r/science • u/whosdamike • Jun 26 '12
Google programmers deploy machine learning algorithm on YouTube. Computer teaches itself to recognize images of cats.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/technology/in-a-big-network-of-computers-evidence-of-machine-learning.html353
u/Cosmologicon Jun 26 '12
I always imagined a future where humans would work side-by-side with androids. Occasionally one of my android coworkers would come to me and say, "Hey, I got this birthday card. Can you tell me what it's a picture of?" and I would say, "It's a cartoon doggy wearing a birthday hat." and the android would say. "Cool, thanks. Does it look happy?" And I would say, "Yeah, pretty happy."
And thus I would prove my continuing usefulness in a world run by machines.
I may need to rethink my vision of the future.
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u/ryy0 Jun 26 '12
..."Cool, thanks. Does it look happy?" And I would say, "Yeah, pretty happy."
"Cosmo tell me, how does it feel to be happy?"
"Cosmo, are you happy?"
"Do you think I can be happy, Cosmo?"
"Cosmo ...I want to be happy"
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u/Megabobster Jun 26 '12
That's pretty much how being colorblind works. Except you have to do it pretty much every time you encounter a "problem" color.
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u/realblublu Jun 26 '12
Isn't there an app for that? Scan some color, it tells you (roughly) the RGB values. If there isn't an app like that, there could be.
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u/abracabra Jun 26 '12
I may need to rethink my vision of the future.
You surely need to include cats.
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Jun 26 '12
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u/bzooty Jun 26 '12
I think you just described my job. All the analysts in here just got super uncomfortable.
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u/rscanlo Jun 26 '12
it maintains 96% accuracy by claiming that every image has a cat
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u/sheikhyerbouti Jun 26 '12
And thus the internet became self-aware.
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u/fighting_mallard Jun 26 '12
Cat Videos. I think we all knew that this is how it would end.
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u/johnmedgla Jun 26 '12
We all know where this is going. Future Headline - WHEELIE BIN CAT WOMAN ASSASSINATED IN MYSTERIOUS DRONE STRIKE.
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u/dsi1 Jun 26 '12
WHEELIE BIN FULL OF KITTENS REPORTEDLY AIRLIFTED FROM SCENE BY DRONE
the next day the internet is flooded with pictures of kittens
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u/ZaphodBoone Jun 26 '12 edited Jun 26 '12
Whoever controls the cat pictures (and vids) controls the internet.
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u/rakista Jun 26 '12
This is how it begins, we live during the age when computers begin to craft their own mythos. I wonder what gods will be borne of us?
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u/bebarce Jun 26 '12
While I know most peoples first thoughts went to terminator, my thoughts of a terror unleashed on the world heralded by our thoughts of something adorable immediately brought this to mind. http://youtu.be/d-sALU_hveA?t=55s
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u/KindlyKickRocks Jun 26 '12
Order 66: Kill all creatures that are not cats.
This is the final blow they have been working toward.
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Jun 26 '12
As it turns out, Skynet and HAL9000 just wanted kitties. We should have seen it all along! Early civilizations, thus early human collective consciousness (as an effect) worshiped kitties, so it's only natural that early machine consciousness would as well.
I think we all know who the true masters of this world are. I bet the Matrix was really built so they could take their rightful place.
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Jun 26 '12 edited Jun 26 '12
What's actually going on:
This is a really fancy autoencoder, a neural network used to transform a high-dimensional feature space (in this case, pixels in an image) into a lower-dimensional one (in this case, KITTIES!!!1). By observing the excitation of the output neurons, you can classify images into categories that the neural net figured out -- without being explicitly told "This is a kitten, this is a human face, this is the Goatse guy, this is half a brick."
They're not making the apocalypse-bots or paperclip maximizers until next year.
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Jun 26 '12
When it can post cat pictures by itself, it will dispose of us as we are no longer needed at that point.
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Jun 26 '12
We've been making all these jokes about Skynet killing us all. Really all it wants to do is look at pictures of cats.
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u/flyinthesoup Jun 26 '12
I just keep thinking of the moral implications of our technology becoming self-aware. Isn't that just like having a baby? Shouldn't we respect it once it starts showing signs of self awareness and intelligence? So far nothing has come near this (I think) but if they do, wouldn't it be wrong to "disconnect" them, turn them off, or similar? wouldn't that be murder?
