Slashdot Mirror
Without Humans, Artificial Intelligence Is Still Pretty Stupid (wsj.com)
Christopher Mims, writing for WSJ: The internet giants that tout their AI bona fides have tried to make their algorithms as human-free as possible, and that's been a problem. It has become increasingly apparent over the past year that building systems without humans "in the loop" -- especially in the case of Facebook and the ads it linked to 470 "inauthentic" Russian-backed accounts -- can lead to disastrous outcomes, as actual human brains figure out how to exploit them. Whether it's winning at games like Go or keeping watch for Russian influence operations, the best AI-powered systems require humans to play an active role in their creation, tending and operation (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternative source). Facebook, of course, is now a prime example of this trend. The company recently announced it would add 10,000 content moderators to the 10,000 it already employs -- a hiring surge that will impact its future profitability, said Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg.
That's because there is no AI. We got fancy algorithms that appear smart when guided by people, nothing more. They don't "think" and they are neither smart or stupid. That would require intelligence, which is missing from this whole equation...
Look up any documented case of feral humans, either in the wild or confinement. If they have a few years first with parents beforehand, they tend to be OK after a period of catching up - but left completely "unprogrammed", they tend to be completely unable to cope.
Humans need interactions on several levels to "become" humans as we recognize them.
It's not at all surprising that computers would need some of that same kinds of interactions to be able to speak to us on our terms. We take a LOT of faulty shortcuts to real logic in order to play our roles in society, conversations, and our shared understanding of the world.
You can get a lot of that odd 'logic' just by building associations - but it takes a LOT of misunderstanding and correction before you can know if those corrections really work the way others understand them.
Ryan Fenton
This is because what the hypesters are calling "AI" is just computers running software. And computers are dumb and so is software. It has been this way since the computer was invented and will continue this way unless there is some magical leap in computing.
Playing Go is not AI. Here is how computers were able to win at Go: a bunch of people sat down and wrote software to teach a computer how to play Go. It isn't magic. It is software. It isn't intelligent either. It was a single purpose program running on a computer playing a game with a strict rule set. Computers are GREAT at that.
All of these articles are ridiculous. AI does not exist and won't exist for a very long time, if ever.
If you define AI as a computer sentience, it will only ever exist in the world of sci-fi. I prefer more relaxed definitions for what constitutes AI. If "AI" descibes an unattainable state, it ceases to be a useful term.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
As long as you live in the fantasy that human brains are magical and computers are not there's no point in having an argument, because you've defined the answer "Humans are intelligent and computers are not, hence anything done by computers is not proof of intelligence." rather than the question: "What is intelligence?" and failed to make any measurable definition or criteria. It's like saying humans have souls and rocks don't and expect the debate to be anything other than theology and philosophy.
Even classical conditioning like Pavlov's dogs are proof of learning and reasoning, hear a bell often enough when you're fed and you associate the bell with food. A plant can't be conditioned, snip off the branches stretching towards the sun and they'll just stretch again and again. If you call it AI and it's not learning it's not really intelligence at all really, if you've found a flaw in a game's "AI" and it keeps falling in the same trap over and over it's just blindly executing. The neural nets at least got that part right, walking into a trap will assign that action negative weights. That's above zero intelligence.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The issue is that the modern definition of AI is just far too relaxed. These days almost any computer system is called "AI" by the media, and often by it's developers. I pretty much expect the standard first program that everyone rights "hello world" to be classed as AI these days.
If people want to be taken seriously when they talk about AI, there needs to be some form of definition, and it needs to be more than just "this computer does something because it's programmed to do it"
It turns out that if you take a newborn and don't have them interact with and learn from other humans they don't learn much and are also quite useless, so this would not be an argument against the idea that these systems are AI, but rather for it. It is not proof they are in fact AI, but it is certainly not proof that they aren't either.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Let me preface this by saying that I agree with you.
That said, you undermine your argument here:
Until then, it's just a computer program doing a lookup against a huge data set and making a best guess as to the answer/choice
If a computer can truly "guess" than I'd say it really is AI. What computers do now is calculate probabilities and choose the most likely best move based on the algorithm in their programming.
And that's the crux of the whole thing. As long as a computer is doing exactly what it's programming tells it do do ("if X happens, do Y") then it's not AI. To be a true AI, it would have to come up with "X just happened, my programming says I should do Y, but I can see for myself that Z is actually a better option so I'm going to do that instead"
Go is the perfect example, just because the programmer doesn't know what move is best in every circumstance doesn't mean the computer is thinking for itself. If the programmer were to manually analyze the same data the program did using the same algorithm, he would come up with exactly the same solution (though it would take a LOT longer). I'll believe something is actually AI not when it does what it's programmed to do, but when it does things it was NOT programmed to do because it has figured out a better way.
The entire universe operates with a strict rule set.
No, a bunch of people sat down and wrote software that lets the computer _learn_ to play Go. AlphaGo doesn't have a big list of "if board state X then do Y." That's precisely why Go was an interesting problem for AI to tackle -- the rules are completely deterministic to be sure, but the set of board states is so astronomical that you literally can't (and never will be able to) build a computer capable of recording them all.
Chess has been the go-to for "AI" for a long time because of its large state space. However, we've pretty much mastered that using tree pruning techniques (aka "soft" AI.) But Go's state space is too large to even be amenable to tree pruning (at least if you want to beat the masters.) So rather than trying to improve the tree pruning algorithm tiny bit by tiny bit, they went the full hard AI approach and hit it with a neural net.
Sure the NN (and in particular, its training algorithms) will be tuned somewhat for the purposes of playing Go, and its not by any means a general purpose "intelligence." But its not simply a matter of "someone wrote a Go algorithm" either.
Of course, your arguments are why they're tackling games like Starcraft and League of Legends now -- games where the rule set is nowhere near strict, showing that the AIs indeed do have some form of intelligence (though again, its not general-purpose intelligence of course.)
All of that said, the whole argument is moot anyway. Sure we're probably not going to be meeting Bender any time soon, but special-purpose AIs can still potentially take over large portions of the human work force and lead to all sorts of social reform (and possibly disaster if we refuse to change for political reasons or whatever.)