Hacker News Reader

Comment by pslam | Hacker News Reader

You are missing the entire point of the article if you continue to call these algorithms "AI". Inflating simple things like this to mean "AI" has led to the term being meaningless.

You are the example it is making.

View on HN

I thought one of the key principles in this discussion is that the goalposts keep moving: before it's a solved problem, it requires Artificial Intelligence; once solved, it's just basic algorithms. The bar for what constitutes 'AI' keeps getting raised.

People have often believed some narrow tasks require general AI (AGI), however it turns out that almost any specific task can be solved without building an AGI first. This does not change the meaning of "AGI" - a system that is able to perform any mental task as well as an average human.

Most of the use of the term 'AI' I see isn't referring to AGI at all.

Ok : define Intelligence. Define Life.

There are no accepted definitions of these terms. Are they meaningless?

AI that does not include backpropagation or logical deduction or GA's or optimisation is... is... magical thinking. AI without the nuts and bolts from the last 50 years of work is meaningless. The article is heartfelt, and we all agree with the tenant that people pretending that they are using AI when they are really using a database isn't a good thing, but if you take any current system look right down inside it all you will find is a Shannon type implementation of church-turing.

There are tonnes of other approaches to machine learning that don't involve backprop! There are also other approaches to neural netwroks that don't use backprop (have a look at Numenta's stuff for example). I suggest you watch Pat Winston's brilliant MIT AI lectures to see how huge the range of techniques is.

I direct you to lectures 12a and 12b.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com