
Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Stupidity (1976) [pdf] - kick
https://homepage.univie.ac.at/nicole.rossmanith/concepts/papers/mcdermott1976artificial.pdf
======
60654
McDermott's paper is a classic for a reason. Back at the dawn of the first
wave of AI hype, he was taking people to task over wishful thinking, and over
applying aspirational labels to mundane computations (e.g. "thinking",
"solving" for simple graph searches) thus making them sound more powerful than
they were. And over building only toy problem solutions, under the assumption
that the results would scale to real world problems (spoiler: they never did).

We need this kind of insight for this current wave of AI hype. Once again
we're seeing a lot of wishful thinking, and a lot of aspirational labels (e.g.
that DNNs are "thinking" up solutions etc). And inevitable extrapolation of
toy solutions, assuming they will scale to real world scenarios (e.g. the
fully autonomous driving fiasco). And the hype does not correspond to reality.

~~~
jeanl
I have a problem with how we use the word "thinking", usually implying
something somewhat magical, or at least something _more_ than the type of
computations done in an algorithm or in a DNN. My belief is what we call
"thinking" is nothing more than a (vastly more) complicated system doing the
same kind of elementary calculation that are done in a neural net. There's
nothing magical in our brain, it's entirely mechanical (chemical really), what
we do when we "think" is, I think, comparable to what happen in a DNN (if not
in scale at least in nature). Consciousness and thinking are illusions created
by our "mechanical" brains. People who say machines will never "think" the way
we do are, I believe, mistaken.

~~~
FZ1
I don't disagree that the "thinking" process is entirely a physical process
(electro-chemical, etc.).

However, we're not even at a point yet where we can articulate specifically
what that physical process _is_ - much less reproduce simplified artificial
versions of it.

To imply we've somehow captured the essence of thinking in a DNN - and that it
just needs to get bigger and more complex - that is exactly the type of thing
this guy is mocking (deservedly so).

------
SilasX
This is quoted a lot at the beginning of my favorite LessWrong article, “Truly
Part if You”, in particular:

>As McDermott says, “The whole problem is getting the hearer to notice what it
has been told. Not ‘understand,’ but ‘notice.’ ” Suppose that instead the
physicist told you, “Light is made of little curvy things.” Would you notice
any difference of anticipated experience?

>How can you realize that you shouldn’t trust your seeming knowledge that
“light is waves”? One test you could apply is asking, “Could I regenerate this
knowledge if it were somehow deleted from my mind?”

[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fg9fXrHpeaDD6pEPL/truly-
part...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fg9fXrHpeaDD6pEPL/truly-part-of-you)

~~~
seisvelas
I haven't seen LessWrong mentioned in quite some time! I remember the first
time I heard about them, from this article in Harper's:

[https://harpers.org/archive/2015/01/come-with-us-if-you-
want...](https://harpers.org/archive/2015/01/come-with-us-if-you-want-to-
live/3/)

LessWrong is great as intellectually stimulating entertainment but I don't
think they are actually any good at all for making people more rational.

~~~
jacquesm
I think the bigger problem there is that they take themselves entirely too
serious. It all comes across as bombastic and mostly based on wishful
thinking. Nice intro material but you can't build a castle on a thin
foundation like that.

