I wrote this comment to an earlier version of Justin’s article:
It seems to me that most of the ‘philosophical’ problems are going to get solved as a matter of solving practical problems in building useful AI. You could call ML systems, AI, that is getting developed now ‘empirical’. From the perspective of the people building current systems, they likely don’t consider what they’re doing as solving philosophical problems. Symbol grounding problem? Well, an image classifier built on a convolutional neural network learns to get quite proficient at grounding out classes like ‘cars’ and ‘dogs’ (symbols) from real physical scenes.
So, the observation I want to make, is that the philosophical problems we can think of that might trip over a system are likely to turn out to look like technical/research/practical problems that need to be solved by default for practical reasons in order to make useful systems.
The image classification problem wasn’t solved in one day, but it was solved using technical skills, engineering skills, more powerful hardware, and more data. People didn’t spend decades discussing philosophy: the problem was solved from some advances in the ideas of building neural networks and from more powerful computers. Of course, image classification doesn’t solve the symbol grounding problem in full. But other aspects of symbol grounding that people might find mystifying are getting solved piece-wise, as researchers and engineers are solving practical problems of AI.
Let’s look at a classic problem formulation from MIRI, ‘Ontology Identification’:
Technical problem (Ontology Identification). Given goals specified in some ontology and a world model, how can the ontology of the goals be identified in the world model? What types of world models are amenable to ontology identification? For a discussion, see Soares (2015).
When you create a system that performs any function in the real world, you are in some sense giving it goals. Reinforcement Learning-trained systems are pursuing ‘goals’. An autonomous car takes you from chosen points A to chosen points B; it has the overall goal of transporting people. The ontology identification problem is getting solved piece-wise as a practical matter. Perhaps the MIRI-style theory could give us a deeper understanding that helps us avoid some pitfalls, but it’s not clear why these wouldn’t be caught as practical problems.
What would a real philosophical landmine look like? A class of philosophical problems that wouldn’t get solved as a practical matter, and pose a risk for harm against humanity would be the real philosophical landmines.
I wrote this comment to an earlier version of Justin’s article:
It seems to me that most of the ‘philosophical’ problems are going to get solved as a matter of solving practical problems in building useful AI. You could call ML systems, AI, that is getting developed now ‘empirical’. From the perspective of the people building current systems, they likely don’t consider what they’re doing as solving philosophical problems. Symbol grounding problem? Well, an image classifier built on a convolutional neural network learns to get quite proficient at grounding out classes like ‘cars’ and ‘dogs’ (symbols) from real physical scenes.
So, the observation I want to make, is that the philosophical problems we can think of that might trip over a system are likely to turn out to look like technical/research/practical problems that need to be solved by default for practical reasons in order to make useful systems.
The image classification problem wasn’t solved in one day, but it was solved using technical skills, engineering skills, more powerful hardware, and more data. People didn’t spend decades discussing philosophy: the problem was solved from some advances in the ideas of building neural networks and from more powerful computers.
Of course, image classification doesn’t solve the symbol grounding problem in full. But other aspects of symbol grounding that people might find mystifying are getting solved piece-wise, as researchers and engineers are solving practical problems of AI.
Let’s look at a classic problem formulation from MIRI, ‘Ontology Identification’:
When you create a system that performs any function in the real world, you are in some sense giving it goals. Reinforcement Learning-trained systems are pursuing ‘goals’. An autonomous car takes you from chosen points A to chosen points B; it has the overall goal of transporting people. The ontology identification problem is getting solved piece-wise as a practical matter. Perhaps the MIRI-style theory could give us a deeper understanding that helps us avoid some pitfalls, but it’s not clear why these wouldn’t be caught as practical problems.
What would a real philosophical landmine look like? A class of philosophical problems that wouldn’t get solved as a practical matter, and pose a risk for harm against humanity would be the real philosophical landmines.