[skrebbel]

@idlewords has a very nice talk about this: "Superintelligence, The Idea That Eats Smart People". http://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm

Also don't forget the filter bubble we're in. This article opens with "We’ve been told the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution is right around the corner", but only a rather specific in-crowd actually believes this. I bet if you'd interview the average world-citizen they'd not be so convinced.

[gradstudent]

> I bet if you'd interview the average world-citizen they'd not be so convinced.

I bet if you interview the average AI researcher they'd not be convinced. All the progress we've seen can be summed up as doing dumb things quickly. Obviously that's a bit reductive and some of the dumb things are less dumb than they were before but it's hard to deny how much progress depends on our ever increasing ability to do mechanical things faster than ever before. "Dumb things quickly" is also closer to the truth about the current (and forseeable future) state of AI than all the pop-culture bullshit about super intelligence and robots taking over.

[emiliobumachar]

> All the progress we've seen can be summed up as doing dumb things quickly.

Multiplying large numbers, playing chess well, and proving mathematical theorems were widely believed to necessarily require intelligence, up until when a machine could do it.

[cat199]

Doing those tasks intuitively requires intelligence - and has still not been done. Doing these tasks brute force by exhausting the problem problem space never required 'intellegence', only computational power.

[cbr]

> doing dumb things quickly

AlphaGo's policy (what moves should I look into) and value (how good is this board position) networks aren't dumb-but-fast. The rollouts are though.

Recent image successes (classifying images) aren't dumb-but-fast.

[folksinger]

You can still trick the best image classification techniques with objects that to the human mind are clearly not what the machine says they are. Machines do not reason in the way that humans do. They don't have a concept of a self that exists in space-time. Humans can make inferences about images precisely because they have an a priori understanding of space-time.

You will always find that those who have faith in strong AI also have faith in a reductionist approach to human intellect. That is, they are behaviorists and neuroscientists and not philosophers and poets.

What makes great art is not the notes that make up the melody but expression of the human condition.

Machines do not make art. They make meaningless objects.

[septimus111]

This is something I want to believe, but history shows us that scientific progress often comes with the loss of traditional, magical views of the Self and of the universe which are taken for granted: Newton "unweaved the rainbow", Darwin showed us that we are quite close to monkeys, and so on. If AI reaches a point where it can mimic great art, it will be a shock to humanity similar to when we discovered that humans are only a minuscule part of time and space.

[novia]

I'd argue that the classifying images successes do indeed qualify as dumb but fast. Not to say it was not a difficult problem to teach a computer how to solve, but if you ask a 5 year old to pick out all the pictures that contain chairs they could definitely do it. Vision & identifying things is a problem that even very dumb humans can easily solve, but all of us do it relatively slowly.

[colmvp]

Strangely, I feel the opposite. That the in-crowd is aware of the limitations of AI and the average educated citizen is largely fearful of the incoming implications of highly advanced AI.

[rubidium]

Agreed.

AI/ machine learning is really expensive to most companies. The ROI just isn't there for a lot of business domains. I don't think we'll ever reach a full AI controlled society for the sames reason the world will never run out of oil: supply and demand. As demand rises so will price, and at a certain point it's cheaper to employ people.

That said, there will be swaths of industry that are more easily automated that will be (and already are), but there are much larger areas that will still need people doing the 'plumbing' with excel and phone calls.

My guess is there's going to be a continued trifurcation in the white collar work force that we've been seeing for 20 years. 1) The MBAs: they will continue to run the show for the vast majority of businesses. 10% 2) The tech kings/queens, barons, and knights: they will run a few of the mega-tech businesses. The rest will work for the MBA's and get rewarded nicely. 10% 3) The information plumbers: proficient at writing/reading reports for the MBA's, working in excel, calling who needs to be called, and moving stuff to the right space when the machine doesn't know how to (e.g. when the tech royalty messes up). 80%

Then there's the blue collar class. Most of the changes there have already begun to happen. The loss of jobs in manufacturing will be echoed in some other industries (e.g. trucking... we'll still need truckers, just not the same % of the population).

