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A Sobering Message about the Future at AI's Biggest Party

posted by martyb on Sunday December 15 2019, @01:32PM   
from the I'll-think-about-it dept.

Fnord666 writes:

A sobering message about the future at AI's biggest party

Blaise Aguera y Arcas praised the revolutionary technique known as deep learning that has seen teams like his get phones to recognize faces and voices. He also lamented the limitations of that technology, which involves designing software called artificial neural networks that can get better at a specific task by experience or seeing labeled examples of correct answers.

"We're kind of like the dog who caught the car," Aguera y Arcas said. Deep learning has rapidly knocked down some longstanding challenges in AI—but doesn't immediately seem well suited to many that remain. Problems that involve reasoning or social intelligence, such as weighing up a potential hire in the way a human would, are still out of reach, he said. "All of the models that we have learned how to train are about passing a test or winning a game with a score [but] so many things that intelligences do aren't covered by that rubric at all," he said.

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Original Submission

• Re:Oh noes! (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 15 2019, @11:19PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 15 2019, @11:19PM (#932527)

  Cycorp has been working on something more fundamental for quite some time now:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc [wikipedia.org]

  Cyc (pronounced SYKE, /ˈsaɪk/) is a long-living artificial intelligence project that aims to assemble a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base that spans the basic concepts and rules about how the world works. Hoping to capture common sense knowledge, Cyc focuses on implicit knowledge that other AI platforms may take for granted. This is contrasted with facts one might find somewhere on the internet or retrieve via a search engine or Wikipedia. Cyc enables AI applications to perform human-like reasoning and be less "brittle" when confronted with novel situations.

  Douglas Lenat began the project in July 1984 at MCC, where he was Principal Scientist 1984–1994, and then, since January 1995, has been under active development by the Cycorp company, where he is the CEO.

  It's the real deal, one of my old roommates (incredibly smart & creative guy) worked there for many years. They don't have any public presence, kind of like Hari Seldon's gang taking off to the other side of the galaxy to work on psychohistory.
   

  Parent