[bsenftner]

The "AI battle" only rages for those who don't make AI; those that write AI know that battle is lost, we will not have an AGI in our lifetimes. We lack fundamental components, such as artificial comprehension. Lacking any form of comprehension, weak or not, all AI technology can ever produce is idiot savants and personality theater. It is not capable of writing original software, beyond the use of pre-composable components, because lacking comprehension it is not writing anything. At the most it can predict given a lot of examples of similar, but it still does not comprehend its own predictions.

AI is a tool for creative people to use, it cannot replace them, unless you want a really boring product, because by design AI rehashes and recombines, it does not have a create capability in its capacity. To create requires comprehension, and lacking comprehension it is just mimicry.

[planetsprite]

What makes human behavior distinct from "personality theater"? What makes human comprehension different than advanced layers of mimicry and cross-functional adaption of learned experiences? Is this not what AI does?

[rytill]

How would you falsify this hypothesis? What specific task do you think AI will be unable to do in our lifetimes because of this lacking of comprehension?

[bsenftner]

One can not explain anything to an AI, it has no comprehension. You're talking to nothing, a brick. Lacking comprehension, using "intelligence" in the name of AI is a marketing joke. I write the stuff, at a very high level. All the "software engineer careers are doomed" crap is nonsense. Lacking comprehension, AI is an idiot savant and a damn good actor, and nothing more because there is literally nothing inside.

[rytill]

So what specific task will AI definitely not be able to do in 5 years?

[bsenftner]

The majority of what people want, because people will expect to be able to explain what they want, and that is speaking to a uncomprehending wall. Lacking comprehension is incredibly fundamental.

For example: you question I am answering, that act of answering your question requires comprehension of your question. Lacking comprehension, only a lookup of canned answers to expected questions is possible.

[qualudeheart]

Can you explain what you mean by comprehension?

[bsenftner]

A scientific foundation for artificial comprehension does not exist.

When comprehension tasks are discussed and researched within the AI field that is a statistical calculus applied to large bodies of text. The comprehension task is to predict follow-on text given starting text, which does not require any comprehension of the content of the text, only statistical probabilities over an extremely large training data set of human written text. This is, essentially, a misappropriation of the use of the word comprehension by AI Researchers - a common practice. The fact that this type of software development is called artificial intelligence and not applied statistical calculus is an example of how successful these appropriations have been.

Quantum computers or not, we still need some type of underlying scientific reasoning how comprehension itself functions.

Consider for a moment, when thinking about a yet-to-be-understood concept, what that activity of trying to understand is composed. A person will decompose complex concepts into smaller concepts, and then mentally create virtual logical versions of these smaller concepts, followed by experimentally, in their imagination, perform trial combinations of the raw concepts to determine if the complex idea can be reproduced. This process is roughly how comprehension is achieved, and it is a universal process human reasoning can apply to any situation. Human science and technology has no such fully transferrable and operational representation of raw concepts and ideas. The closest we have is software, and the closest form of software to something capable of artificial comprehension is… yet to be formally defined. What we call artificial intelligence is not software capable of decomposing complex ideas into smaller concepts because modern AI does not work with the content, the meaning, of the data it is trained, AI works with the landscape the data exists. Modern AI identifies a landscape the data associated with something of interest exists, and through the training of an algorithm that something of interest can be identified, with some level of statistical confidence. All this can and does take place without any comprehension capacity within the software, it is all just sophisticated pattern matching. It’s an idiot savant that can do but can’t tell you how, why, or is even aware it is doing what it does.

Comprehension is the recreation of an observed behavior or event, virtually, within one's imagination, with that recreation composed of the different ingredients that when composed in some new, unique, never before seen manner recreate this observed behavior or event. Comprehension is the process of mentally reverse engineering reality. Modern AI has nothing capable of such a grand calculus.