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Reading about rewards in AI context makes me wonder, why current AI only focuses on the network topology aspect of natural intelligence. What about the neurotransmitters like dopamine or serotonine? Could they (or more specific: their effects) be key to an AI that feels more “natural“?
It's too bad, their prior papers were generally open for anyone to read. These new papers appear to be behind paywalls :(
Reading about rewards in AI context makes me wonder, why current AI only focuses on the network topology aspect of natural intelligence. What about the neurotransmitters like dopamine or serotonine? Could they (or more specific: their effects) be key to an AI that feels more “natural“?
Downvoters please explain what's so stupid about my question.
Take a look at this brain schematic here [0]. I vehemently disagree with some of the presented-as-fact ideological aspects of the article, but the depiction of neurotransmitters working differently in different brain regions is illustrative.
i.e., a dopamine molecule does not already constitute a meaningful coordinate system -- it doesn't have a meaning in and of itself, such as "the reward molecule", or euphoria/"feel-good"/"addiction trap"/excitement molecule) in the brain. Rather, the dopamine molecule has locally-interpreted semantics.
To make this more concrete with examples of different aspects of dopamine alone:
- "dopamine is known to encode the confidence level of motor predictions" - Scott Alexander, psychiatrist [1]
- saturating the synaptic cleft between neurons with released (or non-recycled) dopamine is a part some euphoric processes (e.g. drugs, orgasm, gambling) in the striatum negra
- 'excess' (not a simple thing to determine for individuals imo) dopamine is related with psychosis (not per se causally), and antipsychotics are often designed to blunt dopamine transmission
However,
- dopamine transmission is also fundamentally necessary for muscle movement, in the motor cortex
- additionally, the conscious sensation of dopamine is highly dependent upon the frequency of dopaminergic neuron spikes
- Parkinson's disease is (iirc, said to be,) the result of the degeneration of motor neurons; shakiness, problems sleeping;
What does that mean for AI? Well, if we want to go beyond network topology, and start to use new varieties of component substrates, the individual types of signals they represent must either a) be fairly meaningless outside of a specific context or b) not be suited for learning from evidence and generalization of data. Check out [2], [3], and [4] for more.
[0] http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/the-addic...
[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/12/toward-a-predictive-the...
[2] https://www.edge.org/conversation/stephen_wolfram-ai-the-fut... (not that i am a huge fan of wolfram :P)
[3] https://www.edge.org/responses/what-scientific-concept-would..., ctrl-f "biological"
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-state_modeling_of_biomol...
Reading about rewards in AI context makes me wonder, why current AI only focuses on the network topology aspect of natural intelligence. What about the neurotransmitters like dopamine or serotonine? Could they (or more specific: their effects) be key to an AI that feels more “natural“?
Downvoters please explain what's so stupid about my question.
"Reading about rewards in AI context makes me wonder, why current AI only focuses on the network topology aspect of natural intelligence."
Well, it doesn't. Not at all. It looks as if you conflate one very specific AI techique (deep neural networks) with all of AI. Because that one technique is currently insanely popular and has been widely mainstream reported and hyped that makes it look as if your education in that field did not go beyond reading a couple of mainstream media articles. Also, there's a whole huge subfield in AI which is actually defined by it's focus on learning from rewards, which you seem not to be aware of.
"What about the neurotransmitters like dopamine or serotonine? Could they (or more specific: their effects) be key to an AI that feels more “natural“?"
Not applicable as written, too broad and unspecific. "Not even wrong." Looks like someone with superficial knowledge is just throwing a few sticks into the blue in the hope that someone might be aroused to a reply which competently tries to make actual sense out of it.
Nonetheless, this kind of algorithm sounds like exactly what I expect from a predictive brain that cares fundamentally about trajectories.
Reading about rewards in AI context makes me wonder, why current AI only focuses on the network topology aspect of natural intelligence. What about the neurotransmitters like dopamine or serotonine? Could they (or more specific: their effects) be key to an AI that feels more “natural“?
Downvoters please explain what's so stupid about my question.
It's too bad, their prior papers were generally open for anyone to read. These new papers appear to be behind paywalls :(
That reminds me, I should donate.
Reading about rewards in AI context makes me wonder, why current AI only focuses on the network topology aspect of natural intelligence. What about the neurotransmitters like dopamine or serotonine? Could they (or more specific: their effects) be key to an AI that feels more “natural“?
Historically researchers looked at activation functions that are at least somewhat justified by nature, like the sigmoid. More recently people have focused on the mathematical aspects and figured out that the rectified liner unit `ReLU(x) = max(x, 0)` works just as well if not better for most applications.
Maxout networks (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1302.4389.pdf) are another interesting development in that direction.
There's still lots we can learn from biology, of course; but the last decades rapid advances we saw from deep learning at most barely relate to real brains.
Reading about rewards in AI context makes me wonder, why current AI only focuses on the network topology aspect of natural intelligence. What about the neurotransmitters like dopamine or serotonine? Could they (or more specific: their effects) be key to an AI that feels more “natural“?
Downvoters please explain what's so stupid about my question.