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Are Companies Overhyping AI? (hackaday.com)
When it comes to artificial intelligence, "companies have been overselling the concept and otherwise normal people are taking the bait," writes Hackaday:
Not to pick on Amazon, but all of the home assistants like Alexa and Google Now tout themselves as AI. By the most classic definition, that's true. AI techniques include matching natural language to predefined templates. That's really all these devices are doing today. Granted the neural nets that allow for great speech recognition and reproduction are impressive. But they aren't true intelligence nor are they even necessarily direct analogs of a human brain... The danger is that people are now getting spun up that the robot revolution is right around the corner...
[N]othing in the state of the art of AI today is going to wake up and decide to kill the human masters. Despite appearances, the computers are not thinking. You might argue that neural networks could become big enough to emulate a brain. Maybe, but keep in mind that the brain has about 100 billion neurons and almost 10 to the 15th power interconnections. Worse still, there isn't a clear consensus that the neural net made up of the cells in your brain is actually what is responsible for conscious thought. There's some thought that the neurons are just control systems and the real thinking happens in a biological quantum computer... Besides, it seems to me if you build an electronic brain that works like a human brain, it is going to have all the problems a human brain has (years of teaching, distraction, mental illness, and a propensity for error).
Citing the dire predictions of Elon Musk and Bill Gates, the article argues that "We are a relatively small group of people who have a disproportionate influence on what our friends, families, and co-workers think... We need to spread some sense into the conversation."
[N]othing in the state of the art of AI today is going to wake up and decide to kill the human masters. Despite appearances, the computers are not thinking. You might argue that neural networks could become big enough to emulate a brain. Maybe, but keep in mind that the brain has about 100 billion neurons and almost 10 to the 15th power interconnections. Worse still, there isn't a clear consensus that the neural net made up of the cells in your brain is actually what is responsible for conscious thought. There's some thought that the neurons are just control systems and the real thinking happens in a biological quantum computer... Besides, it seems to me if you build an electronic brain that works like a human brain, it is going to have all the problems a human brain has (years of teaching, distraction, mental illness, and a propensity for error).
Citing the dire predictions of Elon Musk and Bill Gates, the article argues that "We are a relatively small group of people who have a disproportionate influence on what our friends, families, and co-workers think... We need to spread some sense into the conversation."
It's true that AI isn't ready to wake up and kill humans and that's a far way off, but the AI acts like a leverage to give other humans an advantage, even if it's bean counters and financial officers to replace jobs.
I think they're dumbing down the term just as how 'Hover Boards' were dumbed down from their original concept.
I'd consider them more voice activated assistants from the consumer ends. From the machine learning part it's just heuristics on a pile of data to find patterns.
I don't read AC
Next question...
Euh... nope. According to Ray Kurzweil book, we will have to wait another 30 years, then... who knows ??
This has nothing to do with Betteridge's Law. If that applied to any question, the answer to any Ask Slashdot question would also be no. That's absurd. This headline is asking your opinion of whether companies are overhyping AI. Betteridge's Law does not apply here.
Ian Betteridge observed that sometimes journalists who hadn't adequately researched a story and couldn't confirm the story would still run with it. To avoid printing false statements, journalists would write their headlines as questions about the facts. The classic example was "Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA?" where the headline is asking a question about the facts. The headline insinuates that the answer is yes, without directly saying so. The journalist doesn't have the evidence to be confident it happened but ran with the story anyway. It's poor journalism and basically a form of clickbait. That's where Betteridge's Law applies, where the question can be answered with 'no' instead of assuming that the answer should be yes. It's observing that the journalist isn't confident about what the facts are, so the reader shouldn't be, either. Betteridge's Law is a criticism of reporting unsubstantiated stories.
The headline here isn't asking a question about the facts. Instead, it's asking a question of opinion, specifically whether businesses are overhyping AI. Betteridge's Law does not apply here. It does not apply in situations such as this story.
If you're going to mention Betteridge's Law, please understand what it actually means. It doesn't apply to this headline or story. The headline is a question to solicit your opinions and encourage discussion.
