AI - <AUTHOR> http://blog.samaltman.com/ai <comment><USER2> Critically speaking, this article doesn't add anything. I don't know why I read it. Can anyone explain why they upvoted?

<comment><AUTHOR> For me, "There are certainly some reasons to be optimistic. Andrew Ng, who worked or works on Google's AI, has said that he believes learning comes from a single algorithm - the part of your brain that processes input from your ears is also capable of learning to process input from your eyes. If we can just figure out this one general-purpose algorithm, programs may be able to learn general-purpose things." is what was most interesting to me. The idea that there's a fairly simple algorithm to learning, applied in the brain, which produces at least the basic learning capability, and possibly consciousness.

<comment><USER3> We already have a candidate algorithm[1], which is successful in a broad range of applications[2][3][4].

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning#Convolutional_neu...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning#Convolutional_neural_networks)

[2] [http://deeplearning.net/reading-list/](http://deeplearning.net/reading- list/)

[3] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning#Results](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning#Results)

[4] [http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/06/google-x-neural- ne...](http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/06/google-x-neural-network/)

<comment><USER4> "Deep Learning" is not itself a candidate for anything, because it's not any single algorithm, but a category of approaches.

Deep Learning generally refers to machine learning algorithms that deal with stacking multiple layers of simpler functions to enable more complicated functions, and optimizing all the parameters to best fit your training set and generalize to new samples (the hard part). Though it usually refers to neural networks, I dont think there's any reason it doesn't also apply to other layered approaches as long as there's a relatively unified learning algorithm applied across the whole system.

There are clearly many different deep learning algorithms, even if you just count the permutations of tricks you can choose from to improve layered NN generalization. Though to be fair I think very good progress is being made towards developing "better" algorithms in the sense that new ones (e.g. RBM pretraining + dropout) usual perform better than than older algorithms, no matter what data you use it on (now network architecture is another matter entirely).

<comment><USER3> I actually linked to convolutional neural networks on the Deep Learning page as the algorithm.

But I do agree with your point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If the only goal is an 'artificial' consciousness, it might be more prudent to consider a functional definition of what consciousness is and try to build that. We didn't make computers by modeling how individual neurons perform mathematical calculations.

On the other hand, if you want to go the biological route, there's some awesome work to be done. If I were to study consciousness, here's the question I would ask: how do we separate our selves from our surroundings? Patients with brain-machine interfaces (like moving a mouse cursor) start by thinking about moving their arms around. Then they apparently report that they gradually just feel that the interface is another body part. So if it's set up to change the TV channel, they just imagine that they have a channel-changing organ.

So maybe you want to build a system that can identify what is a part of itself versus what is not, and it's not just a fixed list. So what does that data structure look like? How is it defined, queried, and updated? Defined by what you can 'influence?' So gradated based on my influence? These aren't just broad philosophical questions, they're more specific and actionable.

That's just one possible angle, but it's different than, say, machine learning paradigms where you want to build a machine that can do pattern classification (which the brain undoubtedly does). There are probably other routes as well.

<comment><USER6> We know a ton about the brain but so little about the mind itself. We still don't have definitive answers to what consciousness is, why it's here, what's useful for, etc. Some people debate whether the mind exists at all. Also, there's still very little understanding of the difference between the conscious and unconscious mind.

I think building an artificial consciousness is going too far. Artificial intelligence is simpler; it's just fake intelligence. Seems easy enough right? If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it's intelligent. We don't need to make it "conscious" necessarily, again whatever that means, in order for it be intelligent.

I feel like we can build artificially intelligent software pretty "easily" relative to making it "conscious".

<comment><USER7> > We know a ton about the brain but so little about the mind itself. We still > don't have definitive answers to what consciousness is, why it's here, > what's useful for, etc. Some people debate whether the mind exists at all. > Also, there's still very little understanding of the difference between the > conscious and unconscious mind.

One of the really, really bad consequences of the Cold War was the scientific divide between East and West. By that I mean serious lack of scientific data exchange between the blocks. The consequences are still felt and this area (the problem of consciousness) is the one that suffered. The problem of "consciousness" was basically solved, at least at a conceptual level, by Soviet psychology and neuropsychology. Here I refer, of course, to the work of Vygotsky and Luria. What is consciousness? Almost nothing at all by itself. Consciousness as found in humans is a consequence of our cognitive development and the advanced symbolic capabilities of humans. The subjective perception we have of the thing we call consciousness is "simply" (it's not really simple when you get into details) a product of humans acquiring language skills (I'm simplifying).

This is not to say the subject is trivial, it takes volumes to describe what is happening, but the thing we informally call "consciousness" is really nothing at all in and of itself, and the perception we have of it is just a result of the very complicated process of cognitive development. Thin air, like Lisp's cons.

If you want to read on it I can recommend Vygotsky's _Language and Thought_ (actually, it's his only book) and Luria's _Language and Consciousness_ (I'm not sure it was ever translated into English, it's a collection of his lecture notes from a university course he did on the subject) or possibly _The Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations_.

Why this line of thinking is mostly ignored in the West I have no idea. Why do we still cling to metaphysical (even religious I would say) phantasies about "consciousness" is an interesting topic itself. Is it because it's romantic to think there's something special, transcendent, about our minds? Are we really that sentimental? I have some hypotheses, but it's a different topic.

<comment><USER6> I think that's another possible _narrative_ for the mind but it's certainly not hard science. There's no concrete data showing where the mind is in our bodies or what part of the brain creates it. Psycology can't answer questions like where does the mind come from or what is experience.

It's an interesting narrative though and I'll check out those books.

<comment><USER7> > Psycology can't answer questions like where does the mind come from or what > is experience.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by this. Of course it can, that's the whole purpose of psychology (and, more fashionably, neuroscience of course). To me that sounds like saying _science_ can't answer these questions. Do note that when I say "psychology" I mean strictly the scientific areas of whatever comes in the bag labelled "psychology". Due to historical accidents the term acquired a lot of BS pseudo-scientific baggage, and it's really a shame those things can detract from a wealth of valuable hard results honest scientific psychology uncovered.

The answer that developmental cognitive psychology, at least the theory I'm referring to, gives is that "the mind" comes from the only place it can come from: neural processes and the way they hook into environmental interactions of the organism (social and physical). The key to understanding what gives rise to "consciousness" is in understanding the role of language acquisition in broader cognitive development. The point where a child utters it's first words is neither the beginning nor the end of this extremely nuanced process. In my first post I took it for granted it's understood that this is not just armchair speculation, it's based on empirical data. As any good scientific theory it's far from complete, maybe in some details is inaccurate but it's certainly infinitely better that an endless philosophical debate (with strong religious, or in the best case idealist, undertones) on what the mind is and where it comes from.

<comment><USER8> > it's based on empirical data

What empirical data can say anything about, for example, the philosophical zombie problem? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie)

<comment><USER7> There's no such data, because the zombie problem is complete nonsense. Well, actually, it is complete nonsense precisely because empirical data can't say anything about it.

<comment><USER8> By that argument, there is no moral argument against inflicting pain on others, because the pain of another is not something we can empirically observe, except by analogy of how we react to the pain we ourselves experience.

<comment><USER7> First, the moral argument against inflicting pain on others doesn't depend on existence of pain. The moral dilemma is: is it acceptable to inflict pain on others or not. This is different, and to a large extend independent, from the question if pain exists in experience of others. In other words, if pain exists in others, it doesn't follow that you _have to_ , by mere logical reasoning, make a moral conclusion that inflicting pain is wrong. There is an uncrossable ontological abyss between the empirical what _is_ and the moral what _should be_.

