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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.
I think the problem is that people expect machine intelligence to look like human intelligence. Machine intelligence exists and is strong in some areas. Modern chess programs are an example. They can play unique games and be stronger than any human player. Yes, they are given the rules of chess and machines did not invent chess. But they have passed beyond human abilities and it is at the point where some programs are coded to only make move patterns that humans would tend to make. Learning how to adapt machine intelligence to our real world problems is challenging. But we are in for a fright when computers get really good at analyzing human problems and applying better solutions that we now have at hand.
Define "true intelligence". The more computers advance in doing complex things, the more you will see there is no such thing as true intelligence. You are a very big Turing machine, get over it.
Video of some good progressive thrash music
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". so until we - humans - stop thinking of intelligence as being "beneath us" and "not real", i don't really see how we can ever actually properly recreate it.
to make the point clearer: all these "tests", it doesn't really matter, because the people doing the assessment have a perspective that doesn't really respect intelligence... so how on earth can they judge that they've actually *detected* intelligence? like the "million monkeys typing shakespeare", the problem is that even if one of the monkeys did actually accidentally type up the complete works of shakespeare, unless there was someone there who was INTELLIGENT ENOUGH to recognise what had happened, the monkey that typed shakespeare's complete works is quite likely to go "oo oo aaah aah", rip up the pages, eat some of them and wipe its backside with the rest, destroying any chance of the successful outcome being *noticed*, even though it actually occurred.
i much prefer the term "machine consciousness". that's where things get properly interesting. the difference between "intelligence" and "consciousness" is SELF-AWARENESS, and it's the key difference between what people are developing NOW and what we see in sci-fi books and films. programs being developed today are trying to simulate INTELLIGENCE. sci-fi books and films feature CONSCIOUS (self-aware) machines.
this lack of discernment in the [programming] scientific community between these two concepts, combined with the inherent arrogance implied by the word "Artificial" in the meme "AI" is why there is so little success in actually achieving any breakthroughs.
but it's actually a lot worse than that. let's say that the scientific community makes a cognitive breakthrough, and starts pursuing the goal of developing "machine consciousness". let's take the previous (million-monkeys) example and step that up, as illustrated with this question:
How can people who are not sufficiently self-aware - conscious of themselves - be expected to (a) DEFINE such that they can (b) RECOGNISE consciousness, such that (c) they can DEVELOP it in the first place?
let's take George Bush (junior) as an example. George Bush is known to have completely destroyed his mind with drink and drugs. he has an I.Q. of around 85 (unlike his father, who had an extra "1" in front of that number). yet he was voted into the world's most powerful office, as President of the United States. the concept of the difference between "intelligence" and "consciousness" is explored in Charles Stross's book, "Singularity Sky". George Bush - despite being elected as President - would actually FAIL the consciousness test adopted by the alien race in "Singularity Sky"!
my point is, therefore, that until we start using the right terms, start developing some humility sufficient to recognise that we could create something GREATER than ourselves, start developing some laws *in advance* to protect machine conscious beings from being tortured, the human race stands very little chance of success in this field.
in short: we need to become conscious *ourselves* before we stand a chance of being able to move forward.
I'm not really sure it's academia's fault, but more that the entertainment industry got a bit carried away with stories about future AI, and now people think that if it doesn't look like that, then it's not AI, all the while missing the massive advances in computing that AI research has netted them from facial recognition, to self repairing networks, from spell/grammar check to siri, and from Google search results from increasingly natural language type queries through to computer run video game opponents.
Effectively saying AI has failed is like saying Physics has failed because we don't yet have an all encompassing grand unified theory of the universe. These things are the long term goal, and we're not even remotely far along the journey towards that goal, so to criticise because we're not there yet is exactly like being the screaming kid in the back of the parents car shouting "ARE WE THERE YET?".
Not that it matters, because AI research is bearing commercial fruit anyway so it doesn't really matter what the public thinks of it, money will keep being poured into it regardless. AI is fortunate that it's a self-sustaining area of scientific research, it doesn't need good PR with the public when it's churning out cash for corporations. In that respect it has it much easier than many areas of science do, such as space exploration for example that is still somewhat struggling to get necessary funding for it's goals so perhaps it's as much that the AI research industry doesn't care what the public thinks as it is that it's failing to sell itself well in the court of the public opinion. The public are consuming it's results and paying money for the privilege regardless of the opinion they hold of the field - how many iPhones 6s were sold over the competition thanks in part to things like gesture recognition, learning autocomplete on the keyboard, and Siri? how many ads are to be sold on Google? and how many BB-8s are ending up under the tree this Christmas?
I believe that the idea that "general intelligence" exists is a mistake. There are just sets of tools that can do particular jobs. This looks like intelligence to us when we don't look closely enough at some particular tool to see how it works. A few of the "tools" that people have are high level tools that let them use "black box" library routines without understanding them. We don't solve differential equations to catch a ball, we invoke a built-in tool-script that has had lots of adjustable parameters tweaked to work in our body. A similar action happens when a human plays chess. We don't actually use alpha-beta pruning, but we've got a built-in tool that has about the same effect....but which is a lot more adjustable. Et multitudinous cetera.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.