Are they doing anything with AI today that couldn't have been done in the 80's? They're creating rules today, they could have created rules in the 80's. I think people are just running out of ideas more than anything.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Defining thought and original thought is a very complex issue. But to give a very simple example a common chess machine can be overwhelming against human players. And yes the program functions with a list of rules and values. But the telling point is that machine may well play a unique, winning game. To my way of thinking that is original thought and intelligence. There are alos electronic circuits that have been created by computers that are totally inscrutable to humans.
they are.
This kind of technophobia has been going on forever.
Shut up you smelly neckbeard
A very long time ago there was a program called 'Eliza' that did a passable imitation of talking to a drunk/stoned person at a party. The current productions have sobered up a bit but it is worth taking a look at the old stuff to see just how little it takes.
And as for overhyped? Gee... when have technologists overhyped their products? And the almost religious fervor their marketers try to invoke when the latest update of their stuff is released? (Apple, I am looking at you...) Not that the great unwashed have any real appreciation. But it does cheapen the idea that the true miracle is that anything works at all. One EMP or large coronal mass ejection away from chipping flints... not that we remember how to do that, either.
Well I'll be damned.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
That is your latest craze to hype. Hype it now before bubble bursts.
It's in the interest of companies who provide cutting edge technology to play up the potential of their new revolution. That's what gets them funding and early adopters. They don't push where the technIS, they push the idea of whee it can go.
And it's in the interest of the press that covers the technology to play up the exciting new future that might be possible. People like to get excited about things. and the future really is a great unknown.
These facts aren't unique to AI. You saw similar overhyping of the internet. Electric cars. Solar technology. Plastics. The motor car. Smart phones. "Space age" technology. The personal computer.
All went through a cycle where there were quite a lot of people selling visions of the future that were still at least a technology generation away from what was possible at the time. In some cases, the technology never came close. In others, it did. In most, it eventually settled somewhere that was different from the hyped vision at the time, but still somewhere pretty cool.
Sometimes investors in new technology made a bundle. Sometimes they invested too early or unwisely trying to "buy in" and lost a fortune as some early players flamed out. (Hello, .com crash!). But eventually, new industries got created.
There's nothing "special" about the hype level and excitement around AI, even if at least some of "the dream" currently being sold will never come to pass.
Just as the internet didn't actually break down nations and bring the world together as one global people, a computer capable of human-like thought is likely a pipe dream. But other aspects lumped under "AI" like machine learning are not, and really will bring major changes.
Whether you want to get excited about the future potential because you see the world changing, or want to be a cynic about it because at least some of the hype is likely impossible to live up to, is up to you. But the reality is this technology is here. And it's growing. And it will impact your life in ways you can't imagine. This isn't a fad.
Yes, definitely over-hyped. It's the latest marketing buzz word. The company I work for is advertising their product as "utilizing AI" but really we're just using machine learning to develop some algorithms.
...is that people will be stupid enough to rely on this so-called "intelligence". Driverless cars are a case in point. We have quite enough underused brains in this world, we don't need AI to increase the disuse.
Conscious thought doesn't have to come into play. A connected "AI" with bad data can cause damage as well
Sig not found.
Besides, it seems to me if you build an electronic brain that works like a human brain, it is going to have all the problems a human brain has (years of teaching, distraction, mental illness, and a propensity for error). I wholeheartedly agree. I even wrote a blog post on this a couple of years ago, that true AgIs will be forgetful, flawed machines. Might eventually grow to be brilliant and superhuman, but certainly emotional and forgetful.
Just wouldn't happen.
Right?
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Eliza: How do you feel about companies over hyping AI?
?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I would say the biggest issue is that there isn't an agreed upon definition of what constitutes "AI". To get an idea of this, technically from the field, OCR is "AI". Yet commonly I think you'd find people expecting some sort of robotic terminator-like lifeform that is capable of all things human, including emotions (if limited). When you have that sort of range... I mean I could make a case that genetically engineered oranges are "AI". They are computing sweeter flavor (and radioactive cancer).