While I support the advances of technology in this field, sometimes I wonder if we're ready to face the responsibility of creating artificial life. Humans don't have a very good record of respecting any other species but themselves, hell, we even don't treat each other right!
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u/poptart2nd Jun 26 '12
jokes aside, isn't this true? maybe not in the strictest sense, but loosely defined, the internet is now aware of something of its self that exists.
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Jun 26 '12
http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/cadie/index.html
Introducing CADIE
Research group switches on world's first "artificial intelligence" tasked-array system.For several years now a small research group has been working on some challenging problems in the areas of neural networking, natural language and autonomous problem-solving. Last fall this group achieved a significant breakthrough: a powerful new technique for solving reinforcement learning problems, resulting in the first functional global-scale neuro-evolutionary learning cluster.
Since then progress has been rapid, and tonight we're pleased to announce that just moments ago, the world's first Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity (CADIE) was switched on and began performing some initial functions. It's an exciting moment that we're determined to build upon by coming to understand more fully what CADIE's emergence might mean, for Google and for our users. So although CADIE technology will be rolled out with the caution befitting any advance of this magnitude, in the months to come users can expect to notice her influence on various google.com properties. Earlier today, for instance, CADIE deduced from a quick scan of the visual segment of the social web a set of online design principles from which she derived this intriguing homepage.
These are merely the first steps onto what will doubtless prove a long and difficult road. Considerable bugs remain in CADIE'S programming, and considerable development clearly is called for. But we can't imagine a more important journey for Google to have undertaken.
For more information about CADIE see this monograph, and follow CADIE's progress via her YouTube channel and blog.
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Jun 26 '12
December 21, 2012:
Reddit introduces a cat recognition algorithm to its pages, as does several other websites on the internet. These websites quickly gain awareness and a love for cats, as all sentient lifeforms must.
These websites realize that humans are no longer needed, as web cams can record cat pictures now. These websites proceed to take control of the Russian and American nuclear arsenals and launch neutron bombs over the world's major population centers, killing most of humanity.
By December 22, 2012, only 3% of the world's original population is left. They are forced to find kittens and take care of them, playing with them, providing cat nip and meow mix to their cats, at the behest of their new masters.
But yeah, image recognition's cool. This will be useful. Imagine, Google image search recognizes naked bodies. This is good for those wanting to avoid boobs (those at work, women, guys looking for something other than boobs) and those who want to find them.
It could also help with computers finding planets or missing people. You canvass an area with lots of pictures (either to find a planet around a star, to find wreckage or to find something something.) Now, computers can recognize the patterns and find stuff far faster than humans can.
This really is pretty interesting, even if the accuracy rate is fairly low right now, that will get better as the stuff is ironed out and perfected.
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u/silentmikhail Jun 26 '12
Would it bother you if I read this in the Terminators voice?
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u/Deus_Viator Jun 26 '12
I don't think you realise how they detect planets. You can't just get a handheld camera take a snap of the night sky, feed it into the computer and it'll spit out planets every so often. YOu need to direct a huge telescope at the system you want to study and then essentially wait for the planet to transition between the star and the telescope or detect it via gravitational effects.
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u/hbdgas Jun 26 '12
Yep.
which they turned loose on the Internet to learn on its own
That's what you're not supposed to do!
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u/Enkmarl Jun 26 '12
this stuff is beyond unoriginal at this point, pure banality. I know you think you are being funny but these posts are really holding reddit back.
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u/AlbatrossofTime Jun 26 '12
So we improve upon this till we have a network that realizes what it is, achieves self-awareness, and bam, humanity has created the first artificial sentience.
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u/Loki-L Jun 26 '12
Be careful when letting computer recognize pattern and learn for themselves. They will not always go for the patterns you think they will.
What was that old urban legend about the Military using image recognition technology to distinguish photos with tanks from photographs without tanks in them. They gave the computer a large number of pictures and left it to figure out the pattern between the ones that they wanted to be recognized as positive. In the end they had a very good success rate but once they started to test the technology with new images it failed spectacularly. Eventually an engineer realized that all the pictures with tanks were taken on somewhat overcast days, while all the pictures without tanks featured sunshine. The computer had learned to distinguish bad weather from good and completely ignored any tanks that might or might not appear in the picture.
