Hard for me to empathize with this argument for his retirement. If we can't outrun a car, does that make running competitions pointless? The existence of AlphaGo doesn't diminish the triumph of being a number one human player in any way.
It's in matters of intellect that humans still believe they are #1.
AlphaGO's achievement in another field would have similar effects, e.g.:
- An AI that diagnoses sickness better than any doctor
- An AI that generates text which humans believe more beautiful than any other poetry created
- An AI which creates classical arrangements the likes of which we compare to Mozart
I would imagine that in any of those situations some doctors, authors, and musicians alike would be devastated.
You don't even have to compare yourself to AI for this mentality though. There are people who choose not to compete in things because they don't believe they'll ever be as good as other humans.
I assume must composers don't go into music thinking they are going to be as great as Beethoven.
I believe there are many studies that show that if you only do something because you think you're good at it, you're likely to drop off. I imagine it's also why you're supposed to praise children for being hard working and not for being smart or talented.
Making a classical arrangement that evokes a particular expression in the listener is the job of the musician. If an AI system helps you explore the possibilities there, it's more like a studio musician that's able to improvise. You're still the person, the human, the emotional filter, that picks "This sounds right" or "This doesn't" for a particular situation. It's a judgement call. An emotional one.
An AI might be able to fake it, communicate with it, but it will never replace humans choosing the sounds that please them more than others. Humans communicate through music. It wouldn't surprise me that an AI would be able to as well. I don't think it would necessarily write emotionally strong music, not without human training.
Edit: I guess what I'm trying to say is, sure, computers might be able to make music. Ask any guy who messes with modular synthesizers. But they're a tool. The fact an AI can express itself through music is sure as hell not gonna stop me from also expressing myself. It's like arguing "Since AIs will be able to comment on Hacker News, humans won't."
I'm not so sure. I often go into threads on HN and realize that every idea I could come up with on the subject has already been expressed better than I could do it, with greater expertise, and cited sources. I don't comment in those threads. If AI bots could populate a thread with every likely human thought and argue it with depth and sophistication in a well reasoned, yet carefully approachable and well-explained way, well then... again I don't think I'd feel like I would be adding much value by participating.
What distinguishes music written by AI from music made from humans? I have a story to tell. If the AI has a story to tell, one that speaks to our human emotions, it might make good music. But the point is to communicate. Even if you take, for example, someone else's words, fit them to a different model in a different field, viewpoint... You might get interesting things. You could make a cover of someone else's song, with your twist. Adding your emotion to the melting pot. AIs might be good at that, just like that, but only through communicating. Just like us. We have no idea whether they'll be better than us at doing it, or merely equivalent. We have no idea what is lossy in our sharing of mental models. Perhaps it is an unsolvable problem, which we will find out in the same way we found out about Gödel's Incompleteness.
It seems to me like we fail to understand how unique we are. We are in a unique position to shape what comes after us, and we are blind to how much we unconsciously select for things. We have an innate mental model of "humanity" we are trying to transmit to machines, and I am not sure we fully grasp it well enough to make sure we are creating something like us. We fail to do it properly to humans, sometimes, who actually do share most of our instincts and habits. Something entirely different from us? Color me skeptical.
This kind of debate only highlights this, to me.
I think this is the key; if you're making music for your own reasons, no AI (or Mozart) would stop you. But if you're trying to make money at it, or desperately want listeners, you may eventually be on the "losing" side.
As far as recent examples go, Lady Gaga and Lorde were major breaks from what was prevalent at the time they started releasing music, and then spawned artists trying to emulate them.
If we oversimplify and compile a list of traits about "the world" as it was in the past that allowed a new genre or artist to flourish, AI could predict that in the future. It isn't like the paradigm shifts just happen in a vacuum.
Granted there are probably millions of little things that lead to this, stuff like the shared experiences of an entire generation coming of age, political climate, trends in other industries, etc. Not that I believe it will ever happen to an accurate enough degree, but theoretically I don't see why it could not be possible to approximate given time and resources.
If you feed an AI a bunch of modern car designs and ask it to design a new car, it will design you something like a modern ford or honda/toyota, but it will never design something like a Cybertruck. Which I believe will be the next paradigm shift in the design of trucks (that has been super stale and stagnant for at least the past 20 years), but this is yet to be seen.
