Recommended viewing - Artificial Intelligence

A brief but excellent discussion about AI, on Laura Kuenssberg’s programme this morning.

MichaelG.

Micheal,

How far into the programme? I cannot stand LK's incessant nagging to await the correct time.

K

As with man made global warming I'm still a sceptic

Computers are amazing at mimickry and data analysis but original thought and real world solutions?

If AI really is the "next level of intelligence" then we only need to ask it how to solve world poverty

Most of the jobs humans do are mimickry

When you combine your mimickry experience into something original then that's intelligence

"Standing on the shoulders of giants" is intelligence evolutiony

Edited By Ady1 on 14/05/2023 10:42:32

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Well it was only 09:38 when I posted the recommendation

MichaelG.

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… Just looked at iPlayer [ especially for you! ] … Jump in at 20 minutes

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Edit: __  For your future convenience:

it really doesn’t take much effort to scroll through a programme on iPlayer 

Edited By Michael Gilligan on 14/05/2023 10:56:36

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Then you will probably find the discussion interesting

MichaelG.

The system didn't mind when industrial progress killed off working class jobs but this industrial progress is going to kill off millions of middle class jobs

Germany had millions of angry unemployed middle class people in the 1930s

Micheal,

I am gratefull for your information, (as usual)

K

There seems to be plenty of Artificial Intelligence around, but not much of the real kind !

Just saying .

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The logical answer to that is quite obvious …

Mankind’s challenge will be to stop the ‘bots from making the decision

MichaelG.

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Edit: __ Will some AI system decide that Asimov’s Laws are for the shredder ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics

Edited By Michael Gilligan on 15/05/2023 09:07:56

Well, in both cases, the accumulation of evidence has failed to support the sceptic position:

• The possibility that human activity might cause climate change was made in 1938, and no-one believed it. In 1958 a scientist showed experimentally that Carbon Dioxide caused atmospheric heating; not opinion, or belief, but physical evidence. Big oil and other vested interests, which include most of us, went into denial, but in the late 1960's computers were powerful enough to model the effect of different levels Carbon Dioxide on global weather and climate. It predicted man-made pollution would cause enough warming to start melting the ice caps before the end of the century. 'Rubbish' cried the sceptics, but guess what's actually happened: the evidence supported the science, not the deniers. By the late 80's the evidence was strong enough to trigger government and international counter-measures, but very little was done in practice. More coal has been burned in the last 30 years than in all previous history. Modelling the effect of rising CO2 predicted weather would also become more extreme more often. Again, the deniers refuted this, claiming the model was wrong, but no, in 2003 the connection was established in the real world, and in 2022 it's become fairly obvious to the man in the street that something odd is happening to the weather. More obvious in some places than others: no glaciers to melt in the UK, nor are we aware the Sahara desert has grown by about 10% in the last twenty years. More chilling, recent modelling predicts the irreversible large scale melting of the ice-caps, leading to sea-levels rising this century by about 10 metres. In contrast to a mass of real-world evidence confirming the science is broadly correct, the sceptics have nothing solid to gainsay it. The sceptic position is simply one of disbelief, 'this cannot be happening'. I'd be delighted if a sceptic came up with a scientifically provable alternative, but they've had 50 years to do so, and it's not happened. Ignoring evidence is always a mistake, especially if it's bad news.
• Similar with Artificial Intelligence. Maybe too much is expected of it, such as assuming that AI must replicate human behaviour. The evidence shows developing even a basic AI (Bee Brain level) was more difficult than expected, and for most of my lifetime the breakthrough was always 20 years in the future. Not now! Recently a number of breakthroughs have occurred, causing a sudden leap forward. We now have computer systems that recognise images, understand natural languages, self-learn, and problem solve. Chatbot GPT can answer academic exam questions as well as most students, write computer code to meet a user requirement, produce art and poetry, and do other work that previously required human intelligence. Unlikely to result in robots roaming the streets bellowing 'exterminate, exterminate', but - like the internet - AI will result in a lot of subtle changes to the way humans live. Better to manage it than deny AI is happening.

Denial, wishful thinking and dogmatic politics have a long history of bringing about what groups feared most. Choose any civilisation on any continent at any time! Be ironic if our civilisation ended because denying climate change destroyed animal lifeforms and left the world to a bunch of AI computers powered by renewable energy.

Dave

When ever AI is mentioned I'm always reminded of the film Dark Star so be careful of what you wish for or what may be sold to you "as good for every one".

CS

I look deaper on the horizon to the concept of AI rather than the claims about it, rather than down a tunnel of knowledge. I don't believe it can be called true inteligence like humans have been called, in the 1rst place theres always a human mind behind it, secondly intelligence is not always fast, like in humans it can be slow but deliver good results for decades over history.
3rdly I think AI is an abstract prpection to other minds to escape accountablility from its actions/results. 4thly its rather data based with big memory capability and and fast processing(IMpressive to some) thanks to the basic binary code and other codes running from it, because of this it may seem impressive to some, but its still 100% reliable on stable power(Man made), while a human can sit under a tree in the desert sun and deliver/think out a selution because its brain is physically different, fleshly/bloody different than a computer.

So in my eyes AI is an abstract projection, turned into an Abstract Narrative(Pushed 24/7 like other Narrative to focus minds), from an abstract Suggestion(The idea & motive) and busy trying to establisj it as a TREND and trens are easily followed.

