
The Dawn of the Age of Artificial Intelligence - pron
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/02/the-dawn-of-the-age-of-artificial-intelligence/283730/
======
bcantrill
The thing that's so aggravating about this article is what is so aggravating
about AI: the arrogant comparison of software systems to true intelligence.
The examples cited by the article are emphatically _not_ "intelligence" as we
understand it: Siri isn't, Watson isn't, Google's self-driving cars aren't.
They represent algorithms (clever, in many cases) executed by a stored-program
computer -- or many. They take advantage of what computers are really good at:
the ability to perfectly execute endless streams of simple instructions with
astonishing speed; the ability to access vast quantities of data with zero
error; and the ability to reliably transmit that data to one another. These
innovations also reflect the fundamental brittleness of the machines that
implement them: the machines can only do exactly what they're told -- and if
they're told to do the wrong thing, they will gladly do it. The intelligence,
then, is purely in the humans that are programming and engineering the thing
-- not the thing itself. I understand that this distinction is entirely lost
on those who have no understanding of what's behind the curtain -- but we do a
broader disservice when we pretend that our adept sleight of hand is, in fact,
magic.

And my apologies for just speaking the truths that many here already know;
over my decades in computer science, I have tried to hold my tongue whenever
the AI cultists scream at passers-by that the singularity is near -- but every
now and again I must scream back for my own sanity.

~~~
hencq
It doesn't seem like you actually read the article, but are just commenting on
the title. They're not saying any of these innovations are true intelligence.
What they're saying is that computers (and robots) are starting to do things
that until recently were thought to be solely the domain of humans. They're
saying that we're at the start of a new industrial revolution (a second
machine age) which will lead to enormous increases in productivity.

This article focuses on the positive effects. In their book they actually
spend quite a lot of time discussing potential negative effects as well, such
as unemployment. You'll be glad to hear that they agree with you that jobs
like programming and engineering will be ever more important in that world.

~~~
bcantrill
As much as I might like to deny it, I did, in fact, read the article:

 _Because the exponential, digital, and recombinant powers of the second
machine age have made it possible for humanity to create two of the most
important one-time events in our history: the emergence of real, useful
artificial intelligence (AI) and the connection of most of the people on the
planet via a common digital network._

"The emergence of real, useful artificial intelligence" is what I dispute; if
the article chose to describe this as the "emergence of real, useful,
algorithms and systems to address meaningful problems" then, fine. But of
course, that isn't news, either -- it's merely the story of humanity in a
sentence: it is us using our bipedalism and our oversized brains to do what we
have always done to survive and thrive.

------
danso
Ugh, I know this is par for course, but these kind of articles really irritate
me. Especially passages like these:

> _People with connected smartphones or tablets anywhere in the world have
> access to many (if not most) of the same communication resources and
> information that we do while sitting in our offices at MIT. They can search
> the Web and browse Wikipedia. They can follow online courses, some of them
> taught by the best in the academic world. They can share their insights on
> blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and many other services, most of which are free.
> They can even conduct sophisticated data analyses using cloud resources such
> as Amazon Web Services and R, an open source application for statistics._

A. What does this have to do with artificial intelligence?

B. Access to technology does not equal access to ability to use that
technology. I would argue that the problem isn't that people don't have access
to powerful statistical processing and analytical software, it's that they
don't know what to do with it, or with the plenty powerful software that has
been available to them in the past decade. The parallel construction of
"Everyone can now share stuff on Facebook" with "Everyone can now do
statistical analyses via R and Hadoop!" is a gross error of characterization
by the OP.

~~~
DanBC
Search is an AI problem - computers have to try to return decent results.

Facebook has to crop photos in an optimal way - they do a pretty good job of
that.

Either of those feel closer to AI than compression, which is sometimes given
as another example of an AI challenge.

~~~
mdda
Compression doesn't seem that smart on the level of 'gzip'. But one can also
look at what the brain is doing when learning (and classifying stuff into
conceptual clusters) as also being compression. Given the enormous theoretical
'capacity' of the brain (however defined), the compression may not be required
for space reasons - but it potentially serves an interesting function in terms
of understanding.

~~~
dllthomas
_" Compression doesn't seem that smart on the level of 'gzip'."_

If I give you a pile of text, what compression ratios would _you_ achieve by
hand?

------
sentientmachine
What scares me the most is that by the time we have the technology to bring
this artificial intelligence very close to our limbic system and subconscious
mind, our computers (smartphones, desktops, tablets and other) will be so
totally and thoroughly monitored, throttled, spied on, back doored, and
censored, that we will be presented with the choice:

1\. Refrain from getting enhanced, and suffer the consequences of limited
ability and limited existence. 2\. Get enhanced, and start the slow march
where people aren't individuals anymore, we are drones in a collection of
drones, with a queen.

But hey, maybe that's the best thing ever to happen to our species, to become
half and half. Half of the humans become like a hive of bees or colony of
ants, and the other half sees if separate and individual free agents is able
to perform better. Then the wars that come later will see which one natural
selection selects.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
_people aren 't individuals anymore, we are drones in a collection of drones,
with a queen._

Isn't this the best solution long term? Makes sense to me.