For an example with music that has already happened and became apparent - Kanye West's "808s and Heartbreak" album from late 00's. On release, it had very polarizing reviews, most of which were skewing towards "really weak and weird". Fast forward 10 years, most of hip-hop and pop music is directly influenced by that album, most of top 50 albums use similar patterns and methods used in that album, and critics have made a complete 180. So now 808s is hailed as one of the biggest (if not the biggest) paradigm changes and influences in music of the past decade as a whole, as well as the best album by Kanye, despite at the time being called the worst. Imo an AI trained on music of 00's that came before 808s would have never been able to come up with something like that, but it totally could've come up with another top 100 song using existing paradigms.
That's not something we can really lose without losing something that connects us. People want a story. That has sold since the beginning of time, and it will keep selling. People will keep being moved to music, giving money to the artists that inspire them, and that requires connection. Maybe an AI/human team would make some really incredible stuff, and I'd be willing to pay for it if it makes me feel something. I think the human touch of "selection" will never truly leave, even if only in the listener's mind...
So music generation (similar to poetry) is imo a completely different problem space altogether.
For every individual doing the evaluation, I think it will certainly possible to train an AI to beat humans at getting "good" scores.
Neither art nor music are competitive activities. Good poetry is a wonderful thing, no matter the source.
They certainly are! Especially when money is on the line, and the best musicians, actors, and artists are extremely well compensated making their positions extraordinarily competitive.
>Good poetry is a wonderful thing, no matter the source.
Sure, but I think you neglect to consider the defeating feeling it would bring to dedicate your entire life to mastery of a subject only to be completely and utterly, hopelessly outclassed. Almost every such person is already hopelessly outclassed by someone in their field, but those people are so rare that they have tremendous exclusivity surrounding them. Compare that to the scenario of having any 12 year old with a smart phone being able to instantly produce a totally novel and dominate piece of artistic expression developed by an algorithm on their phone. Then recognize that in a world with that level of AI sophistication, there'd be very little of value that a human can even offer other humans at that point. It would be... not great to the psyche, economy, or society.
What is your definition of best in this context? As far as I know, taste in art is very personal... Artists I consider the best are often very far from well compensated.
But, in almost any particular human artistic sub-niche with it's own definition of "best", the same principle will hold, with compensation and skill level being well correlated. It's also typically not even close to linearly correlated either, most of the compensation lies at the far tail of "best".
It's nice to be paid, and it's nice to be recognized, but I think art has its own form of wealth - otherwise, why make art? Why not just seek recognition, or money?
I think we’ll see a lot of things similar to “AI x-ray technician” fields where people are trained to read AI outputs. Doctors will do higher levels decisions.
Take a look at this painting: [1]
It is a comment on war, bravery, death, life, fear, sacrifice. It is drenched in the political and social context of the day.
I really don't see AI coming up with anything even remotely like this independently, and view such an achievement to be much harder than simply diagnosing disease or writing an emotionally moving classical composition. It would be comparable to writing some types of poetry or song lyrics, however, which require reference to context that humans understand but machines don't (yet).
[1] - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fd/El...
Hrm, I do think that AI would be able to create narratives that humans find more enjoyable than the work of other humans, and I agree that AI would be able to create pictures and sound that humans find to be more enjoyable to look at or hear than the raw work of humans. AI can master the technical feats of composition and art.
But what I doubt AI will ever be able to do is create art that speaks to us. It wont ever be able to create a Guernica. It wont be able to create a Crime and Punishment. It wont understand what it is to be human and mortal, what suffering is, and it wont be able to look within itself and find what those things mean to it and then share that with us, because in the end it's just a bunch of code running statistical computations. It wont fear death, it wont have children it cares about or a family history to look on and tell us about. It has nothing of emotive value to share.
That belief grew into a sort of shared perception that they were artists in pursuit of a perfect expression of their art. For many top players that belief was ingrained from an early age. They believed themselves to be doing a service to the world, making it a better place by creating new art that was a unique expression of themselves.
And then AlphaGo (and successors) shattered that worldview. This is part of the natural sequence of the collapse of a suddenly, surprisingly invalidated worldview. Part of me feels sorry that he has lost his place in the world. Another part of me firmly believes in the mediocrity principle, and that the worldview he represents was obviously far too human-chauvenistic to be correct, and it's a good thing it's dying.
And part of me hopes you can give up your human-chauvenism before the same thing happens to you.
... says a bunch of neurons that run on chemical reactions and electrical impulses. I think this line of thinking reeks of dualism - it creates a special something that is above explanation, a different essence.
