Why is AI such an impossible goal?
Discussion
smn159 said:
Maybe the transition over time will be away from the current social economic model whereby improving your lot in life is defined as earning more money so that you can consume more stuff and buy a bigger house / car. Maybe success will be measured in terms of personal betterment or growth in other ways
I think that you're right and that the process will be a painful one. The tendency will be for those who control the AIs to want to accumulate the wealth for themselves.
And that in a nutshell is it, human greed and envy will probably ensure that the AI utopia that everyone dreams about where robots do all our sI think that you're right and that the process will be a painful one. The tendency will be for those who control the AIs to want to accumulate the wealth for themselves.
tty jobs while we all lounge around doing art\music\navel gazing won't happen as no one makes a profit, accumulates power or is better than anyone else in that scenario. It's the same reason why all attempts at communism\socialism invariable fail, too many humans seem to have this innate need to want to lord it over other humans.
an AI said:
I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure.
a sort of AI said.....Mothersruin said:
Article said:
Facebook engineers were forced to pull the plug on one of the company’s AI systems after its bots began communicating with each other in a completely new language which humans simply couldn’t decipher.
Why shut it down? I would have thought this would be a good opportunity to study AI doing something unexpected, and learn from it.
SpudLink said:
Why shut it down? I would have thought this would be a good opportunity to study AI doing something unexpected, and learn from it.
Probaly gibberish the article also stated: "the bots fully understood each other." that would mean conscious thought so no the software did not Understand each other. SpudLink said:
Why shut it down? I would have thought this would be a good opportunity to study AI doing something unexpected, and learn from it.
I can't see that there's anything to learn from it. There's no super-intelligence here. Nor is there some secret language, just variation and machine learning.I think it gets far more creepy if you constrain the variation to something that still reads vaguely as English. There are a lot of weird computer-generated poems out there.
I probably should have said ‘learn from the experiment’. My ambiguous phrasing may have implied the AI can impart new found wisdom to the human race. Which is a terrifying prospect from something developed by Facebook.
Anyway, while we wait for the rise of SkyNet, yesterday evening the Horizon program on the BBC had a program on driverless cars. If manufacturers meet their target for brining these to market in the next 5 years, that will be big step for AI.
Anyway, while we wait for the rise of SkyNet, yesterday evening the Horizon program on the BBC had a program on driverless cars. If manufacturers meet their target for brining these to market in the next 5 years, that will be big step for AI.
The chatbots were negotiating a trade in a test environment. They shut it down because they were more interested in writing bots which can communicate with humans than with each other, but they note that the things may have been evolving a shorthand language which facilitated their communication.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-an...
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-an...
Interesting recent report; 'Malicious AI' - https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/3d82daa4-97fe-409...
Which was in an article in todays Guardian (I know...) - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb...
Which was in an article in todays Guardian (I know...) - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb...
I do not believe that AI will happen on a very broad scale for a very long time, if ever.
For a start, Artificial Intelligence is an oxymoron. Just ecause journalists (wordsmiths) are able to talk into their phone and expect a sensible answer, they assume it’s just around the corner, just because Elon Musk says it will happen. An app that randomly and autonomously decides to design an app, will probably embrace a whole series of algorithms that have already been defined by humans.
The reason a human is sat alongside a self-driving Google car is that he is looking for mistakes that are currently not in the algorithms of the vehicle’s software. A human then writes that algorithm, and hopefully gets it right first time. There will need to be overarching algorithms that decide the “what ifs?” like, what should happen if a sensor fails, or if the passenger becomes seriously ill etc.
It would seem a very simple task to design a machine that can lay bricks, but it has not been done with any success. It may be possible to lay rows of bricks on the outside of a building by travelling on rails, but it cannot assemble itself, move inside a building to complete rooms in blockwork, order and receive mortar, lintels in a timely manner, or even read its own drawing that were probably prepared by a human. But where every attempt at building even a simple machine has always failed so far is that the machine cannot even clean itself at the end of the task. Or even start the task by digging trenches and laying concrete foundations.
Humans are genuinely intelligent at so many varied things. 50 years ago they even put a man on the moon using a flight computer with much less computing power than an iPhone. But then humans have ambition.
For a start, Artificial Intelligence is an oxymoron. Just ecause journalists (wordsmiths) are able to talk into their phone and expect a sensible answer, they assume it’s just around the corner, just because Elon Musk says it will happen. An app that randomly and autonomously decides to design an app, will probably embrace a whole series of algorithms that have already been defined by humans.
The reason a human is sat alongside a self-driving Google car is that he is looking for mistakes that are currently not in the algorithms of the vehicle’s software. A human then writes that algorithm, and hopefully gets it right first time. There will need to be overarching algorithms that decide the “what ifs?” like, what should happen if a sensor fails, or if the passenger becomes seriously ill etc.
It would seem a very simple task to design a machine that can lay bricks, but it has not been done with any success. It may be possible to lay rows of bricks on the outside of a building by travelling on rails, but it cannot assemble itself, move inside a building to complete rooms in blockwork, order and receive mortar, lintels in a timely manner, or even read its own drawing that were probably prepared by a human. But where every attempt at building even a simple machine has always failed so far is that the machine cannot even clean itself at the end of the task. Or even start the task by digging trenches and laying concrete foundations.
Humans are genuinely intelligent at so many varied things. 50 years ago they even put a man on the moon using a flight computer with much less computing power than an iPhone. But then humans have ambition.
Edited by rdjohn on Sunday 25th February 18:54
I appreciate that, but many of the buying public do not.
For example the guy who thought that because his Tesla had “intelligent” cruise control with “intelligent” Lane guidance and got very upset when the car ran into the back of the stationary fire truck on the freeway.
I have a barrister friend who is desperate to buy a Tesla because the salesman assured him that it comes pre-loaded with AI software ready to be “released” once the regulatory authorities catch up to the 21st century.
Needless to say that he has never written a piece of software in his life, nor has he got a good understanding of what a computer actually does between the keyboard and screen. His washing machine works perfectly, using a range of programs, so why shouldn’t a car?
For example the guy who thought that because his Tesla had “intelligent” cruise control with “intelligent” Lane guidance and got very upset when the car ran into the back of the stationary fire truck on the freeway.
I have a barrister friend who is desperate to buy a Tesla because the salesman assured him that it comes pre-loaded with AI software ready to be “released” once the regulatory authorities catch up to the 21st century.
Needless to say that he has never written a piece of software in his life, nor has he got a good understanding of what a computer actually does between the keyboard and screen. His washing machine works perfectly, using a range of programs, so why shouldn’t a car?
I think that the next step towards A. I would be to successfully integrate the biological with the artificial. If we can learn to analyse and control the biological through the artificial interface then we can start to understand it better and eventually replace the biological components or functions one by one with artificial substitutes. I guess it would be a way of reverse engineering the brain and piggybacking instead of starting from nowhere.
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