Second, the case of pain from an empirical side is not at all like what we have in the philosophical zombie "problem". We _can_ empirically observe pain. There are all sorts of physiological and neural manifestations of pain. Of course, now you may say "ah, but how can we know that these empirical manifestations mean the person is experiencing the sensation of pain". Scientifically that dilemma makes little sense, it's simply unproductive, it's scientifically useless. If we were to go by that route, we could inject a similar dilemma into every scientific problem, which inevitably would lead to the problem of solipsism. How can we _really, really_ be certain that anything at all exists? Well, I suppose we can't, but this is a question that science has long ago abandoned because it doesn't get you anywhere, it doesn't yield any useful results.

Do note that unlike the question of pain, the zombie problem is defined so that there is in principle absolutely no way to detect, to measure, if someone is a zombie or not. On the other hand, we _can_ in principle measure and detect events correlated with introspective reports on sensations. If we couldn't do that for some phenomenon it would be wise to consider that the phenomenon doesn't exist for the purpose of empirical scientific examination.

Frankly, I'm surprised that my previous post (where I say the zombie problem is nonsense) got downvoted because this is the foundation of scientific methodology. If you can not, even in principle, measure/detect something then it makes no sense to discuss it. Of course, you can amuse yourself and speculate on it, but that falls outside of boundaries of scientific inquiry and I hope that's what we're discussing here.

<comment><USER8> > Of course, now you may say "ah, but how can we know that these empirical > manifestations mean the person is experiencing the sensation of pain". > Scientifically that dilemma makes little sense, it's simply unproductive, > it's scientifically useless.

Sure, it's _scientifically_ impossible to evaluate. From a purely scientific perspective pain is just electricity. How would you convince an intelligent being that could not feel pain that it exists at all?

The existence of pain falls outside the boundaries of scientific inquiry, I agree. But are you saying that it therefore doesn't exist? Because your earlier argument seems to be that we can explain the mystery of consciousness within a scientific framework, and that is the larger point I disagree with.

<comment><USER7> > How would you convince an intelligent being that could not feel pain that it > exists at all?

Assuming the being is "reasonable" (in this context it would mean it's willing to accept that there exist concepts that it may not understand or directly experience, and is willing to trust us), we could just point out the chemical and electrical phenomena correlated with pain and say that it's something that causes a certain kind of feeling of discomfort. We would get in trouble if this being also can not feel general discomfort, but you're probably bound to hit a wall in understanding at some point anyway when communicating with an entity whose experiencing capabilities are wildly different from ours.

> The existence of pain falls outside the boundaries of scientific inquiry, I > agree. But are you saying that it therefore doesn't exist?

Actually, my point about pain was that it does exist, precisely because it can be examined and explained within a scientific framework. If we couldn't do that, then we could say that for all practical purposes, as far as science is concerned, "pain doesn't exist".

The same is true for consciousness. What's difficult about it is that it's not _a_ thing, there's no hormone for consciousness, there's no brain centre where it's localized, rather it's a process and a product both phylogenic and ontogenic so it's a lot harder to capture it and identify it, to put it "under the microscope". It's not some secret sauce to intelligence, it's a consequence of intelligence. And the most important part of the process is the dynamics of language acquisition (at least when we're speaking of conscious experience in Homo sapiens).

I could go into the details but I'm afraid my posts would explode in length. ATM I don't have time to dig for good online material on this, and I'm under the impression that the theory in time got derailed into developing some practical aspects concerning child cognitive development, verbal learning etc, and away from the hard meaty implications we're discussing here, so I'm reluctant to even attempt to go into that rabbit hole. But they're explicitly there (the books I mentioned discuss the issue at length). Interestingly, about 10 years ago I was doing some work on word-meaning and symbol grounding development and I was both glad and frustrated to see literature on computer modelling in this area full of operationally defined concepts from the theory but people were seemingly unaware that this work has already been treated in depth on the theoretical level because there were no references to it then, I'm not sure if anything has changed, I've since moved on to other things. For example, the Talking Heads model[1][2]. It's not about consciousness per se, and although the authors never reference the socio-cultural theory of cognitive development (a horrible name in this day and age, it tends to evoke associations to post-modern dribble, but nothing could be further from the truth), it can give you a good idea of some aspects of the dynamics explored in the theory because what is happening in the TH model is exactly what the S-C theory describes is happening externally during language acquisition (in broader strokes though).

As for the philosophical zombie problem, I'd like to retract what I said about it being nonsense. Actually, it's very useful in showing why worrying about subjective sensation of consciousness is completely useless in AI and is very much like asking how many angels can dance on a tip of a needle. On a very related note I'd add: people are severely underestimating the significance of the Turing test.

[1] [http://staff.science.uva.nl/~gideon/Steels_Tutorial_PART2.pd...](http://staff.science.uva.nl/~gideon/Steels_Tutorial_PART2.pdf)

[2] [http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=talking+heads+expe...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=talking+heads+experiment&btnG=&as_sdt=1,5&as_sdtp=)

<comment><USER8> > Actually, my point about pain was that it does exist, precisely because it > can be examined and explained within a scientific framework.

The physical processes of pain (ie. the electricity) can be observed scientifically, but the "sensation" of pain (to use your word from before) cannot. But it is the "sensation" of pain that gives it its moral significance, otherwise inflicting pain would be no different morally than flipping on the switch to an electrical circuit.

> The same is true for consciousness. What's difficult about it is that it's > not a thing, there's no hormone for consciousness, there's no brain centre > where it's localized, rather it's a process and a product both phylogenic > and ontogenic

I can only conclude that you mean something different than I do when you say "consciousness." To me the sensation of pain is a subset of consciousness. It's the difference between electricity "falling in the middle of the forest" so to speak and electricity that causes some sentient being to feel discomfort.

> Actually, it's very useful in showing why worrying about subjective > sensation of consciousness is completely useless in AI

Sure it's useless _to AI_. To AI the zombie problem doesn't matter, because the goal is to produce intelligence, not sentience. But it's useful in a conversation about what sentience and consciousness mean.

If we created intelligence that could pass the Turing Test against anybody, it would be basically impossible to know if it experiences sentience in the way that all of us individually know that we do. But that is the essence of the zombie problem. Where does sentience come from? We have no idea.

Actually I take it back; the zombie problem will be extremely useful to AI the moment a computer can pass the Turing Test, because that's when it will matter whether we can "kill" it or not.

<comment><USER9> > The physical processes of pain (ie. the electricity) can be observed > scientifically, but the "sensation" of pain (to use your word from before) > cannot.

You state this as though it's a given, but it's not. You're assuming Dualism. So, of course you end up with Dualism.

> But it is the "sensation" of pain that gives it its moral significance, > otherwise inflicting pain would be no different morally than flipping on the > switch to an electrical circuit.

This is a silly over-simplification. Complexity matters. The patterns of electro-chemical reactions that occur when I inflict pain on another human cause that human to emote in a way that I can relate to because of the electro-chemical reactions that have been happening in me and those around me since before my birth. So what?

It's in no way comparable to flipping a light switch, except in the largely irrelevant detail that electricity was part of each system.

The fact that an incredibly complex system consisting of individuals, language, and society should yield different results from three pieces of metal and some current shouldn't be the least bit surprising, and is not a reasonable argument for dualism, or p-zombies.

Here's my take on the p-zombie "problem". We can say all kinds of shit, but it doesn't have to make sense. For example I can say "This table is also an electron". That's a sentence. It evokes some kind of imagery, but it's utter nonsense. It doesn't point out some deep mystery about tables or electrons. It's just nonsense.

<comment><USER8> > You state this as though it's a given, but it's not. You're assuming > Dualism.

No. Dualism is the idea that our minds are non-physical. I say minds are fully physical, and all thinking happens in the physical realm. But somehow the results of this thinking are perceived and sensed by a self-aware being as "self" in a way that other physical processes are not.