From my view, an "AI" is a machine learning platform that not only processes data but also acts on the results of what it processes. Machine learning has to be a part of it but there is also a distinction that you are automating some human decision tree versus displaying a confidence factor.
An example from Natural Speech Recognition: The current AI/ML platforms that lead the way in this area perform much like what we've learned about the way the human brain structures speech. They take a very large corpus of input, analyze it for context and associations, and when asked to provide a context-based (not context-free!) query, the platform returns a fairly reliable result. This ranges from almost as good to better than human ability in some specific domain areas like legal transcription, article classification, and language translation. The result varies but is typically what you would expect a human to respond with if asked a question and this is the underlying technology driving stuff like Alexa.
The way it works is by starting with a blank slate and building associative connections between words, groups of words, frequency of words, frequency of groups, etc. You can think of this as the same process you went through when learning English as a child. You heard noises, associated those noises with actions in the world based on when and where you were, and after building up enough associations you started speaking. Every category of thought from "animals" to "zeta functions" is learned this way. Contrary to opinions I keep reading about this being "rules based", I've seen published research that shows this can all be done without any pre-defined rulesets or categories. The source corpus builds the ruleset (a graph of Markov chains) including intermediate categories that aren't used in output classification.
Is this AI?
I would also say that I think Musk's view is a bit dire but there are warnings to be noted. As I said, if we assume that an "AI" is an actor in the world, then it will be a risk wherever it is. The level of risk and impact of that risk are all situational. If Alexa gives you a bad answer, no biggie. If an "AI" tells your doctor that you have cancer and a multi-thousands of dollar treatment is required but is actually wrong, that could have consequences in multiple dimensions. How these systems are layered and audited for correct behavior is ultimately what will determine how ruinous or beneficial they are. I mean, we do a pretty poor job of keeping humans from setting everything on fire and then pissing everywhere so I don't know if we need to be too worried. But that's also what gets us in trouble... c'est la vie :)
There was a huge hype then, too, that "expert systems" would soon replace doctors and military strategist, etc...
The only difference being, that back then very few people or organizations could afford the machines that weren't really able to pull it off, but today everybody can buy a machine that can't really pull it off.
Would they?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
procmail is my AI.
Who could need anything more?
Not at all. No, no, no, no, no. Not even a little bit round the edges.
Oh, alright then, yes.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Most of the AI hype is coming from people who are paid to write tech stuff. They write about whatever they think will get them page views; AI is a hot topic so AI it is.
It would be called SI if it was supposed to be ACTUAL intelligence. News flash: Artificial is not a synonym for synthetic.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I don't care what they call it, AI, ML, etc, etc.
I also don't care how intelligent or not it may be, by whatever definition of "intelligent" you may have.
What worries be is that increasingly the world is being run by algorithms. Those algorithms have an ever increasing amount of data for them to munch on.
Want a loan? An algorithm is going to asses your credit worthiness. Using information you are unaware of and of unknown accuracy. There is no man to man chat over coffee with your bank manager to discuss your plans and what the problems may be.
Want insurance? An algorithm will determine what your premium is. As above.
Some how we will have to figure out how to game those algorithms to get anything done. There will be no humans to talk to as the tradition middle class in such positions have all been replaced by algorithms.
Perhaps we need algorithms of our own, AI, ML call it what you will?
Worse still, there isn't a clear consensus that the neural net made up of the cells in your brain is actually what is responsible for conscious thought. There's some thought that the neurons are just control systems and the real thinking happens in a biological quantum computer...
Penrose, is that you?
Seriously, there is no evidence for any kind of "quantum consciousness", nor any convincing theory as to why a neural net would be insufficient to produce consciousness. I suspect that the main attraction of this idea is that it is a non-religious excuse for believing consciousness to be magical or special in some way.
(no sig)
A recent German article on a similar subject called out the current crop of AI and suggested to refer to it as "clever statistics" instead. IMHO this is spot on.
AI has been overhyped since the computer in Willy Wonka refused to tell where the golden tickets were...
