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Comment by tsunamifury | Hacker News Reader

I think Jaron knows what many engineers who have worked on AI know: That the external promise of AI is far more inflated than the capability of the actual technology. It's simply that when the current technology gets just complicated enough for the above-average person to no longer understand, everyone starts assigning magical properties and expectations to it. This results in short term over-valuations, which inevitably lead to disappointment [1].

Jaron has observed this several times and rightly seems to be tired of repeating the same naive cycle.

As I'm just now entering my second cycle and watching tech repeat itself again -- I'm beginning to understand his weariness.

[1] https://hbr.org/2015/12/the-overvaluation-trap

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I understand how the technology works, and I still believe it's amazing and rapidly progressing. Certainly it isn't human level now, and it might take a decade or two to get there. But it's still an incredible advancement.

AI has gotten way better than anyone expected in the last 5 years or so. Progress in many of these areas like image recognition was super slow and challenging. And all of a sudden computers are approaching human level performance with a relatively general algorithm.

For decades robotics has been limited by AI tech. We didn't have the ability to do object recognition, control was really hard, teaching the robot to do things was nearly impossible, etc. Now those limitations are gone, and in the next 10 years it's likely there will be a huge explosion in robotics and automation.

Regardless of the success of current developments, in the long term AI is still inevitable. I have no doubt we will eventually figure it out.

I have no idea why people confuse long term predictions about something with short term ones. Someone saying "we will invent AI by the end of the century" is not saying that they it's definitely going to happen in 5 years and you should invest heavily now. Every time Bostrom and AI risk stuff comes up, there's a bunch of confused comments about how AI isn't that good currently, which misses the point entirely.

One of the many good points that Lanier made was that there is not currently an inevitable, moore's-law-like progression that will take modern AI methods towards the "superintelligence" that is meant when AI is discussed as an existential threat.

Coupling that with the fact that any AI will be limited by its human-defined interface leaves me pretty unconcerned about AI, even if we ever figure out what truly makes a conscious, intelligent being and determine how to replicate it fully in some other medium.

That said, I appreciate Bostrom's work as a philosophical rather than practical matter.

Taking a best-fit line like Moore's law as a fundamental law of the universe is a classic mistake.

Of course, there's no such thing as an inevitable progression of progress in AI research. Until we have AI software capable of contributing to AI research, of course.

"Certainly it isn't human level now, and it might take a decade or two to get there."

Any chance you could define "human level" in a way to make this a meaningful sentence? Twenty-five years after I was introduced to this problem and I still have never heard a better definition of "intelligence" than the Turing test, and it's a purely operational, "I'll know it when I see it" thing.

I.J. Good: "Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an "intelligence explosion," and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control."

A merely human-level AI is one that can match to some window of performance a random human in the intellectual outputs of that human, which are vast and general -- playing games, writing poetry, critiquing film, building small rockets, having conversations, programming, carving wood, teaching a class, diagnosing and fixing a leak, constructing mathematical models... For things that require a body, it suffices to instruct a human what to do, but this thing might as well help design a robot body that's at least as versatile as a human body since we humans do that too even if Atlas is still pretty far off. We're unlikely to have an AI perfectly human-equivalent in the sense that it would probably by default already be superior in some ways by virtue of its ability to not need sleep, do calculations efficiently and correctly, have access to perfect memory, and so on, and unless it's ultraintelligent then it's probably not better than a random human at everything (say directing a movie) just like you aren't.

> it would probably by default already be superior in some ways by virtue of its ability to not need sleep, do calculations efficiently and correctly, have access to perfect memory, and so on

Or maybe we'll learn that in order to be intelligent the machine needs to sleep, do mistakes, forget some things, etc.

Of course, hence probably. That would be really weird and unexpected though.

This drives a long cycle of AI booms and AI winters. Right now we seem to be in another boom. When the limits of deep learning and other new techniques become apparent, we'll be back in another AI winter.

My prediction: One or both of two problems will be the straw that breaks the "wait, this doesn't work as well as you've hyped it to" camel's back.

1. Explanation of why a particular decision was made. (I was incredibly happy to see the Toyota article this morning that mentioned this very subject.)

2. Flexibility in the face of change. (Or is there a better response to a model with declining effectiveness than "start over".)

The real question for me is:

What is motivating otherwise very intelligent people to promote the idea that AI will take all our jobs and/or enslave us?

Possible answers:

1) To prop up their investments in AI to get higher valuation.

2) To reach a political goal, such as basic income, which is often justified as necessary in a world where computers and robots take over the work force.

