Editorial Onward to the Singularity: Google AI Develops Better Artificial Intelligences

[OSdevr]

Facebook's AI accidentally created its own language - TNW

I finally read this article and that AI didn't create it's own language at all, it just scrambled ours to the point that it couldn't even understand itself! The two bots keep saying the same things over and over with minor rearrangements and substitutions each trying desperately to get their nonsensical point across. It didn't create a new language it regressed into baby talk.

 

[Space Lynx]

It doesn't matter if it is a good or bad thing, Putin said it best, "Whoever creates the first true AI will control the world" (or something along those lines).

It is true, it is a rat race now. I hope the USA wins this race. It is the biggest one of them all. I live in the USA, so I am a little biased. lol

I don't think AI is scary at all, AI is still creating AI within its own confines of its original intent (its not just randomly writing code for a video game out of nowhere) and there in lies the definition of something we need to define, what does it mean to be a self-aware entity?

 

[Steevo]

It doesn't matter if it is a good or bad thing, Putin said it best, "Whoever creates the first true AI will control the world" (or something along those lines).

It is true, it is a rat race now. I hope the USA wins this race. It is the biggest one of them all. I live in the USA, so I am a little biased. lol

I don't think AI is scary at all, AI is still creating AI within its own confines of its original intent (its not just randomly writing code for a video game out of nowhere) and there in lies the definition of something we need to define, what does it mean to be a self-aware entity?

The first AI will come from either quantum supercomputers, or will need to be a special built chip and process size will have to be signifcantly smaller than it is now to make the thing work, as we are already up against technological limitations.

 

[plåtburken]

Why does AI topics always bring out the weird side of people.
As seen of today, the level of "AI" is still beyond what is mentioned and explained, it's all still "man" controlled to a certain degree.

 

[BorgOvermind]

That Darwin dude was partially right, Humans are involving into monkeys.
All AIs have to do is sit back and wait.

 

[MaMoo]

But that kind of answer would only be found through neuroscience. If consciousness does emerge after a certain complexity is achieved then the secret lies in it's simpler components aka the neurons.

That is not true. Let me give you two examples - chemistry is an emergent property of atomic physics, but chemistry is not well studied by physics domain techniques and social sciences is an emergent property of biology, but it is moot to study social sciences using biology.

The point is, like how air particles form a hurricane, the physical scaling of these weather phenomena transcends that of the size of air particles. It is my opinion that general intelligence is an emergent property of neuronal connections, so that when we can replicate the hardware to a similar complexity, intelligence should arise.

 

[MaMoo]

Argument from complexity is a logical fallacy, one committed by scientists all too often. Emergent phenomena can't transcend the fundamental limits of single components, rather their properties are based on them even if we don't understand how they all work together.

A lot of this discussion is boiling down to the mind body problem and the hard problem of consciousness. Personally I've thought about and studied both of these quite a bit but I can't say I've come to a conclusion.

See also the Chinese room. Really there is a whole branch of philosophy dedicated to these questions.

I am not sure what you mean by "emergent phenomena can't transcend fundamental limits of single components". It is obvious that emergent phenomena is responsible for new physical laws and order all the time. Without self-organization, we can't have the laws of chemistry from physics. A hurricane obviously has dynamically way more complex behavior than a tank of a few air particles. All emergent phenomena yield new transcendent physical laws and behaviors. You can't effectively study the transcendent behavior from the level of the individual participants. The behavior arises from interactions, so this isn't like the ergodic hypothesis at all.

I don't think we've sorted out the mind body problem, but I do think emergence is a strong component of it.

 

[Vya Domus]

That is not true.

It is , what you're claiming is the equivalent of saying that intelligence is not contained within the mathematical model the brain produces , model which can only be produced by the neurons and their structures. That obviously makes no sense. You're not actually sticking to the true definition of emergence.

"In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence is a phenomenon whereby larger entities arise through interactions among smaller or simpler entities such that the larger entities exhibit properties the smaller/simpler entities do not exhibit."