Now that it has been monetized, the people selling it are going to hype it up like everything else that gets sold for profit.
Also, of course, "Machine Intelligence" isn't the same thing that we consider human intelligence to be. And, no, they're not likely to go SkyNet on us (anytime soon), but the Flash Crash of 2010 was a small taste of how AI can, and does, affect our lives, and as AI gets more integrated into more aspects of human endeavors, the unpleasant surprises will be getting bigger and more impactful.
Is Slashdot overhyping headlines?
#DeleteFacebook
This is a great poiny most people fail to understand. AI is automation that is indistinguishable from a human. Not intelligence that thinks like a human
Right now AI is seeing an explosion in its cognitive abilities mostly in the areas of natural language and data mining (long term memory). Mainly because our sensors are getting better and we finally have the general computing to handle the large datasets. As little as 20y ago were were developing processing,sensor and big data areas (we lacked datasets to feed the AI). Where do we go from there? there are at least three pillars of AI that require further development:
Parallelism, natural language, and data. Or without buzzwords:
Processing,communication,datagathering/retreival
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
Remember how client-server computing was going to bring world peace?
Too much Hype.
A deep neural network, a massive dataset brings you a statistical correlation where one is expected to be found and its called AI now?
This is impressive in itself but even the futurists singularity proponents like Ray Kurzweil are not calling this 'AI' as 'The AI' for the singularity. Or true 'thinking' AI in the sense of human cognition.
There is a massive gap in understanding the definition of AI, its a 'magic hat' term that is ambiguous and over-reaching. The progress should be appreciated for what it is, however all too often it is used to abuse and obfuscate other issues in society like involuntary unemployment and some of the structural faults of rent-seeking capitalism in its current form.
and even I think AI is overhyped.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The marketing department
From TFS:
There is zero evidence for this. Zero. You can also say, with exactly as much evidentiary backing (none), that "there's some thought that the mind is outside the body" and "there is some thought that the mind is a program running in a computer simulation."
The evidence has thus far pointed in exactly one direction: That the mind is a product of electrical and chemical signals channeled by living cells in manners fairly conventional and guided by topology, both innate and developmental (as opposed to the quantum nature of photosynthesis, for example.)
Yes, quantum effects come into play at extremely low levels with pretty much everything; but no, they are not known to be a common modulating force from cell to cell in nature. Furthermore, the harder we look, the more normal (non-quantum) activity and complexity we find.
Finally, the more our simulations of neural activities have been advanced to model what we learn of real neural systems, the more performant they have gotten. The arrow is pointing in one pretty specific direction - and to date, it's not pointing at quantum activity as mechanism for mind even a little bit.
It's not impossible – but it's also not indicated, at all, at this point in time. It's speculation, and more to the point, it's uninformed, evidence-free speculation.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
AI has been overhyped since the late 60s, many times by people like Marvin Minsky, who ought to have known better.
Why I just drove my 3D printed car out of my 3D printed garage attached to my 3D printed house ... on Mars. I was part of the first wave of private space mining colonists.
Hey Siri, "How many cylinders in a V6 engine?" .... let me search that for you. Seriously?
Hey Siri, "How many doughnughts are in a dozen doougnughts?" let me search that for you.
Hey Siri, "What is the nominal size of a 2X4 board?", it's 2x4=8
Hey Siri, "What time is it on Mars?", I am sorry, I don't know where that is.
So yeah, I am thinking AI is perfect.
Seriously, there is no "I" in AI. There is no intelligence.
AI is automation that is indistinguishable from a human
More precisely: AI is automation that is indistinguishable from a human by a human.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
There's no such thing as true AI yet.
It's all just fine tune algorithms.
"Are Companies Overhyping AI?"
Not withstanding Betteridge's Law, the answer is "yes". Yes they are.
