Predicting AI: RIP Prof. Hubert Dreyfus

Key Takeaways

I recently learned that Professor Hubert drus the philosopher and outspoken critic of the field of artificial intelligence has died at the age of 87 he published a lot of philosophy and uh did a lot of teaching but one of the things he's best known for and most relevant to this channel was his work on artificial intelligence and its limits uh so I'm going to talk about that a little bit today and focus on one of his arguments in particular so in the 50s and 60s AI was the next big thing uh computers were tackling problems they'd never been able to approach before people were very excited about what was possible and artificial intelligence researchers were confident that true human level intelligence was uh right around the corner their reasoning was something like this thinking consists of processing facts using logic and rules uh what you might call symbol manipulation you have some things you know you know the relationships between them you know the rules of logic and you can use those to reason about the world computers can do this kind of symbol manipulation very well and they're getting better all the time so computers are able to think and they're getting better at thinking all the time dfus saw some problems with this and one of those problems was that a lot of human thinking doesn't seem to boil down to symbol manipulation at all it's only one of the ways we can think it's perhaps the most Salient because it's related to language and conscious thought which is the part of the mind that we're most aware of but actually a lot of the processing seems to be happen happening much lower down when you look at something you don't think ah yes this has four legs and a flat top and a back so it's a chair and this thing has four legs and a flat top and no back so it's a table because I've learned the rules of what a table is and what a chair is and now I'm applying those rules no you just look at the thing and you know that it's a table the object identification is done before your conscious mind is even aware of anything and it's not like your unconscious mind is doing this kind of rules-based thinking in the background it's much fuzzier than that and what would the rules be for identifying chairs anyway I mean do you need a back do you need four legs or like any legs at all I mean this is still a chair is this thing is this or this even something as simple as a chair is really hard to pin down you need a lot of rules and it would take a human a long time to evaluate them and that isn't how the brain works you can imagine any of our ancestors who thought hm well this thing has four legs but it has a tail so my rules say that it's an animal the pointy ears and sharp teeth suggest it's maybe a cat and its size suggests perhaps a lion or a tiger looking at the stripes on the side I can like you're dead before you're done counting the legs so dfus thought there were problems with the assumptions that AI researchers were making about the mind he saw that the model of cognition that the AI researchers were using didn't capture the complexity of human thought and so their reasons for thinking that computers could do the things they claimed they could do uh weren't very good and he went on to publish some work including a book called what computers can't do which argued that a lot of the things that AI researchers claimed computers would soon be able to do were actually impossible things like pattern recognition natural language Vision complex games and so on these things didn't just boil down to symbol manipulation so computers couldn't do them so how did the AI researchers react to this philosopher coming along and telling them that they were foolishly uh attempting The Impossible well they did the obvious thing which is to ignore him and to say unkind things about him there's a wonderful paper called the artificial intelligence of hubal dfus which I'll link to in the dooblydoo check it out back in the day before the internet you know people had to do their flame Wars on typewriters was a different time so having dismissed him completely They carried on trying to apply their good oldfashioned AI techniques to all of these problems for decades until they finally had to admit that yeah it wasn't going to work for a long of these problems so about some things at least dfus was right from the start but the interesting thing is that since then new techniques have been developed which have started giving pretty good results in things like patent recognition language translation High complexity games and so on the kind of things driers said computers flatly couldn't do people say that we moved away from this good oldfashioned AI approach uh which I don't think is really true we didn't stop using those techniques at least on the problems that they work well on we just stopped calling it AI but the point is the new techniques were what you might call subsymbolic you could make a neural network and train it to recognize tables and chairs and tigers you can look through the source code of that system and you won't find anywhere a single symbol which means legs or ears or teeth or anything like that it doesn't work by symbols in the way that the logic and rules-based approaches of the 60s do so ders was right that the AI techniques of the time weren't able to tackle these problems but the thing he didn't expect to happen was computers being able to use symbols to implement these nons symbolic systems that can tackle the problems so to oversimplify the AI researchers said thinking is just symbol manipulation computers can do symbol manipulation therefore computers can think and dfus said thinking is not just symbol manipulation computers can only do symbol manipulation therefore computers can't think I don't think either of those is really right one of them underestimates what the human mind can do do the other underestimates what computers can do I think what I take away from all of this is you can come up with a simple model that seems to explain all the important aspects of some complex system and then it's very easy to convince yourself that that model fully covers all of the complexities and capabilities of that system but you have to be open to the possibility that you're missing something important and that things are more complex than they seem now you might say well both sides of this disagreement made a similar kind of mistake and they're both wrong I don't see it that way at all though I mean someone who says the Earth is flat is wrong but someone who says it's a sphere is wrong as well it's an oblate spheroid it's bigger around the equator but then it's not really an oblate spheroid either they're perfectly smooth which the Earth is not so you could say that all of those views are wrong but some of them are clearly more wrong than others so at the end of the day can we make computers do any kind of thinking that humans can do some people think that now that we have all these new approaches we have deep learning and so on and we're able to start doing the kind of non-symbolic thinking that ders pointed out was necessary we can add that on to the rules and logic stuff and then we're nearly done and we're going to ride this current wave of breakthroughs all the way up to True general intelligence and maybe we will but maybe we won't maybe there's some third thing that we also need and it's going to take us several decades to figure out how to get computers to do that as well maybe there's a fourth thing or a fifth thing but I don't think there's a hund thing I don't even think there's a 10th thing I think we'll get there sooner or later but I've been wrong before so here's the Hubert dfus a great thinker and a man well ahead of his time was he right overall probably too soon to tell but I think he's truly deserving of our admiration and respect for being loudly and publicly less wrong than those around him which is probably the best any of us can hope for just wanted to end the video with a quick thank you to my amazing supporters on patreon and I especially want to thank Fabian consilio who sponsors me for $10 a month I actually have quite a few people sponsoring me at that level but I thought I'd thank each one in their own video though the waiting list is getting kind of long now I think I might increase the dollar amount on that reward level to keep the wait times down anyway I hope you enjoyed the behind thes scenes uh PC build video I put up I'm looking to have some more behind the-scenes stuff going up fairly soon oh and we hit a Target which means I can get a new lens for this camera which should really increase the uh quality and range of what I can do here so thank you again and I will see you next time