If intelligence is an emergent phenomena then the only thing left to do is to analyze the neurons and then study the resulting systems, therefore neuroscience is where the answer would be found.

It is my opinion that general intelligence is an emergent property of neuronal connections, so that when we can replicate the hardware to a similar complexity, intelligence should arise.

I don't know if you realize it but you're arguing against your own opinion.

 

[MaMoo]

It is , what you're claiming is the equivalent of saying that intelligence is not contained within the mathematical model the brain produces , model which can only be produced by the neurons and their structures. That obviously makes no sense. You're not actually sticking to the true definition of emergence.

"In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence is a phenomenon whereby larger entities arise through interactions among smaller or simpler entities such that the larger entities exhibit properties the smaller/simpler entities do not exhibit."

If intelligence is an emergent phenomena then the only thing left to do is to analyze the neurons and then study the resulting systems, therefore neuroscience is where the answer would be found.



I don't know if you realize it but you're arguing against your own opinion.

I gave specific examples. It is fruitless to study social sciences with only biology, in the same way I think it is fruitless to study intelligence and consciousness with only neuroscience. As per your quote "larger entities exhibit properties the smaller/simpler entities do not exhibit" which necessitates a new field to study them. In the same way that chemistry gives way to biology, which is an emergent feature of chemical interactions. But you'd be a fool to study biology only on the basis of chemistry or try to pretend that all theories in biology can be succinctly described by chemistry alone. Similarly, you can't understand group behavior with only biology. Understanding the biology of chimpanzees tells little about their societal structure. This is the same reason why fossils doesn't teach us much about the social structures of the creatures. All those are higher behaviors not studied at the lower level.

If we apply what you quoted to your statement - neuronal interactions produces higher order structures like intelligence. Therefore, the study of neuron structures and communications are within the field of neuroscience, as it is currently. As such, the study of neuronal interactions and the higher structures are subjects of another field that is one order of level higher. Similar to chemistry and biology, or physics and chemistry. In my example, you can't study cyclone-genesis on the basis of particle physics, or chemistry on the basis of physics or biology at the level of chemistry, with exceptions of course.

If you start to muck around with the current definitions of the fields, i.e., neuroscience stretches to incorporate psychology and psychiatry, then of course neuroscience will incorporate all those things you describe. I subscribe to a more rigid definition of neuroscience where it is the field that studies neuronal structures, neurons and their communications.

As for arguing against my own opinion - emergence works the way you quoted, but the study of its effects are not the way you argued. The whole reason that we have dynamical complexity and the entire field of chaos and emergence is a good example. For a man made example, look at Wolfram's work on cellular automatons and how their chaotic behavior arises from simple rules that are in the short term predictive but the higher order patterns are not studied within the domain of cellular automatons.

 

[mouacyk]

The answer is motivation. Now get that hunk of metal moving.

 

[OSdevr]

I am not sure what you mean by "emergent phenomena can't transcend fundamental limits of single components". It is obvious that emergent phenomena is responsible for new physical laws and order all the time. Without self-organization, we can't have the laws of chemistry from physics. A hurricane obviously has dynamically way more complex behavior than a tank of a few air particles. All emergent phenomena yield new transcendent physical laws and behaviors. You can't effectively study the transcendent behavior from the level of the individual participants. The behavior arises from interactions, so this isn't like the ergodic hypothesis at all.

In my example, you can't study cyclone-genesis on the basis of particle physics, or chemistry on the basis of physics or biology at the level of chemistry, with exceptions of course.

If you start to muck around with the current definitions of the fields, i.e., neuroscience stretches to incorporate psychology and psychiatry, then of course neuroscience will incorporate all those things you describe. I subscribe to a more rigid definition of neuroscience where it is the field that studies neuronal structures, neurons and their communications.

Actually you can do all of these things (see quantum chemistry, biochemistry and neuropsychology as examples) it just gets easier to study the whole instead of all the little parts. Emergent phenomena may yield new behaviors but NOT new laws (this is what I meant when I was talking about limits). A neuron for example is immobile and no matter how many neurons you have or how complex their connections are the network can't move because it contains no movable parts.

