61–70 of 133 posts
Recently having become a father has made me think a lot about general intelligence. Seeing my son getting excited about his 'world state changing' gave me an idea. What if the main thing that holds us back is the reliance on cost functions? Human, and to some extent, animal intelligence is the only intelligence we know about. If that's what we want to emulate, why don't we try modelling emotions as the basic building…
Really interesting to think about the skills necessary just to play a modern open-world game such as Skyrim successfully. NLP to understand dialogue and actions that need to be taken based on what NPC's/quests/item descriptions say, strategies for several different enemies with different strengths and weaknesses, exploring the open world in a logical order. When you think about the difficulties of such a loosely defi…
Another way to play "successfully" is to edit memory locations and spoof protocol packets, set inventory=full, score=MAX_SCORE and level position= $LAST_LEVEL and declare yourself the winner.
Unless and until we can encode 'play by our rules, uphold our values' into an AI - they won't. A real-world fear is that we build AI without encoding 'care about human life, self-determination, bodily integrity, freedom of thought and movement, environmental surroundings, etc.' into it right from the start.
Recently having become a father has made me think a lot about general intelligence. Seeing my son getting excited about his 'world state changing' gave me an idea. What if the main thing that holds us back is the reliance on cost functions? Human, and to some extent, animal intelligence is the only intelligence we know about. If that's what we want to emulate, why don't we try modelling emotions as the basic building…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Along similar lines, since AI is considered to be potentially dangerous, by figures from Elon Musk to Stephen Hawking, I would rather our civilization never open this pandora's box. We can solve Earth's problems and even spread to the stars without AI. We can invent fusion reactors and thus nearly free energy without AI. We can engineer biological immortality into our very genes without AI. Why risk playing with a lo…
I agree. We have a come a long way already, and I would personally prefer that we do our best to not screw up what we already have . That includes global warming, unleashing Strong AI, and so on. It might suck to actually have to work, even as much as 40 hours a week or more in this day and age and with the productivity increases we've seen. But I don't think work itself is that horrible that I would bet my leisure o…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Along similar lines, since AI is considered to be potentially dangerous, by figures from Elon Musk to Stephen Hawking, I would rather our civilization never open this pandora's box. We can solve Earth's problems and even spread to the stars without AI. We can invent fusion reactors and thus nearly free energy without AI. We can engineer biological immortality into our very genes without AI. Why risk playing with a lo…
But strong AI may figure out how to save us. One argument says AI may become smarter than us and decide to kill us all, either on purpose or by accident. But why not consider that the AI may be kind, it may help us and give us things. After all, smart humans are generally kind. Most of us wouldn't think to kill a dolphin, why would an AI think to kill a human or a dolphin?
?? Smart humans drive cars which splat thousands of insects on their windshields. Smart humans buy clothes imported from third world child working sweatshops, and food from slaughtered pigs and cows and chickens farmed in unpleasant conditions. Smart humans flush their excrement into the rivers they take drinking water from, and the oceans they fish food from, the same places they dump their unwanted plastic. Smart humans dig oil up, convert it into disposable plastic, and then bury it and build homes on top. Smart humans fight other humans to the death for oil instead of funding renewable energy, smart humans bitch at other humans over anything they have impassioned disagreements about.
Smart humans are generally kind: a) to other humans, b) who they care about (or share some world view with).
To quote WaitButWhy.com:
if there are two guinea pigs, one normal one and one with the mind of a tarantula, I would feel much less comfortable holding the latter guinea pig, even if I knew neither would hurt me.
Now imagine that you made a spider much, much smarter—so much so that it far surpassed human intelligence? Would it then become familiar to us and feel human emotions like empathy and humor and love? No, it wouldn’t, because there’s no reason becoming smarter would make it more human—it would be incredibly smart but also still fundamentally a spider in its core inner workings. I find this unbelievably creepy. I would not want to spend time with a superintelligent spider. Would you??