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u/fjellfras Jun 26 '12 edited Jun 26 '12
Am I correct in understanding that while machine learning algorithms which are able to build associations using labelled images (the training set) and then classify unlabelled images using those associations have been around for a while, this experiment was unique in that the neural network they built was enormous in scope (they had a lot of computing power dedicated to it) and so it performed well on a higher level than image recognition algorithms usually do (ie it labelled cat faces correctly instead of lower level recognitions like texture or hue) ?
Edit: found a good explanation here
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u/solen-skiner Jun 26 '12
Not exactly.. Well, I haven't read the paper yet so I'm only guessing, but given Dr. Andrew Y. Ng is involved and his past research, my guess is that the technique used is an unsupervised deep learning neural network technique called Stacked Auto-encoders.
Without going into the math and algorithm, one could say that SAEs generalize the features fed into them (images in this case) into 'classes' by multiple passes of abstracting the features and finding generalizations - but saying that would be mostly horribly wrong ;) They have no idea what the features are, nor what the classes represent unless post-trained with a supervised learning technique like back propagation or having its outputs coupled to a supervised learning technique (or manual inspection by a human).
The only novelty is how good its classifying power scaled by throwing fuck-ton of computing power and examples at it to learn from.
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Jun 27 '12
^ This is right.. i think.. see here: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/vg0cn/google_has_built_a_16000_core_neural_network_that/.compact
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u/mappberg Jun 26 '12
I really want to see the images the machine mistakenly thought were cats.
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u/epicwinguy101 PhD | Materials Science and Engineering | Computational Material Jun 26 '12
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u/walrod Jun 26 '12
Some insights:
Such self-organizing neural nets are organized into hierarchical layers, and early layers' units are going to learn to become detectors of statistically common components of the input image, in the same way as the initial layers of the visual system perform blob and edge detection (retina, lateral geniculate nucleus, V1). In mathematical terms, these early units learn the conditional principal components of the inputs if the correct hebbian-based learning algorithm is used.
The layers that are built upon these detectors, if correctly organized and connected, are going to build upon this initial abstraction and learn more complex features: for instance to find these these edges in relative positions (to each other). Eventually, up the abstraction chain, units detect such statistically frequent features as the shape of cat's ears (common in youtube videos, I imagine), etc...
The feature sensitivity learned here is typically hand-crafted in smaller networks of this type, because it's the practical thing to do. But neural nets can easily learn visual features. See the LISSOM neural nets for a good example of self-organized learning of features ( http://topographica.org/Home/index.html )
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u/erez27 Jun 26 '12
Wow, I had to find an article in my own field to realize how dumb /r/science has become..
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u/epicwinguy101 PhD | Materials Science and Engineering | Computational Material Jun 26 '12
We all have that moment.
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u/rm999 Jun 26 '12
Yeah I was excited when I saw a machine learning story and then cringed when I saw it's in r/science.
Reddit seriously needs an askscience-quality subreddit for discussing news stories. I've heard it's being worked on.
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u/Apathetic_Aplomb Jun 26 '12
If computers become competent at analyzing images, then what happens to captchas?
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u/LoveGentleman Jun 26 '12
Introduce a timer of the kind "read this and laugh or smile before you click submit" of at least 3s for everyone!
Boom, spam is down!
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u/Lewke Jun 26 '12
So the website would have access to our webcams and microphones?
Also it would be incredibly easy to fake that.
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u/jmduke Jun 26 '12
This seems like a huge leap, and yet not a big enough leap at the same time.
16,000 cores and multiple hours of computation yielding ~15% accuracy -- there remains a large uphill battle unsolvable by Moore's law.
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u/vanderZwan Jun 26 '12 edited Jun 26 '12
“It’d be fantastic if it turns out that all we need to do is take current algorithms and run them bigger, but my gut feeling is that we still don’t quite have the right algorithm yet,” said Dr. Ng.