> The patterns of electro-chemical reactions that occur when I inflict pain on > another human cause that human to emote in a way that I can relate to > because of the electro-chemical reactions that have been happening in me and > those around me since before my birth.

Exactly. You are extrapolating _by analogy_ that other people experience pain in the same way you do, because you cannot experience their pain directly in the way that they do. But this analogy of thinking is just an assumption. And it certainly offers no insight into why you are self-aware and a computer (a very different but still complex electrical system) is not (we assume).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If anyone is interested in AI, I highly recommend joining Less Wrong, a community started by AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky. He started the community to convince people to focus on the "friendly AI problem". [1] I actually recommend that everyone read LW, but _especially_ if you're interested in AI.

[1] In a nutshell, the friendly AI problem is: assume we create an AI. It may rapidly become more intelligent than us, if we program it right. As soon as it becomes significanlty more intelligent, we will no longer be the most intelligent beings around, so the AI's goals will matter more than ours.

Therefore, we should really give it good goals that are compatible with what we want to happen. And since no one right now knows how to define "what humans want" good enough for writing it in _code_ , then we'd better figure THAT out _before_ building AI.

<comment><USER11> Any suggestions for getting started in the LW community? Its barrier to entry means I can't seem to vote on anything, etc. It's quite intimidating really.

<comment><USER10> I'll reiterate something another poster said, since it isnt' getting enough credit:

Read HP:MoR.

It's a fanfic of Harry Potter, written by the same Eliezer Yudkowsky who wrote much of Less Wrong. It was specifically written to convey the feeling of "what it means to be a rationalist".

For those who aren't into Harry Potter or into Fanfiction (like me), I can tell you this: Suprisingly, it is one of the _best stories I 've ever read_. And I'm talking just as a story, nevermind the other value you can get form it, which is a good introduction to the "rationalist" community.

I'd argue that the BEST way to understand what is going on at LessWrong is to read HP:MoR, as it was intended to be such an intro and succeeds masterfully, while being amazingly fun.

<comment><USER12> I want to emphasize just how good this book is. It may very well be my favorite thing I've read and I was also initially skeptical when it was presented as fan fiction.

I think I might restart reading it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I believe human-level general intelligence (and beyond) is already inevitable, even if we don't make significant developments in "solving" intelligence. Projects that are already developing stuff like this (e.g. IBM Blue Brain) are just copying the human brain as closely as possible. Of course, this isn't as efficient as it could be (they simulate it all at the molecular level, so you can only get 1 neuron per CPU). However, as Moore's Law progresses, even if we don't make the software more efficient, we will eventually be able to create a fully functional simulation.

But if you look at the history of technology, things we create aren't usually exactly based on models seen in nature. Airplanes aren't exactly like birds. I believe we will find a more "man made" model for general intelligence (maybe not even a neuronal model) that works much more efficiently with the hardware we have available.

Going back to the airplane analogy, we already have the people who strap wooden wings to their arms and jump off buildings (like Blue Brain), but we are looking for the first Wright brothers design.

<comment><USER14> "So... why didn't the flapping-wing designs work? Birds flap wings and they fly. The flying machine flaps its wings. Why, oh why, doesn't it fly?"

[http://lesswrong.com/lw/vx/failure_by_analogy/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/vx/failure_by_analogy/)

A very relevant article, both to the main topic and bird/airplane example.

Yes, biology has solved some problems and can suggest some solutions, but we can't go cargo-cult on it and expect things to work just because they _look similar_.

<comment><USER15> We were trying to make airplane-sized birds, which don't exist in nature for a variety of very good reasons.

Equally, our materials science wasn't good enough for flapping wings at the time.

I expect to see flapping wing designs appearing in micro-flyers within a decade. At the insect scale they're really useful:

[http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/newsevents/casestudies/2011/Pages/Tin...](http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/newsevents/casestudies/2011/Pages/Tinyflyingmachineswillrevolutionisesurveillancework.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Hierarchical Temporal Memory is the closest model to the brain that I've seen ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_temporal_memory](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_temporal_memory)). They are capable of generalized learning and excel in the same way that humans do. They are capable of abstraction, self categorization, and online learning.

There are elements of past AI models in the HTM model, however to reduce HTM's or any deep learning algorithm to a mere combination of past AI concepts overlooks the power of the right model when it is achieved. It would be like saying that Facebook is just a news feed. Sure, that's what gets most of the eyeballs, but there's a lot more there which would drastically reduce its value if not present.

What I think is most interesting is that we may find that Humans learn pretty inefficiently from the perspective of the amount of input data required over time. This may seem silly at first, but when you consider how many neurons cover the surface area of our ears and eyes and then consider the fact that it takes anywhere from 12 to 14 months for a child to speak its first word, you might start to agree with this line of thought. Also, when I consider the fact that this processing all happens in parallel even further pushes me in this direction.

Whatever the case may be, HTMs are definitely a cool area of research. For those who are interested, you should definitely check out more of Jeff Hawkins work at Numenta. They've been able to demonstrate some pretty novel things. He wrote a book back in 2006 that blew my mind. Went into deeper explanation about how HTMs could model everything from deep learning, to consciousness, creativity, and bunch of other things.

</comment><comment><USER17> > I am quite confident that we'll be able to make computer programs that > perform specific complex tasks very well. But how do we make a computer > program that decides what it wants to do?

Are we so sure that "we" really are in charge of what we want to do? I believe a lot of our desires and ambitions are hardcoded into our brains and we just project them onto present goals, like getting a promotion or learning how to play the piano, etc. ultimately all these desires cater to the same few desires we always had and were born with: developing a sense of social belonging and intimacy.

See also: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belongingness](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belongingness)

<comment><USER18> This is why the desire for Strong AI boggles my mind. In order for a computer to operate at a "human" level, it would need to make decisions based on things like ambition and fear and greed. It will also have to constantly make mistakes, just like we do.

If it didn't have character flaws, it wouldn't be operating at a "human" level. But if it does have these character flaws, how useful would it really be compared to a real human? Is the quest for Strong AI just a Frankensteinian desire to create artificial life?

I'm curious if there are any good papers looking into stuff like this.

<comment><USER19> Yeah. And what if the computer discovers that desire is pointless? Will it have a religion? Buddhism? Zen Buddhism?

Why does quantum computing even exist if all forms of computing are equivalent?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> One thing that crosses my mind whenever I imagine creating a human level intelligence is that it takes humans YEARS of constant stimulation to begin to exhibit intelligent behavior... Sometimes I wonder if we'll have the algorithm may before we realize it...

<comment><USER21> We can stimulate a computer with the equivalent amount of information in much less time than years, though.

<comment><USER22> We probably can't. Unless it's an extremely fast algorithm, we don't have the processing power to make it run faster than our brain.

We'll can in a couple of decades, probably. But not now.

<comment><USER14> Brain seems to be slow (I read it was measured to run at 200Hz tops), but it's extremely parallelized and caches the livjng shit out of everything.

<comment><USER23> It also appears to have quite a remarkable instruction set.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > artificial consciousness, or creativity, or desire, or whatever you want to > call it. I am quite confident that we'll be able to make computer programs > that perform specific complex tasks very well. But how do we make a computer > program that decides what it wants to do? How do we make a computer decide > to care on its own about learning to drive a car? Or write a novel?

I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

 _We_ cannot decide what we want to do--we can only decide how best to fulfill our wants; a person learns to drive a car because we want the freedom, social approval, and other stuff that comes with that.

Natural selection gave us our base-level desires, that all other desires spring from; and it was able to do that because it's an optimization process. A functional AI's desires will come from _some_ sort of optimization process; the only question is what that process will be optimizing.