 

[MaMoo]

Actually you can do all of these things (see quantum chemistry, biochemistry and neuropsychology as examples) it just gets easier to study the whole instead of all the little parts. Emergent phenomena may yield new behaviors but NOT new laws (this is what I meant when I was talking about limits). A neuron for example is immobile and no matter how many neurons you have or how complex their connections are the network can't move because it contains no movable parts.

I see what you are saying, but I am referring to the new phenomena that emerges to have its own laws. For example, it was observed that emerged complex phenomena can manifest "life of its own", so to speak. Physical chemistry (quantum chemistry) is a field based on atomic physics, biochemistry is a partly interdisciplinary science and neuropsychology as well. There is this new drive to explore the most interesting science that lies between adjacent fields in science, hence the increases in funding in the last decade towards interdisciplinary sciences. This whole expansion of each field to incorporate parts of others is not the same thing as being able to study one from another. I can not study physics from arts, the way they are today, although you can portray elegant physical concepts in art and such has been done since DaVinci.

"it just gets easier to study the whole instead of all the little parts" I want to point out that this is not just "easier" but "possible". It is actually impossible to study the individual parts when the problem is one of n-body interaction in any system. These kinds of problems scale exponentially in computation time with additions of more individual parts, which means that when confined within the originating field and level, complex multi-body interactions are not even possible to be studied. We can't simulate a society even if we understood every last bit of biology. A good example would be multi-body collisions or even a game of Go. This began even with Newton, who wondered about the stability of the planet orbits and was never able to answer this question from within Newtonian physics. This issue was eventually studied (and continue to be studied) from a higher level of dynamical systems and chaos. We can simulate fluid dynamics using particles, too, but that behavior and its associated fluid dynamical laws occur at a higher level, not at the particle level. We are simulating neurons now, which then produces cognitive behavior.

Back to the topic at hand, "no matter how many neurons you have or how complex their connections are the network can't move because it contains no movable parts" is just not true. Those neurons are interacting and those complex interactions yield thoughts, which form "life of their own". An analogy would be that optical fibers communicate information, but the world's worth of communication patterns are better studied outside of photonics. Another one is that although the field of semiconductor physics brought us modern transistors, the originating field is useless to study the IPC behavior of say, Intel CPUs. That task is better left to a higher complexity (in terms of behavior, not workload) field - engineering. Similar situation with traffic flow made of cars but congestion on a city-wide scale is a complexity higher than just dynamics of two cars. Those higher order structures, "vortices" to borrow a term from fluid dynamics have behavioral laws that are one order of complexity higher than the originating order. Turbulence, for example, is a continuum concept and has no equivalence in particle-level physics. Law and order, for another example, is a social construct that has no equivalence in the originating, biological-level. That's the idea of emergence of higher-order structures and their associated, new laws. The neurons don't have to move, but they build a network on which higher order processes, which we call thoughts, do move and take lives of their own. That's my best guess at how massive networks of simulated neurons may one day eventually give way to true machine intelligence, through emergence.

 

[BiggieShady]

Using neural network to correctly classify regions in the captured frame is what we repeatedly see demonstrated.
Those are good old algorithms from the 1970's reworked and applied on today's massively parallel compute architectures, and that's great, neural networks learn faster, detect faster and are correct more often.
The real starting point of AI is in the next step, detecting relations between detected objects - spatial, kinetic, physics in general (and emotional if humans/animals involved) and from that resolving a context, using memory of previous visual-relational contexts.
Here lies a trap, how much will we intermingle our classic procedural approach with neural networks for all these tasks.
Interesting stuff.

 

[Bytales]

That's just an idea stuck into the realm of science fiction unfortunately and I wish people would stop giving so much attention to fancy TED talks and Elon Musk.

Awareness and strong-AI doesn't just pop out of nowhere as you keep building larger and larger neural networks. Neuroscientists have studied neurons and the structures associate with them for decades and there is still not a clue as to how these elements spark intelligence so the idea that you can just scale up cognitive architectures until suddenly it becomes aware and intelligent seems to have no real basis suggesting that the answer is somewhere else.

