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How can there be experts on a subject that doesn't yet exist?

ankurdhama 11y ago
Actually there can be anything possible in the articles that are published by so called Tech Journalists who have no idea of the fundamentals of the tech.
myrryr 11y ago
What do you mean it doesn't exist? I work in that field, it exists.
- blumkvist 11y ago
  What do you mean it exists? How do you definite AI? Can your project reason with you? Or is it simply an Input-Output type of program? Just because you use natural language with it instead of punch cards doesn't mean it is intelligent. People tried to do AI in the 60s to 90s era. It is dubbed symbolic AI. It didn't work out. A good chance that it never will. Today machine learning algos and a bunch of automated statistics is called "Artificial Intelligence". It's not intelligence at all. Intelligence implies something more than I/O computation.
  - one-more-minute 11y ago
    I tend to agree that AI today is a long way from what the founders of the subject imagined – it's become something more like "Applied Computer Science". But what's now called "Artificial General Intelligence" isn't dead, and people are still working on it. Also, it's more tricky than you'd think to narrow down what counts as intelligence. There aren't really any hard lines between an I/O program and an intelligent agent, even though they seem pretty far apart.
    - protonfish 11y ago
      Just because you don't see the hard lines doesn't mean they aren't there. We are deluding ourselves by avoiding a hard definition of intelligence so we can keep believing that we are creating AI when its really nothing of the sort.
      - one-more-minute 11y ago
        Just because you can't see unicorns doesn't mean they aren't there, but at some point you have to give up the search. It's fine to talk about how, broadly speaking, rats are more intelligent than ants, plants or microbes (which are basically I/O rules with a body), chimpanzees more so than rats, humans more so than than chimps etc. But in general there's a ton of overlap and the qualities we associate with intelligence – memory, planning, self-awareness, tool use, whatever – are only loosely correlated continua. There are a few more binary measures in intelligence research, such as the mirror test, but at best they're only a small piece of the puzzle. There's no sudden point where everything clicks into place. Of course, if you have such a good definition of intelligence, feel free to enlighten me.
        protonfish 11y ago
        You are repeating the same mistake as before. The difference is significant between admitting we don't know what those lines are and claiming that they don't exist.
        one-more-minute 11y ago
        It's not a mistake – I see the difference and I am claiming that those lines don't exist. There's plenty of evidence for that, including the continuous range of intelligent behaviour from plants to humans. It's just an empirical fact that there's no hard line. Of course, that could be wrong – new evidence may come to light, after all. But even so, it doesn't make any sense to say that trying to understand and replicate intelligence is deluded, just because we don't know where that line is – because figuring out what intelligence is is exactly the problem that people are trying to solve. AI is one part of that, along with more empirical research in fields like cognitive science and biology. Are people researching quantum gravity deluding themselves because they don't yet have a hard definition of quantum gravity? Figuring that out is exactly the point!
wojt_eu 11y ago
Experts on a subject that doesn't exist? Like professors of theology?
- baddox 11y ago
  Theology exists.
  - Chronic31 11y ago
    It won't, for much longer.
deanmen 11y ago
AI experts don't know how to create an artificial intelligence. AI researchers study how to solve various problems in CS traditionally performed by humans that humans don't solve by carrying out an algorithm by hand like Natural Language Processing, machine learning, automated reasoning, search (e.g. chess).
- peter303 11y ago
  There are at least two flavors of A.I. "Strong A.I." seeks to build something human-like and could pass Turings immitation game test. The new movie Ex Machina explores this test. "Weak A.I." replicates just a single cognitive skill like game playing, pattern recognition, natural language or something more trivial. Most recent A.i. worked on the latter, or its theoretical background.
jules 11y ago
Face recognition, speech recognition, machine translation, text classification and more don't exist?
- VLM 11y ago
  That's the plot line of a hyper critical, yet insightful, joke that came out of one of the many AI downturns in past decades, that as soon as an algo or implementation works it isn't AI anymore, its (fill in the blank specialization). So AI is just the present set of algos that don't (yet?) work. So that fuzzy logic, thats not AI anymore, thats a footnote in the EE control systems theory class, isn't it? And the face recognition is a parallel processing assignment in FPGA class, speech recognition is an advanced section in DSP theory class, etc.
  - jules 11y ago
    Right, it's not yet at that point for face and speech recognition, but that certainly happened to game AI (Chess), constraint solving (Sudoku), and planning.