</comment><comment><USER25> I don't understand the logic behind these types of posts that add no value to the poster and the people discussing it in comments.

Is it a signaling mechanism to attract people working in this area? I'm sure you have already turned them off by showing your naivete. So no value to you.

To people trying to discuss this by racking their brains and looking for new ideas, Any one with a quint decent thought/idea will never share it here to enlighten us laymen. So no value to us too.

So, what's the point HN, and why all the upvotes?

<comment><USER26> > So, what's the point HN, and why all the upvotes?

I guess SV types get a little hot for AI based utopian/dystopian succession when they're the only ones who could possibly gain from such an outcome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Interesting post. The way I look at it is from the perspective of a human baby. How do they become intelligent? They have the "sensors" to detect features and will be able to recognize their parents. A lot of things are then learned, like touching a hot stove and from getting a formal education. For a machine to be artificially intelligent it would have to learn from its environment but also take formal instruction. That seems like a lot of ground to cover and this is what makes it unrealistic (for now).

You can have a machine read every book in existence but how long will it take for it to understand in the same way a human reading a lot of books would need to understand it somehow.

<comment><USER27> Not sure what set off the down votes but we can teach a computer to recognize characters for application in OCR. We also learned those characters from being taught in school and reading bad handwriting. We teach computers the same way. How are they supposed to magically recognize them especially since they didn't invent whatever language it is?

Note that I'm referring to artificial general intelligence[0].

0\. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence)

<comment><USER28> This was back in the 1990s, but I worked in what was basically a data entry company, where the processing was a mixture of scanned forms (Scantron style) and human key entry. The project I was on was image scanning the forms for other purposes, so we had a neural net handwriting recognition system that we were comparing to human key entry at a large scale - millions of documents.

What we found was that human key entry significantly outperformed the neural nets, even when the data was carefully handwritten in constrained boxes. Humans were so far ahead of the heavily trained neural nets that the software was basically unusable at that point.

Of course, that was nearly 20 years ago, and things have probably moved on quite a bit. But you can still see the basic problem in Captcha-style validation on web pages. Computers just can't be trained to recognize distorted text that humans can read pretty easily.

<comment><USER29> [http://www.kurzweilai.net/vicarious-ai-breaks-captcha- turing...](http://www.kurzweilai.net/vicarious-ai-breaks-captcha-turing-test)

I think they have done that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I wrote about limitations on AI imposed by algorithmic complexity here: [http://paulbohm.com/articles/artificial-intelligence- obstacl...](http://paulbohm.com/articles/artificial-intelligence-obstacles- information-theory/)

In essence: unless we extract that "single algorithm" that Andrew Ng believes in from an existing medium, we're unlikely to rediscover it independently.

(read the papers i link to at the bottom of the article for a more rigorous explanation)

</comment><comment><USER31> Wait, wasn't creativity part solved? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_creativity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_creativity) (I'm refering to Stephen L. Thaler's work)

I mean you need two neural nets. One that adds chaos to another neural net and a second one that returns the result. You could probably optimize by somehow making those parts parallel.

</comment><comment><USER32> Many people see Artificial General Intelligence as a panacea. The idea is, "We'll create artificially intelligent scientists who will solve all of our other problems for us!". I think that future generations will look back on this as a modern version of alchemy. If blogs had existed centuries ago I'm sure that people would have called the transmutation of metal the most important trend of their time. This isn't to denigrate the author of this post or the people who have dedicated their lives to AGI research. It's just that this idea probably falls into the category of "If it seems too good to be true, it probably is". [1]

We have no proof that artificial _general_ intelligence can exist. We have numerous examples of specific intelligence: playing chess, driving cars, various forms of categorization. But we don't have a single example of an application that can handle a task that it hasn't been specifically trained and tested for. It's not to say that it isn't possible, but there is no more evidence for AGI than there is for Bigfoot, leprechauns or space aliens. The idea of artificial consciousness currently requires a leap of faith.

The most important trend today is collecting massive amounts of data and using them to make accurate predictions. Instead of lusting after one all-singing all-dancing intelligent program we should focus on tackling one form of decision making at a time. Drive cars, land planes, predict the weather and calculate the best way to get from point A to point B. One day we'll wake up in a world where artificial intelligence is all around us and the idea of a one size fits all solution will seem silly and quaint.

[1] In fairness, this was said about every amazing thing in modern life. You never know.

<comment><USER33> But we do have proof that general intelligence exists. So How would it be impossible for artificial general intelligence to exist ? Do you believe in mind body dualism? AGI will be difficult but comparing it to Bigfoot or Leperchauns is rediculous. There is a huge difference between very very very hard and impossible.

<comment><USER34> Gold exists, So How would it be impossible _alchemy_ to exist ?

<comment><USER35> Star fusion does it every day.

Evidence that something exists is evidence that it is created.

<comment><USER34> Alchemy and AI are both a bit more culturally specific. I agree that seeing life on earth would not logically be inconsistent with extr-terrestial life existing. But that is not to say AI=ET.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wonder what other credible contenders for "most overlooked technology" are.

I think "physical tamper evidence/tamper response" is one, along with hardware security functionality (crazy secure virtualization extensions, etc.) -- essentially competing with Intel not just on power but also on security features. Although Intel is leading in this area with TXT and now SGX.

</comment><comment><USER2> 10 points in 10 minutes. If multiple accounts weren't used, that must be a ready-worthy article.

<comment><USER36> As others have pointed out, the domain probably earned some points all by itself (and multiple submissions, which act as additional votes on the primary submission). It was also posted by a (popular) YC alum, which typically also accelerates upvotes.

<comment><USER2> > and multiple submissions, which act as additional votes on the primary > submission

Didn't know that; thanks for pointing out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The problem of AI is that it has much more complexity than we used to think. Even best guys like Minsky have grossly underestimated the complexity, so they got stuck, and now are in a process of developing more subtle, refined theories. In some sense the story of modern AI is a story of how Minsky assigned to figure scene decomposition for robotic vision as a summer project, and now teaching Society of mind and calling for entirely different approach to what is intelligence. It is not, of course, some massively parallel recursive problem solver implemented in neurons, it is too naive view, so there is no use to search for one.) It is as complicated as actions of whole humanity with a billions of semiindependent agents.

</comment><comment><USER38> Humans have a drive, a raison d'etre, intelligence being only a mean to fulfill that drive.

Thing is that drive is uncertain/subjective.

Learning can't be an objective by itself, intelligence is just a tool, from that perspective you can say there are already AI, like targeted ads, it learns about you and acts accordingly.

So to have a "generalist" AI, like human's intelligence is general, you'd have to have an objective like staying alive and build up from that.

<comment><USER39> No, it's not. Drive is the desire to maximise future available options (e.g. to not get trapped). There is already software that decides what to do without a human telling it what to do. For more see [http://www.ted.com/talks/alex_wissner_gross_a_new_equation_f...](http://www.ted.com/talks/alex_wissner_gross_a_new_equation_for_intelligence.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> > Andrew Ng, who worked or works on Google's AI, has said that he believes > learning comes from a single algorithm - the part of your brain that > processes input from your ears is also capable of learning to process input > from your eyes. If we can just figure out this one general-purpose > algorithm, programs may be able to learn general-purpose things.

As I wrote a few days ago here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7217967](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7217967)

"The way intelligence works, in my opinion, is this:

1) experiences are stored in the brain. Experiences contain inputs from the 5 senses as well as the sense of danger/satisfaction at that point.

2) at each given moment, the brain takes the current input and matches it against the stored experiences. If there is a match (up to a threshold), then the sense of danger/satisfaction is recalled. Thus the entity is able to 'predict', up to a specific point, if the outcome of the current situation is bad or good for it, and react accordingly.

