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

141–150 of 252 posts

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#141

Post by return0 »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #108
moultano wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

this is not a case that happened

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#142

Post by return0 »

mythrwy wrote: post #67
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…

Apparently philosophers have pondered on the matter, it's called the multiple realizability problem.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#143

Post by CuriouslyC »

orthoganol wrote: post #127
CuriouslyC wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think "what humans are" is not a useful definition of intelligence. Not only is it not useful, but it's likely to lead us down a blind alley in intelligent systems research. Kind of like if we assumed when trying to build a flying machine that the only way it could work is if it flapped its wings.

Human intelligence definitely did not arise "in one day" and any anthropologist positing such a theory hasn't looked at the last 30 years of research in statistical genetics. Intelligence is an incredibly complex trait resulting from the interaction of many, many genes.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#144

Post by CuriouslyC »

tokipin wrote: post #138
CuriouslyC wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think consciousness is a selected trait?

Well I don't know what consciousness is, so I couldn't answer that. But I think the opposite stance of consciousness being some kind of majestic oracle is silly. There is a reason why we perceive consciousness, even if it is just as a side effect of something else or a random fluke that is useless or an illusion for coordinating our limbs or whatever. These types of discussions do get pretty wonky. When I say conscio…

Do we perceive consciousness? Or is consciousness perception itself?

It sounds to me like you're referring to cognition rather than consciousness.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#145

Post by psyc »

orthoganol wrote: post #112
CuriouslyC wrote: post #23

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…

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.

Surely it isn't too much trouble to mentally insert "My intuition is that" before the GP's interesting comment. When dealing with a hard problem, whose solution is many steps removed, we routinely use educated intuition to guide us. It seems to me that insisting on empiricism in this space, at this time, would practically mean halting most thought on the topic.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#146

Post by mgraczyk »

jv22222 wrote: post #110
bluetwo wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, it was bicycles that guided the intuition that control should be based on roll rather than rudder yaw. That was the key innovation that the Wrights contributed at the time of their first flight.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#147

Post by klipt »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #109
SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #81

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…

>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.

Perhaps an important warning that AI could go the same thing...

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#148

Post by p1esk »

karpathy wrote: post #139

I gave this talk a while ago to a small group of attendees. It was not recorded (I saw some ask below). It's based on a document I wrote a while ago called "You suck at writing AI" (never published). The basic argument was that people are comically inadequate at writing complex code. You can't write the code to detect a cat in an image and the correct thing to do is to give up, write down an objective that measures t…

It's unfortunate that AI researchers pay so little attention to the brain (a single slide in your talk). We need more ML people evaluating ideas from neuroscience or from such initiatives as Numenta or Spaun.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#149

Post by paulsutter »

karpathy wrote: post #139

I gave this talk a while ago to a small group of attendees. It was not recorded (I saw some ask below). It's based on a document I wrote a while ago called "You suck at writing AI" (never published). The basic argument was that people are comically inadequate at writing complex code. You can't write the code to detect a cat in an image and the correct thing to do is to give up, write down an objective that measures t…

Practical example, neural architecture search to discover convnets that require less computation, https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07012 "Learning Transferable Architectures for Scalable Image Recognition"

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#150

Post by naikrovek »

viewtransform wrote: post #133
NumberCruncher wrote: post #40

If you take a look at the evolution of the most advanced non artificial general intelligence, eg. human intelligence, it is strongly connected to the evolution of communication. It is a question of efficiency whether you learn through your own experience and failures or through the experience and failures of others. This teaching/learning process was boosted through the use of pictures, spoken language, hand written…

I would argue that intelligence is connected to the evolution of sensing at a distance. Vision in particular, allowed life to evaluate the state of the environment at a distance and allowed for the evolution of strategies to predict and respond to the environment in real time. The progression in intelligence from sponge to amphibian to mammal is related to the evolution of finer sensing of the environment at a distan…

'Situational awareness' is maybe a better phrase. Predicting the future was probably next. Knowing that sunset is soon or that rain is coming requires situational awareness, long term memory, short-term memory, and all kinds of other stuff.

A realistic set of stimuli, a LOT of artificial neurons, and a lot of time will probably get there, eventually.

Post reply on HN