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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

"Contextual adaptation" is what they want, but that doesn't mean it's coming in the near future. However, this does mean that funding for research on it will be available.

As I've said for years, the big lack in AI is in the "common sense" and unstructured manipulation area. Nobody can build something with squirrel levels of manipulation and agility, even in simulation. Robot manipulation in unstructured situations is still very poor. The people trying to simulate C. elegans at the neuron level can't get that to work, despite a full wiring diagram and years of effort.

Something very low level is not understood. There's a Nobel Prize waiting for whomever figures that out.

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This is one of my favorite little videos to illustrate the dichotomy - https://i.imgur.com/o7lI08Y.gifv

For all of our mastery of information processing, our ability to fabricate and motivate fine differentiated structures is really quite incredibly poor relative to biology. The little beetle is basically alien technology relative to the toy. But add in the fact that it can feed itself, repair itself and reproduce itself with a system that can scale 3-5 orders of magnitude up and down based on need is pretty mindblowing.

The mRNA vaccines might be one of the first times where we've leveraged biology to directly fabricate a discrete part with desired properties. Certainly in raw tonnage of output I can't think of anything that comes close. I feel like this is only going to advance with time, to the point where we may be growing robots instead of milling and printing them.

I find the comparison with AI and insects really interesting to illustrate just how far off the mark we still are.

You have a room sized super computer that trains for zillions of hours and can’t even pick out pedestrians with especially good precision.

Then you have a bee with a minuscule brain that can do complex pattern recognition to find flowers, complex manipulation to get nectar and pollen out of them, object avoidance, swarming behaviour, and fancy communicative dances (both performing and interpreting), plus all the other stuff bees do to get by in the world.

Something is up there for sure.

Why doesn't that play in Safari?

Interesting. No idea. Here's a beat up version of the same video on youtube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkteAT64YtQ

Reminded me of this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awG09liCMD4

The low-level thing that isn't understood is that intelligence is not progressive. You can not build up to it. Sure, you can forever continue to build better and better approximations of certain aspects of intelligence and pretend you're making progress, but you are not. Of course, there is great utilitarian value in those approximations, so we MUST continue to do this.

Still, my position is that NO progress has ever been made in the area of AI, and no progress will be made any time soon.

I'll take it a step further (in case I don't get enough downvotes for what I've written so far). I maintain that you CAN NOT build intelligence. You can only TAP INTO it. So the very direction in which all of our AI efforts are headed is a dead-end.

> I maintain that you CAN NOT build intelligence. You can only TAP INTO it.

I wouldn't go exactly this far, but I would say that whatever process might exist to create artificial intelligence, it might be closer to gardening than to engineering.

My vague feeling is that there might be some sort of (non-supernatural) "mysterious" component to intelligence that we won't be able to engineer and that might just emerge under the right circumstances.

In that case we would just have to "grow" AI, without being completely sure that our effort will work.

I agree. We need to stop this over use, actually the use of AI as some grounded in science matter of fact. What we have is ML, and thus a system for algorithmic refinement and definition.

I'm sure people said the same thing about motive power before the steam engine. You cannot build it, you can only tap into it.

> Nobody can build something with squirrel levels of manipulation and agility, even in simulation.

While not squirrel level, this impressed the heck out of me: https://ashish-kmr.github.io/rma-legged-robots/

> Nobody can build something with squirrel levels of manipulation and agility, even in simulation.

Isn’t that what alpha go or the StarCraft league are? Organic strategies in well-defined contexts (action options of the squirrel at Tn)? “Squirrel” is a nice reference frame.

Manipulation in the sense of being able to physically pick things up and manipulate them. Which is a difficult problem. StarCraft is moving a mouse pointer and clicking.

AlphaStar dropped the pretenses of even doing that much because it added too much complexity. For its show matches in Starcraft2, AlphaStar just uses an API to say "Target this specific enemy carrier". It doesn't have to do any vision recognition or differentiate between multiple overlapping units like humans do.

That was the original intent, but it appears the dropped it before public demos.

No - those systems simulate "control" at the level of giving commands, not actual motor control. So practically, current AI can win at Go and play at superhuman levels, but still cannot drive a car as well as most adults.

You can sit down for a game of Go or StarCraft against an AI, and it will wipe the floor with you.

But if you want it control a robot that's going to bring out a pot of tea while you play, you'll be wiping the floor.

This made me giggle like a dumbass. Thanks. I participate on the SC2 AI community. It is a-lot of fun. I use Python and CPP for my ML. The game matches are so unpredictable which makes the project questionable because the AI indeed smashes any opponent.

Even just laying bricks or picking fruit seems well beyond machines as of yet, despite all the promises to eliminate toil.

"Squirrel level of manipulation" seems more a problem of building tiny physical robots and giving them appropriate interfaces for AI to control, which is an unreasonably difficult benchmark.

A reasonable first step would be autonomous small cheap drones, but I can't say what their missions would be. AlphaStar and Openai Five are mentioned elsewhere here, and these demonstrate that the problem isn't unapproachable.

There probably isn't enough confidence yet to arm autonomous drones, or there isn't a meaningful tactical purpose.

I see papers being written by scholars and professors. Are reputable ways to publish papers that can get reviewed without being in school?

Well said

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