Strong AI and the Imminent Revolution In Robotics

An anonymous reader writes "Google director of research Peter Norvig and AI pioneer Judea Pearl give their view on the prospects of developing a strong AI and how progress in the field is about to usher in a new age of household robotics to rival the explosion of home computing in the 1980s. Norvig says, 'In terms of robotics we’re probably where the world of PCs were in the early 1970s, where you could buy a PC kit and if you were an enthusiast you could have a lot of fun with that. But it wasn’t a worthwhile investment for the average person. There wasn’t enough you could do that was useful. Within a decade that changed, your grandmother needed word processing or email and we rapidly went from a very small number of hobbyists to pervasive technology throughout society in one or two decades. I expect a similar sort of timescale for robotic technology to take off, starting roughly now.' Pearl thinks that once breakthroughs are made in handling uncertainty, AIs will quickly gain 'a far greater understanding of context, for instance providing with the next generation of virtual assistants with the ability to recognise speech in noisy environments and to understand how the position of a phrase in a sentence can change its meaning.'"

Comments

but handling uncertainty isn't easy

[rmstar]

Pearl thinks that once breakthroughs are made in handling uncertainty, AIs will quickly gain 'a far greater understanding of context, for instance providing with the next generation of virtual assistants with the ability to recognise speech in noisy environments and to understand how the position of a phrase in a sentence can change its meaning.

Oh, of course. But pretending that these "breakthroughs in handling uncertainty" are just a minor stumbling block is somewhat silly. These are some of the hardest problems in maths right now, and there are no easy solutions on the horizon.

Re:but handling uncertainty isn't easy

[alphatel]

Oh, of course. But pretending that these "breakthroughs in handling uncertainty" are just a minor stumbling block is somewhat silly. These are some of the hardest problems in maths right now, and there are no easy solutions on the horizon.

Not to mention that robotics has many other problems to solve, like sensing pressure, navigating obstacles, and making sense of the visual landscape. All of things combined are not going to happen in ten years.

Re:but handling uncertainty isn't easy

[aaaaaaargh!]

Mod parent up.

I'm working in that field and know Pearl's work very well. The problem with uncertainty and current framework is the complexity. Probability theory, possibility measures, ranking theory, plausibility measures, Dempster-Shafer and all these slight variations of the same theme are altogether computationally intractable. Strongly heuristic shortcuts based on implausible assumptions are used (like stipulating independence between random variables for purely technical reasons), and much better ones need to be developed. Human cognition takes amazing shortcuts and AI methods are much too combinatorial in contrast to that.

Moreover, the problem of knowledge representation is still not solved adequately. Yes, there are a few large ontologies like Cyc, but they do not suffice. Basically, a lot of tools are there, but they are disconnected and there is no unifying framework or representation at all. To give you an example from NLP, the kind of tools used by computer scientists (e.g. description logic, event calculus) are practically worthless for doing real-world semantics, and of course logic has the same combinatorial complexity issues.

Breakthroughs will come by combining symbolic AI with connectionist and geometric representations, but only few people work on that (e.g. Smolensky), the math is complicated and not what your average AI/CS guy or computational linguist can handle.

I think what Norvig should have said is that robots with convincible, but ultimately non-intelligent soft AI will enter the consumer market within the next few decades - which is true, but something else entirely.

How long will it be

[meglon]

... before the machines decide that humanity is a cancer on this planet, and a threat to everything.... including the machines.

Re:How long will it be

[NettiWelho]

Personally, I'm more concerned about whetever we get space communism or resource contentration at the hands of 0.01% after 99.9% of the workforce getting laid off due to machines doing everything better for cheaper.

Re:How long will it be

[c0lo]

Personally, I'm more concerned about whetever we get space communism or resource contentration at the hands of 0.01% after 99.9% of the workforce getting laid off due to machines doing everything better for cheaper.

With nobody buying (being sacked, can't afford), what's the point of producing? Everything would be relatively too expensive no matter how absolutely cheap.

Getting real with AI

[Max_W]

My new automatic washing machine is an extremely useful robot, even though it does not have legs or hands.

There is only embedded intelligence. A pure intelligence does not even exist and cannot exist.

Why built an AI, which drives a car, if it is quite possible to build an underground transportation network and automate it with AI. This robust technology already exists.

It is easier to send an AI robot to another planet than to a local supermarket. And the problems are not mathematical, but social. The AI is already here and it is bigger than the current society's setup. The social setup and the infrastructure of society are to be changed in order to use it.

Re:Getting real with AI

[Anonymous Coward]

Why built an AI, which drives a car, if it is quite possible to build an underground transportation network and automate it with AI. This robust technology already exists.

Uh, because it would cost billions of dollars to do this for one major city, while we already have roads everywhere????

Re:Getting real with AI

[Ostracus]

So in plain English instead of making an AI more capable of dealing with greater complexity (like say animals), you artificially constrain the problem set till you get something that present systems (don't need to be AI) can handle then?

Re:unintended consequences

[TheRaven64]

Weren't we all supposed to be enjoying 5 months of vacation by now.

Most people who post on Slashdot probably can, as long as you're willing to accept a lower income than you would if you worked full time. I did for several years. I made enough to live comfortably, but not extravagantly, and had a very high quality of living. I'm now 'working' full time back in academia, because now I get paid to work on things I was doing as a hobby before. The standard of living for someone with the same inflation-adjusted income as me now is far higher than when my parents were my age.

by that measure the advancement of robotics probably won't benefit human lifestyle either

Really? I suggest that you try living in a house that contains no technology developed in the last 100 years for a while if you honestly think that...

Ridiculous

[llZENll]

Comparing anything from 40 years ago to today is ridiculous. Nearly everything in history was FAR easier for one man to understand than it is today, in the past you could be an expert on any one thing, today that is nearly impossible, today teams of hundreds of people push to make incremental changes and will never make extreme breakthroughs required by a single overall view. Anyone who has such a view (at the top of management or a team) doesn't have the expertise to make the breakthrough, and anyone with the expertise doesn't have the view. We are not infinitely capable of understanding things, we are limited in scope and more importantly time. Look at the past, in the 1800's and early 1900's single men were the greatest inventors of the their time, during the mid 20th century it was small teams, now giant corporations are the only ones making any significant difference. We have reached a saturation point of human ability and understanding, where anyone has so much past human experience and knowledge around them they cannot possibly even come close to learning it all, let alone extending any of it, only well funded teams can do it now.

There will be no clear breakthrough or strong AI 'invented', it will be a never ending series of small incremental advances that is so slow and happens over such a long time that we will not even notice, the exact same thing as the personal computing era. To look back to the 70s now it is a foreign idea, but at any point in time it was only a small advancement from the day before.

Ray Kurzweil

[bouldin]

I think it's funny how Ray Kurzweil predicts a "singularity" within 50 years, but the people who would actually implement the singularity (e.g. Norvig) say that won't happen.

Why do people still take Kurzweil seriously?