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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
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."
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.
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.
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.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
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"
This is a problem that has hit a number of slave-owning societies and is currently a problem for China. An imbalance between production and consumption is unsustainable, irrespective of the direction. It was also one of the causes of the US civil war: the south was production-heavy, which was making it hard for workers in the north to compete with cheap imports, which the south needed to keep supplying because they didn't have a large enough local consumer base.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
That's what's known as a post scarcity society, and it will probably end up looking like Western Europe on steroids. A decent basic standard of living for everyone, plenty of educational opportunities, but if you want the good toys you need to excel. What will mostly change will be the definition of "good toys", in a fully post scarcity society, limited only by the physical size of the earth, obviously not everyone can have a cruise liner of their own. A high end luxury car and plenty of living space, sure, but ultimately limitations would have to be put on production.
Whether those come in the form of fiat or economic acrobtics is really the main debate on the issue.
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?
Of course, AI robots by themselves do not solve the problem of resource scarcity.
Asteroids do.
And people will continue to grow exponentially
Don't worry, they don't and aren't.
so on a fixed earth, you'll always reach a point where not everybody gets a basic standard of living.
Its quite doable. And if you look at population trends in societies nearing post scarcity status, like Western Europe, it becomes clear that the best way to head off any such hypothesised difficulties is to provide a decent standard of living to as many people as possible as quickly as possible.
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)
...What.
You think the South in the 1850s was some hive of industry selling all manner of goods to the North?
The South was agrarian (cotton and tobacco and stuff - you know, plantations, as in every depiction of the Old South ever, not factories) which it mostly sold abroad, not to the North. The North was where all the factory production was, which is why it was able to outproduce the South in things like artillery and rifles when the war started. Seriously, at least open a history textbook before randomly making up stuff like this.
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."
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.
I think you're misunderstanding the GP's use of "production heavy" -- the GP meant that the south produced a lot more than it consumed (due to slavery artificially depressing southern wages), and so had to export to sustain it's economy. Not only that, but due to the vast preponderance of the production being labor intensive and inefficient agriculture (skilled slaves tended to 'smuggle' themselves north), the south had to import large quantities of capital goods. So they were in favor of a low tariff, and cheaper imports from France and England, both of which had lower wages than northern industries due to overpopulation.
The north, because of free waged labor, had local demand to sustain their production, and was in favor of a high tariff to support nascent industries from undercutting by European competition (the enduring solution to this problem was the mass migrations from Europe to the US after the Civil War).
Which is why, as Ha-Joon Chang points out, immigration and trade policy are two sides of the same coin: free trade with free immigration mean no tariff (regardless of the legal rate), while free trade with restricted immigration is a tariff on exports (the current US situation), free immigration with restricted trade is a tariff on imports, and restricted trade with restricted immigration is mercantilism (which is unsustainable in the long term, since even accompanied with capital controls, makes smuggling extremely lucrative).
To get back to what happens as machines become cheaper than people at ever more jobs, there are three possibilities: 1) It turns out that there are some things that machines will never do better than people at the prevailing wage (which must remain significantly above zero), and employment moves exclusively to those sectors. 2) We re-evaluate our societal compact that it's generally expected for people to engage in labor to earn money, or 3) The owners of capital resources (.001%) are unwilling to consider (2) while the prevailing wage crashes towards zero, and we get a humongous war/revolution.