~~~
sebastialonso
I'm starting to think that an intelligent species with the social hierarchy
that we have, can only go to a certain level of advancement.

Then it becomes impossible to move further, without changing the social
schema. Possibly into a hive form, where everything is easier to manage.

From an engineering point of view, it's the perfect choice: easy to manage,
easy to enhance, divide labour and what not. From a social point of view,
yikes.

Is there a branch of sociology or something that study the effects of
different social schemas?

~~~
kaybe
But then we might not have come here without our social hierarchy, exactly
because it is harder to manage. It makes people want to outsmart each other.
(This is actually a hypothesis in evolution theory.)

------
drakaal
AI is limited more by language than anything else. NLP which I do a lot of
work on at [http://plexinlp.com](http://plexinlp.com) goes a long way, but the
computer doesn't have the ability to get metaphors, or sarcasm, or have any
sort of "BS" detection.

CoreNLP (which isn't as good as our NLP but is the "standard" only gets the
parts of speech right 95% of the time, by words, but about 75% of the time by
sentence. Imagine you were a waiter and you only understood 75% of sentences.
You'd not last too long.

But somehow we expect computers which not only are limited to 75% of sentences
being "tagged" correctly, but then not having any idea about the concepts
behind them.

AI as we see it today is not so much "AI" as it is Computer Driven Bucketing.
Build a formula that gets as many things in to pre-sorted buckets as possible.
For me it isn't AI until the computer can make leaps of its own. Create a new
bucket and explain why it was needed, or create a new solution that wasn't
proposed by the programmer.

I am working hard to bring all of that to fruition, but honestly we are a long
ways off.

Here are some milestones I think we will need to hit before we get to AI.

Software powerful enough to convert Wikipedia (or any knowledgebase) to
structured Data automatically.

Query system that takes any user input and converts it to something resembling
a Database query (This is what I'm working on)

NPC's for Games/MMO's etc that pass a turring test with in the limits of their
Virtual world. (Basically they don't have to pass for real, just as real as
the DnD character a human would play)

These are really "simple" milestones that are the step before we see true AI
start to work.

~~~
hershel
But why do we need to judge ai by our language? if were dealing with data and
images, machine learning does do impressive things,including things that if
were done by researchers would have certainly gotten them a place inside
respectable academic journals.

For example ,a machine learning algorithm devised a new internet protocol that
doubles the network capacity over best known methods.Another famous machine
learning system understood own it's own how to classify images what belongs to
the bucket of "cat" and many other object types.

Why isn't this enough to be considered intelligent?

~~~
drakaal
Because those aren't Intelligent, they are just "handy".

Sorting doesn't require intelligence. You have X number of attributes and
using them you do your best to get as many things in to "Like" buckets as
possible.

Discovering new attributes is the start of intelligence. Discovering new
buckets could be intelligence.

If the machine gets 100k pictures and can sort them in to Cat vs No Cat, and
then suggests a new set of classification "Indoors vs outdoors" using
attributes the developer didn't pre-identify that would be intelligence.

~~~
hershel
Google's famous experiment did something similar: it offered the machine
plenty of content(from youtube) and the machine on it's own discovered the
category "cat", and others.

~~~
drakaal
You don't seem to want to have a discussion. So this is my last comment.

It was given all the possible traits. It didn't find a new category it had a
collection of things with known traits. Google knew it would be able to find
cats using the traits it was given. That's not intelligence on the computer's
side.

If I tell you that there are things with lungs, things with gills, things with
legs and things with arms, things with hair, I don't have to tell you there
are mermaids and salamanders, you will figure it out when not everything fits
in the bucket of Cats and goldfish.

------
Havoc
As much as I'm looking forward to all the shiny tech I can't help but feel
anxious about the implications for humanity as a whole.

e.g. Right now the poorest of the poor can still resort to back breaking
repetitive work to survive. If the tech keeps going then soon these people
will not be able to compete...at all.

Its a recipe for inequality magnified 100x & I don't see the social fabric
surviving that.

~~~
ForHackernews
Something's going to have to give. If we don't plan for a peaceful transition,
it will happen without planning, in a not-so-peaceful way.

We need to start thinking about basic income sooner rather than later:
[http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/02/09/should-
governmen...](http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/02/09/should-government-
pay-you-alive/aaLVJsUAc5pKh0iYTFrXpI/story.html)

~~~
Havoc
>basic income

Personally I oppose the idea - kinda. To be more precise I would prefer a
system that stacks the odds in their favour heavily rather than "free money".
e.g. Give them their cash...but make them guide school kids across a dangerous
road in return. i.e. Extract some (extra) social benefit from it.

Makes little financial sense either way, but I'd much rather have them do the
school kids thing & collect cash than sleep & collect cash.

