SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Deep learning excels at learning statistical correlations, but lacks robust ways of understanding how the meanings of sentences relate to their parts.
At TED, in early 2018, the futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil, currently a director of engineering at Google, announced his latest project, "Google Talk to Books," which claimed to use natural language understanding to "provide an entirely new way to explore books." Quartz dutifully hyped it as "Google's astounding new search tool [that] will answer any question by reading thousands of books."
If such a tool actually existed and worked robustly, it would be amazing. But so far it doesn't. If we could give computers one capability that they don't already have, it would be the ability to genuinely understand language. In medicine, for example, several thousand papers are published every day; no doctor or researcher can possibly read them all. Drug discovery gets delayed because information is locked up in unread literature. New treatments don't get applied, because doctors don't have time to discover them. AI programs that could synthesize the medical literature–or even just reliably scan your email for things to add to your to-do list—would be a revolution.
[...] The currently popular approach to AI doesn't do any of that; instead of representing knowledge, it just represents probabilities, mainly of how often words tend to co-occur in different contexts. This means you can generate strings of words that sound humanlike, but there's no real coherence there.
[...] We don't think it is impossible for machines to do better. But mere quantitative improvement—with more data, more layers in our neural networks, and more computers in the networked clusters of powerful machines that run those networks—isn't going to cut it.
Instead, we believe it is time for an entirely new approach that is inspired by human cognitive psychology and centered around reasoning and the challenge of creating machine-interpretable versions of common sense.
Reading isn't just about statistics, it's about synthesizing knowledge: combining what you already know with what the author is trying to tell you. Kids manage that routinely; machines still haven't.
From Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust, by Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis.
If Computers Are So Smart, How Come They Can't Read?
(Score: 2) by bart9h on Wednesday September 11 2019, @01:43AM (4 children)
Who told you computers were smart?
They certainly are stupid as hell.
Precise and fast, yes. But nowhere near as smart.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday September 11 2019, @03:29PM (1 child)
Indeed. Nobody considers a pocket calculator to be smart, and a computer is essentially just a very, very fast calculator. And stupidity is still stupidity, no matter how fast you do it.
You may be able to get intelligent outcomes, but not intelligence. E.g. evolution isn't even stupid, just random, but results in intelligent designs through the application of massive amounts of chance and ruthless design culling for functionality.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday September 11 2019, @04:47PM
Maybe outcomes are useful rather than intelligent.
Present day AI technology is useful. Amazing things done just by asking. Hey Alexa, how do I get Siri and Google into an argument?
We have useful speech recognition. Speech synthesis that is a far cry from "votrax" or the TEE ARE ESSS EIGHTTTY SPEEEEEEECH SYNNNNNTHEEEESIIIIZZZEEER. Useful computer vision that doesn't snap the picture until everyone is smiling or frowning, and focuses on the faces. Deep fakes to generate audio or pictures, probably soon fake video of politicians sounding intelligent.
Anyone who questions whether present AI tech is useful need look no further than realize that we now have tech that can instantly recognize whether a photo contains a cat.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday September 11 2019, @03:43PM
Try this one on for size: https://xkcd.com/2030/ [xkcd.com] Except insert "Artificial Intelligence" wherever you see "Voting Machines".
Machine Learning: https://xkcd.com/1838/ [xkcd.com]
End Result: https://www.xkcd.com/948/ [xkcd.com]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday September 11 2019, @04:39PM
You beat me to it!
Who is saying computers are smart? They're as dumb as a player piano. Way back when an early microcomputer manufacturer complained about the price of Bill Gates' BASIC, he said, without my software, your computer is just a dumb box with blinking lights.
In a magazine article of the late 1970's, talking about some construction project, which included a Z80 in the design. The Z80 is the "heart" of the circuit. But why not the brain? The Z80 isn't smart, it's a dummy. But it's a fast dummy.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.