Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

docs.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 252 posts

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#61

Post by letlambda »

kowdermeister wrote: post #51

Would someone be so kind to translate / explain the math on slides 53, 54 to simplish english? What are the symbols (burst pipe, µ) representing on slide 55? And why are the exclamation marks there on the next one?

Consider every action that can be taken at this moment. For each possible action, consider every possible future (out to infinity) weighted by it's likelihood.

There are exclamation marks because some of these terms present minor practical problems. The whole, all possibilities out to the end of forever part of it, is easier said than done.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#62

Post by ThomPete »

Intelligence is emerging just like it was with humans. It's not a thing so it wont come from somewhere. As always solving the small problems will eventually allow solutions to emerge we weren't aware of and that might turn into human like or more probably technology like intelligence far surpassing humans.

I always find it fascinating that we have no problem accepting that we became intelligent over time and out of nowhere (Unless you are religious which is a whole other discussion) we even have no issues imagening that life and intelligence could have happened other places in the universe. But the idea of a non-carbon based intelligence is a big debate as if it's somehow unimaginable to think that AI could emerge from human hand while having no problem entertaining the idea that we our intelligence is somehow a unique snowflake.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#63

Post by danmaz74 »

visarga wrote: post #12
Will_Do wrote: post #7

That was really interesting. I'm interested why he's so pessimistic about the simulating a brain approach. Yes it's the boring and obvious approach but it also seems the most direct. Also found this quote interesting > Might have to make it illegal to evolve AI strains or an upper bound of computation per person and closely track all computational resources on earth.

The brain is slow and redundant. It has to be like that because it is not produced in a factory - it is created by self replication. Self replication imposes strict limits and requirements on the type of brain that can be created. AI neurons, on the other hand, are perfect - they never get old or tired and always remember. A neural net like ResNet-150 is capable of doing essentially what 1/3 of the brain is doing (vi…

> A neural net like ResNet-150 is capable of doing essentially what 1/3 of the brain is doing (vision)

Oh come on.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#64

Post by jandrewrogers »

Will_Do wrote: post #7

That was really interesting. I'm interested why he's so pessimistic about the simulating a brain approach. Yes it's the boring and obvious approach but it also seems the most direct. Also found this quote interesting > Might have to make it illegal to evolve AI strains or an upper bound of computation per person and closely track all computational resources on earth.

The pessimism over simulating a human brain is two-fold.

First, the human brain is built on a computational substrate that is completely and utterly unlike silicon. It is extremely inefficient to effect computation by simulating a computing model on silicon that is almost pathological for silicon to express. The abstract computational model of the human brain necessarily has an equivalent direct expression in computing hardware we actually have thanks to Turing equivalence. It just may look nothing like a human brain once you build it with algorithms optimized for silicon.

Second, and related, the abstract mathematical nature of intelligence is well-understood and the human brain must be an expression of that. However, there is currently a huge gap between that abstract theory and reduction to practice i.e. our computer science for building intelligence from first principles is severely lacking. There are many things that are easy to express in mathematics that go for decades before some reduces it to practical computable algorithms and data structures. Given the fundamental limitations and inherent complexity of simulating (poorly) the human brain, many people feel that applying a similar amount of effort to this direct approach is much more likely to produce a viable result.

And in any case, a simulated human brain would be completely eclipsed eventually by a more pure design by virtue of being several orders of magnitude more efficient computationally. Simulating a human brain is not a particularly productive detour on the long-term path given this.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#65

Post by chanakya »

What is the best book/reference to understand why there seems to be general agreement that AGI/"broad" AI will happen? TFA compares the relative likelihood of the various approaches, but says nothing about the absolute likelihood of any of them. Are there signs of AGI we can see today? Is there an argument/data which links the huge improvements we're seeing in narrow AI to the likelihood of AGI?

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#66

Post by 21 »

visarga wrote: post #12
Will_Do wrote: post #7

That was really interesting. I'm interested why he's so pessimistic about the simulating a brain approach. Yes it's the boring and obvious approach but it also seems the most direct. Also found this quote interesting > Might have to make it illegal to evolve AI strains or an upper bound of computation per person and closely track all computational resources on earth.

The brain is slow and redundant. It has to be like that because it is not produced in a factory - it is created by self replication. Self replication imposes strict limits and requirements on the type of brain that can be created. AI neurons, on the other hand, are perfect - they never get old or tired and always remember. A neural net like ResNet-150 is capable of doing essentially what 1/3 of the brain is doing (vi…

> A neural net like ResNet-150 is capable of doing essentially what 1/3 of the brain is doing (vision)

I'd say ResNet-150 is far from solving human vision, in the edge cases.

Can it distinguish between a baseball texture and an actual baseball?

How about between an actual cat versus a toy cat? Sometimes you want the two to be in the same category, other times you don't.

The human can put the same two images in the same or in different categories, based on the higher task at hand. Neural networks are far from that, because they don't (yet) have a model of the world.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#67

Post by mythrwy »

rdlecler1 wrote: post #29

Background: I did AI and Philosophy of Mind in undergrad, an MSc focused on ALife, then a PhD at Yale under a Macarthur Fellow who developed the theoretical framework for the 'evolution of Evolvability' where I worked on computational evolutionary biology. I can say we're not going to blindly brute force our way forward, but instead we'll need to reverse engineer nature's core algorithms to generate hard AI. Every ti…

Background: Some guy on the Internet with an unrelated Bachelors degree he didn't study that hard for and has picked up a little Python and Javascript somewhere along the way.

I know of no biological forms that have evolved wheels. But wheels have turned out to be a hell of a lot faster than fins or legs. I see no reason "intelligence" has to follow the pathways or limitations of biology or neurology at all. Although certainly it may be a place to look for some ideas.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#68

Post by dragandj »

moultano wrote: post #58
rdlecler1 wrote: post #29

Background: I did AI and Philosophy of Mind in undergrad, an MSc focused on ALife, then a PhD at Yale under a Macarthur Fellow who developed the theoretical framework for the 'evolution of Evolvability' where I worked on computational evolutionary biology. I can say we're not going to blindly brute force our way forward, but instead we'll need to reverse engineer nature's core algorithms to generate hard AI. Every ti…

>Every time a major advance is made in AI the computational neuroscientist say: "why didn't you talk to us 15 years ago? We could have told you that!" Can you name one time that has happened? I can't think of any.

Hindsight is 20/20 there.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#70

Post by ghaff »

aeleos wrote: post #54
rdlecler1 wrote: post #29

Background: I did AI and Philosophy of Mind in undergrad, an MSc focused on ALife, then a PhD at Yale under a Macarthur Fellow who developed the theoretical framework for the 'evolution of Evolvability' where I worked on computational evolutionary biology. I can say we're not going to blindly brute force our way forward, but instead we'll need to reverse engineer nature's core algorithms to generate hard AI. Every ti…

What do you think the best way of attacking these problems is? It seems to me that we aren't even at the point where technology can do much to help us (in terms of recreating what we know about the brain) and we just need to understand the brain better.

"Just" that. Maybe.

The problem is that, at the risk of trivializing a lot of good research, science related to the brain/how we think/etc. has seen a whole lot more money spent and the effort of smart people expended than it has seen useful results. There are still debates going on about a lot of aspects of learning and other aspects of cognitive science that were probably already happening when computers were made from vacuum tubes or even earlier.

Post reply on HN