
A learning technology that enables robots to imagine the future of their actions - rbanffy
http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/12/04/robots-see-into-their-future/
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yaseer
Extremely interesting.

Some AI literature is of the belief that consciousness emerges from imagining
hypotheticals. You could probably describe a few key milestones.

1 - Imagine your hypothetical actions, interacting with objects.

..

.. - Imagine the actions of other 'entities' capable of imagining actions, who
are also interacting with objects.

..

.. - Imagine your 'self' in relation to these other entities, all capable of
imagining each other's actions.

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state_less
This future brought to you by a cost reducing AI across all imagined futures.

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andreyk
This is cool research, but it should be noted that it's a pretty basic
extension of prior work on video prediction:

"the robots can predict what their cameras will see if they perform a
particular sequence of movements. These robotic imaginations are still
relatively simple for now – predictions made only several seconds into the
future – but they are enough for the robot to figure out how to move objects
around on a table without disturbing obstacles"

There is no effort at all at modeling the world at a more abstract conceptual
level, so pretty fundamental ideas/changes will be needed in order to do
'long-horizon' planning/imagination.

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tw1010
I guess they wanted to make robots less scary by rooting the story in the idea
of babies. But it doesn't really achieve its purpose since there's still the
obvious narrative of "oh, so what happends when the baby robots grows up into
scary adult robots with all the greed and hate that that can be associated
to". I think Googles Waymo took a better approach to framing the narrative PR
around AI, namely making the robot feel like a toy or animation character
instead.

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dan678
Not it at all. I saw this paper presented at CoRL last month. It, and a lot of
other papers on the topic of unsupervised learning in robotics, draw on ways
humans develop cognition, specifically, during early childhood. In projecting
the scene forward in the visual spatial domain, the robot plans it's actions
and learns from the corresponding results in a way that parallels what a young
child would do to learn about the world.

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Animats
Finally! Common sense is being able to predict the consequences of your
actions. I've wanted to do that for years, but I was thinking in terms of
planning and trial and error against low-resolution physics models of the
world. Sort of like A* on steroids. This has limited applicability, although
some video games try to do something like that. The new approach here is more
promising, because it needs less of a world model.

Getting through the next few seconds without a major screwup is the big
problem in unstructured robotics. This approach may not be the right answer,
but it's addressing the right question.

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kuwze
Reminds me of this Slate Star Codex post[0] on the book "Surfing
Uncertainty"[1].

Also it looks like the relevant paper is here[3] and a video example is
here[4].

[0]: [http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-
unc...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-uncertainty/)

[1]:
[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0190217014/](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0190217014/)

[3]: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.00696](https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.00696)

[4]:
[https://sites.google.com/site/robotforesight/](https://sites.google.com/site/robotforesight/)

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trey-jones
I know lots of people who can't imagine the future of their actions, so I
don't feel like this is a prerequisite for artificial intelligence.

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jdmichal
Eh, huge difference between "can't" and "won't". I feel confident in assuring
you that they likely _can_ imagine such futures, and likely do but with
perhaps with extremely limited scope. The machinery is all there, and is
probably working, even if they don't recognize it as such.

Also, like decision making in general, it's a skill that requires practice to
improve.