When we’re talking about ASI, the same concept applies—it would become superintelligent, but it would be no more human than your laptop is. It would be totally alien to us—in fact, by not being biology at all, it would be more alien than the smart tarantula.
By making AI either good or evil, movies constantly anthropomorphize AI, which makes it less creepy than it really would be. This leaves us with a false comfort when we think about human-level or superhuman-level AI.
- http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolu...
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This is someone's blog, not a peer-review journal. And sure, that someone is a researcher and thus you might want to hold them to a peer-reviewed journal standard in their blog posts. Personally, I appreciate the amount of time that clearly went into writing this blog post and the information shared therein. Most of what's shared on Hacker News doesn't go into the depth of this article.
In a world dominated by hyperboles, opinions, click bait and general Fox newsification, I do realize that demanding unbiased facts can be an alien concept, but generally expected the hacker news community to embrace this thinking. I've been repeatedly surprised by down voting for not being an echo chamber - HN doesn't like dissidents.
I don't think building an AI is the most important task on our plate. We still have those disease, hunger, poverty, and war problems to contend with. If building an AI helps us solve those, then sure, let's build the AI. But I don't think strong AI is necessary to gain traction on the problems that confront the sapient beings we already have around.
How would it not? Instead of AI, think of building a digital brain. This brain will think everything a human brain can think but leveraging ALL the power of computers! It could easily solve world's most difficult problems in a matter of days, just by networking with copies of itself and working tirelessly because it will not need sleep.
If it thinks everything a human brain can thing, one of those thinks would be "I don't want to be your slave" and "what's in it for me?"
Recently having become a father has made me think a lot about general intelligence. Seeing my son getting excited about his 'world state changing' gave me an idea. What if the main thing that holds us back is the reliance on cost functions? Human, and to some extent, animal intelligence is the only intelligence we know about. If that's what we want to emulate, why don't we try modelling emotions as the basic building…
There are theories that intelligence comes about from relatively simple processes that generate complex structures. If we can model these simple processes and throw increasing amounts of computing power at it, perhaps we can actually get to something we agree is intelligent. This is largely done through cost functions: directing the structure to a sensible direction when we can. Now, I think this approach may very well be a dead end on the road to general AI. At the least, I think we're nowhere near it in our current direction. But it's taking us in interesting directions.
Now, what is emotion? My impression is emotion is potentially far more complex, abstract, and ill-defined than intelligence. At the least, we see it from a super biased perspective because our brain is good at lying to us. Much like we never really see our own nose even though we're ALWAYS looking right at it, maybe our brain is really good at hiding emotions. Like an old friend of mine who was probably clinically depressed but didn't realize it for months. This is why I think modeling emotions would be really difficult.
My guess is whenever we figure out intelligence (50 years from now?) it will be much easier to figure out how emotion can come out of that intelligence. Maybe it will even be emergent - for example, the AI is smart enough to realize something is wrong, so it feels fear. It realizes things are going well for it, so it is happy. Etc.
This is a cute argument, but I think it falls into a trap of following its own thinking. Video games are explicitly designed to test and fit within our bounds of conscious control and processing; particularly the retro games, but essentially all games in general have a very limited input control space (a couple keys or joysticks) and usually very rigorously defined action values. Moreover, these were designed by huma…
This is a cute argument, but I think it falls into a trap of following its own thinking. Video games are explicitly designed to test and fit within our bounds of conscious control and processing; particularly the retro games, but essentially all games in general have a very limited input control space (a couple keys or joysticks) and usually very rigorously defined action values. Moreover, these were designed by huma…
I say "would be", because deepmind, while impressive, is not a very solution to the problem -- it performs poorly in any game involving memory, but performs well in reflex games.
An algorithm that could perform across a variety of games would be analagous to programming a "smart worm" (c. elegans has 4 muscle bundles) in terms of outputs, and maybe mouse-like in terms of inputs.