[Dprglist] AI in natural language, self-driving cars, etc.

[Murray Altheim]

Hi David,

This is kinda my field (Knowledge Representation and computer-based ontologies),
and one of the things that neither AI-based automobiles nor language systems have
is anything like an underlying **model**. So while GPT-3 may be able to mimic
human writing by using massive data sets and "deep learning" (a horribly
misleading term), as the article correctly states, there is no underlying model
of time or space, physical, mental, emotional, spiritual or other entities, no
notion of that seemingly archaic ontological modeling that was part of the earlier
systems like Cyc. There is of course research into hybrid systems, but the fact
that there is no existing computer based ontology that accurately and reliably
models reality (based on what? language?) that even such hybrid systems will be
plagued with all manner of issues.

If was only about a decade or so ago that the computer-based ontology community
began having yearly conferences on the subject of "context", and my exposure to
many of the commercial/industrial ontologies in use show that they typically
reflect technology from the early 1990s, where context simply could not be modeled.
E.g., the scary Palantir system used in the intelligence and security community is
utterly unable to model things like context, opinion, disagreement (either of facts
or human expressions), as its extremely weak model theory has no such facility, this
even after spending putatively billions on its research and development. If that's
representative of best-of-class it's still in primary school.

In other words, just like Elon Musk's silly claims about self-driving electric cars,
Thiel's claims about AI are similarly marketing fluff . Musk's and others' fears of
the imminent danger from AI are either based on ignorance of the current state of
technology or trolling, or both. My guess is the former -- I've never though Musk so
intelligent as his cult tend to think, simply based on his known education, known
experience, and the content of his public statements (which are quite ignorant).

Every article I've read in The Guardian, written by journalists who often fancy that
they've read a few books and perhaps interviewed somebody, touts the advances of AI
as if they're already here or soon to occur. I've I think before referred to the
writings of somebody who knows better, Rodney Brooks of the MIT Robotics Lab, who
in many of his online blogs and papers points out a lot of the fallacies of these
fluffy ideas, and has for many years kept a list of his predictions on most of the
AI-related technologies and when they may either exist or become feasible enough to
mass-market. He remains a skeptic as do I.

So while the hybrid approach is, as they say in Japan, "trending", it will still be
plagued by both the problems inherent in ontology modeling as well as the problems
inherent in knowledge networks built from large data sets harvested from existing
sources, which are often acontextual, factually wrong, often dangerously so, with
no means of discerning a single "common sense reality" from that data. Cyc may have
had its issues but it did have a single "common sense" because Doug Lenat's views
were paramount in its design: he has been the God in that system since day 1. On
the Web there are billions of Gods and they all disagree with each other.

Cheers,

Murray

On 10/17/22 06:02, David P. Anderson via DPRGlist wrote:
> Interesting take:
> 
> https://undark.org/2022/10/07/interview-why-mastering-language-is-so-difficult-for-ai/
> 
> dpa
> 
> 
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...........................................................................
Murray Altheim <murray18 at altheim dot com>                       = =  ===
http://www.altheim.com/murray/                                     ===  ===
                                                                    = =  ===
     In the evening
     The rice leaves in the garden
     Rustle in the autumn wind
     That blows through my reed hut.
            -- Minamoto no Tsunenobu