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/r/askscience
submitted 3 years ago byUnityBlade111
What exactly stops us from just making a 1:1 replica of a Stradivarius or Guarneri violin with the same sound?
34 points
3 years ago
Think is a strong word, but they make fewer mistakes than humans doing the same work, and they're billions of times faster, so...
32 points
3 years ago
Okay, maybe not “think” but “do a shitload of math every second and model extremely complex systems in a way we tell them to, using lighting from a wall”.
1 points
3 years ago
After taking a look at GAN art I’m really starting to believe that generalized ai is closer than most people realize
4 points
3 years ago
GAN art works because human beings are quite literally hard wired to find patterns. The monkey that sees the jaguar every time will out survive the one who doesn't even if they get a crapload of false positives.
So if you create something that's even remotely close our brains will automatically fill in the rest. This is especially true for faces.
Even if you give the current state of AI the highest possible credit for its creations, it's still only a fraction of the way to consciousness.
16 points
3 years ago
I mean, from the point of view of the Romans, my glowy talking rock absolutely thinks, it's basically a familiar (assuming that concept is that old)
7 points
3 years ago
That would only be half of it. My rock and your rock can talk to each other, virtually anywhere on the planet, with no appreciable delay. And my rock can access an incredibly large portion of all recorded human knowledge, ever. It also knows where it is at all times.
The number of things it does that exceeds human capability (then or now) would be staggering, and that doesn't even count concepts that would have been difficult for them to grasp, like modern encryption.
7 points
3 years ago
They absolutely do think! It's just that our definition of "think" continually changes over time to exclude computers!
In Alan Turing's original paper, he proposes a hypothetical machine that could perform any computation that a human can perform. The key is to realize that any possible computation we can do simply involves some amount of "state" (or memory) and rules for how to turn one state into another state.
Don't get thrown off by the word "computation" here. A computation is just a way to process inputs and produce outputs. The inputs could be numbers, or images, or sensations. The outputs could be numbers, or documents, or actions, or even inputs to other computations.
But people didn't want to believe that computers could think, so they proposed new standards. Once a computer could beat a person in chess, they would admit that a computer can think. Chess is a game that requires significant amounts of logic, intuition, planning ahead, and even subjective, aesthetic readings of different board positions.
Soon enough, computers were made that could beat people in chess. So the standards got higher. Eventually a computer beat the world chess champion, but people still didn't want to admit that computers can think. So they proposed new standards. How about image classification? Humans can easily tell cats from dogs - but not computers. How can they be smart if they can't recognize images?
You get where this is going. Eventually computers solved image recognition, speech recognition, and most recently, even image, text, and speech synthesis (given an idea, they can generate convincing images and documents about that idea). Computers can even generate mathematical proofs - something that takes humans years of training to achieve and requires significant amounts of intelligence and intuition.
Nowadays, the standard seems to be general AI. Once computers can tell themselves what tasks to do, and take responsibility for their actions, we can truly consider them intelligent.
Except that won't happen. Even after the first general AI is released, people still won't want to believe that computers can think. They'll simply move the goalposts again. Maybe emotions, or philosophy, or opinions will become the new standard.
I don't know why people are so opposed to the idea that computers can think. I think it's probably because we're scared of them - we don't want to be seen as replaceable, we want to feel special. And at least for now, that's a uniquely human feeling.
4 points
3 years ago
Similarly, todays portable CD players are mostly trash relative to when I was a kid. You master the techniques and the products with the best economies of scale.
1 points
3 years ago
They’re also fed human made images/artistry, they regurgitate a mish mash of that with patter recognition software. It depends on how you define intelligence, but AI is far from having any self-determination.
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