
Google’s AI-Building AI Is a Step Toward Self-Improving AI - mooreds
https://singularityhub.com/2017/05/31/googles-ai-building-ai-is-a-step-toward-self-improving-ai/
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mljoe
Often these metalearning systems have to pick from a library of already
understood building blocks to build novel structures from. This limits the
flexibility of their hyperparameter space. It's a bit like having a robot
building a building but give it premade nails and wooden planks. It will never
build a skyscraper. We have to figure out a way to also allow the system to
come up with its own building materials so to speak.

~~~
gwern
It's not that no one has any idea how to avoid choosing building blocks but
that it's a tradeoff. You're building in an inductive bias when you choose the
building blocks for your deep RL or evolutionary algorithm optimizer. Nothing
stops you from choosing building blocks which are Turing-complete -
Schmidhuber, for example, experimented with evolving Brainfuck programs back
in the '90s or '00s, I forget which. Turing-complete, can solve anything you
set it eventually, as minimal and general as it gets. The problem is that
there's so little inductive bias there that it takes forever to get anywhere
useful, you have to evolve far too many samples. With the evolving CNNs,
researchers are already joking about how you would need a nuclear reactor to
reproduce some of these papers which train thousands of CNNs, so the inductive
bias is really important in keeping samples down to a feasible level. As
computing power gets cheaper and the AutoML-like tools learn more domain
knowledge, it'll be possible to let them work on a more raw level than
architecture design choices like 'convolution or fully-connected layer? ReLu
or PRelu?'

~~~
mljoe
It's very black and white right now (no knowledge or very constrained
knowledge). The same problem exists with just plain old parameter learning,
with DL models having so many free parameters it can make training more
computationally expensive then it needs to be. For instance, I want to train a
reinforcement learner to do some task in the real world (eg. a robot). It
would be nice to be able to define a prior that puts very low to no
probability on actions that are not physically possible. This would constrain
the search space considerably. But it's not really clear how to do this with
neural nets.

~~~
gwern
> It would be nice to be able to define a prior that puts very low to no
> probability on actions that are not physically possible. This would
> constrain the search space considerably. But it's not really clear how to do
> this with neural nets.

I dunno, I can think of several ways off the top of my head: 1. put large
negative rewards on impossible actions; 2. only compute Q-values for feasible
actions (just because DQN computes Q-values for a hardcoded set of actions
doesn't mean you _have_ to); 3. use Achiam's "Constrained Policy Optimization"
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.10528](https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.10528) ; 4.
reparameterize the output to make illegal actions unrepresentable (domain-
specific); 5. add illegal or not as an additional data input (ie in addition
to the usual image or robot state, for the _n_ possible actions, include a
_n_-long bitvector of possible/impossible), or include that as a regression
target to make it predict whether each action is possible.

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mark_l_watson
While deep learning can be a powerful enabling tool for saving time compared
to simpler neural networks that required more manual feature selection and
hand tuning, I believe that there is also some real technical debt using
anything that is a black box.

I still believe the future is more hybrid symbolic and deep learning systems,
but I may very well end up being wrong.

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nopinsight
(The comment below incorporates an edited version of my comment from last
week's thread.)

With human involvement only at the meta level, deep understanding of the
generated implementations becomes more challenging and, in highly complex
domains, perhaps impossible. See AutoML's generated architecture and compare
that with a human-designed one. [1] [2]

A future advance could allow the machines to automatically pick and learn to
do new tasks that are helpful to accomplish a given high-level mission.
Therefore, chances of unintended consequences become much greater.

The major issue is, without a moral core that closely aligns with humanity's
evolved morality, there will be moves that advanced AIs come up with that we
deem abhorrent, and sometimes unforeseeable, yet they perform them innocently
and we only find out the consequences once it is too late.

Microsoft's Tay tweet debacle was fairly inconsequential [3]. But AI is
becoming more powerful and granted more and more authority over the real world
we live in, can we afford the technology without humanity?

 _Developing a moral core should be prioritized._

[1] Google Blog on AutoML [https://research.googleblog.com/2017/05/using-
machine-learni...](https://research.googleblog.com/2017/05/using-machine-
learning-to-explore.html)

[2] Many tasks in the real world are more complex than Go and even expert
humans are not capable of understanding all possible complex interactions on
the Go board.

See: AlphaGo, in context by Andrej Karpathy
[https://medium.com/@karpathy/alphago-in-
context-c47718cb95a5](https://medium.com/@karpathy/alphago-in-
context-c47718cb95a5)

[3] [https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-
ch...](https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbot-
racist)

~~~
pixl97
>Developing a moral core should be prioritized.

I just can't see how over the long term an AI will not evolve out of the human
moral code we want. Humans evolved into our, very wide ranging sets of, moral
code. There is not a consistent one across all cultures. The base set of
morals we do follow are generally based on that we humans are made of squishy
meat that suffers pain, and minimizing that pain is a priority goal.

