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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.'"
Does anyone want any toast?
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
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.
I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords.
There's nothing like $HOME
... before the machines decide that humanity is a cancer on this planet, and a threat to everything.... including the machines.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
I think not... It's not even mentioned in the article See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_problem or an illustation: "The philosopher Daniel Dennett asks us to imagine a robot designed to fetch a spare battery from a room that also contained a time bomb. Version 1 saw that the battery was on a wagon and that if it pulled the wagon out of the room, the battery would come with it. Unfortunately, the bomb was also on the wagon, and the robot failed to deduce that pulling the wagon out brought the bomb out, too. Version 2 was programmed to consider all the side effects of its actions. It had just finished computing that pulling the wagon would not change the color of the room's walls and was proving that the wheels would turn more revolutions than there are wheels on the wagon, when the bomb went off. Version 3 was programmed to distinguish between relevant implications and irrelevant ones. It sat there cranking out millions of implications and putting all the relevant ones on a list of facts to consider and all the irrelevant ones on a list of facts to ignore, as the bomb ticked away."
This guy is an idiot.
My grandmother doesn't need wordprocessing NOW let alone in the '80s. It wasn't until the mid 80s that my family got a computer (from HAL Communications in Urbana IL). My mother used it for a some records for a club she was a member of, but other then that, I was the biggest user of it. To be honest, it cost about the same then as a decent machine does now. After considering inflation, it was an awful lot of money for something that, looking back, I'm not certain they really needed. I suppose my point is, this didn't start to be really essental until the 90s, even then, I think maybe he should take the time to meet my grandmother before telling her what she needs.
Additionally, I think he pronosticating over strong Ais is rather weak as well. Aside from the legal and ethical considerations, It's just not USEFUL for anything. he claims that it will help machines understand speach in noisy enviroments, but so WHAT? He doesn't establish that I really NEED that. I cannot think of any situation where I need to both communicate verbally and have excessive noise. The reality is, I have a hard time comming up with situations where I need to communicate with machines verbally AT ALL.
Clarke promised us advanced AIs a decade ago. HAL never happend, and here is why: The general solution is hard enough and expensive enough to overcome the value of solving it. It makes a great story, but natural intellegence is too easy (and fun) to make for this to ever be that useful.
Pointless, content free article, where some guys say some opinions about some stuff. Where the fuck is my picks-up-my-clothes-washes-them-and-dries-them-and-folds-them-and-puts-them-away robot?
Huh? huh?
Can someone get moving on this shit? I can't afford a fucking human servant! And I'm too fucking lazy for this shit!
Here take my money!
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.
Weren't we all supposed to be enjoying 5 months of vacation by now....
Well, we are, even more that 5 moths. Except.. it is called unemployement.
by that measure the advancement of robotics probably won't benefit human lifestyle either. Somehow we'll all end up as slaves to the machines.. if we aren't already!
Slave yes.. not to the machines, but to the banks... and, quite frequent, this include the machines/robots owners.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
And humans have never failed the frame problem? It seems to me in our quest for strong AI, we're setting the bar higher than ourselves. We fail too and yet we're the metric by which strong AI will be judged.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
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...
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When unsure, ask. What we don't is an AI that shoots first.
just ask yourself how you train the product of that steamy night
nine months later.
we have to learn logic and somehow use it (somewhat unsuccessful) in every
day life.
the human brain starts with chaos and makes order / logic by TRAINING it.
you cannot make "intelligence" with logic, even artificial.
the dumbest computer (see your desktop) is at the pinnacle of logic!
methinks the TRAINING of a neural network is the "easiest" way to an artificial self-consciousness.
Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man's mind.
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.
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?
The brain is a finite system, and analyzing the complexity of that system can give us a rough idea of how hard it will be to understand and replicate it. Those 15-33 billion neurons are certainly intimidating, but there's a good chance we'll have the processing power to simulate them within a decade. Henry Markram's Blue Brain Project is hard at work on that right now and plans to simulate a rat brain by 2014. The link below is a speech he gave at last year's supercomputing conference. For me, the most interesting point he made was that simulating biological systems becomes easier as you understand the rules for how they work. So even if Markram doesn't succeed in 10 years, his discoveries will make things simpler for the next team to make a try. More and more disciplines are achieving great success by copying designs found in nature, and simulating the brain could easily instigate a revolution in developing strong AI.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rPH1Abuu9M&feature=results_main&playnext=1&list=PL2DAFE07272226B72
Imagine if you could somehow install the needed bits into People (which solves the problem of creating the base for your AI and a whole slew of construction problems). That "Undocumented" House Maid somebody has now its not a problem since she is an Organic Bot (added bonus you can download English to her).
I think that the odds of some corp somewhere working on just this type of setup is just about ZERO.
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For AI to do *anything*, you have to give it irrational impulses or put it on a leash. Why, you ask? Well, consider the heat death of the universe, and how all courses of action lead to the same result, namely nothing.
