Live data from Hacker News

Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

docs.google.com

101–110 of 252 posts

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#101

Artificial general intelligence won't be invented, it will emerge, just general intelligence did in the wild. AGI is just going to be a hierarchical arrangement of specialized tools. The first step is highly specialized AI tools for very specific problem domains. The second step is AI tools that use other AI tools as components but address slightly larger problem domains. The third and successive steps are recursions…

> Artificial general intelligence won't be invented, it will emerge, just general intelligence did in the wild.

I think so as well, but for a specific reason: That people are not as "AGI" as we think, and that our general intelligence is the result of immense neuron-computing resources committed to satisfying a few simple drives. In other words, narrow AI with a lot of resources. Not to mention many specialized subcomponents.

And to the degree that consciousness is a selected trait, that means it has a purpose. I think the work on attention/focus in neural networks hints at that purpose.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#102

Artificial general intelligence won't be invented, it will emerge, just general intelligence did in the wild. AGI is just going to be a hierarchical arrangement of specialized tools. The first step is highly specialized AI tools for very specific problem domains. The second step is AI tools that use other AI tools as components but address slightly larger problem domains. The third and successive steps are recursions…

This. This i believe is the how its going to turn out. Specialized AIs cooperating and creating higher level abstractions. It may not be AGI at first but Practical AI that could be used for real world applications where human intelligence is usually needed.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#103
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll preface this by saying that my views don't necessarily represent a mainstream position here: Humans already accidentally invented AI at least a few times, sort of. To talk meaningfully about this topic, I think it's better to step away from the topic of "intelligence" and instead speak about "reasoning ability". It's still fuzzy, but seems to sidestep a lot of the "can submarines swim" arguments. Things like soc…

1. What are the other general intelligence that we know of besides life? 2. How is it that you know that the reasoning abilities of the structures that we create are because of the structure, and not because we are the pieces that make up the larger structure?

1. Sorry if I was unclear -- the examples I listed were meant to be examples of "general intelligences", but I think corporations are a good example.

2. Well, this is somewhat more complicated to answer --

Obviously the reasoning abilities are (partly) because we're part of the structure. But in a way that we know can be decoupled from the reasoning ability of the structure -- see modern CS on which problems are tractable to mechanize and the success of ML at individual tasks -- because modern corporate theory has formulated a system of corporate governance and execution that only depends on individual people for one or a few tasks. The fixation of modern corporate management on replaceable, cheap, low-skill workers makes it a perfect template to replace components one at a time with bruteforce discovered ML components (and in fact, we already see this happening -- because it is part of the reason that corporations are designed that way).

After all, from the perspective of the corporation as a reasoning entity, increased cyberization is increased efficiency, which ultimately means increased competitiveness (and hence survival).

Electronic computers were designed to replace human computers in the military, and we have a wealth of information on their numeric and string processing capabilities. They're specifically designed to emulate in another medium some of humans' reasoning abilities, particularly those around logical deduction and numeric calculation (which in some senses are similar). Since modern corporations have reduced much of their operation to machines (eg, factories), string manipulation and calculation, it seems perfectly conceivable to have a corporation control all of its "core functions" via electronic computer after a period of increasing cyberization, with contracted delivery services and on-site technicians viewed something like a doctor.

Corporate cyberization is, if you take my first claim that corporations represent a "general" reasoning structure of made of specialized components as true, an open and direct path to an AGI that we seem to be stumbling down.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#104
post #78

Do we consider simpler brains to exhibit general intelligence (e.g. A crow's). Is it a more tractable problem to replicate crow level AI first before tackling humans?

We can't even model worms at the moment, so a crow might be far off still.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#105

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 n…

I think the problem is not that we cannot accept evolving general AI by solving much smaller problems first, rather we're very impatient and don't want to wait for the evolution to take place.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#106
post #67

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…

> 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.

On certain terrain. And much slower - sometimes useless - on others. Wheels aren't simply better legs, they're a different way of moving, with its own benefits and drawbacks.

Likewise, if we're talking about computational ability, we already have things that are faster than the human brain in certain areas (say, numerical computation). When we talk about AGI, we're talking about human-like intelligence (at least to a certain degree).

So we already have the wheel, but now we want to develop something that does what the leg does. Now, maybe that doesn't have to be an actual leg, but that's usually what people usually end up with when they try to find something that will have a similar functionality as a leg.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#107
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The brain is slow in "cycles"/second, but the amount of computation done by each cycle isn't directly comparable to that done by a computer. Forgetting isn't a bug, it's a feature. Forgetting is basically like dimensionality reduction on input data - we extract the principle components/exemplars, remember a weighting, and trash the redundancy. Training a ML model is a lot faster on smaller data, and the same is true…

Evolution creeps along.

Engineering ability however appears to be growing exponentially. It took millions of years for the brain to reach the place it is now but it only took a few thousand years to get to the moon and create the Internet. I wouldn't count out the power of engineering because biology is complex. Particularly given ever more powerful tools of computation and communication that have only recently (historically speaking, not in lifespans of javascript frameworks) come on line.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#108

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.

Bayesian brain theories of perception. The neuroscientists and cognitive scientists are still waiting for the AI theorists to stop obsessing over that one paper with the cat's visual cortex and get off the deep learning train of sacrificing correctness for cheapness to compute.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#109
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are right that we could, in theory experimentally brute force intelligence. But if we try and do that, we are basically trying to simulate an entire universe and wait for intelligence. But the amount of computing power that that would require is beyond even what we can imagine. And even if we could find some ways of simplifying it, it still seems like a waste of our intelligence. Like when it got cold for…

I'll preface this by saying that my views don't necessarily represent a mainstream position here: Humans already accidentally invented AI at least a few times, sort of. To talk meaningfully about this topic, I think it's better to step away from the topic of "intelligence" and instead speak about "reasoning ability". It's still fuzzy, but seems to sidestep a lot of the "can submarines swim" arguments. Things like soc…

>The quest for an AGI is more about translating the notion of a corporation (or government, etc) meaningfully into fully electronic computer terms than it is in replicating the human mind.

That's an astoundingly terrible idea, considering what powerful corporations and governments have done to the world.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#110
post #99
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's been this tension over whether achieving apparent human levels of artificial intelligence requires thinking like and following processes associated with human learning and intelligence pretty much forever. Today, computational capability and data have gotten us to a place where there's been a big step forward while largely ignoring how it relates to human-level thought. (After all, we got powered flight by la…

Actually, previous to the Wright brothers, the dominant theories of flight involved studying how birds flew and theorizing what parts were important and trying to replicate them. You could get a degree in this area of study. I do agree that different approaches are needed. In the case of flight it was the realization that the airfoil is important and the rest is window dressing.

Am I right in thinking the study of fish/sharks and fluid dynamics helped with the breakthrough?
Post reply on HN