The Case Against Artificial Intelligence

The Case Against Artificial Intelligence(tra38.github.io)

17 points by tariqali34 9 years ago

> Now, some people may argue that these algorithms are not examples of "intelligence". The obvious conclusion must be that hiring people, beating people at Go, and playing Super Mario must also not be tasks that require intelligence.

Or it could be more nuanced than that. Effectively we have shown that given enough time (and data, and clever learning algorithms) we can teach machines to answer questions that we tell them to answer. But that is only part of intelligence---which itself is a tricky concept to even define. An intelligent agent is able to pose questions that need to be answered. (Or at least, we can probably come to a consensus agreement on that statement.)

And yes, this is a minor nit about a careless statement that was made, not an analysis of the full article.

Kadin 9 years ago | |

I think it's possible that "intelligence" is by definition always a chauvinistic property: it is whatever we possess that nobody else does. It is defined precisely by that difference between anything else, and "us" (for varyingly inclusive definitions of "us").

E.g. whales and giant squid are almost certainly intelligent in an absolute sense, relative to the average self-replicating organism (which is probably a bacteria or yeast at best, maybe an overgrown protein depending on who's doing the computation), but we frequently define "intelligence" in such a way so as to exclude them. I would argue that this says little about the quantity but a lot about those doing the defining.

"Intelligence" will always be out of reach for anyone other than humans because as soon as machines get close, we will simply move the bar a little. The nebulousness of the definition allows us to always maintain a je ne sais quoi that is all our own, and will never be approached by machine or beast.

TheOtherHobbes 9 years ago | | |

A practical definition of intelligence is the ability to successfully abstract and predict the outcome of interactions with an organism's environment in ways that aid long-term survivability of the organism's species.

With this definition, a Go playing robot has extremely limited intelligence. It can't model anything except the Go game in front of it.

Any single-talent AI is going to have the same limitation.

Most mammals are somewhat intelligent. It's not clear if dolphins and whales do much abstraction, or even if they need to do much abstraction to survive. Some basic heuristics are enough to get by, and - so far as we know, which isn't much - life in the oceans is less varied and challenging than in all the many different habitats on land.

Even so, dolphins and other animals can learn and improvise, which suggests a basic ability to model and predict reality through internal mental representations.

Humans are modestly intelligent. We've learned how to do basic abstraction and social learning, but we're still stuck in a bottleneck of individual competition, and are only just beginning to consider the possibility that it could be useful to model and predict our future as a species.

I would guess - based on no evidence at all - that at some point an intelligent species breaks through the bottleneck and starts being able to model the interactions of the species as a whole with the environment as a whole. That likely means starting with planetary environments and terraforming, but for all anyone knows it may expand to something much broader - because a species will have to understand itself extremely well to survive successfully the bottleneck.

So a true multi-talent AI will have to model the physical world - i.e. understand and improvise its own science - and also do the same with the human world. Which means it would understand and improvise human politics, psychology, and culture.

That would be quite something - light years from the current machine learning classifier projects that are so popular.

It's worth remembering that the benchmark for that AI isn't any one human, but all of human culture as a whole.

Most humans can't play Go, never mind win at it. The average human is also pretty terrible at music, psychology, science, art, coding, and so on. Worse, the average human will take a very long time to learn any of the above, and will still be averagely mediocre, even after a lot of time and effort.

But an average human is still good at being human - i.e. understanding and generating, possibly improvising, correct social and conversational responses for a variety of set situations.

AI theory seems to get this ability confused with intelligence. In fact a single-talent social AI should be possible. But even if it appears averagely human, it won't necessarily be a good general self-directed multi-talent AI that can quickly learn to beat the best human in in any problem domain.

quinnftw 9 years ago |

I'm not sure I would classify printing hand written strings as having a bot "write" the article.

ankurdhama 9 years ago |

When was the historical moment when machine learning earned the synonym of AI?

lisper 9 years ago |

The irony here is that by having a bot write an anti-bot story the author actually undermines the argument that bots will spin out of control.

partycoder 9 years ago |

Economy follows the path of least resistance and AI that path in some cases.

If you lead an organization and receive quarterly bonuses based on financial performance, laying off everyone and hiring robots and AI for a fraction of the cost might be the best way of being rewarded.

We are clearing cut forests, driving many land and marine species into extinction due to poaching, overfishing, habitat loss, acidifying the ocean, releasing green house gasses into the atmosphere, we are melting permafrost (including the one containing methane), warming the planet, we are killing off natural pollinators like bees, we have industrialized the killing of animals for our consumption... believe me, downscaling humanity to a higher level of sustainability might not be bad.