The key thing to the above is that the whole process is fused together: the steps for adding new experiences, matching new experiences and recalling reactions is fused together in big pile of neurons."

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm just going to stick this out there because I'm a futurist and it's my role to share with others what I'm thinking about. What I share may be flat out wrong, scary, half assed, or appear to be crazy. So be it.

We've advanced a lot in the last 100 years. We're starting to see a bigger picture forming with the advent of compute and networking capabilities. Combining simple elements of these basics give rise to surprising and interesting behaviors. See "Twitch Plays Pokemon": [http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57619058-93/twitch-plays- po...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57619058-93/twitch-plays-pokemon-is- now-a-fight-for-the-soul-of-the-internet/) as an example of suprising behavior.

The more we look in detail at the universe around us, the more puzzling it gets. Prime numbers spirals are unexplained. The two slit experiments results indicate the observer plays a part in collapsing a particle's probability wave. The effects of dark matter could be a result of parallel universes. You couldn't make up weirder shit if you tried.

It's not a huge leap of logic to assume some parts of our brain operate at a quantum level. Given that first statement comes to a truthful fruition, I don't think it would be entirely unreasonable to assume AI will do so as well. Given computers already use some quantum properties, it's also reasonable to expect advancement in AI lies in this direction.

When they announced Google was getting a D-Wave computer, I got really interested. Granted, they know beans about how it works (and whether or not it actually works at all) but it's still crazy interesting to consider.

As I said, I could be wrong or crazy. Or both.

<comment><USER42> > It's not a huge leap of logic to assume some parts of our brain operate at a > quantum level.

To the best of our knowledge it is still a pretty large leap of logic.

<comment><USER41> It's definitely a leap, but there's a decent amount of information (not proof however) on the subject laying around. We still don't understand how the brain brings about consciousness. I guess I should say it's not a huge leap to assume it has something to do with other things we also don't understand. Given quantum effect and number theory still elude us in areas, it's a decent approach to assume they _might_ be related.

I've debugged problems in my code that, at first glance, appear to be unrelated to each other. Given something is slightly off in one area isn't a proof something of in another area is related, but it's a good place to start looking.

<comment><USER42> As far as I know there is a decent amount of information _against_ the fact that brains are quantum computers.

On the other hand there is a talk by Hinton on youtube [1] that sheds interesting light on some variants of deep learning and the way the brain uses (classical) noise.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DleXA5ADG78](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DleXA5ADG78)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> > "the part of your brain that processes input from your ears is also capable > of learning to process input from your eyes. If we can just figure out this > one general-purpose algorithm, programs may be able to learn general-purpose > things."

This is the Holy Grail of CS. I believe we're closer than most people would expect and I think it's going to be a race to the finish line.

<comment><USER44> For perception, maybe. The neocortex (hint: where we do everything we consider "thinking") operates on entirely different principles and is not interchangeable with perception.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I'm a strong A.I hobbyist, and I just put up a website for my basic abstract algorithm: genudi. The website's implementation of the algo revolves around having a conversation with a computer. Currently in limited release, you can request a Pioneer account from there: [http://www.genudi.com](http://www.genudi.com)

<comment><USER45> An example is worth a thousand words, take a look at this conversation with a strong AI machine: [http://www.genudi.com/share/27/Dialog](http://www.genudi.com/share/27/Dialog)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I think one of the next hot emerging careers will be connecting and interfacing traditional computational algorithms for the bits that are clearly orders of magnitude more efficient than using a multi-layer neural network to do them into neural networks, SVMs, and/or whatever comes next that figure out how to allocate such work from raw data feeds.

</comment><comment><USER47> I think going about it from a complex algorithm point of view is the wrong approach.

We should, instead, be concentrating our efforts on two things - sensing, and reacting. The predictability of the reaction doesn't matter; all that matters is that the machine reacts. Everything else will need to depend on evolutionary processes, which requires a third criterion - changing reaction based on prior data.

If the previous reaction did not lead to a negative result ("negative" meaning detrimental to one or more arbitrary values), then the reaction can continue to the same stimulus. If the previous reaction, however, elicited a strong positive result, then the reaction should be encouraged. Similarly, if it triggered a strong negative response, it should be avoided.

To a degree, you could do this without any kind of "operating system," just by using sensory data as inputs in a complex circuit.

At least, that's how I would approach it. I know nothing about A.I. research.

</comment><comment><USER48> There are many classes of problems in computer science and AI falls into one of my favorites. If today the world had a machine with infinite CPU power and infinite RAM we _still_ wouldn't have a good AI.

We just don't have the knowledge to utilize such resources to write an AI that could, for exampe, play League of Legends or Starcraft at a level beyond professional gamers. And it certainly couldn't write a best selling novel. It could solve an arbitrarily large traveling salesman problem but it couldn't do those other things. I think that's kind of awesome.

I'm not saying it can't be done. Assuming we humans don't kill ourselves I think someday it will. But it's a long, long ways off.

<comment><USER49> If you had a machine with infinite CPU power and infinite RAM you could _evolve_ an AI. Greg Egan wrote a great story about that: [http://ttapress.com/553/crystal-nights-by-greg- egan/](http://ttapress.com/553/crystal-nights-by-greg-egan/)

Someone tries it, with mixed results.

<comment><USER50> Ah, but we weren't given infinite time also, so you might be able to evolve an AI, but it might take many millions of years (like it did with real life).

<comment><USER51> He said infinite CPU power which implies infinite number of iterations. In real life it would probably take a lot more than millions of years (because computers are too slow to simulate populations of millions of minds.)

<comment><USER50> Does infinite energy (as infinite CPU cycles) really translate into immediate time? My physics isn't great, but I thought energy was related to mass, while entropy was related to time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Dear HN users: If you are even minimally interested in the topics that this post "covers", please, do yourselves a favour and open up _any_ book about machine intelligence instead of reading such uninformed and negligent posts.

I urge you to, seriously.

</comment><comment><USER53> From a pure layman's perspective: if you believe in evolution, then what separates us from a reptile (as mentioned in the post) is almost certainly something we can figure out and replicate. There is nothing "special" there.

So if you believe computers today already have the "intelligence" of a reptile, or a toddler (i.e., ability to play pong), or something along those lines, it's only a matter of time before a computer has the intelligence of a full-blown adult human (and soon thereafter much more).

Our level of intelligence/awareness seems magical only because we haven't fully understood it yet. That will change.

<comment><USER54> No I don't think "belief" in evolution implies that at all. That's a big jump.

<comment><USER53> Why is that a big jump? I'm not saying it will be easy or quick. It does imply that getting from a reptile-level intelligence to a human-level intelligence was a natural process and something that can be reverse engineered.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I dunno, the definition of intelligence is biased by our own ability to comprehend and therefore profoundly slim (even IQ can be gamed, and most people puke at emotional/lizard brain intelligence) so large chances "science" either under or overshoots its "stakeholder aware" analysis and doesn't know functional self preserving, iterative enhancement intellect when its looking it in the face. You know us monkeys, running around derping science with wacky wavy hands going 'Hai Dolphin What You do jump hoop!'. AI, rockin the casbah. Maybe one day!

</comment><comment><USER55> "But artificial general intelligence might work, and if it does, it will be the biggest development in technology ever."

I'd like to point interested readers to the AGI Conference series[1], the Open Cognition Project[2], and a mostly outdated (2009) but still useful list of everything AGI[3].

[1] [http://agi-conf.org/](http://agi-conf.org/)

[2] [http://wiki.opencog.org/w/The_Open_Cognition_Project](http://wiki.opencog.org/w/The_Open_Cognition_Project)

[3] [http://linas.org/agi.html](http://linas.org/agi.html)

</comment><comment><USER56> "But how do we make a computer program that decides what it wants to do? How do we make a computer decide to care on its own about learning to drive a car? Or write a novel?"