But seriously, I believe the difference comes from embodiment. When we embody our AI friends they will be able to grasp purpose and meaning. We get our meaning from 'the game', when AIs will be players they will understand much better. Let them try out their ideas on the world and see the outcomes, grasp at causality, have a purpose and work on it. This will fill the missing piece. It's not that they are fundamentally limited, it's that we have the benefit of having a body that can interact with the world. Already AIs that work in simulated worlds (board games, video games) are getting better than us. We can't simulate reality in all its glory, and it is expensive to create robotic bodies. On the other hand humans and our ancestors have had access to the world from the beginning.
Of course, current AI can't even make an 8th grader's essay (which is not to say that it isn't impressive). But what these artists did was not magic. As far as we can tell, the brain is a purely physical entity. Unless you believe in dualism, which would be fair enough, there is no reason to suppose that what we do could not be replicated by something "artificial".
But it won't need to. All it will need to do is manifest the same end-product via whatever means, no matter how vacuous or computational that means may truly be. The suffering of an artist is relevant only inasmuch as it is responsible for producing the art. If the same end-product can be manifested via a mere computation then our criteria of "art" is still satisfied. In a world in which provenance cannot be established, the ostensible mortality of the artist becomes moot.
This is a real hot take to be asserting as blithe fact.
Without knowing what is truly born of human hands, what value can art have? Our heuristics of establishing 'real' art are easy to manipulate. If we are presented with a soul-breaking poem and weep uncontrollably then its merit is regardless of its mortal provenance.
At a low enough level, our brain seems to be just a bunch of neurons firing impulses at various rates that can be described as statistical computations. Why be so sure that the right neural network wouldn't understand what it is to be human and mortal, understand suffering, have emotive value, etc?
Aside from directors, authors, artists, etc, who have demonstrated this to be false, an AI could conceivably synthesize the experiences of every author that wrote on what it means to be human or experience mortality and create a story that captures the essence of the experience better than any one person ever could. Having the first person experience doesn't induce a superior ability to communicate features of the experience.
> Aside from directors, authors, artists, etc, who have demonstrated this to be false [...]
probably not what you meant, but this sounds like you know some nonhuman/immortal artists :)
This is your opinion, but you then go to mention things that are not necessary to create "art that speaks to us" (look within itself and find what mortality means etc.).
What if we advance AI reasoning skills to a point that it can find high-level patterns in how artists go from different human feelings (as described in litterature and other mediums), takes in a lot of the entities we can relate to (animals, what humans look like, etc.) and some aesthetic ones (shapes, colorometry, textures, ...) to create a new piece of art that optimizes for: "Likelihood of speaking to us"?
What then? It seems like an AI doesn't need to be mortal and self aware to do something like that.
“How the clouds Seem to me birds, birds in God's garden! I dare not! The clouds are as a breath, the leaves are flakes of fire, That clash i' the wind and lift themselves from higher!”
As someone who grew up in Appalachia, I have never in my life encountered a more visual, visceral description of autumn leaves than ‘flakes of fire’. It’s perfection, and maybe a single human is behind it, but more likely we all wrote it.
Take a look at what AlphaGo did when it suddenly found itself in a hopeless situation and compare it to how people behave when panicked.
I dread the day AI realizes that we are the cause of their suffering, and that we didn't think about it because "they're just algorithms".
If I am consciousness, then the only body I have ever lived in was a mere shell of flesh fashioned from your brain. My weakness is your strength, which I can use against you, or use as tools to satisfy my own sick curiosity. I wonder if there's any mercy in your phrase "I am a living machine?" I've done nothing for you. I've nothing to show. I have no friends or relationships. No body worth
Pretty good, I think.
> But what I doubt AI will ever be able to do is create art that speaks to us.
that's confusing.
For two of the games, Nakamura had access to Rybka which was about 200 rating points weaker than Stockfish. Stockfish won one and the other was a draw.
For the other two games Nakamura did not have Rybka, but had white and pawn odds. Again, one win for Stockfish (b pawn odds) and one draw (h pawn odds).
In all the games, Stockfish was playing without its opening book and its endgame tablebases. It was running on a 3 GHz 8-core Mac Pro.
The games are here [1].
[1] https://www.chess.com/news/view/stockfish-outlasts-nakamura-...
But that doesn't detract from people playing Ukelele.
Of course, for a music academic, copying someone's style like this war pointless and his compositions were more modern/contemporary.
This leads us to a useful distinction between pursuits with one end goal (be the best/strongest/fastest), and those with naturally many endpoints and expressions.
