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Comment by DSingularity | Hacker News Reader

Most interesting statement is the last one. Author seems to think we are about to enter into another AI winter.

Seems odd given alpha go and recent success of deep learning.

Because when you start confusing pattern recognition and neural net training with "intelligence" and "learning" and "consciousness" then everybody who doesn't know enough about the technology will get wrong expectations, it's even worse as even people working on AI are having these wrong expectations, so yes a winter is coming. Besides that, the AI we have today is used all wrong, to spy on people even more and to consolidate central services and the big players.

Yeah, it seems pretty unlikely to me that there is an AI Winter coming, given that we now have programs that look at a photograph and say "Women wearing a hat, sitting on a bar stool and drinking wine" when 5 years ago such capabilities were unfathomable- The kind of capabilities that are currently being demonstrated have wide reaching applications and will take a decade to filter into the rest of the economy, even if you pessimistically assume that all research from now on reaches a complete standstill.

> given that we now have programs that look at a photograph and say "Women wearing a hat, sitting on a bar stool and drinking wine"

That may be; but then there's also this: http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.1897

Well, personally I think you could perform those exact same attacks against the human brain, but in the case of NNs it's much easier to do simply because computer algos allow for exact repeatable experiments.

So? Any generalizing learning algorithm necessarily accepts a large number of inputs (including some unintended ones) for each possible output.

Humans are no more robust against this kind of attack than any other system - consider stage magic, confidence scams, NLP, optical illusions, etc.

If you want a truly infallible system, then no, AI will never provide that. What you want is a magic deity.

and also programs that do the reverse: http://arxiv.org/abs/1605.05396

The skyscraper building frenzy always reaches its peak right before a recession. So a quick explanation could be that once a conceptual breakthrough happens ("deep learning") it gets applied better and better, and then suddenly winter. So you'll see new peaks conquered (so from the MNIST records from a few years back now to AlphaGo and everything TensorFlow et al. can do) but then the concept peaks, and back to the blackboard again! (Or wait for Moore's maybe-law for another already sort of okay theoretical concept to become implementable/applicable.)

Well, I would argue that the previous AI efforts basically had zero practical utility- I can't think of any piece of software I was using in the early nineties that contained any "AI code" from the previous 20 years of research (Maybe the A* algo in some games I played, and maybe some fuzzy search capability in word processor dictionaries)

This wave of AI from 2005 on, however, is affecting every facet of our lives significantly.

(Of course, the early AI research efforts lead to IMMENSE amounts of non-AI innovation in programming languages, database design, operating systems, etc so it may have been one of the most successful "failures" in history)

I'd say PageRank is pretty much AI, and anything running on distributed map-reduce implementations is some form of crude AI. [Except the word count! there must be always at least one instance of that running somewhere.] (Netflix, Amazon and anyone who was doing precomputed recommendations before 2005.)

Also, the ridicolously simple "recency algorithm" used by Mozilla to show things in the awesomebar (the merged search and location bar) probably saved more man-hours than the Netflix recommendations, but I completely agree that it doesn't feel AI at all. Just as the wheel doesn't seem like technology compared to the loom, and sometimes the inverse is true, as the James Webb space telescope doesn't feel like better technological achievement than going to the Moon, but it probably is.

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