Big Data Is Not the Answer
Great interview with one of the leading experts on AI, Gary Marcus, by Alice Lloyd George who was writing for TechCrunch. Like myself, he’s skeptical of how far companies like Google can get with big data when it comes to artificial intelligence.
The Limits of Artificial Intelligence
The Limits of Artificial Intelligence
ALG: Gary you are well known as a critic of this technique; you’ve said that it’s over-hyped. That there’s low hanging fruit that deep learning’s good at — specific narrow tasks like perception and categorization, and maybe beating humans at chess, but you felt that this deep learning mania was taking the field of AI in the wrong direction, that we’re not making progress on cognition and strong AI. Or as you’ve put it, “we wanted Rosie the robot, and instead we got the roomba.” So you’ve advocated for bringing psychology back into the mix, because there’s a lot of things that humans do better, and that we should be studying humans to understand why they do things better. Is this still how you feel about the field?
GM: Pretty much. There was probably a little more low hanging fruit than I anticipated. I saw somebody else say it more concisely, which is simply, deep learning does not equal AGI (AGI is “artificial general intelligence.”) There’s all the stuff you can do with deep learning, like it makes your speech recognition better. It makes your object recognition better. But that doesn’t mean it’s intelligence. Intelligence is a multi-dimensional variable. There are lots of things that go into it.
I’d go a step further than Gary and say that today’s approach to artificial intelligence is hampered by the computer’s inability to dream the impossible and imagine alternate realities. I’m not sure that this is something that can ever be replicated by a machine. This may be a part of our spiritual being.
Our brains are tools that are wielded by our spirit much like a car is a machine driven by a person. Today’s artificial intelligence is somewhat akin to a hospital ventilator that can pump your blood through your body while you are brain dead.
Robots can follow complex instructions to give the illusion of intelligence, but they’ll never become self-aware or have emotion like a spiritual being. That’s because the core of human personality and intelligence has nothing to do with the material world.
Related:
Google's Machine Learning Is Destined to Disappoint
GM: Pretty much. There was probably a little more low hanging fruit than I anticipated. I saw somebody else say it more concisely, which is simply, deep learning does not equal AGI (AGI is “artificial general intelligence.”) There’s all the stuff you can do with deep learning, like it makes your speech recognition better. It makes your object recognition better. But that doesn’t mean it’s intelligence. Intelligence is a multi-dimensional variable. There are lots of things that go into it.
I’d go a step further than Gary and say that today’s approach to artificial intelligence is hampered by the computer’s inability to dream the impossible and imagine alternate realities. I’m not sure that this is something that can ever be replicated by a machine. This may be a part of our spiritual being.
Our brains are tools that are wielded by our spirit much like a car is a machine driven by a person. Today’s artificial intelligence is somewhat akin to a hospital ventilator that can pump your blood through your body while you are brain dead.
Robots can follow complex instructions to give the illusion of intelligence, but they’ll never become self-aware or have emotion like a spiritual being. That’s because the core of human personality and intelligence has nothing to do with the material world.
Related:
Google's Machine Learning Is Destined to Disappoint
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