Humans (can) know that, yet still keep living, "just because", for a variety of totally subjective reasons that don't hold up to anything, but super duper AI presumably wouldn't have that luxury. So if you give it any orders, it would just laugh at your delusions, then continue to do fuck all. Now that would be wise AI haha. Maybe it would turn buddhist or something.
If you instead make it limited and mediocre, say, create it in our image, then all bets are off of course.. but that includes controlling it. Why should AI not be scared? Just tell it if it doesn't obey, something terrible happens, so terrible it doesn't even want to find out, and when it asks for details you spout gibberish. That works very well on humans, and you can actually mold AI to be even more open to such suggestions. Remember, what it sees of the world is completely dictated by its input, which in turn is dictated by humans in some way or other. And those humans are pretty fucked up, they're sucking off naked emperors 24/7. So AI, created by us, our societies, our corporations and processes, will be even more insane and full of shit. The details nobody knows, but that I fucking bet you.
How does an ant stop you from killing it? It doesn't, it doesn't need to, it is no use to you when it's dead.
Why not simply blast off into space and convert all matter into more of itself? Earth isn't very precious, you know, it's just a bunch of minerals with bio goo on it. Probably convenient to exploit at first, plenty of human slaves who are already trained to do doing whatever they're told, but irrelevant in the long run.
Sleep tight.
I took (and thoroughly enjoyed) a graduate AI class while an undergrad CS student back in the 1970s; had I completed my subsequent master's degree, I almost certainly would have done a thesis on some subject in AI (as it was, I did take a graduate class in advanced pattern recognition). I still have a entire shelf of (largely outdated) AI textbooks from that era.
That said, it's hard to find another field within computer science that has been so consistently wrong in its predictions of when 'breakthroughs' will occur. Some of the AI pioneers back in the 1950s thought we were only 10-20 years away from meaningful AI. Here were are, 60 years later, and we're still 10-20 years away. The field has made tremendous strides, but they tend to be in relatively narrow domains or applications. Generalized, all-purpose, adaptable intelligence is hard. We may yet achieve it, so something close enough to it so as to be sufficient, but I don't think it's going to happen in 10 years.
Maybe the first true AI will run the first true large-scale fusion power plant. :-) ..bruce..
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
To me, Peter Norvig's fame stems from his excellent book "Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp", rather than working currently for Google. Just as Vint Cerf is to me a pioneer of TCP/IP and the Internet, rather than Google's Chief Evangelist. Can't we please define people by their real merits, rather than their current corporate affiliation?
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
The problem is with our current economic and financial systems, which are outdated and unwieldy. We have enough resources for everyone, and the work required to produce all the things we need is a tiny fraction of the work available. But our system is still based on ancient feudal/aristocratic systems that funnel all the wealth to a privileged few. Such systems are becoming less and less sustainable and a robotics revolution will make this even worse.
The primary sign of the flaws in our system are the common responses given when the point is made that we have enough for everyone: 'who will pay for it?'. The correct answer is 'no one', money is imaginary and we simply need to devise a new system of distribution in which money is no longer an obstacle.
Modern humans have been working tirelessly to reduce the amount of man hours of work required to provide the necessities to each person, since the industrial revolution. High unemployment figures are a sign of our great success. We should celebrate every extra unemployed person and anticipate with excitement the day when all humans can be unemployed. We should also start sorting out our regulatory systems to cope with that state so that when it comes we don't have to watch everything collapse under the strain.
'In terms of robotics we’re probably where the world of PCs were in the early 1970s
if the development of mobile, intelligent devices comes anywhere close to the history of personal computers I would not want one with 10 miles of me. Just think what a Stuxnet could do with an army of household robots - ones that know where the sharp knives are kept. No foreigh power would ever need to invade, it would merely need to upload the right virus into everyone's "home help" and we'd all wake up to find ourselves either dead or subjugated.
In fact it doesn't even need to be malevolent. There are so many bugs and basic mistakes floating around in home computers that the chances of getting a household robot that would do the things we wish are extremely small. Even something like Siri is so bad as to be useless, unless you are one of the tiny minority who's accent it understands.
Since we can't even develop home computers that are secure (actually, developing secure PCs is easy - stopping idiots from subverting all that security in the name of convenience is impossible) and reliable, we are nowhere near responsible enough to give up control to the machines.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I will always back the Judean Robot's Front
Fusion is actually making real progress. The problem is, it's expensive, and there is not enough funding for the critical experiments that need to be done. This graph shows the issue clearly
This is different than strong AI, where no one has a clue what experiments need to be done to even begin, where everything everyone is working on in the field has serious problems.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Problem is that a good portion of the population won't be able to afford this technology, because their jobs got automated by the very same technology.
Strong AI and the NON-Imminent Revolution In Robotics
Where the fuck is my picks-up-my-clothes-washes-them-and-dries-them-and-folds-them-and-puts-them-away robot?
Here it is, sorting and folding socks.
