[oldandtired]

You make the following comment regarding artificial stupidity systems (AI)

> since it knows how to correctly apply exist concepts to previously unexplored areas

and yet these systems know nothing at all. Far too many people (including the developers of such systems) have failed to understand that none of these systems can go beyond the programming that humans have incorporated into them. Yes, they appear to exhibit certain [abilities] but no more than any other essentially mechanical device and the limited capabilities that we have been able to design in them.

You can certainly pose questions and these systems (within the constraints of the programming involved in them) can retrieve and correlate data that is accessible. Bus the insights drawn will require human involvement.

Over decades, I have built tools to help in the analysis of all sorts of data sets and it has taken a human asking the [right] questions to get appropriate outcomes.

We do not understand our own intelligence let alone being able to build any artificial intelligent system that can operate on its own.

What does amaze me though is that we create natural intelligence systems all the time and they are called children. I have been avidly watching the development of my youngest grandchild and she makes an absolute mockery of any artificial system we have built anywhere.

In a very real sense, every artificial stupidity system (AI) that we have built is as complicated as a hammer or a knife.

It is what we (human beings) do with these simple tools that determine the outcomes.

[philipswood]

> and yet these systems know nothing at all. Far too many people (including the developers of such systems) have failed to understand that none of these systems can go beyond the programming that humans have incorporated into them.

> within the constraints of the programming involved in them

I think the point of machine learning is that programming isn't "incorporated into them".

These systems may not be intelligent yet, but we certainly didn't program them - the majority of their features and abilities arise from the training data they were exposed to.

[snoman]

I get what you’re saying, and will echo that these systems are still just tools that enhance what we, as humans, are capable of doing. But I think you’re failing to consider that even comparatively simple systems can exhibit emergent behavior, well beyond their programming. You’re being unreasonably reductive and dismissive.

[oldandtired]

Emergent behaviour can occur, not a problem. But if you study such systems, I think you will find that the emergent behaviour is based on the programming involved and is not "beyond the programming".

When it comes to intelligence, this is not something that we can say is actually emergent.

There are currently a number of projects that are looking into intelligence and free-will. There are researchers on the same teams who hold quite different opinions - the results for these projects are not at all conclusive.

[scooke]

I admire you for pressing home your point that others are missing. I practice a visual art form (which I won't name; many other smaller cultures around the world too have their own) which will never "emerge" from AI _unless_ it is programmed in, or trained on the visual art itself. Even though, I don't see how it could ever figure out the intricate detailed meanings without it being programmed. The people trying to counter you are thinking only within the culture within which these AIs have been created, and thus it does seem to them that anything AI creates is emergent because it seemingly created soemthing they haven't, didn't, couldn't, wouldn't. Without the programming (never mind the electricity), AI is still a blunt tool.

[ronald_raygun]

It is shocking to me how many people miss the fact that the big prediction machines trained on lots of data, are fundamentally historical and based on that data?

[ethanwillis]

The specific behavior you get is a result of the programming. what does "beyond the programming" mean? I think it's actually a meaningless statement.

I would love to see an actual example where a program does something not encoded in itself already.

[encomiast]

In what sense is a novel, never-before-seen image that comes out of DALL·E 3 "encoded in" in the system? The image may be, in a sense, encoded in the latent space of images, but so is every image (of the same dimensions) that ever has been or will be.

[oldandtired]

The images generated are based on two things:

1). the code within the systems

2). the data entered into the system.

Those images are the result of how the data is processed by the code. Even if you put in a random number generator, the code processes those numbers based on it internal code constraints.

Now a well designed and built code base may be able to generate every image of the same dimensions. You can certainly write code that can exhaustively generate every possible image, but the question here is whether this exhaustive generation is intelligent.

[nl]

This isn't really true except in the most reductive sense.

If you ask for a picture of Shakespeare dressed as Spiderman reading a McDonald's advert on the moon, no one has programmed that and the fact it knows these individual concepts is no different to the fact a human has seen them too.

[ben_w]

> The specific behavior you get is a result of the programming. what does "beyond the programming" mean? I think it's actually a meaningless statement.

The laws of physics encode every motion and interaction of every particle.

None of those fundamental laws directly says "water is wet".

> I would love to see an actual example where a program does something not encoded in itself already.

You see it every time you use a machine learning system. Even the simplest models, say a linear regression line in a spreadsheet, "learn" from the data, not from the code.