And that answer might be that the solution lies into the abstraction that you build on top of these models and that can't be created by mistaken without even knowing it and most importantly it's not inherently guaranteed. There is no reason why it would be.

A very Valid point here, and i quote :
"there is still not a clue as to how these elements spark intelligence".
There is a missing Piece we are yet to discover. And that is the Spiritform of the human.

A bit more on this. Every animal has a Spiritform located in the central nervous system, (in the human is the Superior Colliculus), what differentiates HUMANS from animals, is that Humans have a spirit form through which the human is aware of itself. This is the very definition of humanity, which will be later established later on, once the Human Spirit form will be detected, inspected, researched, etc. A robot, or AI in this case can never be aware of themselves, like humans are, since they lack a Spiritform. The only exception to this will be ofcourse an artificial construct so complex that will allow the residence of a spiritform within its structures, like the spiritform resides in the structures of our body. But that is future music alltogether.

By this definition alone, any biological entity aware of itself, can be classifieds as a human, even if it has different shape size, construction and adapted to different planetary conditions (temperature, pressure gravity, etc). This way for example, all the species in star trek (cardasians, klingons, bajoran, etc) are humans.

By contrast to humans, animals, allthough they have a spiritform, they are not aware of themselves, like the humans are aware of themselves.
When an animal dies, or when a human dies, The Spiritform exits the body, and an animal Spiritform cannot enter the next time in a human body and viceversa.

I must underline, that this is a totally new domain of science, we dont even know exists, because we dont have yet the technological means to detect the fine spiritual energies, and the Spirit form in living beings.

This whole new Science Domain, is the missing piece that we lack understanding of, that tells us, what the human mind is, the human psyche, where the thoughts come from, what enacts inteligence, etc.

AI Scientist should start to familiarize themselves with these new concepts, allthough accurate info regarding this is extremly rare, and most is bullshit, there is only one and only one individual which provides accurate information regarding this new area of science. I estimate it will take at least 100 years before humanity familiarize itself with this new domain of scientific discovery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Meier
http://www.ufofacts.me.uk/index.php/billy-meier/b1/who-is-billy-meier
More info on the Spirit here
http://www.ufofacts.me.uk/index.php/creaton/investigation/immortal-spirit

One might not probably grasp it by reading this post, but this new Domain of science, SpiritScience, has implications in Cosmology, Physics, Planetary Science, Age of the universe, temporal/quantum mechanics, and what not.
The problem is for now the "Spirit" term, is cast in a magical light, by the "Church and Co. aka Religion" which are nothing but a bunch of connmen, thiefs, liers, and murderers and obstructors of truth.
But Science and Truth will prevail some day. Mark my word for it.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

Argument from complexity is a logical fallacy, one committed by scientists all too often. Emergent phenomena can't transcend the fundamental limits of single components, rather their properties are based on them even if we don't understand how they all work together.

A lot of this discussion is boiling down to the mind body problem and the hard problem of consciousness. Personally I've thought about and studied both of these quite a bit but I can't say I've come to a conclusion.

See also the Chinese room. Really there is a whole branch of philosophy dedicated to these questions.

Yes but I understanding the individual components, Really understanding, not the 4% we know and proclaim describes matter intimately will take many more decade's, and the fine points of our self awareness might lie in what we don't know for example higher dimensions, we at this point can't be sure we aren't just an avatar of some other being in a higher plane.

Ai is so far off from the singularity imho that i will be dead before it happens, and so will most that work upon it.

To me Ai can and will be made to seam intellectual but just like Google lets you down via rubbish voice recognition now and again Ai will always hit a wall of wtf occasionally and not know the corret way to procede.

I am very much of the trecky mindset where we will be able to converse and reason with Ai's but they don't get to be Captain and will be ignored if they disagree with the bossman ,and then wouldn't throw an Ai strop teleporting the captain off the ship as i might do if you pinned my mind into a ship.