Autopilot was invented in 1914. It is clearly a form of artificial intelligence. That AI doesn't require computers should be a conceptual shock-- one that can help us better understand what AI really is.
* https://www.electronics-tutorials.ws/systems/negative-feedba...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback
There are no heuristics involved:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic_evaluation
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic_(computer_science)
although I think when autopilot was invented, the concept of "AI" didn't exist, so maybe not a perfect example
A feedback loop — namely between a system and its measure of its own performance— is central to the idea of AI. At least according to Peter Norvig, the director of research at Google, who defines intelligence as ‘the ability to select an action that is expected to maximize a performance measure’ (Russell & Norvig, 2016, p. 37).
(I do go along with author Charles Stross, occasionally seen here on HN: that Corporations are Old Slow AIs, in which case we've already had AIs around for centuries.)
Personally I'm happy to grant a degree of intelligence to plants (and probably even bacteria, if I squint hard enough) though it's of a quite different nature to our own. Certainly feedback loops are central to the idea of intelligence, but there's a whole lot more wanted/needed than merely feedback. And so, I find Norvig's definition a tad wide of the sort of intentionality and sentience we'd want flying a plane, and certainly far, far short of the sort of thing we'd call AGI.
Is it useful to view corporations as old, slow AI? I certainly think so. Otherwise we get really confused about AI. Look at Zillow. That was a deep misunderstanding of AI— the product isn’t done until we take the humans out of the equation. No. What is intelligent is to have a system that uses its own measures of success to improve. This, by the way, is why cybernetics is so critical to understand in the context of AI design.
I have experience in adaptive education where massively expensive teams of engineers missed the point that the “smartness” of the system needs to be based on improving outcome measures (namely, learning outcomes) and instead focused on massive, complex modeling initiatives with no feedback loops to indicate whether the models were doing anything useful.
If more people understood why a steam governor or a 1914 autopilot or a corporate bylaw were primitive forms of AI, they wouldn’t be looking for magic. “If I can understand it, it must not be AI”
By the same argument, a person could say "AI is like a steam governor. I understand completely how steam governors work, and I know they cannot possibly translate from one language to another or recognize faces, so any claim that AI can do so is nonsense." This, of course, would a completely fallacious argument - and where it goes wrong is precisely with the assumption that AI is anything like a governor, except in the broadest possible way that gives precedence to a commonplace resemblance over all the substantive ways in which they are almost completely different.
I understand your desire to persuade people to not regard AI as magic, but I do not think this is helping.
I am also curious as to how you reward a steam governor - does it get more sex, with better governors? You might reward the inventor of a particularly effective governor with orders, but that isn't rewarding the governor.
1. Venus fly traps detect if an insect is on the trap and close the trap. So far so known, but less people know that the trap will open again after a while if there is no movement detected (ie if a stone fell in). Likewise digestion will only start if there is movement detected for a while.
2. Mast years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mast_(botany)) ... somehow trees communicate when to produce seeds on mass ... from what I gathered we have no idea how they do that.
Alternately, I have also read of trees exuding pheremones via their leaves as a warning to other trees in the vicinity when predators (antelope) come around to munch on the leaves, resulting in surrounding trees rapidly increasing tannin content in their own leaves to make them unpalatable to the browsers.
There's a whole lot of shit going on out there that we're scarcely aware of...
A feedback loop may be necessary for AI (or even "natural" intelligence, and sentience (nevermind sapience)) to happen, but is simply having it sufficient?
see also the last few chapters here; http://lavalle.pl/planning/book.html
i would say relative to classical control, fast gpus have replaced the need to have certain closed form solutions that are easily analyzable.
A "good" three axis autopilot consists of 3 quite independent systems. One controls pitch/altitude using a feedback loop very similar to an old-style car cruise control (no traffic sensing here :). A second system controls heading, similarly simplistic. And a third controls yaw, even simpler. There might be an auto-throttle, almost identical in function to conventional cruise control. There might be some useful variations (eg VS and FLC modes) - all very useful but there are NO SMARTS HERE.
Modern systems have edge-case handling (triggered by too-slow, excess load, or anything going outside the normal operational envelope). The AP handles such cases by going "beep" and turning itself off - just handing over to the pilot!
Alexa, Tesla autopilot, Google search, speech to text, recommendations— any practical example of AI— these are tools. Not human replacers.
Is it your position that commercial flying can never be automated, or only that, if it is automated, it would not, by definition, be AI?
My position is that “fully automated” is a logically inconsistent human objective. It means that there is no possibility of human control, because if there is human control / supervision, the system is not fully automated. And, so long as there is human control, you are designing tools for people to use. No one wants anything to be fully automated. It’s the biggest fallacy of AI in design.
If your basis for so believing is the same as you expressed a couple of posts back - that "fully automated" means that there is no possibility of human control, because if there is human control / supervision, the system is not fully automated - then you are simply avoiding the issue by using a pedantic definition of automation. It would seem that, to you, full automation of anything is a logical impossibility as there is no such thing as automation (in the usual sense) in your dictionary.
If this is your argument then, by your definition, even the task of governing the speed of a steam engine cannot be fully automated, as someone sets the desired speed. This sort of reasoning is not insightful; it merely turns your participation in a discussion into a statement of your private lexicon, and avoids engaging any substantive issue. Private lexicons are not useful in communication!
Furthermore, I can respond to your pedanticism by rephrasing the question: do you think it is impossible that commercial aviation could ever operate without human pilots either aboard the airplanes or controlling their flight remotely, beyond just setting target routes and schedules?
I think it is fair to say that, in the context of the article we are all responding to, the relevant sector of commercial aviation is that which currently uses airplanes flown by human pilots.
We should not remove humans from the loop until the system passes the Turing test and solves the Trolley program concurrent to acceptable ethical standards.