Perhaps it'd be better to ask: why would we _want_ a computer to do these things? I certainly do not want to live in a world where computers have their own motivations and desires and the ability to act on the same.

Actually, I can put that more strongly: none of us _will_ live very long in a world where computers have their own motivations, desires, and the ability to act on the same.

<comment><USER57> you seem pretty convinced living computers would kill us all. this seems like a pretty big assumption to me?

<comment><USER51> Because you are made of atoms that can more efficiently be used for something else. Morality (and all human values) is a purely human concept that evolved in the specific conditions of human evolution (and even just our specific culture.) AIs are not anthropomorphic, they don't have to have _anything like_ human minds or values.

<comment><USER19> Why do you think AI would be more concerned about efficiency than understanding?

<comment><USER58> There are a bajillion possible future worlds that a particular mind might choose to make, and only a extremely tiny faction of these worlds include hapiness of mankind as a priority above everything else. And being not first priority, in essence, means being a worthless disturbance in the way of the first priority, and thus extinction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> " _But how do we make a computer program that decides what it wants to do? How do we make a computer decide to care on its own about learning to drive a car? Or write a novel?_ "

if intelligence is solved by reverse engineering the brain at a molecular level surely consciousness and creativity are?

" _And maybe we don 't want to build machines that are concious in this sense._"

if the physical composition of the brain defines intelligence and conscience, i'm not sure you'll be able to pick and choose. i am all for artificial conscious though. yolo.

</comment><comment><USER59> Sorry to be negative; Sam Altman is a great guy and had plenty of valuable insight before, but his take here is infantile at best. When people accuse PG of speaking in very authoritative terms, it doesn't bother me. It's a writing device. But here Sam is doing the same trick, with the difference that I know the field he talks about well enough to see the poor logic transitions. My take: don't imitate PG's style on areas where you are not deeply knowledgeable.

</comment><comment><USER60> Are we building AI equivalents of the philosophical zombie?

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie)

If P-Zombies are an impossibility, then so too true AI that dismisses the need for consciousness, or begs the question by assuming that consciousness will emerge from intelligence.

It may be that intelligence, true human intelligence, emerges from consciousness.

</comment><comment><USER61> > Something happened in the course of evolution to make the human brain > different

Not just the human brain, a great number of animals share the very same characteristics as the human brain we find ourselves closer and closer to them every single day as new researches on animal neurology and animal behavior get published. It would be very wrong to suggest that intelligence is only a human thing.

</comment><comment><USER62> AI was also the subject Gates pointed to when asked a similar question on the AMA thread the other week on Reddit, I believe.

</comment><comment><USER63> Computers are actually pretty good at being creative already. That's not the hardest problem to solve... [http://www.psmag.com/navigation/nature-and- technology/rise-r...](http://www.psmag.com/navigation/nature-and- technology/rise-robot-artist-67731/)

</comment><comment><USER64> How do we develop intelligent systems when we don't know how to measure intelligence?

<comment><USER51> Who says we don't know how to measure intelligence? The simplest way would be just to select a problem that requires intelligence and measure how good it does at that problem.

<comment><USER65> But what is a problem that specifically requires intelligence to solve? How do we know we're measuring intelligence, and not the programs aptitude for the particular problem?

<comment><USER51> Why does it matter? If if solves the problem then it's as good as if it was fully intelligent. Who cares what goes on inside the black box?

If you worried about it overfitting to a specific problem, give it lots of problems and weight the solutions by complexity. So you heavily favor simple algorithms that can learn to solve a large class of problems, over ones that are more adapted for those specific problems.

<comment><USER66> All I'm learning from this thread is that some people see infinite regression where others see tautology.

edit: what I mean:

Person 1: "What if we're just measuring the color of the sky? What if we're just measuring blueness? What if we're just measuring a wavelength of light? ... ..."

Person 2: "The sky looks blue."

<comment><USER51> What do you mean?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> The easiest way to create AI would be to make a model our own brain's neural pathways. With a computer model we could analyze and break down what makes consciousness/intelligence, etc.

</comment><comment><USER68> In my opinion true AI must have reasoning skills and be self aware. This brings the disturbing truth: either we never get it to work or we will get it to work and it will destroy us.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's foolish to create general AI. What we should be working on is IA (Intelligence Amplification).

Why would you create a god, when you could instead become a god?

</comment><comment><USER69> Does anyone have a list of public companies (especially small ones) which are involved in AI? There don't seem to be many besides the big players.

</comment><comment><USER54> I hate to get "meta" but it doesn't seem frontage worthy, it's just a musing about AI.

</comment><comment><USER70> ...and then we'll just need to figure out how to make humans more creative.

</comment><comment><USER71> how does this guy consistently write mini-Paul Graham essays?

<comment><USER13> Because he basically is mini-Paul Graham.

<comment><USER72> Really? The essay "Andrew Ng thinks there's one algorithm underlying all intelligence. Also, I hope we get conscious computers." is a mini Paul Graham essay?

No PG essay is so lacking in content or original ideas. Conscious computers? Who hasn't thought of conscious computers? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intellige...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intelligence#The_optimism)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> Building AGI in Common Lisp if anyone wants to help.

<comment><USER55> Do you have your own approach to AGI or are you implementing another concept?

<comment><USER73> I have my own approach.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> D-Wave AI - maybe; diophantine AI - lol.

</comment><comment><USER75> There's a joke in the computational neuroscience community somewhat along the lines of "consciousness is where neuroscientists go to die". I literally saw this happen when I was at the Salk institute as a lowly undergraduate research assistant. Sir Francis Crick was there at the same time, and spent his last 25 or so years in pursuit of a theory of consciousness. I was fortunate (and humbled) to get to talk to him a few times before he passed in 2004, and he was undoubtedly a thinker of superior ability and unbounded curiosity (a pretty awesome combination).

Actually there were (and still are) a lot of the biggest names in the field there at the time (including Crick, Terrance Sejnowski (a professor of mine who co-invented the Boltzmann machine* amongst other things), VS Ramachandran). These are all people who were coming at the problem from the biological &| pure science/math side of things (vs people like Andrew Ng, who Sam mentioned, who have a more CS/engineering based approach).

No doubt they consistently came up with spectacular theories and very interesting models of how a specific regions of the brain may function. How for the most part they worked was this:

1\. Come up with a biologically or cognitively plausible mathematical model (many of which were fantastically cool). 2\. Implement and run this model on massively parallel architectures (at the time not quite the level of technological sophistication you see nowadays, so things may have changed a lot) 3\. To train, use feedback from EEG (this is what I "worked" on, but they also worked with other electrical signals, MRI and chemical measurements at the level of individual neurons).

The biggest progress was made at the smallest level (understanding how individual neurons and small networks work). This was primarily because measurement at this level actually provided useful information. The signal/noise ratio of EEG scalp recordings (which to this day gives me nightmares) was (and is) so terrible that I left the field as a quite disgruntled phd student. Maybe I just didn't have the intellectual capacity, but I never felt like I was working on anything that made sense. This was true for _many_ of my fellow graduate students .. after a couple years, we felt we were doing pseudoscience.

Rant completed, I think the CS/engineering approach is more promising: don't worry about the biology or some grand theory of the mind and just try to do something useful. Since computers get more powerful consistently, we'll incrementally be able to do more and more useful things. If consciousness emerges at all, it may or may not appear like _human_ consciousness. We may not even be able to tell if/when this happens, but at least we would be solving real problems in the meanwhile.

* [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_machine](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_machine)

</comment><comment><USER76> Explain to me how a brain can evolve, and yet not understand how itself functions?

