Artificial-intelligence research revives its old ambitions

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/center-for-brains-minds-and-machines-0909.html

by singhketan7 • 13 years ago

26 74 13 years ago

web.mit.edu

In my opinion, hard AI could be just around the corner. Wonder what kinds of startups would rise up to leverage such a technology that is so natively different.

seiji3• 13 years ago

What would it do to the nature of startups? Startups would cease to exist. The first one to AI wins.

eli_gottlieb13• 13 years ago

I think you mean, the first one to AI laughs their butt off as the AI proceeds to kill all humans ;-).

moocowduckquack• 13 years ago

I'm not as scared of militarised human level AI as I am of militarised cat level AI. The former you may be able to reason with.

mbq3• 13 years ago

Er, you're assuming that this strong AI would be smarter than a human brain, what is not at all obvious.

ceejayoz2• 13 years ago

I thought the general assumption was that a strong AI would be able to rapidly self-improve. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

PeterisP• 13 years ago

From the evidence of how fast new botnets spread, and the current prices of 0-day vulnerabilities we can assume that any strong-AI can easily get access to immense computing power (percentage points of globally installed CPU's).

The difference is that it can use them not for sending low-return spam, but for multiplying its power - even if it doesn't give a qualitative difference, there should be a quantitative difference (how many different tasks it can do at once) when a strong AI gains many orders of magnitude more computing power than any laboratory/datacenter where it was initially created.

Houshalter11• 13 years ago

Strong AI generally means smarter-than human.

swombat2• 13 years ago

Solving all those problems should take a team of 10 or so scientists no longer than 2 months at the outset.

eli_gottlieb13• 13 years ago

Is this a joke about that 1956 conference?

swombat2• 13 years ago

Aye.

(Ai?)

But I forgot the exact reference (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_Conferences) so I will now edit my original post to include the right numbers...

JamesArgo• 13 years ago

There is that pesky issue of machine vision. But no worries I've got one of my graduate students ready to spend a whole summer on it.

_random_3• 13 years ago

Well, virtual reality makes a come back, why wouldn't AI?

eli_gottlieb13• 13 years ago

On the one hand, yeah, Occulus Rift.

On the other hand, I have a hard time thinking that anyone's going to treat virtual reality as all that cool after having seen The Matrix. Our culture now perceives "virtual" as something you're trapped inside, hiding you from the "real", rather than as a pleasant place to spend an afternoon shooting zombies.

hharrison9• 13 years ago

We are far, far from hard AI. If anything, this article shows that we're only just now starting to ask the right questions. And that's even debatable. Plus they're very hard questions.

The problem is we have no theory of intelligence, no theory of psychology. Research in the cognitive fields is fractured, all about tiny insignificant phenomena with little relation to anything else. Our best theory is "the brain is like a computer" which is, frankly, a terrible theory.

Here's something I find more promising: On Intelligence From First Principles: Guidelines for Inquiry Into the Hypothesis of Physical Intelligence [1]

In short, what we really need to understand is self-organization and non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Not image labeling.

[1] http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10407413.2012.645...

eli_gottlieb13• 13 years ago

Go read Juergen Schmidhuber's research and then tell me we're so far away we can't even see Hard AI on the horizon.

hharrison9• 13 years ago

Read the paper I linked and you'll understand why I'm not impressed.

tlarkworthy• 13 years ago

Yes I think the same. Understanding how thinking machines self organise out of a set of sufficient conditions is very important. I am commenting mainly so I can read your link later.

chongli9• 13 years ago

The problem is we have no theory of intelligence

I don't think we can have a theory of intelligence. At least in the public consciousness, intelligence is one of those "God-of-the-gaps" style concepts that continually evolves in order to maintain the illusion of human superiority.

hharrison9• 13 years ago

Well, to the extent that it's a scientific problem, it sure would help to have a theory. I sure don't expect that theory to enter the public consciousness anytime soon, if at all.

But I do agree with your sentiment as far as the way intelligence is usually discussed, even among the science-literate.

Houshalter11• 13 years ago

Intelligence certainly exists. There is a reason humans are building space ships and chimpanzees are playing around with sticks.

ramanan• 13 years ago

The goals of the new research center seem close to what Douglas Hofstadter (author of GEB) has been working on for all these years.

A related HN post from a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6605015

dave_sullivan• 13 years ago

I spend a fair amount of time thinking about this stuff...

