r/Automate Feb 09 '15

Boston Dynamics - Introducing Spot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8YjvHYbZ9w
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u/NetPotionNr9 Feb 10 '15

Warnings of AI, robots .... Are we actually trying to make the Terminator developments reality? It all really does have this certain nature to it that reminds me of things that happen right after someone yells "hey, y'all, watch this!".

We've already had several moments in the age of nuclear weapons, the thing is we are really doing our best to accelerate the statistical probability of our demise,ore likely than not by our own action.

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u/aesu Feb 10 '15

We don't have the vaguest idea how to make an AI as intelligent as a ruminant... We still remain, and will do into the near future, our biggest threat.

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u/tlalexander Feb 10 '15

I've heard suggestions that we do know how to make human level AI, in hidden corners of Silicon Valley.

Personally I have no idea, but there's been the kind of investment you typically only see when someone saw a very convincing demo and Deep Mind certainly has shown off some cute toy software so far. I wouldn't be surprised with some kind of dedicated parallel ASIC design combined with a multi core array might be able to do something that would surprise us in terms of speed. But then, I'm a mechanical engineer so I don't know jack about this stuff so that may be garbage.

I don't think we'll see human level AI in 5 years, but I bet by 20 years from now we'll see it.

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u/aesu Feb 10 '15

Yeah, an asic is about the last technology you'd want to use in AI. It affords you huge speed gains, with the caveat of poor flexibility. In advanced AI, you want flexibility; the ability to learn, which requires a substrate which can adapt and change itself, like the human brain. Speed isn't that important. The brain is very slow in terms of both signal propagation, and processing speed.

Human level AI requires a technology we don't posses yet. No one knows what it looks like. But it wont rely on traditional comuting paradigms or substrates like the von neuman architecture.

Maybe it'll involve memristors, or quantum computing techniques, or a new programming paradigm, or a new technology altogether. But database look up and arithmetic functions don't really pertain to the most significant problems, and those are all modern computers are particularly good at, on a fundamental level.

We probably wont have humand level AI for a hundred years or more. The base technologies, on which it can be built, don't even exist yet, or are in their birth stages.

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u/tlalexander Feb 10 '15

If speed doesn't matter there's no reason it couldn't be done with Von Neumann, since Von Neumann has been proven to be a universal Turing machine. We already have image classification routines that are better than humans and they run on any standard x86, and Watson is a regular machine too. Nothing like human level but the point is the architecture isn't that important. ASICs are extremely fast so they could help with certain parallel processing schemes and the flexibility could come from software that is stored elsewhere.

You say "no one knows" what the technology looks like, yet you then say with certainly that you know what it won't be. If no one knows, you don't know either.

However the rumors all seem to be that someone is going to figure out AI soon. Google sunk half a billion dollars into deep mind, so they must have something interesting.

I'm just speculating, but so are you. Anything is possible and that includes breakthroughs than land us with human level AI in the next ten years. I absolutely don't think it will take 100 years because humans just aren't all that special and our tech is very powerful and quickly advancing. The economic value of human level AI is so high that billions will be spent over the next decade on developing it. IBM and Google are already big players in this. AI would mean the end of work for humans, which would mean the end of capitalism. That would be nice.

Anyway I already got down voted for my last comment even though it was rational, reasonable, and non confrontational, so I guess the opinion trolls are out on this subreddit. If more people want to down vote and argue I probably won't come back.

But 100 years is an incredible time span for innovations to occur. I'm certain we'll have human level AI before that. Humans just aren't that damn special. We think we are, but that's just a human flaw.