The standard solutions for these changes people propose is: 1) UBI: I believe this is a pipe dream that helps the tech royalty sleep at night. 2) Training: Covert Blue collar jobs into the while collar plumbing class. A nice idea, and has merit. The problem is white collar is office, and most blue collar employees _HATE_ the office. 3) Infrastructure: hearkening back to the United States CCC, beef up infrastructure projects to replace loss of jobs in the blue collar sector. This is not a bad idea, but has funding issues.

Any I missed?

[dirkc]

This made my day:

> If AdSense became sentient, it would upload itself into a self-driving car and go drive off a cliff.

[djaychela]

"I bet if you'd interview the average world-citizen they'd not be so convinced."

That's as maybe, but it doesn't mean it's not going to happen.. Granted it's easy to see the possibility of AI taking over everything when you're working with it, but I don't think ignorance of the field has any bearing on whether it actually happens. It was popular opinion in the 1980s that video phones will "never happen" because the telephone system couldn't handle the amount of information needed for pictures to be transmitted, and that's clearly no longer the case.

I'm merely an interested observer of this stuff, who is slowly learning programming. But the vast majority of people I speak to (and indeed teach) are totally oblivious to the advances that are being made, or their consequences. But that doesn't mean that some of them will not have particular jobs available to them in 10 years time because of the progress of which they are unaware.

[s_kilk]

> I bet if you'd interview the average world-citizen they'd not be so convinced.

You don't even need to go that far afield, we're talking about a country that can't even provide clean drinking water to all of it's citizens.

[skrebbel]

Wait, we were talking about a country? Which one?

[s_kilk]

The USA. Look up what's going on in Flint.

[skrebbel]

Personally, I find the USA very far afield. (I'm in the Netherlands).

[dirkc]

From the link you reference:

> Premise 2: No Quantum Shenanigans

> ...

> the mind arises out of ordinary physics. Some people like Roger Penrose would take issue with this argument, believing that there is extra stuff happening in the brain at a quantum level.

And some other people would take issue with the idea that you can talk about a simple physics that excludes quantum physics.

> But for most of us, this is an easy premise to accept.

I'm out.

[marcosdumay]

It's not excluding quantum physics, it's excluding quantum shenanigans.

You'll certainly need chemistry to model the brain; you'll very likely need solid state physics; everything points towards you needing some very low level molecular dynamics.

What you can't use is high temperature long term coherence. Mostly because quantum physics all but forbids it.

[yorwba]

But of course you can talk about simple physics without invoking quantum physics. What do you think physicists did before? Most everyday phenomena can be approximated very well by classical physics, and modeling the full wave-function for every particle wouldn't even get you any results in a reasonable time.

Since neurons are relatively large and dense, I expect a classical approximation wouldn't show any observable difference in behavior. Unless a deviation is shown, I don't think it is necessary to postulate things like Roger Penrose's quantum-gravity "explanation" of consciousness.

[DiThi]

I read it as "everything can be explained with classical physics alone", the same way we can safely assume the Earth is flat for making a small house. We're not going to complicate math by using the curvature the same way we're not worrying about tunneling, spin, entanglement, etc.

[dirkc]

That is exactly why I'm skeptical. Photosynthesis involves quantum entanglement. I'd be surprised if quantum entanglement doesn't play a role in consciousness.

[haltingthoughts]

Saying that quantum effects are present and saying that the human brain is a quantum computer (or more?) and will get exponential speedup are two very different things.

[DiThi]

We have a pretty good understanding of the individual neuron, and we modeled it with good accuracy. We used a very simplified model of it to build deep learning. The problem is the absurd amount of neurons and interconnections that we would have to run to simulate a human brain.

At some point we may find some phenomena for learning that involves some quantum event, but I doubt we have ever to simulate them at the quantum level.