

The A.I. Revolution Is On - loboman
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/12/ff_ai_essay_airevolution/

======
jacquesm
Way to go wired, an article with a bunch of references to things that are
_definitely_ not AI, would not have been considered AI (even in the dark gray
past) and that are not considered AI today even by those that would like to
believe that an 'AI revolution' is on.

According to this article AI is just another way of saying 'the leading edge
in real world interaction', from inventory control to (apparently) crappy
search results that still need further interpretation. (google 'what is the
color of grass' for a nice example of AI in action, any three year old would
tell you 'green' is the answer, not a bunch of links).

The 'AI winter' was not brought on by a lack of progress or interesting
results, it was mostly brought on by it being used as buzz word hyping the
notion of AI long before even baby steps had been made in the field, and this
article fits right in with the over-selling of AI. An ABS system is AI?
Please.

As of now we do not know if there will ever be something that we would call an
AI but just like with pornography, I'll know it when I see it, and an
inventory control system, no matter how clever it appears is not it,
especially not if it took a bunch of programmers to write.

I think the one thing that will set a true AI off against the background of
wanna-be AI systems is that a true AI can be taught by non programmers to
reason about the world around it and draw meaningful conclusions without
external input. We are still - in my opinion at least - very far away from
anything that comes close to that.

Learning is the key to AI, not programming.

~~~
hbt
it's _Artificial_ !

Maybe their example sucked but Search engines fall into AI in my book.

I think the author is emphasizing the complexity behind very simple things.
Obviously, it's not intelligent but it's doing way more than expected.

To me "intelligence" in software is about hiding complexity, making decisions
and deducing things based on data, predicting and adapting based on input to
deliver unforeseen results using a simple UI (where UI could be keywords in a
search engine or a warehouse reorganizing itself to deliver and locate stuff
faster based on new input/output).

The next generation of software is not about building actual intelligent
systems. It's about accomplishing specific tasks and delivering more than
expected.

Think of your IDE fixing your most common typos because it's constantly
analyzing your input, or a file selection program that saves
patterns/dependencies between your opened files and tries to guess which file
you mean when you hit `gt` etc.

To me, this is smart behavior or _artificial_ intelligence. This is as far as
software will ever get unless you start mixing it with biological stuff.

------
flatline
"The computers are in control, and we just live in their world"

No, _we_ are ostensibly in control, or at least the humans who know how to
program and control this type of system are. Like any machine or complex
system, it may fly out of our control, but it is not in some other entity's
control at that point, it's just out of control. We're not to the point of
facing a true artificial intelligence, yet...

~~~
lukev
Agreed. The mystification of what computers do is a worrying trend.

For now, at least, computers can't do anything at all interesting or
remarkable. They can, however, do boring things _really really fast_. And lots
of boring things, done really really fast, can yield some pretty impressive
results.

But it doesn't change the fact that what computers actually _do_ is utterly
trivial. Anything interesting they achieve is the result of algorithms
programmed by very intelligent and sophisticated human beings.

That's a clear, qualitative difference from any real AI. When computers are
creative, when they start doing things that haven't been done before, without
the direct programming of any human, _then_ a computer can truly be said to be
"in control."

~~~
treeface

        The mystification of what computers do is a worrying trend.
    

Trend? When have the masses ever had a clear grasp on computation? Quoth
Babbage:

 _On two occasions I have been asked,—"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the
machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member
of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question.
I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could
provoke such a question._

------
reader5000
A.I. is probably one of the most exciting concepts I know of, yet if you think
about it the somewhat disappointing utilitarian "reality" of A.I. is what
makes sense. For example why are no other species as intelligent as humans?
Are they just slow evolvers, or suck at evolving? Are humans just blessed
evolvers to achieve intelligence before everybody else? No, survival is a
purely utilitarian exercise. You find a stable niche and fill it, or die. In
other words humans and their brains have just stumbled upon a particular
pattern of living (what with language and societies and "intelligence") that
is currently "stable". What if in 500 years all humans are extinct, yet
bacteria still happily do their thing. Would we still consider humans so
'intelligent'? The same rule applies to processes embodied in silicon as to
processes embodied in carbon. And for as intelligent as we humans think we
are, we are very bad at predicting where the next stable niche will be
(otherwise we'd all be millionaire entrepreneurs). This is why when "A.I."
finds a stable niche in areas like search engines and warehouse management, we
are both surprised and a bit disappointed.

