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Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

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Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#231
post #52
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> neuroscientist say: "why didn't you talk to us 15 years ago? We could have told you that!". Interested to hear about these. I can honestly not remember any.

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…

Why are planes called wings? And while the propeller or turbine is largely missing from birds, it contains many wings as well. I'm not convinced.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#232
post #209
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can't really evolve a wheel in the sense that a half-evolved foot is useful already, whereas a half-evolved wheel: not really. Therefore obtaining a functional wheel has to be done in one jump, which is contrary to how the gradual process of evolution works.

Wheels are way more basic. Anything will skid and slide on a spread of rubble, doesn't even need to be animated.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#233
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main objective function in nature is very simple though: maximize the number of copies of your genes. Such an objective enforced in a resource-constrained multi-agent world (as suggested in the slides) could really lead to quite complex sub-objectives which may as well lead to general intelligence. For example, if each agent can process information and perform work, it follows that individuals that have better co…

There's no guarantee this will favour the development of intelligence though. To take examples from nature, flighted birds are so optimised for weight that they would never develop large, heavy enough craniums to support sentient brains. Many selective criteria may turn out to favour optimisation patterns that could actualy exclude general intelligence, or at least might effectively close off evolutionary paths that…

Except that ravens and other corvids seems to be self aware and are highly intelligent, it's correct that evolving things does not guarantee high intelligence.

Insects and especially social insects like ants are good examples of very successful survivors with very little general intelligence.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took nature four billion years to invent humans, who are actually - if we're honest - pretty terrible as an example of workable AGI. In fact what nature invented was a persistent colony organism with external memory. Wild solo humans are only a little smarter than wolves individually, but being able to share and externalise invention and learning created a massive advantage. Humans are successful because although…

> until there's a persistent, transferable, abstracted model [...] It can be compressed to "until AIs can talk".

... to other AIs.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#237
post #233
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no guarantee this will favour the development of intelligence though. To take examples from nature, flighted birds are so optimised for weight that they would never develop large, heavy enough craniums to support sentient brains. Many selective criteria may turn out to favour optimisation patterns that could actualy exclude general intelligence, or at least might effectively close off evolutionary paths that…

Except that ravens and other corvids seems to be self aware and are highly intelligent, it's correct that evolving things does not guarantee high intelligence. Insects and especially social insects like ants are good examples of very successful survivors with very little general intelligence.

As another user TheOtherHobbes noted, humans share this characteristic with insects to some extent:

> Wild solo humans are only a little smarter than wolves individually, but being able to share and externalise invention and learning created a massive advantage.

This seems to resonate with a strain of Philosophy of Mind https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/content-externalism/ which deals with our mental content being distributed not only around the brain and body, but on paper, computers and relations with other people.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#238
post #12
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…

[deleted]

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#239
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main objective function in nature is very simple though: maximize the number of copies of your genes. Such an objective enforced in a resource-constrained multi-agent world (as suggested in the slides) could really lead to quite complex sub-objectives which may as well lead to general intelligence. For example, if each agent can process information and perform work, it follows that individuals that have better co…

There's no guarantee this will favour the development of intelligence though. To take examples from nature, flighted birds are so optimised for weight that they would never develop large, heavy enough craniums to support sentient brains. Many selective criteria may turn out to favour optimisation patterns that could actualy exclude general intelligence, or at least might effectively close off evolutionary paths that…

On the other hand, one can possibly steer the evolution towards a direction that enables general intelligence to evolve. In nature there are many local minima due to biological constraints (body weight, cranium size, birth channel size, predators, payoff between energy investment into large neural networks vs large muscles, ecological niches). In a simulation one can probably avoid many of these local minima by changing the rules that govern the simulation.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#240
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Actually convnets were inspired by Fukushima's Neocognitron, which was itself inspired by visual cortex. That doesn't contradict what I wrote. ConvNets require the synchronization of weights between neurons, which is not considered to be biologically plausible. Some aspects of the architecture (the receptive fields, in this case) may well be plausible, with the complete architecture still implausible.

You're focusing too much on the implementation details and assuming that because they're different that it's not equivalent. The secret sauce here is that network topology (and threshold rules), not the implementation details, are largely what determine the functional properties of that network. Show an electrical engineer the circuit diagram of a 4 bit adder and they'll know it's function immediately. Artificial Neu…

There are some similarities, but ConvNets really remind me of LeCun's airplane vs bird analogy. There are similarities such as learning very similar intermediate representations (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5288363/), but they are also very clearly not doing the exact same thing that a human is. It's a technological emulation, and that's good enough for me.
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