Next clickbai- err, I mean "story", please.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
"... there isn't a clear consensus that the neural net made up of the cells in your brain is actually what is responsible for conscious thought." WHAT?? Perhaps the author (who seems to not be inflicted with the burden of intelligence) would provide some citations to the literature to validate his moronic assertion? Try to parse what he wrote: what does he mean "clear consensus"? Is this in contrast to an unclear consensus or to a clear debate or what?? The "neural net" he's talking about is the one that is "made up of cells in your brain"... are there others he means to distinguish that from?? I am unable to parse this mental garbage. Are the Sales & Marketing departments overhyping.... What an astoundingly stupid question. They're PAID to "overhype", they're expected to "overhype". Moron. The human brain "operates" at frequencies in the 0.5-100 Hz range (delta-gamma). While it is true that a 3 year old human child has an estimated 10E15 connections, by adulthood that number has DEcreased by a factor of 5X or 10X. It is clear that the connections (i.e. the "neural net") IS the basis for "conscious thought". (Although neurons interact with glial cells, and it is increasingly recognized that they too are active and important part of brain function.) Its estimated that the average neuron is connected to 7000 others. (In humans) The strawman argument that AI needs to think "like a human" is simply moronic. Without the human evolutionary development, without the human endocrine system, without the human sensory, somatic, and motor-control systems, there's no justification to believe an AI will think anything like us - and why would we want it to? There's plenty of us thinking like us and making more of us is a lot more fun than making an AI (ymmv). (At least, the practice is)
Are you serious? Has everyone in tech been struck retarded? It is probably the most overly-hyped technology in existence, except for possible self-driving cars. It will never do what people claim (it is a mathematical impossibility), and it is not a panacea (hint: there is no such thing as a panacea or magical formula in reality, people are just going to gave to be ok not being lazy and actively participating in their lives). Also, last time I checked, big data was not exactly a reliable resource, as people tend to lie like mofos online, you see. The algos are better today, sure, but fundamentally it is not any more advanced than itâ(TM)s ever been.
So...
Is Betteridge's law overhyped?
Am I asking your opinion or just not bothering to find the facts?
Besides, it seems to me if you build an electronic brain that works like a human brain, it is going to have all the problems a human brain has (years of teaching, distraction, mental illness, and a propensity for error).
If you created an electronic brain (of which no one is remotely close), the one advantage it would have is the ability to copy. That's the same advantage that Expert Systems have today. We don't have intelligent self driving cars but once we cover enough edge cases and the software controlling a self driving car becomes safer than the average driver then we can copy that to 100k other cars. We can also continue to improve it and then copy that improvement. The advantage that computers have is reliability, predictability, and reproducibility. Once we code the knowledge of a surgeon into a computer, we don't have to worry about the doctor not getting enough sleep the night before, etc... Even if we don't have intelligence machines, having machines that can reliability drive cars safer than humans is a huge step up for safety while also a huge problem to deal with when millions of professional drivers are out of a job. It is artificial intelligence though it might be better if we used another word for artificial and called it "fake intelligence"
News flash: Artificial is not a synonym for synthetic.
No, but synthetic is often used as a synonym for artificial. You're splitting hairs. Simulated intelligence would be the best name for what we have now, where we are giving the appearance of intelligence without actually implementing intelligence.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
In order to make such a claim, or contradict such a claim, we would have to be able to define intelligence. Since nobody can define it, nobody knows if it is intelligence or not. You are the one splitting hairs.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I think companies use the term AI because it sounds smart to small minded people lacking real technology understanding. They buy into this ideal that isn't really over selling its capabilities.
There is a comment, probably made by McCarthy or Minsky, that AI is what we haven't been able to do yet. If it works, it's now called "computer science," or "programming technique."
No matter what the programs do, even if it was called AI before it was done, afterwards people will say it's not "real AI."
That doesn't stop it from being overhyped, though. BTW, "overhype" is redundant.
Yes!
Yes they are!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
This one:
"Besides, it seems to me if you build an electronic brain that works like a human brain, it is going to have all the problems a human brain has (years of teaching, distraction, mental illness, and a propensity for error)."
Is the single truest statement about AI I have read in a long time.
