Comment by bloak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bloak | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Lots of AI journalism refers to "beating humans" but that's a hopelessly vague and unhelpful comparison. No AI can ever beat a human if by "human" you mean a human equipped with whatever tools the human may choose to use, because those tools would include the AI against which you would have it compete. So the comparison only makes sense if you restrict the human in some way. Depending on how you restrict the human, beating the human may be very easy or very hard. For example, if you insist that the decision be made within 100 ms then beating the human is very easy.

I think the usual way in which these experiments fiddle things so that the AI wins is by giving the AI lots of training data but giving the humans no training whatsoever, which may seem grossly unfair, but apparently that's acceptable in AI research/journalism.

Me: Horses can run faster than people!

You: "Faster than people"?! That's a hopelessly vague and unhelpful comparison. No horse can ever go faster than a human if by "human" you mean a human equipped with whatever tools the human may choose to use, because those tools would include the horse against which you would have it compete. So the comparison only makes sense if you restrict the human in some way.

Me: Um..

:-) The other stuff you say makes perfect sense, but that first bit is more pedantic than fair, I think.

A bit unrelated but there are horse vs people marathons. and many times people win. that is because horses cannot cool themselves like people can

Yes, see "persistence hunting". It turns out that although humans may be thrashed by a poodle over short distances they are really rather good at extreme-long-distance races.

You make a good point. There are many situations in which it's fairly obvious how the comparison ought to be made: the human should not be allowed to use a horse in competing with the horse in "running", and should not be allowed to use a computer in competing with the computer in "guessing sexuality". However, if the competition is in "predicting share price movements" then surely it would be strange not to allow some kind of computational assistance for the human, so in those cases, at least, it gets a bit hard to decide where to draw the line.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com