
The AI Guru Behind Amazon, Uber, and Unity Explains What AI Really Is - wildduck_io
https://www.fastcompany.com/40491906/danny-lange-interview-what-ai-is-and-isnt
======
10-6
"I understand that a machine could kill people. But will a machine want to
kill people? That seems to go back to that philosophical notion of
consciousness."

This is exactly the issue with a lot of journalists and people talking about
AI/ML. There is no WANT or DESIRES from the programs, there is no self-
awareness where the programs ask themselves if what they are doing is right or
wrong. They are doing exactly what they were programmed to do.

With his example of adversarial networks, one network is learning to detect
fake news and other other is generating fake news--they are working towards
their reward functions and optimizing the weights to reach the goal. It's
math, that's all it is. It's so silly to bring up consciousness, desires,
awareness, fears, etc. in these AI programs.

~~~
candiodari
Don't you think that

> they are working towards their reward functions and optimizing the weights
> to reach the goal

applies to the human mind too ? Consciousness, when you think about it, might
simply be a layer of indirection that any sufficiently complex network is
capable of, if you give it a notion of time and events.

Certainly it's not super hard to make reinforcement learning "bots" that
certainly appear as conscious as small animals are.

~~~
10-6
that statement I made _may_ apply to the human mind and our thoughts, but it
also may not some would argue:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_theory_of_mind#C...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_theory_of_mind#Criticism)

So if someone were to disagree with the view of CTOM, then they can argue that
no, consciousness must be something else.

~~~
candiodari
CTOM's suffer from the Russel Teapot problem. All of them suppose magical
stuff is there. Of course none of it can be found in any inspection of the
actual brain ...

------
visarga
Ok, I took the bait, who is this AI Guru? His name is Danny Lange, who has
published his latest paper in 1999, which means ages ago in AI time. Keep it
real! This kind of hype is not worth it.

~~~
Karnickel
Independent of knowing who he is and how "famous" he is, I'm only looking at
the one thing I got from/about him: This interview. What I see is a very,
_very_ shallow article, both questions as well as the answers. Elevator music
comes to my mind, not a symphony.

That doesn't say anything about his abilities, but I'm not here to judge the
person but the article.

I think trying to find out "who he is" and his accomplishments is actually
bad: Let's just concentrate on the article. It doesn't get better or worse if
I were to know anything more about the guy. Everything that we are here to
talk about is there - I really don't understand some of the comments where
people try to discuss the _person_ instead of the content. Neither attacking
the person or elevating him are of any help.

------
pmarreck
Or he could have just said "massive linear algebra"

~~~
wildduck_io
lol reminds me of that xkcd about Douglas Hofstadter

[https://www.xkcd.com/917/](https://www.xkcd.com/917/)

~~~
tw1010
Surely it must have also reminded you of this xkcd:
[https://xkcd.com/1838/](https://xkcd.com/1838/)

~~~
pmarreck
I hope these don't get downvoted due to merely being humorous, but having
taken Andrew Ng's online Stanford class in ML, the takeaway for me was indeed
"this is just linear algebra at a massive scale" (fortunately, I enjoy linear
algebra!)

------
uberthrowaway12
It's laughable that this guy is called AI Guru. Does anyone in the AI/ML
community recognize him? What has he technically achieved in AI? Other than
jumping ships and giving broad AI talks (Elon-Musk-broad) to PR?

~~~
visarga
I checked him and there's nothing much to show in the latest 18 years.

~~~
uberthrowaway12
And his papers 18 years ago have nothing to do with AI.

I briefly worked with his team at Amazon and know that he knew almost nothing
about AI or ML.

------
yters
General artificial intelligence is inherently impossible, so why discuss its
ramifications?

No algorithm can create more information than is put into it, yet the hallmark
of human intelligence is the ability to create new information. The two are
inherently different beasts.

~~~
Danihan
>the hallmark of human intelligence is the ability to create new information.

What's an example of this "new information" human intelligence creates?

~~~
yters
An example I gave to the other commentator is humans can derive principles of
play in these games that AIs are currently dominating. AIs have a very
different method of playing, which amounts to memorizing a near perfect
tactical response table.

It seems like from a limited number of examples of A implying B, humans can
infer that A always implies B, and can from there figure out A' implies C
which is more favorable.

~~~
Danihan
I'm not sure that's new information. It's utilizing inferences.

Basically, humans are much better at stereotyping / categorizing objects than
machines currently are. But that could change (and is changing).

Watson, for instance, seems pretty good at making inferences.

~~~
yters
In general, inference requires the creation of new information, in a
Kolmogorov complexity sense. I.e. perfect inference uses Solmonoff induction,
and Solomonoff induction is only possible with the ability to enumerate all
elegant programs. But infinite Kolmogorov complexity is necessary to enumerate
all elegant programs.

