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Comment by nukeop | Hacker News Reader

It looks like it's just a way of reassuring the "common people" that all AI systems are good, under human control, and helpful. Google's AI is often centered on surveillance, profiling, marketing, and exploitation. We are being spammed with pictures and videos of happy people playing with children and animals so that we learn to associate AI, and Google's AI in particular with happiness and innocence, while it is simply a very powerful and unimaginably advanced tool of corporate oppression.

I found a lot of factually incorrect statements in that article. Such as: "If a human can’t perform the task, then neither can an AI." Don't we create AI systems to solve problems human cannot all the time?

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Yeah, this whole article seems... off.

> We are being spammed with pictures and videos of happy people playing with children and animals so that we learn to associate AI, and Google's AI in particular with happiness and innocence, while it is simply a very powerful and unimaginably advanced tool of corporate oppression.

I might be in a minority here, but I found those cute pictures off-putting. Like "too much sugar", "fake happiness" off-putting. Hell, some pictures/videos reminded me of Black Mirror. The only association I made here was that Google seems to focus on trivialities, on surface-level faux-happiness, instead of using AI research to empower people.

Beyond that, something bugged me about the whole narrative of "human-centric design", "we're just dumb developers, and this is social issue". Excessive humility signaling, or am I just imagining things?

To top it off, this highlighted sentence caught my special attention:

"The hardware, the intelligence, and the content ultimately belong to you and you alone."

It's funny to see this, because it's literally anathema to Google, and most of the businesses on the Internet. If that sentence was true, it would mean the product works offline, is fully self-contained and fully owned/controlled by the user. It ain't happening, and we all know it.

It's about creating an illusion that you can control it. Recently a lot of people have been invoking Terminator-esque visions of AI slipping out of control and becoming the worst threat to humanity's survival. Obviously if this were to become the prevailing image of AI in our culture, companies that work on AI would seem outright evil. That's why they're dishing out propaganda (because that's what this article is) to change the zeitgeist.

> I found a lot of factually incorrect statements in that article. Such as: "If a human can’t perform the task, then neither can an AI." Don't we create AI systems to solve problems human cannot all the time?

Not really, I think we create AI systems to solve problems humans take way too long to solve. But I can't think of anything AI does, that a human couldn't, given sufficient time and resources.

Regarding the rest, I fully agree with you. Things like this are nothing but scary to me

Ah, but certain problems are not just limited by the amount of time and resources that may be apportioned to them, but are bounded by needing to be completed with specific time and resource constraints.

And that's a spot where computers and programming show that they are capable of implementing systems that biological humans literally cannot under any circumstance. Our hardware/meat-ware is not capable of it.

If we maintain a willing suspension of disbelief, for sure a human being may be able to add up a million numbers correctly if they had infinite time and infinite resources (although in reality they would not be provisioned with those resources or time), but what no individual human can do is be presented with those numbers and add them up in under a second. Or to be more realistic and to draw away from our simple notion of individual problems and individual resource constraints, there are fields of knowledge resulting from coordinated-compound-tasks that require locally doing 20 disparate but coordinated operations in parallel in under a second.

The application of our modern day technology literally involves the creation and implementation of systems that no biological human or human-centric system can accomplish.

edit: of course, that might be a way of saying the problems that you said human beings take way to long to solve, but i think there's an important need to distinguish between those problems that we can't do because of algorithmic complexity, and those problems that we cannot do because we are not made/manufactured of the same stuff and able to be programmable with the same ease. Without blurring the definition of what it means to be human/computer, there are fundamentally problems that computer/AI can solve that we cannot.

Given sufficient time and resources a human will likely recruit other humans to design and built AI to solve those problems.

I feel like the statement is fundamentally contradictory, seeing as how humans have invented and trained the AI systems. By definition, that is something that humans are doing.

On the other hand, it may be more insightful to say that if humans cannot perform the task (time is not a factor), than neither can AI. For example, assessing non-tangibles, or something abstract like identifying sarcasm in text without context.

I think this is dancing around a tautology - if humans can't do something "in theory", it means they can't describe it, which means they can't program it in AI. Obviously.

ML can handle things at scale (not just speed, number of data points) that humans can't. Imagine a classification problem with 1000 dimensions -- humans can't keep in working memory that many entries. Granted, many of these are trivially solvable if you can scale them (e.g. human with a computer but no AI/ML), but scale is an important component.

It's kind of like how metadata isn't that big of a deal until you have enough of it.

