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Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

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Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#121

Post by CuriouslyC »

mythrwy wrote: post #107
CuriouslyC wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (hist…

Two points:

- The first part of a sigmoidal curve looks exponential.

- Evolution is massively parallel.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#123

Post by red75prime »

Houshalter wrote: post #114
chanakya wrote: post #65

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?

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 macr…

> Signals travel through the brain about a million times slower than electrons through silicon.

Correction. Electrons' drift velocity in conductors is quite slow and it doesn't affect signal transmission speed.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#124

Post by red75prime »

crypticlizard wrote: post #75
indifferentalex wrote: post #2

Not on their radar, or their slides at least: Natural Language Processing based rule-based brute-force artificial intelligence (that could be augmented through sensors/motors that allow interaction with the external world). A Vulcan-like (Star Trek) AI, what do you think? Might be easier to simulate the entire brain, on the other hand it might be doable and bridge the gap to general AI.

With regards to Vulcan emergence, I do believe we are in for that soonish; it's an archetypal depiction that consumers desire. Biotech, my friend, genetic enhancement. We can make ourselves smarter with genetic enhancement. We can even give ourselves the vulcan mind meld, and everything else exceptional about Spock. I do think the human brain substrate is exceptional, worthy of improving upon. I wish we talked more a…

"I want to go out". The door is opened. "Lemme think a bit. Nah, I just want the door open". We can't have the door open at all times! "Who do you think you are for me to care? You are a human, invent something."

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#127

Post by orthoganol »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #118
orthoganol wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 emerge…

Ok but I am talking about general human intelligence when I say AGI and 'recently emerged', not mollusks. You could easily argue we will find out how higher-order intelligence emerged one day, as some researchers already have models for that if you've read a college anthropology textbook; may not be right, but it's not out of the realm of possibility that it emerged recently due to new structure(s) ('design') coming about in a relatively short time period, so making the claim "Since we don't know how it happened, therefore it must be like X" is flawed.

You know what French Enlightenment thinkers were also against? Making headstrong claims (as an authority) without empirical evidence on your side :)

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#128

Post by Torai »

So, when when say AGI, what do we mean? Is it about creating a new intelligent "being" or mimicking what we perceive as human intelligence inside some hardware? I guess it's the the first one.

And I guess AGI would be just 1 intelligent being because there is no need for more as they would communicate and share intelligence, so de facto being only 1.

Can all human intelligence also be understood as only 1 in some sense, as an isolated human without access to culture wouldn't be more than surviving animal?

And when defining intelligence's ingredients, isn't necessary some sort of "motivation" than drives someone to get better at something? Humans have, genetic (survival), social, personal... motivations. How does that translate to AGI, what could be it's motivation?

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#129

Post by ilaksh »

psadri wrote: 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?

I think the answer is yes and yes. And I believe this idea to be key.

His artificial life slides do show starting with simulating very simple animals.

That reminds me of something I was thinking a few years ago which I wrote in this comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/8uwcq/are_worms...

See this article https://www.inverse.com/article/35862-a-i-ben-medlock-machin... I think Medford is right when he points out

> “It comes back, I think, to what intelligence actually is,” reasons Medlock. “Intelligence is not the ability to play chess or to understand speech. More generally, it’s the ability to process data from the environment and then act in the environment. The cell really is the start of intelligence, of all organic intelligence, and it’s very much a data processing machinery.” > The organic intelligence, he says, confers an embodied model of the world for the conscious organism. “The data that’s coming in [through the senses] only really matters at the point where it violates something in the model that I’m already predicting.”

So I believe that we should be emulating the capabilities of much simpler organisms. For me I would look at something like a lizard or simple mammal first for a practical starting point, rather than simulating billions of cells and DNA machinery. But the core aspects of intelligence are right there in the cell as he says -- the embodiment, the complex model, prediction and adaptability. To me crows are too smart for a starting point.

Personally I think that what typically we think of as general intelligence or strong AI is really just a very smart animal (human), but that is mainly a matter of degree of performance rather than a totally different type of intelligence from animals. What is missing from our computer programs is the type of things that a crow, your cat, or probably even a lizard, all do very naturally. And we may be able to technically bring that down to worms or the cell even as far as core capabilities (but not practical targets for emulating).

Can we build an artificial lizard that is able to process the same high bandwidth stream of sensory data as that animal? That can output the same high bandwidth stream of motor outputs? That can see part of a predator behind a rock and realize that it must move, and plan an escape route? That can do these things in completely arbitrary novel environments? That can perform that species' mating dance to attract a mate? These are the types of capabilities I believe we should start with, based on broadly adaptable systems like advanced neural networks. So I think his artificial life slide is mostly right, but we should aim to just emulate animals as a serious goal, with the types of high bandwidth inputs and outputs and complex environments, and make sure that all of the capabilities he lists on that slide like attention etc. are derived from/integrated with powerful general purpose adaptive computation like advanced neural nets so they can handle real world complexity and performance requirements.

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