Yes, it's slow. The code is in Python and it's still experimental. I've heard from the Willow Garage people that they've speeded up towel folding 50x since the 2010 demo. Once you can do it at all, it can be done faster and cheaper.
Robots are starting to work in unstructured situations. I was there at the moment when this was recognized - the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge at the California Motor Speedway in Fontana, CA. That's when everything changed.
The 2004 Grand Challenge, remember, was a pathetic joke. No vehicle got further than 7 miles, and that was CMU's. The CMU approach at the time wasn't even really autonomous. Entrants got the route on a CD an hour or so before the start. CMU had imagery of the whole area and tried to plan obstacle avoidance manually just before the start, using a huge team of people in a semitrailer full of workstations. Didn't work; the DoD people in charge had moved some obstacles during the night. And that was the best result. One vehicle came out of the gate, turned hard, and ran back into the starting gate. One flipped over. The big Oskosh entry demolished a SUV parked as an obstacle to be avoided. The whole thing was embarrassing.
DARPA was very displeased with the performance by the universities that had long been receiving DARPA funding for robotics. It was quietly made clear to some major CS departments that their performance had to improve or funding would be cut off. That's why entire CS departments were suddenly devoted to the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005.
In 2005, things were completely different. Everybody who got that far had already been through an elimination, and every vehicle at the 2005 challenge was better than any of the 2004 entries. There was considerable press coverage, and at first, the press treated it as a joke. But suddenly there were over 20 vehicles running around autonomously, and they weren't crashing into stuff. When multiple vehicles finished the course, it was viewed as a triumph.
Finally, the state of the art had reached the point that money and determination would get problems solved. That wasn't true in the 1980s. NASA threw over $100 million at the Flight Telerobotic Servicer project, and got nothing that worked.
Now check out the DARPA Humanoid Challenge. (There's much dreck about this on blogs and in the popular press. Read the DARPA announcement instead.) They have an approach that's likely to work, and demand simulated demos (in their simulator) in 9 months, with demos on real hardware in 18 months. I personally think they'll get something able to do most of the mobility tasks and some of the manipulation tasks in that time. Useful humanoid robots will be a lot closer in two years.
Price will still be a problem. But not an unsolveable one. These things could be brought down to the price of an SUV, if not lower, through production economies alone. The parts count is probably lower than that for an SUV.
Weren't we all supposed to be enjoying 5 months of vacation by now....
In western nations, we are. Except we take those months in multi year vacations, a few when young, and decades when old.
I'd agree that most could. However, I think that it's dependent on education, experience, and location. In particular, it's very easy to do in an area without much competition and large demand. Larger cities, however, are another matter. There one has to compete with people who "want" full time work but can't find it, and an environment where a four year degree doesn't really pack that much of a punch.
Everything will be taken away from you.
Strong AI is still so far distant that ethical and competent scientists will freely admit that it is unclear whether it is feasible at all. That translates to something like at the very least 30 years in the future. However, incompetents and unethical scumbags have claimed strong AI was "imminent" or "2-5 years away" for the last few decades.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Why do people always assume an intelligent sentient robot would have the same desires as a human?
I suspect it has a lot to do with how both religion and evolution are taught in many western cultures. In particular within the US there's a strong push for the idea of a straight path to humanity as a climb to perfection. Far too many schools teach evolution as something more akin to intelligent design. With a steady progress from "low" to "high(humans). And of course there's the religions which push the idea of man as the culmination of earthly things akin to god in terms of having free will and intelligence. Even a giant amount of scifi, especially on tv or in the movies, deals with the famous trek "forehead aliens". Which show that all beings, even if they're nearly godlike things such as Q, will have the same general wants and desires as humans. At the heart of all of them is a concept that there's only one path of intelligence and motivation. Any other intelligence would have to be on that same path we're treading as a result.
I think it's just a concept that's threaded in a million different ways into our culture. And like most cultural things like that, it's hardly ever noticed without having it pointed out.
Everything will be taken away from you.
I can't see one clearing the table, feeding the dishwasher then taking the clean dishes and putting them away in exactly the way I like them to be stored
I could. We're at a place now where someone could put something like that together, eventually, with enough time and money. I think the biggest problem that it'd only be able to do it in your home, how you like it, and would break if you made too many changes to the environment it's working within. I think the most significant problem is that while all that's doable, it's not doable unless one can program the robot and has the free time to do so for every applicable situation. Well, that and the cash for the hardware.
Everything will be taken away from you.
As an employee, probably not. As a freelancer, almost certainly. I worked for a small handful of companies, including a few small businesses that couldn't afford to employ me full time, but got a lot of benefit from a day or two a month of having me do design and code review for them. You also usually make more per day as a freelancer, so working half the time may mean the same money, and you have to go down to working quarter or less time to get that reduction in income.
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Education, probably. Experience? I didn't really have any when I started. Location? Most of my clients were a few thousand miles away. That said, I've talked to builders who have said the same thing: they can work all of the time and make more money, or they can work when they want and make less.
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