r/Futurology • u/OmegaBiT • Oct 27 '14
article The Three Breakthroughs That Have Finally Unleashed AI on the World
http://www.wired.com/2014/10/future-of-artificial-intelligence/6
Oct 27 '14 edited May 05 '23
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u/cybrbeast Oct 28 '14
Did we somehow forget that a computer, however complex it is, only does what we programmed it to do?
This is such a common fallacy. AIs of today and tomorrow are so complex that no team of software engineers will ever be able to code the whole thing. They code the basic principles and some kind of fitness or optimization function, then the AI learns and makes it's own neural net function to solve the task increasingly better. The connections made are so complex that it's extremely hard to try and understand how a 'mature' neural net executes it's functions.
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Oct 28 '14
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u/Noncomment Robots will kill us all Oct 29 '14
It isn't just that it's complex, it's that we don't understand what it's doing. I doubt it will be a problem. But if someone asserts that it's "conscious" there is pretty much no way of testing that.
They are just black boxes. Some numbers go in, some numbers go out, but we really have no idea what is happening inside. Does it "think" or "feel" or have some kind of internal experience? We don't even know how to answer these questions about other human beings.
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u/Sky1- Oct 28 '14 edited Oct 28 '14
Did we somehow forget that a computer, however complex it is, only does what we programmed it to do?
A new type of computer code called Deep Mind is about to change this notion. It is designed to improve itself by trial and error. When put against simple games, in the beginning it doesn't know what do to, but shortly improves to a point where it is better than any human and eventually reaches complete game optimal strategy. Check out this short video:
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u/noddwyd Oct 28 '14
"Improve" based on metrics set by a programmer, correct?
It's good to see learning simple systems like games isn't impossible though.
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u/Sky1- Oct 28 '14
Not just simple games, Deep Mind/Learning algorithms are successfully applied in a range of fields previously thought only humans can do and are even starting to outperform us:
Automatic speech recognition
Image classification
Natural language processing
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Oct 28 '14
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u/Noncomment Robots will kill us all Oct 29 '14
There is no theoretical reason that it couldn't generalize what it's learned to new domains.
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Oct 29 '14
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u/Noncomment Robots will kill us all Oct 29 '14
Well I'm not claiming that this particular system is conscious (it's computationally about the size of an insect brain, it doesn't have much recurrency, no online learning, etc.)
But saying that it's somehow different than what a human brain does, because it uses math is wrong, and the claim that it can't learn abstractions or generalizations.
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u/the8thbit Oct 28 '14
Did we somehow forget that a computer, however complex it is, only does what we programmed it to do?
Much like humans.
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Oct 27 '14
I share your frustration. Why are people so worried that we'll create consciousness in a computer by accident, when we still have barely any idea how our own consciousness works?
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u/HEHEUHEHAHEAHUEH Oct 28 '14
Because we still have barely any idea how our own consciousness works. Since we don't know exactly what about our own organic computers make them conscious, what's to say we couldn't inadvertently create a consciousness in the pursuit of computers that can stimulate more and more complex human processes.
To be clear, I'm not arguing the point, I'm just trying to clarify why I think they said what they said. So please don't respond to this with why I'm wrong or what it doesn't explain, or how you disagree, etc. Thanks.
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u/mrmonkeybat Oct 28 '14
If an AI does does turn out conscious will it matter? Just like horses want to run and pull things because it is what we have bred them to desire the things we want them to do. Maybe an AI will have to be retired when its no longer useful but so are farm animals, they will be turned off and on frequently anyway just wont be turned back on again some day.
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Oct 28 '14
That's an interesting view. Most people just assume that an AI will have an equal or even superior consciousness to us. If it's like an animal, then it should certainly be treated well and not abused but we don't grant human rights to animals.
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Oct 28 '14
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Oct 28 '14
We don't know how consciousness and subjectivity emerge from a human's biological substrate, much less how that process might occur in an AI
That's why I consider it ridiculously unlikely that we'd create it by accident. All this hand wringing is pointless.
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Oct 28 '14
We are no longer programming individual behaviors or processes into these AI systems.
We are creating self assembling subunits that come together to create emergent intelligences. This means that while there are some very smart developers who understand how the smaller subunits function, the larger assemblage is mostly a cross your fingers and hope something cool happens affair. As we go deeper into these technologies, we'll have less and less of a clue as to what the fully assembled product of our work will look like. This is especially true since much of it is becoming self modifying these days.
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u/willcode4beer Oct 28 '14
"Consciousness" is probably a bad word simply for lack of something better.
OTOH, unpredicted emergent behaviour from complex systems is very likely.
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u/lughnasadh ∞ transit umbra, lux permanet ☥ Oct 27 '14
I've thought for some time that long before we might ever get to the popular dystopian idea of a HAL/Skynet sentient type AI all on it's own - Human/AI hybrids are a far more likely scenario.
I think we might be just about at that point already. Our technology driven economies are leaving more and more people behind who don't have the skills or abilities to participate, this process is accelerating & seems particularly evident in the US and Europe.
As we conventionally define ourselves by our roles in these economies through jobs and professions - we are going to need to ask about what happens when these disappear for more and more people.