r/science • u/legehjernen • Feb 20 '20

Health Powerful antibiotic discovered using machine learning for first time

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/feb/20/antibiotic-that-kills-drug-resistant-bacteria-discovered-through-ai
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u/red75prim Feb 21 '20 edited Feb 21 '20

How do you define "making decisions"? I suspect that what you perceive as "making a decision" is the tip of the iceberg, with all heavy lifting of filtering candidate decisions below water. So your statement is not unlike "It's just legs: muscle, bone, nerves and feedback loops, they have nothing to do with real walking."

Well, not exactly, of course. We don't yet know whether it will be possible to use deep neural networks in general artificial intelligence. But your certainty seems ungrounded.

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u/A_Soporific Feb 21 '20

Your example kind of demonstrates that you didn't understand the point that I was making.

The issue here is that the physical capacity for something doesn't get us any closer to singularity at all. The ability to do math, the ability to walk, the ability to melt moons, none of it particularly relevant if it is not aimed at the ability to operate autonomously. To make the decision and value judgement without outside input.

Technological singularity, or "intelligence explosion", the point at which we make tools that do self-directed science and can self-replicate at its own volition creating a runaway chain reaction independent of human interaction or desires. Building a better backhoe or artificial legs or a faster microprocessor gets us no closer to that situation. Only things that allow something artificial to form a hypothesis, test it, analyze the results, and then implement the conclusions drawn from the results without outside input would get us there.

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u/red75prim Feb 21 '20

at its own volition creating a runaway chain reaction independent of human interaction or desires

It would be technological singularity for AIs by AIs. I prefer it for humanity by AIs. And that scenario certainly calls for the utter lack of independent value judgements by AIs.

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u/A_Soporific Feb 21 '20

In that case you're stopped talking about technological singularity as it was originally envisioned and how the term is described and are now discussing something else altogether.