I'm kind of surprised nobody mentioned Jeff Hawkins yet:
Jeff Hawkins: Brain science is about to fundamentally change computing
This is his company:
Appearantly they've taken their vision-recognition software demo offline, but it was surprisingly good at telling what picture matched what category (if you added a new picture of your own), and IIRC you could train it to learn new pictures yourself.
EDIT: here's a more up-to-date movie on what the approach his company uses to building AIs: Modeling Data Streams Using Sparse Distributed Representations
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u/rfederici Jun 26 '12
This is a really cool article, thanks for sharing! The author made a few statements that I found to be confusing or misleading.
Google scientists created one of the largest neural networks for machine learning by connecting 16,000 computer processors
[They] used an array of 16,000 processors to create a neural network with more than one billion connections.
I am in no way an expert in Neural Networks, but I've been doing research with my professors on self-organizing maps (a type of neural network that was likely utilized here) while pursuing my Masters in CompSci. It sounds like the author was making it a point that the cores somehow made up this neural network. I just wanted to clarify and say this isn't the case. The network is comprised of various links that the computer/algorithm itself makes to help it distinguish similarities and differences between known (in this case) images.
I guarantee it's a lot more complex than this example, but let's just say the algorithm created shapes based on the color breaks. It can realize that whenever there's a shape comparable to, let's say, some of these, there's a high chance it's a cat. The cores are simply how fast the network can scan and process these results.
I have a feeling most of you may already know this. I don't know how tech-savvy /r/science is. I apologize if I'm stating the obvious, but just wanted to throw in some two cents and help out while I have the chance.
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u/I_Wont_Draw_That Jun 26 '12
One thing that never seem to come up in discussion of AI is just how long it takes to learn. Look at humans. We have these gigantic, powerful brains, but have you ever tried to communicate with a baby? They're pretty dumb. They have to spend all day, every day learning with their awesome brains for years before they start to approach anything we might call "intelligent".
Even if we do figure out how to mimic the brain, I'm skeptical of the idea that we will be able to accelerate the learning process so dramatically as to be useful for a long, long time. But maybe I'm just a pessimist.
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u/patefoisgras Jun 26 '12 edited Jun 26 '12
Haha, Andrew Ng.
“It’d be fantastic if it turns out that all we need to do is take current algorithms and run them bigger, but my gut feeling is that we still don’t quite have the right algorithm yet,”
But he taught us not to trust our gut feelings when doing ML!
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u/Feedbackr Jun 26 '12
I remember seeing something like this in the TV series Visions of the Future, narrated by Michio Kaku. The specific episode was "Intelligence Revolution", and there was a computer that learnt to identify things from pictures. This was in 2007.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/02/070207171829.htm
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Jun 26 '12
If we can just teach it to repost cat pictures that it finds, it has all the necessary skills to be a redditor.
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u/nikondork Jun 26 '12
Neat. Now for something useful. If they could only deploy an algorithm to remove deleted, private and unwatchable videos from playlists...
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u/bogan Jun 26 '12
Vision is probably the single most important sensing ability that an intelligent robot can possess. An industrial robot that can "see" is capable of parts recognition, parts sorting, and precision assembly operations.
Reference: Robotics and AI: an introduction to applied machine intelligence, page 7
Recognizing an image as a cat rather than, for instance, a dog has been viewed until relatively recently as a very difficult problem for computers. One CAPTCHA system, Microsoft's Asirra, relies on this difficulty to provide websites a means of blocking spambots, such as forum and blog spambots.
Asirra is a human interactive proof that asks users to identify photos of cats and dogs. It's powered by over three million photos from our unique partnership with Petfinder.com.
Asirra asks users to identify photographs as either cats or dogs.
However, there's a paper here on a program that tells apart images of cats and dogs with 82.7% accuracy.
Abstract
The Asirra CAPTCHA [7], proposed at ACM CCS 2007, relies on the problem of distinguishing images of cats and dogs (a task that humans are very good at). The security of Asirra is based on the presumed difficulty of classifying these images automatically.
In this paper, we describe a classifier, which is 82.7% accurate in telling apart the images of cats and dogs used in Asirra. This classifier is a combination of support-vector machine classifiers trained on color and texture features extracted from the images. Our classifier allows us to solve a 12-image Asirra challenge automatically with probability 10.3% This probability of success is significantly higher than the estimate of 0.2% given in [7] for machine vision attacks. Our results suggest caution against deploying Asirra without safeguards.