I would also add in addition to list (teaching, distraction...)
logical fallacies, including blind loyalty, confirmation bias, etc.
quarrelsome (among themselves)
greed
and my personal favorite:
lazyness
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
In this case the "no" happens to be sarcastic.
In all seriousness though, it is a matter of fact. AI is demonstrably oversold by multiple companies in the market, and if that's not overhyped then the only matter of opinion is what you mean by "overhyped." Strictly speaking, I think it's a no brainer to factually confirm question in the headline, and the content of the article supports that interpretation.
Oh, that one is easy and already solved: Just use a really dumb (i.e. average) human and there you are.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
It can be defined just fine. We just can't reach consensus. The arguments are almost religious in nature.
Earlier this year we lost Hubert Dreyfus, an early and unmatched critic of Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence. He argued over and over that while GOFAI might eventually meet the challenge of difficult games like chess, it was not an approach that could ever solve problems where the context of the problem required an understanding of human experience. Self driving cars, for example, where the problem requires the "computer" to understand what the objects are in the world it is navigating, from the lines on the road to an empty grocery bag in the gutter to a person standing near a crosswalk. Once you think you have a few pieces in place, you realize you seed some practical rules for assessing the situation - but how do we discover practical rules, how to we develop a theory of practical knowledge that can be built into a machine? The self-driving car sees the person by the crosswalk, but how does it understand if that person is tying their shoes? How does it decide to eliminate that person from the task of navigating an intersection? Imagine a scenario where some children have discovered that self-driving cars will always stop if they detect someone tying their shoes, what a fun game that would be on the way home from school!
This particular battle of semantics has been going on for a while now, and much like previous battles (hoverboard, drones, HDR in 4K), it'll be won by advertisers who don't know better.
The point is building interest in a generic marketing term even if it comes at the cost of the original meaning of the word. Scientific or technical terms (and in some cases, terms made up by sci-fi authors) have always been appropriated, it'll keep happening.
But is AI being overhyped? Definitely. Because behind all the AI craze, the real interest for several companies is in user data collection which is becoming the new coin of the day. It is a very convenient way for tech companies to imply that there are some vague gains to be had using their products while not mentioning that they are harvesting your data or saying that they need to do it "because the AI needs it to work better".
Notice how it's also super convenient for companies and services to use vague terms like that because they not only "fancy up" their products, it also serves as a convenient scapegoat when things go south (see how "algorithms" is losely employed by social media networks to put the blame on for mishaps).
For those who didn't see the dimention of this overhyping just yet, here's a comprehensive list of a whole ton of products and services where the term is used, most of which have zero AI in it:
https://medium.com/imlyra/a-li...
Some of them barely have any intelligence on them at all.
Lets begin with the state of the art. The voice and face recognition technology is the same as what defeated human players in Go. While it is not yet the same kind of general intelligence as humans it proves that you don't need the same number of neurons and connections as a human to be very very intelligent in at least a narrow domain. They are true intelligence by any measure, just not as general as human intelligence. Furthermore human level intelligence is not required for machine intelligence to be a problem. The level of AI we have now will already replace millions.
"Nothing in the state of the art of AI today is going to wake up and decide to kill the human masters." - and nobody is suggesting it will. It is almost like you have listened to nothing that has been said. Virtually every presentation by the likes of Gates, Musk, Harris and Hawking is prefaced by a statement to the effect that the Terminator view of AI isn't credible. This is a classic straw man argument, a misrepresentation of your opponents position. AI is a threat, but not because they will raise armies of mechanized soldiers to exterminate us.
"Despite appearances, the computers are not thinking. You might argue that neural networks could become big enough to emulate a brain." - Machines will 'emulate' a brain in the same sense that a F16 emulates a seagull. Nobody will argue that a F16 replicates the delicate structure of the feathers of a seagull, but if I had a choice between a seagull and and F16 in a fight.... machines already outperform us in many narrow domains. I think my dog is conscious and 'intelligent', but it can't walk the right side of a pole when on a leash.
