars: at least with humans, our failure modes are well-known. We cannot say the same for most software, especially software that relies on a fundamentally heuristic layer as input to the control system. To that mix, add extremely dynamic and completely unpredictable driving conditions -- tread lightly.

AndrewKemendo 12y ago
What concerns me is not Skynet; what concerns me is the exasperating over-confidence that some people have in our current AI capabilities, on Hacker News and elsewhere. Yes exactly!! Each AI winter is preceded by unrealistic expectations. If the unrealistic expectations this time are resoundingly fearful, I worry that the next AI winter will be even worse - like create legislation and basically kill the field worse.
foreigner 12y ago
The key to self-driving cars is to realize that they don't have to be perfect - they just have to be better than us. It's not that the AI driver so good - it's that human drivers are SO BAD! I agree with you that AI is a pipe dream but I do think self-driving cars will succeed. I don't think the computers will ever match our judgement but it's trivially easy for them to beat us on attention span and reaction time, which will make them better drivers.

dataker 12y ago

As a contributor to several ML projects, I am happy the mainstream media and 'thought leaders' haven't found out and picked on early projects like OpenCog or DeepDive. We could've seen a tremendous amount of pseudoscience BS that would've undermined important initiatives.

ccvannorman 12y ago

The most common misconception about AI is that it will "mimic human level intelligence or better". Human intelligence is an infinitesimally small sliver of possible conscious entities with agency, and whatever "wakes up" enough for headlines to declare AI is real will almost certainly be worlds apart from us.

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blixt 12y ago

I would agree with this article that every independent solution today does not have the slightest chance to be iteratively improved to some kind of real intelligence. Even the "generic" game playing AI is very limited outside the scope of a pixel buffer and some digital output signals. However, I don't understand how the arguments correlate to "there is no need to worry about AI". The real worry should come from the fact that there are now many, many more people looking at the problem of AI than before, and it's a competition that now has serious money behind it. The article mentioned the infinite monkey theorem as a counterargument, but ironically that is exactly how I think we will stumble upon generic intelligence. The more people that work on it and have the confidence, belief, and money to actually try out random things, the more likely it is that someone out there will discover the step change that will, in a day, take AI from deep prediction algorithms to eerily deliberate behavior. Even if no one manages to shortcut our way to generic intelligence, we sure as hell will brute force it. While we're extremely early in the world of simulating organic brains, they exist. People have constructed virtual organic bodies controlled by virtual electric currents from virtual neurons in virtual brains. It's happening today, and as capacity, domain knowledge, and most importantly awareness increases, more and more people will work on the problem and bigger and bigger brains will be simulated. I really don't see how we can question whether we will eventually reach human level intelligence running on computers. The only way I see generic machine intelligence not happening is by making people believe it is so impossible that no one ever tries to do it. And maybe that was the purpose of this article.

blixt 12y ago
Here's one project simulating the C. elegans (earth worm) in a virtual environment. If they (or any other project out there working on similar problems) can prove that the simplest organic life form can be simulated in a computer, I think that's a big initial step towards brute forced brain simulation. http://www.openworm.org/ http://www.openworm.org/
eli_gottlieb 12y ago
>I would agree with this article that every independent solution today does not have the slightest chance to be iteratively improved to some kind of real intelligence. Even the "generic" game playing AI is very limited outside the scope of a pixel buffer and some digital output signals. Why do people who are laypersons to machine learning continue to insist, despite what those in the field say, that we are learning nothing about the principles of general-domain learning from current developments? I think DeepMind is making genuine discoveries: they're certainly able to build things nobody was able to build before.

ikeboy 12y ago

>It is telling that among people who actually do machine learning most aren’t afraid of superhuman AI (even if they believe it’s possible). http://futureoflife.org/misc/open_letter#signatories http://futureoflife.org/misc/open_letter#signatories

jcoffland 12y ago

I'm always glad to see someone cutting through the hype. Way too many people gobble up the missinformation pumped out but academia and corporations who's main goal is to increase their own funding. Add to that the wild speculative fiction of the likes of Ray Kurzweil and pop science "news" who again are mostly interested in entertaining and shocking you to increase they're own popularity and thus revenue. There's just not enough incentive to think critically and too few of the readership are inclined to cut through the crap. It's not even socially acceptable to think critically. It's such a downer. You're better off just agreeing and not pointing out your friend's gulibility if you want to continue to have friends.

sushirain 12y ago

“A woman holding a teddy bear in front of a mirror”. Hilarious. The jokes will not last long.

kamaal 12y ago

I'm not sure why this is so difficult. AI simply going to be a highly context sensitive answering machine which will rely and pick its answers from a massive knowledge graph(which it can grow as it spends more time interacting with assisted learning). If there is no context, it will just pickup the most commonly expected answer based on weights and priorities. This is exactly what human mind does as well. Everything else is parsing the sensor inputs in a language that makes sense to the AI answering machine. So its knowledge category and context. Form a big enough and comprehensive graph of interconnected elements, and traversing that graph is what AI will do eventually. Apart from growing the graph and using the knowledge within the graph to improve itself.

ilaksh 12y ago

Study AGI approaches like OpenCog, HTM, etc. and look at mainstream deep learning objectively. Lose your supernatural beliefs about the mind or human exceptionalism. What do people do? Advanced pattern-based behavior generation and unsupervised hierarchical spatial temporal pattern learning and abstraction. Logic and reasoning. Attention and goals. I believe we will start to see somewhat convincing human-like conversational interface, speaking and movement from machines in lesx than five years. I don't even believe these things require real breakthroughs necessarily -- we can probably mostly combine existing techniques.