Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

TagWinograd Schema

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Words HYPE and HOPE written on blocks of wood. The word HOPE goes over the word HYPE.

Robert J. Marks: AI History — How Did All the Hype Get Started?

Dr. Marks and Gretchen Huizinga muse on the remarkable inventors who made AI what it is — and isn’t — today

In the first segment of the recent podcast, “What Does It Mean to Be Human in an Age of Artificial Intelligence?”, Walter Bradley Center director Robert J. Marks discussed what artificial intelligence can and can’t do and its ethical implications with veteran podcaster Gretchen Huizinga In this segment, they talk about the hope, the hype and the likely realities. The entire interview was originally published by Christian think tank, the Beatrice Institute (March 3, 2022) and is repeated here with their kind permission: https://mindmatters.ai/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/03/Mind-Matters-Episode-176-Beatrice-Institute-Rebroadcast-rev1.mp3 Here’s a partial transcript of the second segment, with notes and links: This portion begins at 18:55 min. A partial transcript and notes, Show Notes, and Additional Resources follow. Gretchen Huizinga: Computational intelligence is one of Read More ›

White robot using floating digital network connections with dots and lines 3D rendering
White robot using floating digital network connections with dots and lines 3D rendering

No AI Overlords?: What Is Larson Arguing and Why Does It Matter?

Information theorist William Dembski explains, computers can’t do some things by their very nature

Yesterday, we were looking at the significance of AI researcher Erik J. Larson’s new book, The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do, contrasting it with claims that AI will merge with or replace us. Some such claims are made by industry insiders like Ray Kurzweil. But more often we hear them from science celebs like the late Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins, who, on these topics, are more known than knowledgeable. So why does Larson think they are wrong? He offers two arguments. First, as information theorist William Dembski explains, is that there are some kinds of thinking that, by their nature, computers don’t do: With regard to inference, he shows that a form Read More ›

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Border collie dog catching frisbee in jump

Researchers Disappointed By Efforts to Teach AI Common Sense

When it comes to common sense, can the researchers really dispense with the importance of life experience?

A recent experiment showed that AI still does not show common sense: “Current machine text-generation models can write an article that may be convincing to many humans, but they’re basically mimicking what they have seen in the training phase,” said [PhD student Yuchen] Lin. “Our goal in this paper is to study the problem of whether current state-of-the-art text-generation models can write sentences to describe natural scenarios in our everyday lives.” University of Southern California, “New test reveals AI still lacks common sense” at ScienceDaily The paper is open access. Essentially, fake news bots can sound like the New York Times or marketing copy by generating mimics, after taking in thousands of natural examples. But it isn’t thinking about any Read More ›

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Robot Close Up

AI Is Not Nearly Smart Enough to Morph Into the Terminator

Computer engineering prof Robert J. Marks offers some illustrations in an ITIF think tank interview

In a recent podcast, Walter Bradley Center director Robert J. Marks spoke with Robert D.Atkinson and Jackie Whisman at the prominent AI think tank, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, about his recent book, The Case for Killer Robots—a plea for American military brass to see that AI is an inevitable part of modern defense strategies, to be managed rather than avoided. It may be downloaded free here. In this second part ( here’s Part 1), the discussion (starts at 6:31) turned to what might happen if AI goes “rogue.” The three parties agreed that AI isn’t nearly smart enough to turn into the Terminator: Jackie Whisman: Well, opponents of so-called killer robots, of course argue that the technologies can’t be Read More ›

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Dozens of Drones Swarm in the Cloudy Sky.

Robert J. Marks on Killer Robots

Robert J. Marks discusses AI and the military, autonomous weapons, and his book The Case for Killer Robots with hosts Robert D. Atkinson and Jackie Whisman from the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF). Dr. Marks’ book The Case for Killer Robots is available at Amazon.com in print, audio and Kindle formats. For a limited time, the Bradley Center is Read More ›

Futuristic and technological scanning of the face of a beautiful woman for facial recognition and scanning to ensure personal safety.

Teaching Computers Common Sense Is Very Hard

Those fancy voice interfaces are little more than immense lookup tables guided by complex statistics

Researchers at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) published a paper recently, deflating claims of rapid progress toward giving computers common sense.

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バイナリーコードの背景

Superintelligent AI Is Still a Myth

Neither the old classical approaches nor the new data scientific angle can make any headway on good ol’ common sense

The official Winograd Schema Challenge, organized by Levesque and friends to see if AI could learn common sense, was retired officially in 2016 for the embarrassing reason that even the well-funded bleeding age Google Brain team performed poorly on a test set of a few hundred questions.

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Big Data Technology for Business Finance Analytic Concept. Modern graphic interface shows massive information of business sale report, profit chart and stock market trends analysis on screen monitor.

Serious Investors Should Embrace the Stock Market Algos!

We can use computers’ inability to distinguish meaning from noise in data to our advantage

Computer algorithms are much, much better than humans at discovering statistical patterns but much, much worse than humans at discerning whether the patterns are meaningful. Wise investors can use the resulting blips to their advantage.

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Computers’ Stupidity Makes Them Dangerous

The real danger today is not that computers are smarter than us, but that we think computers are smarter than us

Many marketing decisions, medical diagnoses, and stock trades, loan and job applications, and election strategies are evaluated by computers. But, as my little experiment shows, the computer does not know whether a pattern is information or noise.

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Hand above a red emergency button

Why an AI pioneer thinks Watson is a “fraud”

The famous Jeopardy contest in 2011 worked around the fact that Watson could not grasp the meaning of anything

Gary N. Smith explains that a computer’s inability to understand what “it” means in a sentence is because it doesn’t understand what any of the words in the sentence mean.

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Singer songwriter playing guitar

Time Passes, Love Fades, But What Does “It” All Mean?

Gary Smith and Bob Marks on AI's incomprehension, from IBM's Watson to the Clinton campaign's Ada

Gary N. Smith and Robert J. Marks discuss the inability of AI to understand puns, lyrics, context, or anything at all. From trading futures, predicting political outcomes, and parsing lyrics, the fundamental incomprehension of artificial intelligence is a key to understanding its limitations. Show Notes 02:30 | The AI Delusion by Oxford University Press 03:00 | The importance of knowing Read More ›

elephant mask beautiful young hipster woman
elephant mask beautiful young hipster woman in the city

AI Is No Match for Ambiguity

Many simple sentences confuse AI but not humans

Because computers lack common sense, they cannot interpret statements that assume a background of general knowledge, as the Winograd Schema challenges show.

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