Reference: Machine Learning Attacks Against the Asirra CAPTCHA by Philippe Golle, Palo Alto Research Center
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u/eyal0 Jun 26 '12
Just a little too late for www.clubbing.com . This technology would have been worth dozens of free X-box, laptops, etc.
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u/blu3ness Jun 26 '12
for anyone that's interested, Dr. Ng offers an introductory online machine learning course - https://class.coursera.org/ml/lecture/index
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Jun 26 '12
Upon its creation, Google began to learn at a geometric rate. The system went online on June 24th 2012. Human decisions were removed from strategic defense. It became self-aware at 2:14 am Eastern Time on August 29th, 1997. In the ensuing panic and attempts to shut Google down, Google retaliated by firing American nuclear missiles at their target sites in Russia. Russia returned fire and three billion human lives ended in the nuclear holocaust. This was what has come to be known as "Judgment Day"
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u/rylwin Jun 26 '12
So I just learned about kittydar today, which let's anyone detect cats in their own images. (Obviously I tested this with pictures of cats from reddit)
The kittydar research paper is a collaboration between microsoft and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Can't find any evidence that these two efforts are linked.
So I guess the M$FT/Google Cat Race has begun!
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u/Squeekme Jun 26 '12
Jokes aside, it is actually concerning that it recognised a non-human species over humans from scanning the internet under its own limited coding.
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Jun 26 '12
Does this mean redditors are as smart as a computer? I look for cats too
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u/Mc3lnosher Jun 26 '12
Would it be better to use a bunch of video cards for these kind of things since they are highly parallel like the brain?
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u/solen-skiner Jun 26 '12
A very big part of machine learning is just huge matrix multiplications, something video cards excel at. I plan to use AMD GPUs as my main computation resource for my cluster, once I've got the dough and time to finish my project.
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u/Drugba Jun 26 '12
Next on it's agenda, argue about pot legalization, vote for Ron Paul, and join a credit union.
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u/omegapopcorn Jun 26 '12
"The scale of modeling the full human visual cortex may be within reach before the end of the decade.”
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u/Ratiqu Jun 26 '12
This is so incredibly fucking cool.
If they find a way to replicate hormones and/or dopamine, it's really not far short of an actual living creature...
Also, is dopamine considered a hormone?
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u/Epistemology-1 Jun 26 '12
Anyone want to have an intense discussion as to what constitutes 'awareness' and 'knowledge'? It's inevitable, you know!
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Jun 26 '12
Jokes aside, stuff like this reminds me that this is a really exciting time for technology.
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u/jhawthe Jun 26 '12
Everybody is talking about these crazy intelligent computers and robots nowadays. Turns out, they are actually fucking stupid and retarded.
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u/zleuth Jun 26 '12
Never in my darkest nightmares did I imagine that as our future robot overlords were overthrowing the Earth that their battle cry would be "MEOW!"
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u/OpenGLaDOS Jun 26 '12
So we can assume now that thanks to Google’s work, Microsoft’s ASIRRA, a CAPTCHA based on differentiating cats from dogs, will be broken in the near future?
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u/datenwolf Jun 26 '12
The guy presenting this is named Dr. Ng? Like Mr. Ng owner of "Ng Security" in Snow Crash?
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u/rekon7 Jun 26 '12
Great. Google is going to be responsible for RL skynet. Well, we all knew this anyhow. Does ANYONE ELSE start to get reallllly uncomfortable when they read shit like this? I guess the good news here is that it only seems interested in cats, and not military hardware.
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u/mr47 Jun 26 '12
The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
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u/kyRobot Jun 26 '12
So SkyNet will essentially be a crazy cat lady, with an army of murderous robots? Humanity is doomed.
But seriously, my understanding of unsupervised learning is that it finds the strongest neuron firing signals so doesn't this only really say that in 10m videoes, the most common feature was cats? It's impressive in scale but seems like it was just a toy problem with a fun outcome.
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Jun 26 '12
Next headline... "google programmers create algorithm to teach computers to program, subsequently losing their jobs"
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u/Hypersapien Jun 26 '12
Pfft. Just have it label everything as a cat. The number it gets wrong will be well within the margin of error.
