Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck

> There have been no new breakthroughs in this area. Most of the research being done is in application of what we have known for decades in specific areas, with minor insights into tweaks and uses of combinations ...

There are 2 huge problems with that:

1) nobody is trying to "embody" an intelligence with any sort of research project behind it. Nobody's even trying to create an artificial individual using neural networks. There are several obvious ways to do this, so that's not really the problem.

Therefore I claim that your implied conclusion, that it isn't possible with neural networks somewhere between premature and wrong.

2) What if the difference between an ANN and our brain is a difference of scale and ... nothing more ? We still do not have the scale in hardware to get anywhere near the human brain, and just so we're clear, the differences are still huge.

Human neocortex (which is roughly what decides on actions to take): 100 billion neurons

Human cortex (which is everything that directs a human action directly. Neocortex decides to throw spear and the target, cortex aims, directs muscle forces, moves the body and compensates for any disturbance like say uneven terrain): another 20 billion neurons.

Various neurons on the muscles and in the central nervous system directly: a few million (mostly on the heart and womb. Yes, also in men, who do have a womb it's just shriveled and inactive). They're extremely critical, but don't change the count very much.

AlphaGo 19x19x48, times 4 I think. About 70000 neurons, and that does sound like the correct number for recent large-scale networks.

A human neuron takes inputs from ~10000 other neurons, on average. A state-of-the-art ANN neuron takes input from ~100, and since it's Google and they've got datacenters, AlphaGo was ~400.

So the state of the art networks we have are on par with animal intelligence of the level of a lobster, ant and honeybee. I think it is wholly unremarkable and understandable that these networks do not exhibit human-level AGI.

What is remarkable is what they can do. They can analyze species from pictures better than human specialists (and orders of magnitude better than normal humans). They can speak. They can answer questions about a text. They can ... etc.

Give it a few orders of magnitude and there will be nothing these networks don't beat humans on.

Examples of top-down algorithms, in my opinion (since bottom-up and top-down are debatable concepts in many concrete situations), include:

- Genetic algorithms

- Q learning

In the sense that they learn general behavior first and then learn ever more little "tricks" to be used in particular situations. Both are more effective when combined with ANNs. But when they start they're only aware of very high level goals.

That said, I also have kids, and while they're bigger now, I would argue the idea that humans work top-down from the very beginning doesn't survive caring for a toddler for a few hours (babies can't really move, so they don't make particularly stupid decisions. Toddlers and up to teenagers make idiotic decisions that make sense from particular perspectives. For instance, they exhibit extreme short term decision making (like taking a huge risk of falling down just to get a little piece of candy).

Top-down decision making isn't just something that is eventual emergent behavior, it's learned behavior. Telling a toddler that to get candy he should go to the store, get flour, sugar and ... and follow this recipe doesn't work. They get distracted after 30 seconds. It's not that they're trying to fail, their mind just doesn't let them focus beyond a certain (short) amount of time. Adults have the same limit, just longer time, but they have learned to compensate for it. For instance using TODO lists, or project plans.

I agree, it's obvious that human intelligence is >99.9% a behavior copying algorithm. What we call rational thought is in reality restricted to conscious exercise and it is a learned skill. A trick, nothing more, and especially not a core part of our behavior. It is not that different, at a low level, from learning to juggle balls. Rational behavior, firstly, most people just don't have it at all, and secondly even in the people who do behave rationally occasionally, it is only when things are happening slowly enough and they're putting in constant effort toward maintaining that rational behavior, constantly second-guessing themselves and going back in memory every few minutes to evaluate your own actions and formulate a plan.

And if you've been to the third world (or just a large poor part of a large western city), you'll know this is true: billions of people have never learned to act rationally, and only few and far between will ever act rationally. You can do a thought exercise with these people and figure out with them what the rational action is, and the vast majority will simply act anyway.

Yeah that's interesting, it does have some kind of memory with all the genes we have. I mostly just meant that Nature is not an intelligent agent with an agenda (unless you believe that in a spiritual way, which is cool too).

>If we created AGI, then nature created AGI. AGI can look back and say the step from biological to machine was akin to single to multi celled organisms. I do think it's interesting to consider AGI as a similar step from single to multi celled organism, but I also feel like if we consider everything manmade as part of nature, the term nature doesn't really mean anything. If it refers to all man-made things as well as all non man-made things, it kinda just becomes a synonym for "things"

Huge killer mice I presume