The future of AI

[boriz]

As a (former) programmer, AI has never held any mystique for me. Indeed, I wrote my first neural network in the 90's on an "IBM compatible PC", my first genetic algorithm too. But recently, the political will to exploit this emerging tech, and dump huge amounts of money into it without sufficient consideration for potential misuse, or safety issues, has given me pause. Here's a couple of interesting vids on the subject I found recently.

Military AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geaXM1EwZlg

Geoffrey Hinton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxkBE23zDmQGeoffrey Hinton

Edited Saturday at 03:05 AM by boriz

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

It is a tool. 

FYI - they're training AI on the internet 

GIGO 

[Lisias]

1 hour ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

It is a tool.

That works by statistics.

The only World in which such a tool would work if it would be fed by experts using carefully curated data.

But if we would had so many experts with so much time available in order to curate all the information in the World, we would not need that too at first place.

5 hours ago, boriz said:

Spoiler

 

You are being optimistic.

[DDE]

6 hours ago, boriz said:

But recently, the political will to exploit this emerging tech, and dump huge amounts of money into it without sufficient consideration for potential misuse, or safety issues, has given me pause.

The demand for an exploitable result currently exceeds supply. Current AI is optimal for low-end cognitive tasks requiring no originality, whereas the expectations are for superhuman insight. However, the methods suggested for achieving that are completely brute-force, and are extremely unlikely to succeed without a fundamental technological paradigm shift.

As I wrote elsewhere, it's not the AI that's worrying me, it's the humans. There is an awful willingness, a thirst to offload decision-making on an AI in search of "silver bullets", at a time where easy solutions are nowhere to find, and individual responsibility is more needed than ever.

Edited Saturday at 09:34 AM by DDE

[boriz]

25 minutes ago, DDE said:

optimal for low-end cognitive tasks requiring no originality

Like a soldier?

[boriz]

3 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

It is a tool. 

I Agree.

Like a hammer, or a knife, or a gun, or a small quad-copter with explosives on it.

Edited Saturday at 10:10 AM by boriz

[darthgently]

2 hours ago, DDE said:

The demand for an exploitable result currently exceeds supply. Current AI is optimal for low-end cognitive tasks requiring no originality, whereas the expectations are for superhuman insight. However, the methods suggested for achieving that are completely brute-force, and are extremely unlikely to succeed without a fundamental technological paradigm shift.

As I wrote elsewhere, it's not the AI that's worrying me, it's the humans. There is an awful willingness, a thirst to offload decision-making on an AI in search of "silver bullets", at a time where easy solutions are nowhere to find, and individual responsibility is more needed than ever.

Beautifully said

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

Guys... Look at the flip side of the training of AI.  The downstream, automated processes. 

Scraping. 

Figure out what that is and how 'curated' it might be. 

Sites & content creators are getting fed up and some are also starting to poison the system. So not only do you get the full panopoly of human misinformation and nonsense (aliens, conspiracies and ignorance) you now get to add active trolling of the AI to the mix. 

All it is is 'super Google' 

 

*FWIW I get what @Lisias and @DDE are both saying and implying - and fully agree. 

Paid for Enterprise AI might reach the 'curated' level... But probably not. 

Self aware world ender?  Nope. 

Lazy humans who assume they're not being fed garbage?  Yeah, that's the problem. 

Edited Saturday at 07:28 PM by JoeSchmuckatelli

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

8 hours ago, boriz said:

knife, or a gun, or a small quad-copter with explosives on it.

Weaponized?  More like a mean tweet or Chinese disinformation. 

Otherwise about the best you can do is mount it to a discreet weapon and allow it to guess the difference between a truck and a tank and select the priority it's been given when launched. 

Those fearing AI as a weapon should analogise a pistol in a drawer. Generally harmless unless someone picks it up and points it at you. 

Edited Saturday at 06:58 PM by JoeSchmuckatelli

[DDE]

8 hours ago, boriz said:

Like a soldier?

The scope of minute-to-minute tasks of a soldier greatly exceeds the capabilities of something that's brought up on the combined "wisdom" of the Internet, yes.

But remember, we're specifically talking about the AIs on the hype train, the GPTs that require massive data centers, not the small visual analysis neural nets everyone has forgotten about, and which are, at any rate, not a qualitative innovation compared to earlier automated tatget acquisition systems. Besides, turns out the current innovation in quadcopters with explosives isn't onboard AI but jamming-immune wire and fiber-optic guidance, LOL.

The expectation seems to be of gains at a higher level, e.g. churning over intelligence to deliver genius magical tactics that allow victory against forces with numerical and firepower superiority (i.e. developing on the magic already promised by Palantir), or pressing a button to design a new fifth-generation fighter (the New Century Series concept suggests adopting a new F-22/F-35-level fighter design every two or so years to be able adapt to trendy threats, and the designs would somehow stay on budget because "modern computer-aided design techniques"), or even simply "press button to have Skynet defeat enemy". Anything to escape mundane things such as the need to painstakingly rebuild industrial capacity.

[Lisias]

1 hour ago, DDE said:

Anything to escape mundane things such as the need to painstakingly rebuild industrial capacity.

Or to avoid paying people smarter than them.