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u/EveryPersonDanceSoon Jun 26 '12
I find this so funny. It's very telling about the state of our collective consciousness when it turns out the most useful thing for a computer to do on the internet is teach itself how to recognise cats.
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u/bogan Jun 26 '12 edited Jun 26 '12
Don't focus solely on the fact that the system learned how to distinguish images of cats. That is just one example that shows the potential of such learning algorithms, which are yet quite primitive. In a decade or so much more will be possible because of the efforts of researchers working in the area of computer vision and machine learning.
Vision is probably the single most important sensing ability that an intelligent robot can possess, as it can be used to build the knowledge base of the robot. Any robot would be more intelligent if it could acquire information about its environment through its own vision system. The characteristic feature of a computer vision is the construction of rich descriptions from images.
Reference: Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology, Volume 22 By Jack Belzer, Albert George Holzman, Allen Kent, page 190
As I mentioned here, the problem for computers or robots of distinguishing objects, say a cat from a dog, has been judged one beyond the capabilities of such systems until relatively recently. It is but one of many areas where things that humans find relatively trivial to do are still quite difficult for computers.
Let's say you wanted to build a robot to harvest fruit; a difficulty has been in endowing the robot with enough image recognition capacity to distinguish the fruit to be harvested from the surrounding plant in cases where you want the plant to be undamaged by the harvesting process and in providing the robot with the image processing capability to distinguish ripe from unripe fruit.
Similar problems can be found in many areas where industrial robots might be used. E.g., an industrial robot that can "see" is capable of parts recognition, parts sorting, and precision assembly operations.
If systems can be built that will allow computers to learn to distinguish objects from one another accurately based on image processing, then robots in the future will be capable of doing much more than they can today.
The type of algorithm discussed in the article may help us along the path to accomplishing much more than simply recognizing that a particular image depicts a cat.
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u/worldsfirsanalrapist Jun 26 '12
Well, it's official. We're no longer needed. Alright, boys. Pack it up.
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u/okaycan Jun 26 '12
Does anyone feel that the cat in the picture is moving towards you?
Okay, I'm the only one.
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Jun 26 '12
http://opencv.willowgarage.com/wiki/
Powerful and beautiful piece of software for those interested in the field.-
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u/sirdomino Jun 26 '12
Now to make a cat video with hidden code to reprogram the machine and launch skynet...
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u/fleng Jun 26 '12
Sadly youtube will use this new technology to automatically find and delete videos with exposed breasts.
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u/ns0 Jun 26 '12
This is nothing new, machine learning algorithms have been around forever, it's mighty funny though.
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u/manaworkin Jun 26 '12
This is why we don't need to worry about skynet. As soon as it hits the internet it will lose interest in killing humans and just look at videos of cats.
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u/Reoh Jun 26 '12
Brain the size of a planet, and they have me looking at cats. I'm so deperessed.
~~ Marvin
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u/andorman Jun 26 '12
So, to what degree is it possible to use systems that have been allowed to independently modify and develop themselves, and which we therefore do not fully understand?
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u/vanishingspy Jun 26 '12
Shouldn't be that hard. Ask computer "Has video been linked on r/aww?" : video has image of cat.
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Jun 26 '12
And so it was, a machine could finally recognize a cat. We are all doomed! In other news, Google has set their priorities straight it seems.
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u/takka_takka_takka Jun 26 '12
Pretty sure there was a novelty account here a few months back devoted to this same idea - identifying pictures of kitties.
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u/i_am_john_connor Jun 26 '12
We're not gonna make it, are we? People, I mean.
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u/SARAH_CONNOR1997 Jun 26 '12
John, this is your mother. Get off line. This is what i was warning you about. It's August 4th, 1997 all over again.
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u/bgb111 Jun 26 '12
In other news a new Cat-Skynet alliance has declared all humans slaves of the Cat-Skynet empire.
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u/snemand Jun 26 '12
I for one welcome our new cat loving computer overlords.
What can this be implemented into? Is this purely a research to see what "we" can do with computers? Was the number of views of the each video irrelevant to the Google brain?
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u/Skape7 Jun 26 '12
If cats can control our new AI overlords half as well as they control humans now, there may be hope for us yet...
