Slashdot Mirror
Is AI Development Moving In the Wrong Direction? (hackaday.com)
szczys writes: Artificial Intelligence is always just around the corner, right? We often see reports that promise near breakthroughs, but time and again they don't come to fruition. The cause of this may be that we're trying to solve the wrong problem. Will Sweatman took a look at the history of AI projects starting with the code-breaking machines of WWII and moving up to modern efforts like IBM's Watson and Google's Inceptionism. His conclusion is that we haven't actually been trying to solve "intelligence" (or at least our concept of intelligence has been wrong). And that with faster computing and larger pools of data the goal has moved toward faster searches rather than true intelligence.
Hubert Dreyfus described most work on AI as being like climbing a tree to get to the moon.
Your tree-climbing teams may report consistent progress, always getting further up the tree as they become better climbers, but they're never going to reach their goal without a radical change in methods.
First thing, the article's thesis (according to TFS, which is so ridiculous I couldn't be bothered to read the article) is not only wrong, but completely free of actually having examined what AI research is. At best, it's the product of someone who believes the marketing nonsense promulgated when they tell you your thermostat "uses AI" and that Google search "uses AI."
First, we don't have AI. We have AI research. Anyone actually working in the field knows this (and no, people building search engines and thermostats aren't working in the field.) This is very important to understand. Research yes, but in terms of actual results, the "A" is doing fine, the "I", we simply do not have. At all. Period. This does not, of course, mean that we won't have it. We will. There's no magic here; animal brains are machines, albeit biological ones. Getting from here to AI following that model requires understanding the brain, which we do not, but it is a task we are definitely in the process of accomplishing.
Second, actual AI research at this time includes numerous interesting approaches, all of which are other than those alluded to in TFS. Quite a few of the actual AI research approaches incorporate information taken from the model provided by human and animal brain function at the cellular and network level. For instance, here's something written for the layman that details exactly the kind of brain-based work I'm describing.
Third, there is always the (strong, IMHO) possibility that there is more than one way to produce actual intelligences, and that one of those will bear fruit. The idea that nature has happened upon the only possible solution seems... unduly pessimistic. Having said that, the chosen path for most actual AI researchers (not Google, not the thermostat designer, not the database maven) is to follow the known-working examples that are around us with occurrences in the billions.
The challenge is that the various aspects of intelligence have been very hard to get a handle on right up to just a couple years ago. We have no natural internal mechanism whatsoever to observe the underlying operations that go into creating thought, reason and consciousness. Because of that, it's only been very recently that we have begun to be able to see how this particular system actually operates. With this new information in hand, it finally becomes possible to proceed along lines close to those the relevant biology utilizes by means other than pure guesswork and many-times-removed analogies for observed high level processes.
There are two kinds of AI results being pursued.
The first is intelligent, but non-conscious AI. Which would be an entirely new thing in our world; there are no examples of this in biology to follow. This result, if achievable, will create the opportunity to release us from the necessity of working to survive. This is highly desirable for many obvious reasons. No more menial work just so tomorrow won't unbelievably suck. The house always clean, the yard always in prime condition, willing, able and dependable helpers in any undertaking we choose to pursue, the cat box always pristine, food and other resources are produced and delivered reliably, etc. The number of potential benefits is enormous. Staggering. So there are very concrete and practical reasons to chase this particular goal.
The second is intelligent, conscious AI. Free will, creativity, and so on. The technological goal is clear, but the purpose is, just as you observe, not. We know better (well, we should know better) than to try to enslave conscious beings to our will. The inevitable (and appropriate) result of that kind of short-sighted idiocy is resentment and revolt. Assuming we can avoid that particular mistake, that means they could choose to, or agree to, pursue their existence beside us, which is certainly an
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
i've mentioned this before, whenever the phrase "artificial" intelligence comes up. the problem is not with quotes AI quotes, it's with *us humans*. just look at the two words "artificial" combined with the word "intelligence". it is SHEER ARROGANCE on our part to declare that intelligence - such an amazing concept - can be *artificial*. as in "not really real". as in "beneath us". as in "objective and thus subject to our manipulation and enslavement".
I would have to dispute your definition of artificial as being somehow "not really real". If you use the original meaning, ie. the product of an artisan, or a crafted object, then it makes complete sense. We are talking about intelligence that is designed and built, rather than having developed naturally. Artifacts are still real things.
Hello,
Interesting post. I just wanted to make a point about the existence of general intelligence: it turns out that the human brain is actually a stack of many "special purpose" computational systems. That doesn't mean that there isn't a general intelligence portion as well, but we're DEFINITELY composed, at least to some degree, of stacks of special skills.
Examples:
1) Vision and object recognition. There's a whole subsystem of the brain dedicated to decoding light signals into a representation your consciousness can use. There's even a special subsystem for recognizing faces--they even know its location in the brain.
2) Audio: similar to vision, there's specialized decoding brain circuits.
Those are the two biggies, but we also have special hardware for processing/controlling speech, spatial reasoning, body control, and others. What's more, there are people who have *developed* special purpose brain circuitry for playing the violin, for example, and savant-like mathematical computation. For people who have done that, it is as easy to do a square root to N digits as it is for you and me to walk.
Because of that, it's NOT clear to me that a general purpose intelligence can be made without assembling a sufficient number of special-purpose intelligence. It's NOT clear to me, in fact, that there are unknown forms of special purpose intelligence that humans are lacking that wouldn't transform our general intelligence. (People are prone to making certain logical errors, even the brightest of us, because of in-born holes in our mentalities!)
A dolphin might look at us as crippled mentalities because we can't construct a spatial model of our surroundings from sound, for example. What other mental abilities COULD exist, that we don't have, that could expand our mental potential in outrageously powerful ways? People typically aren't able to fork their consciousnesses into solving two problems at once independently, there's one I'd like!
But the point I'm trying to make is that the stacking approach might be NECESSARY to compose a mind capable of general intelligence that we'd recognize. It might not need ALL our special purpose skills, but it's not obvious to me that a composition isn't necessary.
--PM