~~~
endtime
I disagree with your analogy; branches of math/stats/CS are not subject to
natural selection. They have quite the pantheon of "designers" (academia)
deciding for what to use them and to what to apply them.

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tehgawdo
AI is the sexiest, most romanticized and misunderstood fields in computer
science. Certainly, it never ceases to generate boring article topics for
Wired.

~~~
Dn_Ab
I read and enjoyed the article. Was not boring to me. I am extremely
interested in machine learing and get excited about things like graphical
models, MCMC, hybrid monte carlo, online learning, reinforcement learning,
deep learners, sparse learners, co-evolution, ensembles etc.

I found this article interesting and actually very well informed as such
things go. It does not focus on Human like AI but practical approaches
currently being used that are able to do the most basic type of learning at a
complex level - ability to infer albeit on restricted spaces. For example, its
9 AM someone is at the door, given my past experience on situations like this
(data) who is it most likely to be? I have a best guess based on what I have
learned about who tends to come knocking when.

They can also pick out basic patterns whose details are very intricate,
sometimes nuanced. What is interesting is that in these small spaces they can
account for and infer on and recommend basic actions on vast number of
parameters so accurately that they blow away any human attempt to match them
to smitherings. This is why they are used as they are. Creativity,
abstraction, self aware introspection,emotions, exploration for exploration's
sake etc. are nice to think of as AI but that would be a waste of the type of
niche intelligence computers are particularly well suited to based on their
architecture. They do need to handle nuanced ambiguity better though. As well
as transfering learning and dealing with situations far outside their
training. The logic overflow of the 1960s movies is quite apt sometimes.

I do believe though that when (if) AI arrives it will be sudden as a unifying
framework, a Standard Model of ML if you will is created. But in the mean time
there is a lot of very interesting things going on and the combined explotion
of introspection in the field (of Statistical Inference/Learning), data and
processing power means very interesting times are ahead.

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fendrak
My Multiagent Systems class at UT Austin (taught by Peter Stone) discussed the
Kiva system, along with many, many other topics pertaining to AI today.

A couple of videos about Kiva: <http://www.raffaello.name/KivaSystems.html>

A paper on Kiva:
[http://www.raffaello.name/Assets/Publications/CoordinatingHu...](http://www.raffaello.name/Assets/Publications/CoordinatingHundreds.pdf)

[http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~pstone/Courses/344Mfall10/assignme...](http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~pstone/Courses/344Mfall10/assignments/index.html)
has all of the readings for the class (with more on the 'resources' page). If
you want to learn something about AI, it's certainly a good place to start!

If you're more into the algorithms side of AI, you should certainly read AI: A
Modern Approach ([http://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Intelligence-Modern-
Approac...](http://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Intelligence-Modern-
Approach-3rd/dp/0136042597)). It's a text book, don't get me wrong, but it
clearly explains many relevant algorithms in AI today with accompanying
pseudocode and theory. If you've got a CS background, it's a great
reference/learning tool. I bought mine for a class, and won't be returning it!

------
clay
"Today’s AI doesn’t try to re-create the brain. Instead, it uses machine
learning, massive data sets, sophisticated sensors, and clever algorithms to
master discrete tasks."

The second sentence is basically my model for how the human brain works.

------
Anon84
Is it being televised?

------
carsongross
Has A.I. figured out how to simulate humility yet?

It certainly has a lot to be humble about...

-A Systems Guy

~~~
FooBarWidget
I've seen a chat bot that's indistinguishable from a real human being. It
reaches that goal by acting like a stupid and rude 12 year old kid who think
he's cool and l33t.

    
    
      hey man
      wtf u talking about
      lololol wtf man ur dumb
      thats shit
      whatever
    

You can't tell whether he's really an annoying 12 years old or whether he's a
bot.

~~~
carsongross
Touche.

OTOH, this is wired we are talking about. Until the drones hunt me down and
eliminate me with impossible, ruthless efficiency, I remain skeptical. And
I'll die screaming "Yeah, but it was a _SYSTEMS_ _GUY_ who made you _ACTUALLY_
work!"