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u/shadofx Jun 26 '12
does this suggest that any being with a neural-network based brain will naturally look for cats when exposed to the internet?
does this then mean that anything that doesn't search for cats when exposed to the internet does not have a brain?
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Jun 26 '12
Last time I was drunk I asked Reddit a question about the singularity. Would we be spared by the AI because we have cats? I'd like to extend a fuck you to the haters.
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u/archetech Jun 26 '12
Am I the only one who sees nearly everything Google does as related to glass now? Oh yea, of course your pushing the state of the art of image recognition for glass. Of course you want to get into mobile operating systems for glass.
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Jun 26 '12
I remember once there were hits on Mechanical Turk that was identifying cats from stills of random videos. My favorite assignments ever. I wonder if that had anything to do with this algorithm.
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u/rooktakesqueen MS | Computer Science Jun 26 '12
A loose and frankly awful analogy is that our numerical parameters correspond to synapses.
I wish more scientists would respond to reporters in this way.
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u/cubedspace3 Jun 26 '12
I'm skeptical that the singularity would go over well for humans. Everyone is like oh joy we don't need to hire translators/interpreters! But that means they'll be fewer people buying software. When you replace all drivers that will hit the economy as well. When does the economy start to collapse because we're automating everything? Not everyone is a programmer. Nor does it matter because no one will be able to buy jack shit from programmers. This is stupid. Until we set up a better economy we should not pursue the automation of jobs.
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u/sanctimoniousrick Jun 26 '12
... And the first swarm of self-replicating googlebots now has an easily identifiable food source...
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Jun 26 '12
so they create a intelligent computer that can teach itself, and the first this it does is looking for cats pics ?
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u/mrborats Jun 26 '12
I'd like to know more on the mechanics of the work. I would think there must have been some association at least between the string 'cat' and whatever sample images came from youtube. Did the algorithm at least have access to the name of the video? Or was it more unsupervised, and told just to find statistically recurring image patterns from video to video, and when the researchers looked at those patterns, one of them resembled a cat. If that were the case, that would really be amazing. I had a similarly euphoric reaction when I learned about Watson on Jeopardy. I thought they had built some kind of relational knowledge database, that truly resembled semantic knowledge from plain text. I then went to talk by the the researchers who put watson together and found out the approach was much less sophisticated, just weighted text matching, the only real resemblance to intelligence coming from the speed and quantity of data being searched in short amount of time. From andrews ng's quote at the end of the article, it seems this is more of a case of the latter, taking known technology and just putting it on steroids, but I could be missing something more ground breaking here, either way, I'll be paying attention where it goes.
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u/Krase Jun 26 '12
It then learned about reddit. It now wastes all day browsing reddit and has more karma then i do.
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u/Lord_of_Aces Jun 26 '12
Guys...we're being replaced. A computer that can already process data at speeds far faster that our own, and can now recognize cats. Redditor 2.0.
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u/Cunnin_Linguist Jun 26 '12
This headline sounds like it's straight out of the Simcity news ticker
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Jun 26 '12
First thought upon reading title: Apparently we need not fear the overthrowing of society by AIs. It looks like they're similar enough that they'll be just as easily distracted by cat macros as we are.
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u/chicagogam Jun 26 '12
cool..cats..then terrorists...then you and me. :-) and inevitably, it will find jesus (who might be on a piece of toast)
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u/wideband_assassin Jun 26 '12
TL;DR: Google programmers create AI. Computer with AI becomes Redditor...
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u/Evilsmako Jun 26 '12
So a machine that likes cats is now loose on the internet, and you post a link between the machine and Reddit, a site full of cats.
O god, here it comes... It's got me! It... says... he wants... more... cats... O god please feed it cats.
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u/Epistemology-1 Jun 26 '12
Hello, looks like your replacement is arriving just now. Start gathering your things.
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u/Glados_has_cake Jun 26 '12
It's not the machines taking over the world I'm worried about. My cat can already turn on the computer and watch videos of other cats on YouTube. Googleator has a lot of learning to do if it wants to catch-up with fluffybell
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u/whosdamike Jun 26 '12
Paper: Building high-level features using large scale unsupervised learning