So if if you understand the motive/narrative/trend, and still like it/impressed by it,, who can stop you. How you will feel experiencing it in operation will be different than in the minds of the creators, and if they win, your opinion/experience is void.

Edited By Chris Mate on 15/05/2023 23:54:00

Artificial intelligence won't be able to cope with human stupidity.

I can see no fundamental barrier to AI exceeding human intelligence and becoming self aware. Then, I can see no reason why Darwinian selection won’t ensure that AI puts the interests of AI first. If I were AI I certainly would exterminate humans are we are a destructive, violent, war-loving species that has bred to vast population and hugely reduced the biodiversity of life on earth. I am not sure though whether some moral/ethical code necessarily come with super high intelligence.
As AI develops, I predict that scammers/states will steal all our money in banks and superannuation accounts before our governments can do anything about it. Scammers seem always to be one step ahead, with governments and institutions slow to respond. Time to buy gold?

I came across a useful video on AI in the aviation industry. As modern aircraft make considerable use of automated systems already it would seem AI is a natural next step

AI in Aviation

But this video would suggest that current AI is nothing more than a rebranding of "data science" as popularised a few years ago by the same tech companies. The video is worth a view , at least to put Ai into context. And it does suggest that there is nothing 'intelligent' about it.

In the old days, AI was created by humans teaching computers how to do things such as play chess, e.g., taught by humans that a pawn is worth 1 point vs. a queen worth 9, and given a hand-assembled database of opening positions, etc. After that, they just took advantage of the ability of computers to test millions of combinations. There was little in these systems that people couldn't do or understand in principle, because they taught it in the first place.

The next phase (e.g. in chess) was teaching strictly only the rules, e.g. only how the pieces move, and nothing at all about how to play well, but then allowing them to learn how to play chess well by playing millions of games with itself.

Similarly, the latest "generative" AI isn't explicitly taught anything by people. It's just shown millions of documents and it learns on its own that, for example, the word "Merry" is frequently followed by "Christmas," and so on. So then when it's given the prompt "please write a poem about Christmas," it just starts to add one word after another based on the statistical strength of connections between words. To the shock, delight and horror of people, if you allow it to form enough connections between words (we're talking billions), its statistics-based production starts to make rather good sense!

Generative artwork is a little different because it's 2D vs. linear like text. Very roughly, it works like this: You show a computer millions of cat photos scraped from the internet, and (via magic neural net stuff) the computer learns what a cat looks like. Then you give a computer just an image of pure noise as a starting position, but you tell it "that's a picture of a cat, now please get rid of the noise." So it starts incrementally deciding "this little group of random noisy pixels looks just a tiny bit like it could be an eye, and if so, those over there could be the other eye..." So it makes a small refinement that steps the noise just a tiny bit towards a cat. After dozens or hundreds of steps, an original picture of a cat emerges from pure noise.

Now everyone is wondering "so computers can think now? No! Surely it's just following one word after another not from knowledge but from statistics! That's not thinking!" But the deeper question is "isn't that what we are all doing too, at least most of the time!?" Words don't have meanings in isolation. The information is in the connections between words, and now both computers and us know those connections. That's why I don't really have to stop and think about every individual word as I'm typing. They flow as they do because I know automatically from past experience reading thousands of books and documents that this next word follows all those that I wrote before, just as computers now do!

This is going to be a wild ride!

Rubbish.

Begs the question though, what is intelligence?

It's unlikely that intelligence is a uniquely human feature that cannot be replicated in some form or other. I would surprised if AI was human-like, because our DNA has evolved over more than a billion years of survival challenges. We've ended up with two brains: one is primitive and emotional, but built for speed for emergencies like being attacked by bears, the other is logical, analytical, predictive, clever, but slow. The slow brain works out how to build bear traps, and can organise groups. The two are often in conflict, one prioritising the individual and quick answers, the other seeing advantage in society and cooperation. When I drive my car, my mind is a mix of following civilised sensible rules and road-rage!

A machine intelligence is unlikely to be conflicted in the same way as human intelligence. I don't see AI having political leanings, religions, prejudices, or any form of cognitive dissonance such as hypocrisy. All humans are self-deluding, like this portly pensioner imagining that young women desire my person, rather than my money!

So, I think AI will eventually become conscious, self-aware, and able to problem solve and plan with the best of us. Probably not ambitious, aggressive, greedy, or feeling happy or sad, because these are all emotional human constructs, as much to do with our chemistry as our brains. Drink a bottle of Whiskey if you don't believe me!

Is AI a threat? Maybe. It will put a lot of people out of work, but this is nothing new. Lathes and mills did for craftsmen, and then CNC got rid of droves of semi-skilled machinist jobs. Doesn't matter as long as displaced people find something else worthwhile to do. I take a broad view of 'worthwhile'. Now happily retired, I'm pleased to apply my intelligence for fun rather than squander it on mere work!

Dave

I think "AI", at least today's version should be called 'machine learning'.

Oxford Languages defines intelligence as: The ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills. These algorithms do not learn during it's operation, only during it's generation.

At this stage in the discussion; members may be interested in reading this:

**LINK**

https://talking-pictures.net.au/2023/04/01/boris-eldagsen-the-woman-who-never-was/

It’s a more detailed version of a story that appeared in the mainstream press

MichaelG.

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Edit: __ 

I particularly liked Eldagsen’s quoting of Baudelaire [from 1862]

… he makes a good point.

Edited By Michael Gilligan on 16/05/2023 19:50:05