3) ?

A lot of intelligent people are promoting the idea that AI will take a lot of our jobs, for the simple reason that a lot our jobs do not require that much I. Whether it's driving a truck, plowing a field, or making food at a McEatery, a frighteningly large proportion of our economy consists of tasks which can be automated by technology coming online in the next decade or two.

Here's a big task that is a) not directly related to computers, and b) the coming wave of automation can't take away - maintenance. All those buildings, tracks, machines, etc. can't clean and fix themselves. We can't jump over everything with the standard market approach of making cheap disposable crap and replacing it wholesale when some component breaks. There's infrastructure. Like water mains, electrical conduits and cabling, etc.

We need one more breakthrough before we can free people from jobs - self-maintaining machines. Which will probably involve self-healing materials. Imagine if you could simplify maintaining underground cables to just making sure there's enough nutrient-rich fluid around them. Then we could automate the production and delivery of such fluid, and we'd be done.

The future without jobs is the future where our infrastructure heals itself, just like our bodies do.

I don't have an analogical example in mind, but I think that often-times, what happens when a revolution gets past a hurdle like automation vs maintenance, is that the hurdle gets worked around.

In this case, I think that, to a large extent, maintenance can be side-stepped by recycling and rebuilding. A bit like how the current world works: we can fix anything, but for most things, it's simpler to throw and buy a new one because the labour is more costly than the product itself. One example is asking a computer repair shop to fix your laptop screen (particularly so if said screen is touch-sensitive).

In a world where energy is free (fully solar for example), this is awesome: oh, you just got a month old car but a better design just came out? No problem, you'll get the newest one when your turn comes.

I doubt I'll see this kind of world (if it ever comes) in my lifetime, but it doesn't seem so far-fetched, I think.

Maintenance turns out to be a subdiscipline of logistics.

And if your instrumentation is good enough, it really becomes a subdisicipline of logistics, plus maybe the machines can begin to defend themselves from ordinary abuse.

Whilst the "enslave us" thing is a bit alarmist, regarding it taking our jobs there's a certain analogy here with mechanisation.

You pointed out (below) that historically people have often been terrified that machines would take all of our jobs, and that terror has turned out to be unfounded. But they weren't wrong, they were just wrong in thinking it would be a bad thing.

Over the last 150 years, the proportion of Americans employed in agriculture has dropped from ~70% to ~2% [1]. They've literally been replaced by machines.

A large proportion of those people are now doing menial intellectual jobs that likely will be replaced by "AI". A complete shift in the nature of the work we do isn't unprecedented, and it shouldn't be considered impossible, but it shouldn't be considered disastrous either.

edit: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_United_Stat...

The industrial revolution created a ton of jobs. Lots of people were needed in the factories. The industrial revolution wasn't about automating jobs that had existed before, it was about increasing productivity. A single skilled craftsmen could only make 1 chair a day, but 100 children working in a factory could make 1,000 chairs a day.

The only people who lost jobs were skilled craftsmen, who made up a tiny percent of the population anyway. And they weren't really lost, just replaced with lots of unskilled work.

Agriculture automation came years later, and the farmers weren't entirely screwed because they mostly still owned the land. If you own the robot that replaces you, you aren't necessarily worse off.

The coming technological revolution is entirely about automation. And not just automating skilled jobs, but most unskilled ones. A large percent of the population will be affected.

"Over the last 150 years, the proportion of Americans employed in agriculture has dropped from ~70% to ~2% [1]. They've literally been replaced by machines."

In most of the fields I've seen they've been replaced by Mexicans.

Then fine, it's probably 5% if you count them in. It doesn't change the fact that all the machines we now have, combined with the fertilizer revolution of the early XX century that started with the Haber process[0], has increased the food production output per worker by orders of magnitude.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process

Most of the industrial revolution has been about replacing mindless physical labor with machines. The unemployed humans (or their children, typically) were given new jobs as "knowledge workers." In other words, jobs which required thought as the principal skill. Now thinking is being done by machines. So where will the new jobs come from?

The difference is that this time we're running out of work we could give to those who will get displaced by machines. Yes, we can keep inventing bullshit jobs, but we've already reached the point when people are starting to ask, if working for the sake of working makes any sense.

Wat. I keep hearing the argument that there "won't be useful work to be done soon." Considering that a median house still costs 4x yearly median salary means that not only do we live in a resource-scarce world but we will continue to for a long time.

Just because you don't "see" the work humans currently do doesn't allow you to be ignorant to it happening. Just because you personally don't want to work (as most people) doesn't mean there isn't plenty out there for people to do.