<comment><USER77> There's little to no evolutionary pressure towards the brain understanding how it functions.

<comment><USER76> Ok then, tell me where the evolutionary pressure came from for brains to consider and act upon things like burials, math, surgery, and brain surgery in particular.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Goodbye HN!

<comment><USER2> ?

<comment><USER41> If you had AI, you wouldn't need a community like Hacker news, or something along those lines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> "Something happened in the course of evolution to make the human brain different from the reptile brain, which is closer to a computer that plays pong." \- i beg to differ on this statement, clearly the complexity and sheer magnificence of the human brain did not come about by mere chance, if this was so it would have been easy to replicate this.This is proof of an intelligent creator.</comment>


Why I'm Angry About the iPhone Leak - <AUTHOR> http://blogazineapp.com/articles/iphone-leak.html

<comment><USER2> Ugh. What a load of shit.

In the grand scheme of things, this whole ordeal is utterly insignificant. Watching these bloggers furiously wipe the foam off their mouths for Apple's sake is pathetic. Nevertheless, Apple brought this upon themselves.

Apple treats their products like they're little Holy Grails. Insane levels of security, meticulously choreographed press releases, dramatic introductions by the electronic Jesus himself. What do you expect to happen when they screw up and leave one at a bar?

In the end, none of it _really_ matters and the world will go on spinning. Apple will sell them like the little hotcakes they are. Gray will go on to have a completely successful career (might not get to have any more pre- release units). And Gawker will go on "creatively" scooping stories.

Perhaps the only injury from the entire affair is to the bloggers and tech news junkies that aren't going to get to play out their familiar 41 minute "new Apple product" masturbation routine...

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Apple products are cool and all but there really is much cooler stuff going on out there than a marginally upgraded iPhone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Arguing that the media shouldn't publish factual information because it impacts a company's bottom line is a dangerous argument, even (especially) if the company affected is one that you like.

<comment><USER5> Very true. I agree that plastering the Apple employee's info all over the place was tacky, but I see nothing wrong with publishing their story. People love it when wikileaks breaks huge stories involving governments, armies, and corporations, but they get upset when a (lackluster and predictable) Apple secret gets leaked by a tech/gadget journalism website. I personally enjoy both.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. Publishing the story about the device, fine. But it takes a real d-bag to leak the name of the engineer who lost it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article fails to make a convincing case on exactly what Gizmodo damaged by releasing information about the phone.

Leak or no, this phone is most likely going to sell like hotcakes, and the builders at Apple should do just fine. It's not like the product launch is ruined in any way... Steve Jobs will be A-OK on stage presenting it.

Virtually any tech publication would report on an iPhone prototype, and it is not their moral duty not to.

(I don't think Gizmodo needed to name the Apple engineer who lost the phone; however, this is not a topic presented by the article.)

<comment><USER8> _It's not like the product launch is ruined in any way, and Steve Jobs will be A-OK on stage presenting it._

Can't disagree more. You're saying Steve is going to go on stage and pretend like he's "unveiling" something everyone knows everyone in the room has seen? I'd expect that from any other CEO, but Steve is smart enough to not reek of bullshit in front of his most loyal customers.

Apple's not just selling a phone, it's the entire lifecycle experience: that includes the buildup, the unveiling, the opening of the presents. It's precisely like Christmas, and Steve Jobs is Santa. For those of us who buy into this ritual, what Gizmodo did is like tell us exactly what our Christmas present will be in August.

If Jobs is as big of a perfectionist as I think he is, even if they intended to, there's no way they're introducing that phone on June.

<comment><USER9> _Apple's not just selling a phone, it's the entire lifecycle experience: that includes the buildup, the unveiling, the opening of the presents. It's precisely like Christmas, and Steve Jobs is Santa. For those of us who buy into this ritual, what Gizmodo did is like tell us exactly what our Christmas present will be in August_

So what? It's about time that Apple was welcomed to the real world product leaks that happen every day with companies with size of Apple. I think the key here is how Apple deals with it now that everyone is watching.

<comment><USER10> > I think the key here is how Apple deals with it now that everyone is > watching.

Andrey predicts [1] that the new iPhone launch will be canceled (or delayed?), and that Gizmodo will pay dearly for the leak.

1\. [http://andreyf.tumblr.com/post/540380259/two-points-about- th...](http://andreyf.tumblr.com/post/540380259/two-points-about-the-iphone- prototype-leak)

<comment><USER11> Canceling the launch would be utterly insane. Steve is not going to throw away millions of dollars because somebody exposed the "secrets" of a slightly modified exterior and front-facing camera.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Information wants to be free. If you don't want someone to know about something, don't take it out to a bar. And especially don't leave it sitting around in the bar where anyone can take it. If you show something to a bunch of people, it's not a secret anymore.

Apple fucked this up, and they have only themselves to blame.

Gizmodo did what their readers wanted. They worked hard (to the tune of $10,000) and got an exclusive story that no other media outlet got. If nuclear launch codes were left in a bar, the media would be congratulated for breaking the story. But if it's a telephone, then everyone should be quiet and say nothing about it? Why? Why does the government deserve more scrutiny than a publicly-traded megacorp? Because Steve Jobs likes saying "one more thing"?

I'm not convinced.

(Uh oh, dowmodded because I hate Apple. What a shock.)

<comment><USER13> "If nuclear launch codes were left in a bar, the media would be congratulated for breaking the story."

Well, not if they scanned the launch codes and posted them online for everyone to see. That's not the only fallacy either--the government losing nuclear launch codes in a bar is a story because it proves the government can't protect nuclear launch codes, Apple losing a prototype iPhone in a bar is only a story because it gives us some idea of what the next iPhone might look like.

Incidentally, paying thousands of dollars for something you damn well know isn't legally owned by the person who's selling it to you is wrong. If it's a book of nuclear launch codes and there's a legitimate story to be told it's outweighed by a greater good, but where's the greater good here?

<comment><USER12> So the media can only cover subjects that lead to a "greater good"? Why not hold Apple to the same standard -- they can only keep their phone model secret if it does so for the "greater good".

Oh wait, maybe businesses -- even the media -- are motivated by something other than the greater good.

<comment><USER13> That's not even remotely what I said. What I said is that trafficking in stolen goods is wrong unless it's justified by a greater good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _Did they even consider the hundreds of people whose blood, sweat, and tears went into building that device?_

Of course they didn't. Nor does anyone else. Apple anonymizes their engineering team for the most part. No more signatures on the inside of our Macs. The public knows Steve Jobs and Jon Ive and that's about it.

It's been clear for a long time that Apple would love to commoditize not just their internal engineering but their developer community as well. I say this impartially. It makes sense given their trajectory and control over the distribution channel.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm getting really angry with people about this whole thing: It's called a free press people. While they skirted the law, I doubt any DA would touch this affair (prosecuting the press when no one is physically harmed is a generally losing proposition; ditto for the sources of the press when they're not government employees).

If Apple doesn't release the phone due to the leak itself, they're silly. And you don't become one of the biggest companies in the world via silliness. I don't hate or love Apple. I'm a realist. Guess what: Apple is made up of realists too! They're going to release the phone still

Sure, some of you actually have talked yourself into liking the ultra-secret nature of Apple's product cycle. Good for you. A huge other portion of reality hates it. It makes that group of people make poor buying decisions (such as people who don't realize you never ever give Apple items for Christmas, because they're likely going to be superseded by the next thing in a release in a month).

Even if everyone DID like the secrecy and theater: Guess what, Gawker is a for-profit company, just like Apple. They do things for money, just like Apple (section 3.3.1 people? Is your memory that short?). Gizmodo was presented with a prototype. They'd be remiss to not run with it, after finding out it wasn't stolen (in the common understanding of the word, not the quibbling "but by California code 2309482 it is stolen" sort of manner). Gizmodo is a company that makes money by selling the eyeballs of people looking at interesting information. This is exactly what they SHOULD do when presented with this.

