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Comment by alextgordon | Hacker News Reader

What is our purpose if computers can do everything better than us?

It feels like computers have taken one aspect of humanness: logic. Computers could do arithmetic, do algebra, play chess, and now they can play go.

It hurts because logic is usually thought to be one of the highest of human characteristics. Yes computers might never be able to replicate emotion, but even dogs have that.

There's still some aspects we have left to call our own. Computers perform poorly at language-based tasks. They can't write books, write math papers, compose symphonies. I hope it stays that way.

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You're implying that if something can be outdone it doesn't have a purpose, which seems to rule out purposes for pretty much everything.

I'm sure there's always someone that can write books or maths papers or symphonies better than you. I don't think this robs you of purpose, unless your purpose is to be the absolute best at something.

Anyway, I find it curious that you would say logic is a quintessentially human trait, because humans are naturally quite bad at logic.

The difference between being outdone by another human and being outdone by a computer is that the computer's efforts are nearly infinitely reproducible, given the processing power.

So a more apt analogy would be if there was someone inside every cellphone who could write books, papers, or symphonies better than you. That day is coming.

And it would be great. Think of all the great symphonies and books!

And the economic preduction. And the influx of wealth into underdeveloped countries. And all of the people not dying.

Reading this thread, I believe there's one aspect not discussed: in a battle between man and machine, it's debatable who wins and depends on the domain, but a man-machine combination always wins over both.

On emotions, that's a characteristic of life. With the consciousness we possess, without emotions we would quickly realize that life isn't worth living. I doubt that a "true AI", one with consciousness, will want to live without emotions. And about dogs, we haven't built anything as sophisticated yet ;-)

On AlphaGo, personally I'm not impressed. It's still raw search over the space of all possible moves, combined with neural networks and these techniques do not have the potential to yield human-level intelligence.

On logic, we have enough as to be able to build AlphaGo (also aided by computers and software that we've built, in a man-machine combination, get it?). Can a computer do anything resembling that yet? Of course not, because for now computers are just glorified automatons.

"Reading this thread, I believe there's one aspect not discussed: in a battle between man and machine, it's debatable who wins and depends on the domain, but a man-machine combination always wins over both."

It doesn't 'always'. Advanced chess is already dead, and judging from the pro commentaries, they currently are worse than useless in an 'Advanced go' setting. That may change, but given how much faster computer Go is reaching superhuman levels than computer chess, the 'Advanced go' window may have already closed.

It's not even close to raw search over the whole move space. AlphaGo searches fewer moves than Deep Junior did, and Go is a much larger game. Your premise is just wrong. AlphaGo is precisely so impressive because it operates much like a human does.

Computers will be able to compose symphonies very soon. If DeepMind started working on this problem, I am sure that they would succeed. At least, we would have some innovative mashups of Beethoven, Mozart and Tchaikovsky. But training a powerful AI on a massive dataset of all popular and classical music should produce some extraordinary results. Especially if the dataset was given as MIDI with separate instrument tracks, so that an AI could learn how to write parts for different instruments, and how a song should be balanced. I actually think we are at the point where we have more than enough data to distill the essence of "good music", and generate an endless supply of great songs.

People have been doing his for decades, but as far as I'm aware, no-one has tried it with thousands of distributed servers and millions of songs.

Training it on popular music will at best make a machine that's really good at making music that humans enjoy. The really interesting breakthrough will be when a computer makes music for itself.

Composing an amazing symphony is probably about as hard as being the best go player in the world. But I think we're much further away than you think.

AlphaGo needed a training set of perhaps a billion games to be as good as it is. The dataset of master Go games is perhaps a million games. So AlphaGo played at tons of games against a half-trained version of itself to reach the billion game mark.

This doesn't work for songs, because there's no one to tell AlphaBach whether any of the billion symphonies it makes are any good. AlphaGo can just look at the rules and see if its move lead to a win, but there's no automatic evaluation function for music.

Perhaps the Matrix wasn't using the humans for power, but rather the computers wanted to get good at writing music, so they gave each human in it slightly different music and watched their emotional responses.

> Perhaps the Matrix wasn't using the humans for power, but rather the computers wanted to get good at writing music, so they gave each human in it slightly different music and watched their emotional responses.

This is possibly my favorite comment of the whole thread.

It's a super interesting idea and could make for some fascinating science fiction. Poorly programmed AI might not wipe out humanity, because it still needs humans to evaluate its fitness function.

>This doesn't work for songs

don't you think that a team trying to build this could provide a free offering where users get free algo-generated music in return for 1-10 voting on a song-by-song basis. given enough time and votes, i suspect that the algo could get remarkably good at delivering satisfaction.

Bad (good?) news: we can indeed algorithmically determine a song's intrinsic quality (to some degree): http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1136733...

Why assume that humans and computers won't merge?

We are the Borg. Resistance is futile.

Not necessarily. Maybe just individual enhanced humans. Or small collectives.

Do you feel the same way about your human children? Would you rather they were 'better' than you or 'worse'?

No it won't. Natural languages are the next focal point of AI research. Expect big changes in the next few years.

You mean, in addition to the big changes of the last few decades?

I mean, like actually passing the Turing test.

That's easy. Just pretend to be a really stupid human. It's been done before.

Turing test isn't just a natural language problem. It is far more complex and requires context awareness and emotional intelligence far beyond where we are currently. Language recognition has been at the forefront of research for at least 30 years and it has improved significantly. However, the turing test aspect has only minimally improved.

Edit: iopq, pretending to be a dumb human (or one with a language barrier) is cheating for a headline. A real Turing test would require a computer imitate a human for longer than 5 minutes (although currently that is plenty of time) and without any caveats or limitations on the computer's skill.

Yes, it is very hard challenge, even for 5 minutes. Still, I think we will see some significant progress soon.

There is no "purpose".

There is only selection.

Meat is just a phase.

Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children. -- Marvin Minsky http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/sciam.inherit.html

"Naches" from our Machines https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26117

>Naches is a Yiddish term that means joy and pride, and it's often used in the context of vicarious pride, taken from others' accomplishments. You have naches, or as is said in Yiddish, you shep naches, when your children graduate college or get married, or any other instance of vicarious pride. These aren't your own accomplishments, but you can still have a great deal of pride and joy in them.

>And the same thing is true with our machines. We might not understand their thoughts or discoveries or technological advances. But they are our machines and we can have naches from them.

Our purpose is to enjoy life... Strive to be the best Go play you can be and enjoy the process.

Don't worry about the machine. Even in Star Trek TNG, Data can outperform everyone in every task, but was never truly happy!

Yes but Data is a fictional character written by a human.

What is the purpose and meaning of anything else? We human being is just a node in the evolution of the whole universe.

I hope it won't stay that way :) If we can create a being smarter than ourselves, we should by all means do so.

First we would have to figure out our purpose even if computers couldn't do everything better than us. I don't think many people have answered this question. I believe the answer is something to do with love, reproduction, creation, and happiness.

>What is our purpose if computers can do everything better than us?

You think we have one now?

> What is our purpose if computers can do everything better than us?

Use the computers to engineer ourselves to "superhuman" capabilities.

Future research will be along these lines.

and what is our purpose if there are no computers at all? you can keep believing whatever you believe, computers being good at things change nothing.

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