>Considering that a median house still costs 4x yearly median salary means that not only do we live in a resource-scarce world but we will continue to for a long time.

Are housing prices, at least in the U.S. actually attached to the value of work, or they mostly affected by the banks willingness to hand out money?

Let's go another step and take work out of it completely. If houses were free, there would still be houses that are worth far more than others, simply because of proximity to other things of human interest.

Why, there still will be plenty of work to do - maintenance, for instance. But probably not enough for everyone.

That "a median house still costs 4x yearly median salary" means exactly nothing. The size of median salary is market driven, and the price of housing reflects the games banks and housing developers are playing, and thus can be arbitrarily high.

The house price is set by what buyer's are willing to pay for them. This is taking into account that in median, 4 years of that person's work-output will be required to purchase a house.

In which country is that? Last time I checked, the common way for financing a house purchase in the entire Western world is through a mortgage loan, which makes the house price tied to the size of the loan a bank is willing to give to an average person.

That's not how prices are set. Just because I can borrow $X thousand dollars on my credit doesn't mean I go ahead and purchase all the big screen tvs and computers I want. Just because I can borrow $XX thousand to purchase a car doesn't mean I'm driving around in a new mercedes. Just because I can borrow $X million to purchase a house doesn't mean I will purchase real estate which will turn my net accrued savings to 0.

When people only think short-term (what's can I afford monthly) vs. long-term (what will I pay out over the life of the loan vs. what I'm getting now) they make mistakes. These mistakes are self-inflicted but these people tend to then blame any and all others for why they can't get ahead, why the system doesn't work, why the American dream is dead :).

That's besides the point. Most young people today can't afford a house. So they take a mortgage loan to buy one, and surprisingly, houses tend to be priced just at the level of the loan an average person can get.

The situation is different from the TVs and computers and cars because those are not considered as important as your own house. Most people eventually have to move out, so they have to participate in the game. I believe we call it "inelastic demand".

At that point perhaps our society will have to recognize that we've reached the point where we simply don't need the entire population working. There's nothing inherently wrong with a fraction of the population working to support the rest of it, assuming everyone's on board. It might not be a easy change, but I imagine something like that will happen eventually.

>assuming everyone's on board

I'm on board with surfing all day while you maintain the robots to make my food. Is that cool with you?

Not GP, but yeah, it's cool with me. I can use some break from coding my own projects, but not too much. :).

Sure. And I'll have a bigger house, better food and more luxuries in compensation for volunteering my time to help support humanity.

Hence, IanDrake's point 2) in the comment upthread.

>Yes, we can keep inventing bullshit jobs

What is an example of a non-government bullshit job?

Most of the advertising industry, and resources they draw from other industries, e.g. print (think printing leaflets).

Let's elect dictator TeMPOraL to tell society what he/she deems worthy of human ouptut. Whatcouldpossiblygowrong.

Why thank you, but sadly, I must refuse. I am yet too stupid to hold such position responsibly. :).

You should still accept and then offload your decisions onto someone else you think is responsible enough.

Greeter?

3) Because it's a real possibility. What makes you think the otherwise very intelligent people are wrong? Maybe we should look to the stupid and to philosophers who don't understand computers for answers?

>What makes you think the otherwise very intelligent people are wrong?

Mostly history. Specifically the history of such predictions made by smart people of their own time that never came to pass.

I assure you, this has all been predicted before. AI taking over the earth is always a decade away.

There are people who wear tin-foil hats and there are those that sell tin-foil hats.

The former think they're saving the world, while the latter are just making money off of the former. It's the same business model as religion and global warming.

There are predictions and there are predictions. There will always be those predicting that strong AI is a decade away, right until the point when the last group is actually right about it.

But there's a different kind of "prediction", which I think is the type those smart people subscribe to - that we are on the path to an AI, that there's nothing that would make it impossible to achieve as the technology progresses (a reminder: we have a working example that intelligence can be built - our brains). Of course there are a lot of obstacles on the way. Personally, the most probable is that our civilization ends before we reach the necessary level - because of war, or all the economic and political shenanigans we see every day.

So their predictions are wrong, but yours are correct? You can't argue against someone else by saying all predictions are unreliable, and then insert your own predictions instead.

And nice, you managed to cram global warming denial in there too.

>So their predictions are wrong, but yours are correct?

Wrong/correct? We're talking about predictions, so let's talk about probability.

In the course of 20 years is it more probable that life will look more like it does today or that AI will make us all jobless?

