An epic AI Debate—and why everyone should be at least a little bit worried about AI going into 2023
We recorded 7 claims from this post. 2 were checked against evidence. 5 can’t be checked. Read the post at its source.
Claims from this post (7)
In the order they appear in the post. Each quotation is the speaker’s words in this post. A label such as “Supported” or “Can’t be checked” is the claim’s current assessment; its page has the evidence and the reasons.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Forecast
“I, Gary Marcus, worried about whether contemporary approaches to AI would ever give solutions to four key aspects of thought that we ought to expect from any intelligent machine: reasoning, abstraction, compositionality, and factuality.”
Our reading: Contemporary approaches to AI may never solve reasoning, abstraction, compositionality, and factuality, which any intelligent machine should have.
No horizon
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Observation
“(Spoiler alert: they’re not, at least not yet.)”
Our reading: Current approaches to getting machines to reason about causality are not adequate, at least not yet.
No horizon Evidence as of
Limitation: The cited experiments and theoretical results are historical context, not comprehensive measurements within the target month.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Recommendation or value judgment
“George, like Chomsky and myself, called for a greater emphasis on the understanding of human intelligence.”
Our reading: AI research should place greater emphasis on understanding human intelligence.
No horizon
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Recommendation or value judgment
“David Ferrucci, CEO of Elemental Cognition, and director of IBM’s successful Watson Jeopardy effort, worried that current systems were “ultimately unsatisfied”, and like me called for hybrid approaches that combine neural networks with reasoning and structured representations.”
Our reading: AI should pursue hybrid approaches combining neural networks with reasoning and structured representations.
No horizon
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Forecast
“Kai-Fu Lee, often far more optimistic than I am, worried about whether recent advances in AI-generated content were a net positive for society, or whether they might lead to an avalanche of misinformation [something I too am deeply worried about] and target advertising that might be detrimental.”
Our reading: Recent advances in AI-generated content may lead to an avalanche of misinformation.
No horizon
Assessment: SupportedSaid
Forecast
“That’s a huge commitment, 3.5 hours, but one thing that I think all of our speakers could agree on is that artificial intelligence, in whatever form it currently is, is about to have a huge impact on society.”
Our reading: AI, even in its current form, is about to have a huge impact on society.
Settled before its deadline Evidence as of
Limitation: Marcus supplied no fixed deadline or numerical definition of huge.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
Rhetoric
“If you want to know what a large cross section of the field’s leaders are thinking, right now, there’s no better place to start, a time capsule of 2022 as we enter into the remaining wild AI years of the 2020s.”
Our reading: The remaining years of the 2020s will be wild for AI.
No horizon