~~~
ForHackernews
Some people talk about "Guaranteed Minimum Income" as a conditional income
guarantee, as opposed to an unconditional "Basic Income"

I don't feel strongly (either approach would be an improvement over the status
quo), but I suppose I mildly agree with you. I think human beings need to have
some Work to feel like their lives have meaning. Even if we made GMI
conditional on 10 hours a week of charity volunteering, that could have
positive mental health outcomes.

~~~
Havoc
>need to have some Work to feel like their lives have meaning.

Agreed.

Vaguely relevant story time for 1st world crowd: In my country (South Africa)
it is illegal for the public to refuel their own cars. There is dedicated
staff that does nothing else all day - essentially behave like restaurant
waiters but for petrol stations.

Realistically the law is only in place for job creation purposes - it is by
most measures unnecessary. And yet I've come to appreciate it: I don't need to
leave my car. The people handling flammable liquids do this all day long &
received training - much better than random McDonalds munching idiots. Credit
card speedpoint gets brought to my car window, windscreen washed, tyre
pressure checked etc. I end up (voluntarily) tipping 0.5 USD - a drop in the
ocean. I have a million problems so a guy making my life easier there &
smiling whilst doing so...I'm totally ok with carrying him on my tax/fuel
bill.

~~~
ForHackernews
In the United States, Oregon and New Jersey also require an attendant pump gas
for you. Supposedly gas stations have lower insurance premiums as a result.

~~~
dllthomas
_" Supposedly gas stations have lower insurance premiums as a result."_

I didn't know that part - presumably not lower enough to cover the wages,
though, or we'd see it done voluntarily elsewhere.

------
Houshalter
AI is marching forward relentlessly. It may or may not be as close as most
people think, but were are still getting there within a generation or two at
most. Meanwhile almost nothing is being done to solve the friendliness
problem. Since it seems to be much more complicated than building normal AI it
may never be solved. There might not be a solution - our morality and values
are just a bunch of messy evolutionary heuristics, and abstract concepts are
hard to define concretely (eg "a human is a bunch of atoms in this specific
configuration, but not this specific configuration. It's ok to kill one but
not the other.")

Humanity's odds aren't good.

~~~
diydsp
The effects of AI are an extension of human will. We will succeed or fall with
or without AI. AI will only be a factor or artifact in this process, not its
determinant.

~~~
Houshalter
AI brings the possibility of creating minds literally _millions_ of times more
intelligent than humans. That kind of power is unimaginable to beings in a
world where the dumbest village idiot still shared 99% of his brain structure
in common with the greatest genius. An AI will either solve all our problems
pretty much instantly, or crush us like ants.

It definitely the dominate factor in the future.

------
brianberns
How many times now has the age of AI been heralded without it ever actually
arriving?

~~~
cryptoz
It's arriving right now. I can speak in plain English to my smartphone (or any
other language really, it knows more human languages than I do), cars drive
themselves, the world's billionaires are now focused on rapid AI development,
etc. There are so many things different this time around that you shouldn't be
so pessimistic. "It's different this time" (it actually is though)!

~~~
CmonDev
I am optimistic, but there were dolls capable of playing musics back in
Medieval Age, I feel like e.g. Siri is one of those things.

~~~
appledapple
The difference to me is that the dolls capable of playing music were made up
of a small set of parts compared to 15 million lines of code for Wolfram
Alpha. We are way more sophisticated today.

~~~
CmonDev
You chose a bad example. Wolfram Alpha is like 15000 of such dolls. Not an AI
in any way though.

------
qwerta
Current AI does not even have a intelligence of rat, we are somewhere around
insects.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
In terms of general intelligence, that's probably true, but in terms of
accomplishing tasks that are useful to humans, AI is far ahead of rats. There
are many useful tasks that I can get an AI to do for, but practically none
that I can get a rat to do for me.

------
michaelochurch
I feel like this article is just another aspect of the bubble. We have people
on the sidelines-- intelligent people, but unaware of what the "tech" industry
is actually doing-- cheering on something they hardly understand.

Look, Google is a closed-allocation company. So, I believe, are Apple and
Amazon and probably Facebook. Socially, we're stuck in the 1980s. If people at
the 99th percentile of technical literacy are still stuck mindlessly churning
tickets in closed-allocation environments-- note that basic research funding
has fallen off a cliff in the past 30 years-- and raising VC is _still_ more
about playing a feudal reputation economy than anything remotely approaching
excellence, then what are most of the world's 7.1 billion people going to be
able to contribute to this brave new world? Nothing. They'll have no leverage,
nor the resources to learn what they need to learn because they'll have to
spend all their time on basic survival. The only thing that seems to await the
majority, barring some unforeseen social or economic right angle (the long-
term odds of which are quite high) is joblessness.

We can't even deliver basic healthcare to middle-class Americans anymore, and
here we have the gall to say that humanity's approaching some technotopia?

~~~
comatose_kid
I don't understand how this seemingly random bunch of statements strung
together is the top-voted comment in this thread.

~~~
cscurmudgeon
Most of the times things we don't understand appear as random.

~~~
psbp
It's not random, just needlessly obfuscated.

------
jotm
Hey, fuck your invisible auto playing video/audio!