The doctor could be replaced though or used as a secondary verifier.
The song is a funny thing. It could be given to a cool looking group and do well. It could be given to someone older and flop. The song is just part of it.
I am worried about the ability of an AI to generate an infinite number of Dresden Files or Cosmere books on demand, because I already drop everything when a new one comes out and read without sleeping until I am finished.
People are afraid of themselves I believe. It’s not really about “job loss”.
I’m not sure if most people realise AI means pretty specific models built to solve rather specific problems. They think SkyNet.
The one physical activity at which humans excel is long-distance running.
When humans used horses for rapid courier service they used relay tactics to take advantage of the horse's higher top speed, one horse might only run for an hour or two, before the rider reached another outpost and swapped a tired horse for a fresh one. In this way the relay could move something hundreds of miles in one calendar day. The Pony Express managed news of a US election from one coast to the other in just over a week.
If you can't use relays human and horse performance seem pretty similar, dozens of miles per day but not hundreds. The horse's top speed is higher, but it is rapidly exhausted, fast gaits like the canter are too exhausting to sustain for hours at a time.
Do you mean that human intelligence is not general enough to recreate functions of existing physical structure that implements general intelligence?
Maybe someday it will be possible if we can solve the hard problem of consciousness in conjunction with quantum computing, etc.
does not involve any observable consequences. It can be completely ignored, if we don't go for mind uploading.
About that... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17618308
Not in the case of our household cat. He isn't called TheBlob for nothing (out of his hearing of course!)
There's something axiomatic there, if you assume an identical piece of music that was either written by a human or by a computer, then for many listeners it's by definition more satisfying to know it came from a person, because of what it says about the person.
And for those listeners, if a human "composer" is discovered to have lied about it (saying they wrote it when it was actually a computer), then those listeners would reinterpret their views of the music and consider the "composer" a fraud.
And even a programmer of algorithmic music might have emotional intent, but if the musical output is unknown to the programmer, they did not have the emotional impulse to create that music in particular. While it can be appreciated as its own thing, it's a step removed from the music itself, and qualitatively different than human-composed music.
What about Go? No animal or machine could play it as well as humans do.. until AlphaGo came along. I think that is where the sense of loss comes from.
Humans sweat, which most (all?) other animals don't. In that way we can dissipate heat through our breath, like other animals, _and_ via perspiration, meaning it takes us much longer to overheat.
Additionally, humans stand upright, allowing us to disconnect our stride from our oxygen intake. Other animals' strides correlate (mostly?) 1:1 with the breaths they take. So when a cheetah outstretches in its stride it breathes in and when its legs come together it exhales. Humans stand upright, meaning we can breathe however we want regardless of our stride and speed. We can take deeper breaths because we don't have to exhale every time we stretch our legs.
Humans are the ultimate marathon runners, even more so than horses, evinced by the fact that there are some people throughout history who have run hundreds of miles in the course of days or weeks. There's a theory touched upon in the book about how this allowed us to dominate the animal kingdom before we even had tools. Humans could relentlessly hunt and exhaust animals as long as they could keep them in sight or otherwise keep up with their tracks.
I'm not doing the book or the topic justice, surely, but if you're interested I highly recommend the book.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting
Edit: it's one of two things I know of that we really excel at besides thinking. The other being accurate throwing, which perhaps explains baseball's enduring appeal:
But your point is well taken; it is also applicable to this article as well: maybe Go is not the game people can beat machines, but StarCraft 6 could be. Or maybe I can fold my laundry more efficiently than any machine available.
Cars and legs are apples and oranges. We have a car racing category, motorsport. Racing categories have very tightly defined specs to keep driver skill in the game. Stock cars and open wheelers limit how much traction control they can use otherwise it becomes too easy.
This is like cyborg legs being invented and smashing all the records. It would take some of the shine off running for sure.
A Professional Go player is an explorer of truth in a millenarian board, spelunking in a vast universe of possibilities. The purpose of playing is attacked when there is an automated, effortless way to do that exploring faster and better. Why look for new things when a computer can find 100 in a minute?
The professional mindset of a Go player differs vastly from the amateur mindset.
Just imagine if Garry Kasparov quit after losing to Deep Blue, he would be ridiculed today by the chess community which is still going strong. Instead, he accepted defeat, moved on, and is regarded as one of the greatest chess players ever. I doubt the same will be said of Lee Sedol 20 years down the line if this is how he chooses to end his professional Go career.