Actually there can be anything possible in the articles that are published by so called Tech Journalists who have no idea of the fundamentals of the tech.

myrryr 11y ago

What do you mean it doesn't exist? I work in that field, it exists.

blumkvist 11y ago
What do you mean it exists? How do you definite AI? Can your project reason with you? Or is it simply an Input-Output type of program? Just because you use natural language with it instead of punch cards doesn't mean it is intelligent. People tried to do AI in the 60s to 90s era. It is dubbed symbolic AI. It didn't work out. A good chance that it never will. Today machine learning algos and a bunch of automated statistics is called "Artificial Intelligence". It's not intelligence at all. Intelligence implies something more than I/O computation.
- one-more-minute 11y ago
  I tend to agree that AI today is a long way from what the founders of the subject imagined – it's become something more like "Applied Computer Science". But what's now called "Artificial General Intelligence" isn't dead, and people are still working on it. Also, it's more tricky than you'd think to narrow down what counts as intelligence. There aren't really any hard lines between an I/O program and an intelligent agent, even though they seem pretty far apart.
  - protonfish 11y ago
    Just because you don't see the hard lines doesn't mean they aren't there. We are deluding ourselves by avoiding a hard definition of intelligence so we can keep believing that we are creating AI when its really nothing of the sort.
    - one-more-minute 11y ago
      Just because you can't see unicorns doesn't mean they aren't there, but at some point you have to give up the search. It's fine to talk about how, broadly speaking, rats are more intelligent than ants, plants or microbes (which are basically I/O rules with a body), chimpanzees more so than rats, humans more so than than chimps etc. But in general there's a ton of overlap and the qualities we associate with intelligence – memory, planning, self-awareness, tool use, whatever – are only loosely correlated continua. There are a few more binary measures in intelligence research, such as the mirror test, but at best they're only a small piece of the puzzle. There's no sudden point where everything clicks into place. Of course, if you have such a good definition of intelligence, feel free to enlighten me.
      - protonfish 11y ago
        You are repeating the same mistake as before. The difference is significant between admitting we don't know what those lines are and claiming that they don't exist.
        one-more-minute 11y ago
        It's not a mistake – I see the difference and I am claiming that those lines don't exist. There's plenty of evidence for that, including the continuous range of intelligent behaviour from plants to humans. It's just an empirical fact that there's no hard line. Of course, that could be wrong – new evidence may come to light, after all. But even so, it doesn't make any sense to say that trying to understand and replicate intelligence is deluded, just because we don't know where that line is – because figuring out what intelligence is is exactly the problem that people are trying to solve. AI is one part of that, along with more empirical research in fields like cognitive science and biology. Are people researching quantum gravity deluding themselves because they don't yet have a hard definition of quantum gravity? Figuring that out is exactly the point!

wojt_eu 11y ago

Experts on a subject that doesn't exist? Like professors of theology?

baddox 11y ago
Theology exists.
- Chronic31 11y ago
  It won't, for much longer.

deanmen 11y ago

AI experts don't know how to create an artificial intelligence. AI researchers study how to solve various problems in CS traditionally performed by humans that humans don't solve by carrying out an algorithm by hand like Natural Language Processing, machine learning, automated reasoning, search (e.g. chess).

peter303 11y ago
There are at least two flavors of A.I. "Strong A.I." seeks to build something human-like and could pass Turings immitation game test. The new movie Ex Machina explores this test. "Weak A.I." replicates just a single cognitive skill like game playing, pattern recognition, natural language or something more trivial. Most recent A.i. worked on the latter, or its theoretical background.

jules 11y ago

Face recognition, speech recognition, machine translation, text classification and more don't exist?

VLM 11y ago
That's the plot line of a hyper critical, yet insightful, joke that came out of one of the many AI downturns in past decades, that as soon as an algo or implementation works it isn't AI anymore, its (fill in the blank specialization). So AI is just the present set of algos that don't (yet?) work. So that fuzzy logic, thats not AI anymore, thats a footnote in the EE control systems theory class, isn't it? And the face recognition is a parallel processing assignment in FPGA class, speech recognition is an advanced section in DSP theory class, etc.
- jules 11y ago
  Right, it's not yet at that point for face and speech recognition, but that certainly happened to game AI (Chess), constraint solving (Sudoku), and planning.