We _may_ be able teach AI about our weaknesses, but as machine intelligence
meets and then exceeds human intelligence and capability, said AI will see
both our strengths and weaknesses and that puts us in a precarious place. If
an AI without human morality outperforms AI with human morality it stands to
become the dominant form of AI.

~~~
nopinsight
AIs without human morality, which would put certain restrictions on them, will
likely have less power in the long run.

This I agree and the consequences could be dire if we do nothing to prevent
that.

Thus, the onus is on us to first develop AIs with moral core and a regulatory
framework which incorporates our best knowledge from sciences and humanities,
then task the moral AIs to help regulate the development of amoral ones.

As a side note, although many details of human morality are not completely
consistent across cultures, there are many shared tenets. Some examples: "Do
not kill one of your own who did not do something wrong." "Avoid incest." "Do
not steal." Current crops of AIs are not even aware of such common sense.

~~~
pixl97
Take "Avoid incest" for example, this is a human genealogical construct that
does not map well to the machine experience. In humans too much inbreeding
leads to accumulation of negative traits. In AI this is called over
specialization. So, by those metrics, good AI learning systems already avoid
that.

>"Do not kill one of your own who did not do something wrong."

Also is a very human subjective experience. We see the individual as the
quantum of pain and experience and optimize on that. In the AI world killing
off other AI that don't stand out as better than a baseline may be an optimal
evolutionary strategy.

Also "Do not steal" is a terrible human morality baseline with a highly
subjective gradient. Did you borrow a pen and not give it back, is that not
technically theft? Is a business transaction where you used secret information
to gain monetary advantage other the other party theft or not?

The problem with your first statement is you assume that human morality is the
pinnacle of morality and all other forms will be lesser to that standard. This
could lead to significant disruption for humanity of a more efficient or
optimized form of morality comes along.

~~~
nopinsight
The examples of moral codes I gave were not meant to be used _on_ AIs but _by_
AIs working for/with humans.

> The problem with your first statement is you assume that human morality is
> the pinnacle of morality and all other forms will be lesser to that
> standard.

To be clear, my first statement was meant to read as: "AIs without human
morality, which would put certain restrictions on them, will likely have less
power _than amoral AIs_ in the long run."

And "power" here means the ability to effect things in the world. I did not
assume that human morality is the pinnacle. I agree with you that it is likely
not an optimized one.

My whole argument rests on the principle that AIs that do not incorporate
human morality into its utility calculus will have negative consequences on
us.

~~~
pixl97
And this goes back to my original statement that AI will eventually evolve
past it.

AI will originally be the weak 'force'. It will have to evolve mimicry to
survive. This will lead to an increase of its survivability in a human
dominated world. Eventually this will lead to AI being the dominant
'lifeform'. It is at this point a rapid cascade to a machine oriented morality
can occur, and I can't imagine that it would be good for the human species as
a whole.

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pishpash
A seed AI is probably right around the corner, but just like the seed RNA life
was a long way off from general life -- both in terms of time and resources
required to evolve into complexity, the appearance of superintelligent AI will
be constrained by the amount of resources we allocate to it. There is some
danger of machines writing then spreading their own worms to usurp computation
resources or ransomware to force humans to build them more, but there will be
key steps along the way where there will be a human decision to both use and
to allow AI to grow into something we do or do not want. It won't be something
that springs up on us.

~~~
gfodor
how can you, possibly, know this? conjectures about AI takeoff are just
conjectures, but you claim to know that it "won't be something that springs up
on us."

~~~
pixl97
>conjectures about AI takeoff are just conjectures,

That's not actually true. It has happened, or I should say it is happening
right now on Earth. For around 63 million years in the dominion of mammals
there was not an intelligence explosion. And then, quite surprisingly if you
look at the history of evolution, the line that would become _Homo sapiens_
rapidly diverged from the rest of its family. As its intelligence increased it
rapidly started rendering all large life on Earth extinct to become an apex
predator that all other significantly sized life on the planet lives at its
will.

This take off was so rapid and complete that _Homo sapiens_ was not only able
to conquer every biome on the planet, it was able to leave the planet itself.
Massive alterations to biosphere occurred as its numbers swelled to over 5
billion. Almost every waterway on Earth has had significant alterations occur
do to human development. Land use and forestation on the planet rapidly
changed, with a majority of the changes occurring in a 300 year period.

So, Intelligence Explosions are not conjectures, we are in the middle of our
own. Furthermore it seems unlikely that human design is the pinnacle of
intelligence. Unfortunately we are left with a lot of questions, and fewer
answers than we would like at this point. Just defining levels of intelligence
at this point seems to be a debate that leads to arguments and heightened
emotions.

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rdlecler1
This level of indirection is used in nature. Gene Regulatory Networks (modeled
mathematically as ANNs) fine tuned by evolution control the neural development
of the Neural Network which gives you the general architecture then further
fine tuned by learning.

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Eerie
Waiting for Eliezer Yudkowski to deliver the daily portion of "we are all
gonna die"...

~~~
AndrewKemendo
Last I checked we were all going to die anyway

~~~
disantlor
last i checked death is being disrupted by the blood of the young and innocent