I'd guess the correct form of that statement should be:

"If a human can't theoretically perform the task with a lot of time and a pocket calculator, then neither can an AI."

But it's not really saying much as that applies to almost everything.

As for the core idea of designing AI UX better to get people to trust it - maybe put a list of all the data being collected and stored up front, and make it possible for the user to easily and permanently delete specific data while still allowing them to use the system. Also an explanation of actions taken: "the system took this photograph because 76% of testers found photographs with these particular features (high light level, human looking at camera, action) to be desired." You could probably trace your dataset back to these features by collecting all the photos from training that matched to those features and manually labeling them.

In short: un-black-boxify your UX.

I think you have it backwards there. Computers can already perform all sorts of calculations that a human can't. AI aims to make computers solve problems that currently only humans can.

> un-black-boxify your UX

I thought the whole point of AI was that the program itself is effectively a black box, even to the programmers.

They ask a neural network to solve a problem; it tries repeatedly until it succeeds. The algorithm it arrives at is not necessarily sufficiently simple that a human could understand it, even given the source code.

The problem isn't just that Google won't tell the user how their software works; that's nothing new. The scary thing is that even Google doesn't understand how their software works; they just know that it does seem to work most of the time.

Hopefully I've misunderstood completely, and we're not entering an age of “the algorithm (that we don't fully understand but is extremely useful most of the time) says so, and we shouldn't question its authority”.

> I thought the whole point of AI was that the program itself is effectively a black box, even to the programmers.

No, it isn't. In fact, it's the opposite of a responsible approach to AI, and one of the reason why you have smart people screaming about dangers of uncontrolled intelligence explosion.

Being a black box is a feature of a particular method people now choose to do AI - namely, neural networks. Neural networks are basically chains of multiplications, additions and thresholding; you start throwing tons of data at them and have it tweak its coefficients, until the result sorta looks like what you want. The knowledge hidden in those coefficients is almost completely opaque to us ("an open research problem").

People use deep learning because it's effective, but I hope that we go back to methods we're able to trace and analyze before we attempt to bootstrap a general AI.

you are spot on, but I doubt that was the plan.

I felt it was that they gave a toy to someone they wanted to keep. that person just started photo training a neural network from scratch when google already have dozen of more mature such projects. his product wil go over the same mistakes as the more mature projects (see: gorila incident) but said person had to write grandiose progress reports to justify their toys and PR loved this one, probably for the reason you pointed out: that naivete that brings such calm and reasurance.

So you claim Google's AI is centered on survelliance, exploitation and corporate opression? Do you have anything to support this?

Is this a joke?

No I am actually serious, could you give specific examples of Google's AI efforts for surveillance, exploitation and corporate oppression.

I can think of many examples of more benign nature, e.g. strong go and chess playing AI, lots of algorithms in google photos, song recognition, Infrastructure optimization, spam detection, search improvements and ranking.

Or maybe you consider ai algorithms to increase ads targeting / precision oppressive or exploitative?

Tracking everything you do on the internet and offline using your phone including 24/7 location tracking and passive wi-fi mapping is not intrusive enough for you?

Do you think the designers of such services made them mainly for nefarious purposes (surveillance, exploitation and corporate oppression)?

Most of the things you mention has perfectly legitimate and useful functionality, they are usually optional and data is anonymized after a while, has option to completely disable / remove / see all data with a a few clicks.

> see all data

Yes? Where do I have to click to get a database dump of the actual data Google has on me? In machine-readable format, please?

My activities page is a good start.

Uh, you've missed the forest for the trees.

Google is an ad company, full stop.

Everything Google does is functionally built to track you and sell ads based on that tracking. Any "legitimate and useful functionality" exists to give you a reason to feed data into their ad company. Google Maps doesn't exist to help you get around, that has never been it's purpose and never will be. Google Maps exists to give you a reason to tell Google where you are and where you're going so they can target ads to you.

Well You can disable almost all of that and delete all your history permanently. Isn't it nice?

You can delete it from your view, but you can never delete it from Google's servers. And they (like Facebook and others) have an advertising id tied to your profile even if you don't have an account with them. Try deleting that.

No, when you delete your data (history etc.) it is also deleted from servers and backups. This was previously discussed on HN before, with some input from google SREs.

And you know this how? They can just remove it from your view, claim they deleted it, and keep it on their servers for future profiling, just like they do with people who do not have accounts with them.

Well it is google engineers words against random speculation, why sould they bother creating all that infrastructure for deleting stuff thoroughly. I take theirs.

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