That is why I'm "more likely" right and Elon is "more likely" wrong.

I'll put money down on it. If, in 10 years, it only takes 1 employee per shift to run an entire McDonalds, I'll give you $1,000.

And yes, I don't believe your single factor over-fit models prove anything about global warming. I'll put money down on that too.

> AI taking over the earth is always a decade away.

I can't say I've seen that said. Any sources? Most predictions I've seen for AI surpassing human intelligence are for mid 21st century. The reasoning isn't rocket science. I wrote an essay about it for some school exam 34 years ago. If you discount the religious stuff then brains are biological computers of roughly fixed ability and regular computers are less able but get better each year. If so, they'll overtake and you can kind of graph it and make a rough estimate of when.

I was with you until you plunged straight into global-warming denial.

This is one of those cases where you can't really extrapolate from history. At least linearly extrapolate.

If it's not a snark question, and you are truly interested in the dangers intelligent people see in AI, then I recommend the book "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies" from Nick Bostrom. I had the same question you had here, and that book shown me well reasoned arguments from the AI worry camp.

3) Press/Media

It's low hanging fruit, the public eats it up. Also people can be very intelligent but not have done the research in the field they are commenting on. Elon Musk and Stephan Hawking aren't AI PhDs.

I'll grant you Elon and Hawking, especially because the former is a "new guy", but otherwise intelligent people were talking about those issues for decades, and until very, very recently most people have either never heard of the issue, or thought those talking about it are loonies. Mass media is late to the party.

This all reminds me of the Y2K debacle. The world would end. Everything would stop. A common example given in the media (by "IT-professionals") was that all elevators would stop, I was always like: "WTF would an elevator check what date it is?"

Yeah. I remember Y2K and since I was already taking baby steps in programming back then, I was also perplexed as for why it would matter.

16 years later now, I see that about the only thing that could do some real damage was software in factories and stock exchanges breaking, and requiring downtime to fix. It would be that downtime that could do actual harm. Because I've now seen some code that runs in factories and... man, how this is totally and utterly fucked up. I'm happy nothing bad happened back in 2000. I'm also surprised that some manufacturing plants are running at all.

Yes, after seeing my fair share of code in different production systems, vehicles, med tech, etc, I'm amazed the world doesn't stop every day..

My explanation is that it's a power fantasy of people who believe they possess superior intelligence and like to dream-up a scenario where super-intelligence becomes a super-power.

It's just another apocalyptic narrative. They are apparently fun; you get yards of cognitive dissonance out of it.

Imagination.

I find the failures to be sufficiently spectacular that they're entertaining.

But on a more serious note, as some of the higher-order techniques of applied mathematics become more and more popular and find expression in tools ordinary people can use, that's liable to change a lot of things. If we get better at characterizing systems and making model-controllers for them, this might just matter a lot.

Your link is about banks pretending the financial markets were OK before the 2008 crash which is really a different thing. Probably some people assign magical properties to AI but a lot of average people use things like Siri and Google Translate and have seen self driving cars on video and have a realistic idea of what they can and can't do.

People always overestimate technological progress at the short time, and underestimate it at the long time. (Somebody else said that, don't remember who.)

On what time-frame are you make those claims?

Applies to human behaviour as well - we overestimate how much we will achieve or change in the short run, and underestimate the same in the long run.

Relevant: Clark's Third Law

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Yeah, we might as well quit calling it AI altogether. It's a terrible name. It really encourages pendulum swinging.

Actually, it's not as inflated as you might imagine. For example, extend Deep Minds work on video games to a fully simulated 3D environment of a factory. Now, have Deep Mind learn to 'play the factory' to produce goods (starting off with the current process as the baseline). Suddenly, the potential gets pretty exciting.

Assuming of course, the AI doesn't get control of the Factory by accident and does something terrible in the name of improving productivity.

You comment is already forecasting, overvaluing, and then presently justifying yourself using guesses based on a technology you likely don't fully understand.

Reinforcement learning isn't magic pixie dust that suddenly solves AI.

One thing we often do is assume for some compact subproblem that AI will offer massive optimizations relative to our current human baseline. However it often turns out that engineers have spent enough time to do a good enough job that the relative improvement is either not existant or small when focused on optimizing subcomponents of a system. With your video game reference there are some games that q learning does better than humans and others that does worse. For the factory floor I know data scientists and industrial engineers run optimizations to increase productivity and reduce costs. With their constraints it becomes hard or impossible for any algorithm to find a much more optimal solution especially when their problem is convex where the human generated solution is provably globally optimal.

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