Assuming a lot of people here are working on an AI or ML problem for work or fun, what are you working on?
Where will artificial general intelligence come from?
111–120 of 252 posts
Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?
#112Artificial 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…
It's interesting how people come out of the woodwork with their personal theories on AGI. Do you/ we even really know how general intelligence works, or even how it emerged i.e. incrementally, or in a dramatic mutation more recently? Last I checked there wasn't a scientific consensus on either topic. To then come out headstrong and say "AGI will be like X" always makes these AGI conversations a tad farcical.
Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?
#113Earlier 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…
>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.
I didn't mean it as a normative statement, just one about the technology required -- I share you concerns.
Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?
#114What 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?
We know intelligence is possible because we exist. The human brain was created by a stupid process of just random mutation and selection. It was designed under ridiculous constraints like very restricted size and power consumption, that we don't have to deal with.
And the brain really isn't that great. Signals travel through the brain about a million times slower than electrons through silicon. Neurons are large macroscale structures. Compare to our transistor technology that is approaching the limits of how small you can build things with atoms. These are just the hardware specs, I don't see any reason to believe the software is much better.
Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?
#115Background: 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!".
I'm not sure which advances you are talking about, but the modern successes of Deep Learning are primarily due to backpropagation and convolution. Neither of the two is considered to be biologically plausible.
Some people are actively trying to come up with alternatives to backpropagation that would be biologically plausible though.
See for example: Bengio et al., "Towards Biologically Plausible Deep Learning" https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.04156
Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?
#116That 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 computi…
As other commenter said, you can do similar things with analog. One team even built a wafer-scale model for simulating neural networks:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.464...
A stacked version of that in a 3D mesh could probably handle quite a bit of intelligence.
Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?
#117I think a very interesting aspect of general AI is that while an incredibly complex technology, it is not unrealistic that it could be created for the first time in someone's home office. Unlike many other earth changing technologies there is nothing that a massive corporation has that a home tinkerer does not (besides the obvious of money and many engineers). With the rise of cloud computing and open source; everyth…
[X] Open Source Tools [ ] Massive Data Sets [ ] $Millions in Computing Resources I'd put it roughly on par with finding a general cure for cancer. While unlikely, quite amazing that the cure for one of the largest causes of death could be solved 3 doors down with lab supplies from amazon and a handful of mice.
2 and 3 aren't really restrictions. I can download multiple libraries worth of books in an afternoon. I can buy a PC for a thousand dollars that is basically a supercomputer compared to computers 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago.
The biggest reason I suspect it will be solved by one person is it's "just" a math problem. Most of the hardest problems in mathematics were solved by a single person. Building off of the works of others of course, but rarely in some big team or corporate project. 9 women can't have a baby in 1 month. The research process of big corporations or even academia isn't really amenable to actually solving hard problems.
Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?
#118Artificial 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…
It's interesting how people come out of the woodwork with their personal theories on AGI. Do you/ we even really know how general intelligence works, or even how it emerged i.e. incrementally, or in a dramatic mutation more recently? Last I checked there wasn't a scientific consensus on either topic. To then come out headstrong and say "AGI will be like X" always makes these AGI conversations a tad farcical.
Intelligence clearly isn't a one-off/recent thing, since we observe remarkably intelligent behavior from cephalopods, which are vastly distant in the tree of life and not recent from an evolutionary perspective. We also know intelligence is also clearly not a binary attribute from many animal and human studies.
The fact that we don't know how higher-order intelligence works in general is exactly why it will be emergent rather than designed.
You shouldn't worry so much about consensus, but instead use your senses and your brain to make up your own mind. That is the approach that gave us the enlightenment.
Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?
#119Artificial 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 subco…
Why do you think consciousness is a selected trait?
Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?
#120Intelligence is an emergent property of self-replicating systems. I would file that under "something else" since that seems so different from all the approaches listed here.