Currently, we've got machine learning--I think there's a market for it, but it's early. I think the near term is about automating data science tasks--we won't have a shortage of data scientists because we can automate much of what they do. Even that's a hard problem. Personally, I think deep learning (specifically relatively recent neural net related research) will play an important part in this--as far as automation goes, it will help automate feature engineering (currently a huge cost).

In general, I agree with the sentiment in the comments that "we are a long way from AI". Objectively, we are. However, I think we were similarly a long way from flight when the Wright brothers figured out how to keep a plane in the air. Or towards the end of the human genome project--although at least in that case, we knew what we were doing, whereas AI still doesn't really have a good theory behind it. The first software that seems awfully "AI like" though--I'm thinking that it could very well appear by accident while working on more general machine learning tasks. I don't think we're as far off as most people think, but I certainly don't have a crystal ball (and neither does anyone else)

VLM2• 13 years ago

Maybe in your second paragraph you're discussing science vs engineering? For example from a science perspective the Wright Bros got to check mark "flight" pretty decisively, mostly because of their windtunnel work, although the engineering has mostly failed for most of the species and most of the species has never flown and due to massive resource constraints probably never will, so defining "flight" as a success is iffy.

The genome project is another science to engineering transition problem, where the science check mark is done, but as far as I know there are no widespread engineering applications for the data at all, although someday there might be in the generic sense that all research is potentially useful.

Something like this could happen in AI. OK the science proves conclusively that it could work, its just human engineering might not be up to it for a few centuries (like the Babbage experience WRT computation) or even the engineering is possible but the economics and politics make it impossible (like building a massive power generation dam across the straits of Gibraltar) We could prove the science of AI works, and then nothing happens for the next 500 years. Or maybe not.

Houshalter11• 13 years ago

That's actually a really good idea, automating data science. Currently it takes a lot of technical knowledge and time/skill. There are a lot of even everyday things where just putting your data into a spreadsheet and asking it for predictions would be useful.

j2kun• 13 years ago

Talking about "the nature of startups" seems pretty shallow in comparison. It's like asking "how close are we to a Mars landing? What could it do to the nature of startups?"

invalidOrTaken• 13 years ago

"How will the landing affect the social media landscape?"

jackylee0424• 13 years ago

Make me think about one of the classic (but imaginary) debate in StarTrek: Measure of a Man [1]

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PMlDidyG_I

_random_3• 13 years ago

About time!

atpaino• 13 years ago

It's funny to see this on HN, because I currently have a copy of one of Dr. Poggio's papers in front of me. I've got to say, from what I've read so far I've gotten more excited by his group's approach than any other's I've seen. If you are mathematically inclined and interested in AI, I highly recommend reading through some of his group's papers, which are available on their site[1]. For those of you commenting that we don't have any theory on how the brain does its magic, this new initiative should excite you because this group is actually approaching the problem from a far more rigorous theoretical viewpoint than before. Specifically, their theory of neurons storing both sample images and common transformations on them fits rather elegantly with what we know about the brain, and seems like a promising route to matching humans' ability to "learn" a new object from just one instance of it.

[1] http://cbcl.mit.edu/publications/index-pubs.html

AndrewKemendo• 13 years ago

I think this should be re-stated that a group of respected researchers have revived Artificial Intelligence's original ambitions.

In fact, there have been a handful of folks thinking and working on Strong AI/Artificial General Intelligence steadily for years. Ben Goertzel even started the conference [1] and journal [2] in 2008.

One of the biggest things I see in every one of these conversations and threads is everyone assuming humans are actually good at things, as opposed to just marginally better than most other machines or humans. So people's standards for machine intelligence are way above what they would expect from human standards.

Google translate is a perfect example. People were complaining about it here on HN the other day because it wasn't perfect, however in comparison to any group of average professional linguists (Some of whom I work with daily) Google Translate and some of the other machine translation services' accuracy for it's speed is light years ahead.

People also forget that "Strong AI" and "AI complete" is always a moving target for benchmarking - and there is no benchmarking standard (No, a turing test isn't a robust enough test for an AGI). I posit that humans will never truly accept an AI as smarter than us until it dominates us. It will always be - well yes it can X, but is it really thinking? Does it have consciousness? Great questions philosophically, but practically it really doesn't matter.

This is good though, I think if there is anything the human race should be working on it's this. Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING pales in comparison in my opinion.

[1] http://www.agi-conference.org/2013/ [2] http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/jagi

Artificial-intelligence research revives its old ambitions

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