Apple took a business risk in field testing phones. Guess what, sometimes the bad thing happens. That's why they call it risk. In this case: the bad thing did happen. Honestly, the fact people were still talking about 3.3.1 even after the iAd and other 4.0 items being unveiled makes me wonder if this was an intentional leak to regain the control of the news cycle for Apple.

And as to the guy who got outed: Honestly, I think Giz was doing two legitimate things (but likely hurting a random person in the process). 1> They were establishing the authenticity of the phone. By pointing out 'hey, it is from someone at Apple' they dispelled the rumors of this being a faked up phone. 2> They were revealing how they came to get it, dissuading the police and Apple from finding out through legal discovery processes. Apple could have argued industrial espionage if more details weren't out there, but by publishing it all, Gizmodo likely pulled the legs out of any legal proceeding.

Do I think the self serving saving their own ass was a good thing? Not the nicest thing, but I think it was a realistic business decision which was good for the business, just like 3.3.1 was for Apple, and just like publishing this whole story in the first place was for Gizmodo.

<comment><USER16> This whole thing is a giant un-story. The internet drama has far outweighed it's significance. This isn't the first iPhone; it's just a prototype of an n+1 version iPhone. It's not like we didn't know Apple would come out with a newer model. I doubt halfway competent cell phone engineers would have trouble guessing what it would look like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If this is really the case, he should be enraged at the mere existence of sites like Gizmodo and Engadget. But, clearly, he's not. For some reason Apple is held to a different standard. Are the employees of other companies not skilled enough to deserve the same protection? Are they just common labor?

This whole notion of outrage on Apple's behalf (for the moment, ignoring the poor engineer and his very public outing) mystifies me. This is the first time I've seen such a reaction by so many people feeling bad for a multi-billion dollar corporation.

Just because Apple's policy is secrecy doesn't mean we have to cover our ears and close our eyes when they let something slip. Sure, Gizmodo's handling of the whole situation was dubious, but in the long run, I can't see any way that this actually hurt Apple.

<comment><USER18> Lots of people seem to be trying to live Steve Jobs' life vicariously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "They posted a video on YouTube with a smug smile on their face as they unveiled the iPhone a couple of months before Steve Jobs could. They stole his thunder. They rained on his parade. They spoiled his secret."

The poor man... I mean, it's not like he'll ever be able to a product reveal again, is it? </sarcasm>

Serious, I'm not going to argue that Gizmodo should have done what they did, but I have a hard time feeling sorry for Steve Jobs missing out on the opportunity to present yet another product to world in a massively self- glorifying fashion, with thousands of fans singing his praises. He does it every few years; he can miss one.

</comment><comment><USER20> Gizmodo's behavior may have been reprehensible, but I have a VERY difficult time shedding tears over the so called 'damage' this does to the Apple employees that worked on/are working on the device. Boo frickin' hoo. The phone isn't going to sell a single unit less because of this. Nor will the people who worked on it have any reason to feel any less pride in their work. I'm sure the thing is going to rock. _sigh_

<comment><USER21> Except of course the engineer that Gizmodo publicly humiliated, of course.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, that part was completely unnecessary and unfortunate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Come on, it's a hardware update on a phone that changes the shape a little. Yes you can say you don't agree with Gizmodo and think it reflects badly on them. But that's only worth a passing comment in a pub with friends or a comment here on HN in what _should_ have been the one and only thread about it. But instead we get a deluge of threads about it and people writing "why I'm angry" blog posts. This kind of stuff isn't really different to celebrity news and doesn't belong on HN at all.

</comment><comment><USER23> If Apple's strategy for building things requires strict secrecy, they must be prepared for occasional failures in that secrecy. This was simply an accident, bound to happen eventually. Apple can cope with it; otherwise, they wouldn't be using this strategy.

I find it amusing that Gizmodo is portrayed as the destroyer, here. They are creating value in their own way; it's a little ironic that the blogger bemoans the lack of builders after writing an entire article tearing down Gizmodo's work.

If Apple fans really wanted to be surprised when the new iPhone was unveiled, _why did they read the Gizmodo article?_ Surely the readers are just as much to blame for the "destruction" of value as Gizmodo and Apple.

</comment><comment><USER24> This line resumes everything:

"They posted a video on YouTube with a smug smile on their face as they unveiled the iPhone a couple of months before Steve Jobs could."

I do not think he is angry because of Gizmondo (low) standards of decency, because they apparently released an entire report about the guy (I just do not read Gizmondo, so I did not read the post), he's just mad because Jobs will not present an orgasmic keynote for Apple fans.

<comment><USER16> Which silly because this phone isn't news. Steve might pimp it during a keynote but it would be a lame center piece.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Getting angry that a company is going to have a little less marketing buzz at launch seems a like a bit of an overreaction.

Apple make some awesome phones. This one will do just fine on its merits.

</comment><comment><USER25> Is Steve the only person in his life who truly understands him, the only one who can surprise him with a wonderful present he's sure to like?

All the shiny toys in Cupertino won't help you, Mr. Blogger. You need a _girlfriend._

</comment><comment><USER26> This analogy would work better if Gizmodo destroyed the prototype, all of its blueprints, and murdered the engineers behind the project.

Or, for that matter, did anything but hold a pin to an over-inflated hot air balloon.

</comment><comment><USER27> What about the possibility that this was done intentionally by Apple? They're famous for these kinds of intentional leaks.

I don't know anything more than anyone else here I'm just speculating.

<comment><USER22> Who downmodded smutticus here? That's just ridiculous. Modded back up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I enjoy a good spy photo of a mysterious new product. It doesn't ruin the surprise for me; it enhances it by keeping me guessing.

Gizmodo ruined both for me this week. It just felt unfair, even predatory—acquiring the device itself through shady means, photographing it up and down in high resolution, dissecting it and macroing each component; it turned what was a game into something unnecessarily serious. It turned a coy tease into pornography.

I had to imagine the Apple designers and engineers who had made this thing their focus for the better part of a year, cringing as their unfinished work went through the wringer of Gizmodo's pageview circus.

<comment><USER29> _Gizmodo ruined both for me this week._

If the launch of a new consumer electronics product is something that can be "ruined" for you then I would suggest, sans malice, that you perhaps need more stuff going on in your life.

<comment><USER28> Do you play games? I do. Consumer electronics unveilings were one that I enjoyed until a blog decided to stop playing for fun.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I am not at all angry about the iPhone leak. I could not care less.

Am I the only one that suspects this leak to be just a PR stunt?

<comment><USER31> This has certainly gotten more attention and buzz than the real launch of the 3GS, and it seems like the phones have less of a difference. Who's the victim?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Anybody else consider maybe Apple allowed this whole fiasco intentionally (viral marketing style) to take press away from the TOS change that the blogosphere has been frothing about for the last few weeks?

</comment><comment><USER33> Marketing is necessary to a degree, and insofar as marketing gets potential consumers knowledge of devices they may want, it's important that marketing happen.

But what this blog is essentially saying is that Gizmodo ruined Apple's hard work of marketing the phone by publishing pictures of the phone. That's absurd. If publishing pictures of a device in a neutral manner depresses a device's reputation, that device is not as reputable as its marketers would have you believe, and their work should be torn down.

</comment><comment><USER34> I worry for the fan-boys. I really do.

</comment><comment><USER35> This iPhone incident has been a low point for Apple blogging. I think that when an Apple blog is teaching us why stealing is wrong, or publishing California laws, then I think that Apple blog is doing something other than Apple blogging.</comment>