"Maybe, but keep in mind that the brain has about 100 billion neurons and almost 10 to the 15th power interconnections." - Current neural networks were inspired by, but not attempting to simulate human neural activity. Just as human flight is a combination of principles inspired by nature and our mechanical expertise, aka the internal combustion engine, artificial intelligence is not a simple minded replication of the human brain neuron for neuron. It might be that the human brain is grossly inefficient, with many neurons and connections being uninvolved. There is no reason to believe that achieving human level intelligence requires a specific number of neurons or connections.
"Worse still, there isn't a clear consensus that the neural net made up of the cells in your brain is actually what is responsible for conscious thought." - unless you are referring to clergy I'm afraid I have to call this utter bullshit. There is no magical 'soul' separate from the brain. The neurons in our brain and the configuration of their connections make up who we are. We may not really understand consciousness all the way down yet, but there is no doubt that it is an emergent property of the configuration and activity of neurons.
"There's some thought that the neurons are just control systems and the real thinking happens in a biological quantum computer..." - The 'real thinking'? I'm sorry, but this is just outright magical thinking. Replacing the theist 'soul' with 'quantum computer' does not help. Even if there were a quantum mechanical aspect it is neural networks which enable brains to do what they do, not QM.
"Besides, it seems to me if you build an electronic brain that works like a human brain, it is going to have all the problems a human brain has (years of teaching, distraction, mental illness, and a propensity for error)." - finally something we can agree on. Yes, a machine that learns will have the same weaknesses we do potentially. They will just be more intelligent. They will not have the same limitations.
Seriously, there is no evidence for any kind of "quantum consciousness", nor any convincing theory as to why a neural net would be insufficient to produce consciousness. I suspect that the main attraction of this idea is that it is a non-religious excuse for believing consciousness to be magical or special in some way.
You said that using language. Language is the evidence.
What is the sound of one hand clapping? Quantum handwaving.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
Despite appearances, the computers are not thinking. You might argue that neural networks could become big enough to emulate a brain. Maybe, but keep in mind that the brain has about 100 billion neurons and almost 10 to the 15th power interconnections. Worse still, there isn't a clear consensus that the neural net made up of the cells in your brain is actually what is responsible for conscious thought.
This is very much correct. Much of what we call artificial intelligence today we could instead call functions of best fit. We emulate aspects of biology in systems and these aspects allow a pseudo-intelligent matching to occur. The matching function might be able to identify your face to unlock your phone or identify lingual patterns to generate language that a human speaker will feel is somewhat natural or identify what animal an image is of or even to beat human players at Jeopardy.
This isn't consciousness. While we can get systems that appear smart this way, we're not going to get to consciousness though bigger versions of these functions of best fit and calling these AI is near to a misnomer.
Until consciousness in the brain is better comprehended, a better approach toward real AI might be to simulate aspects of biological evolution, specifically in regards to social communication.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
Herp Derp
Its not really general purpose AI. However, deep learning sometimes performs better than the procedural or statistical algorithms it replaces. That aspect isnt hyping.
This sounds like the sort of article that Cyberdyne Systems would have written before unleashing Skynet.
If the brain was electrical and really did create a virtual world to experience with THIS MUCH FIDELITY then... where does the heat go? No fans. Its totally enclosed.
It should be at least 500 watts or something, if you compare it to top notch GPUs. Probably MUCH more.
Shouldnt the brain explode or at least overheat from all the computations being made?? ...not if its quantum, or at the very least a classical reversible computer.
If you're going to mention Betteridge's Law, please understand what it actually means.
You must be new here. I'd tell you how to create an account, but I could never figure out the blasted thing myself—it got all funky after Chips n' Dips.
I've only been saying this for at least a YEAR, now. Companies hype their 'product'. The Media doesn't understand it and runs with it anyway. In the minds of laypeople everywhere reading all that, they conflate it with fantasy 'AI' they see in movies and on TV. The result: People think the so-called 'AI' everyone is talking about, is like something out of an Isaac Asimov novel, fully conscious, self-aware, and like a human being in it's ability to 'think'. Nothing could be farther from the truth though!
I cannot argue with that. It may prove to be an important qualifier when dealing with future replicants.
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