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> The second premise is that the brain is an ordinary configuration of matter, albeit an extraordinarily complicated one. This is the part I doubt is true. There was a time when humans thought brains were very complex systems of microscopic clockwork because gears were the pinnacle of technology. How do people keep mistaking pattern matching with intelligence?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
First time encountering a Maciej idlewords post, huh? He doesn't even take himself seriously. That also doesn't stop him from being an excellent and thoughtful writer.
I don't mean to say "he made a Rick and Morty reference, Serious Adults don't make Rick and Morty references". That'd be dumb. I mean that he points to a robot in Rick and Morty that was sad about being programmed to pass butter, and attempts to infer from this that real robots would refuse to intelligently pursue arbitrary goals, and therefore that the orthogonality thesis is false. He's treating a thing that happen…
I think in this case it might be you who is mistreating what's written. This also produces the same not-working result but for somewhat different reasons.
This always puzzles me. I don't have enough knowledge about AI to be objective about that kind of statement. But deep down, I feel skeptic about it.
Not long ago I saw an episode of a show occuring in the late 80's. This kid had just received a computer as a gift and was talking to a kind-of-AI program through keyboard and screen.
The AI reactions to the kid's input was not dumber or smarter than Siri or any other currently widespread kind-of-ai program. I don't know if the show was accurate vis-a-vis this particuliar software but I like to think it was. If it was, that means in the last 30 years AI hasn't really gone further. Computer power has. Algorithms not so much.
I'd love to get the opinion of someone that has a good understanding of the current state of the AI art.
> The second premise is that the brain is an ordinary configuration of matter, albeit an extraordinarily complicated one. This is the part I doubt is true. There was a time when humans thought brains were very complex systems of microscopic clockwork because gears were the pinnacle of technology. How do people keep mistaking pattern matching with intelligence?
In a general sense, microscopic clockwork isn't an incorrect way to put it. Any known chemical or biological reaction is just some microscopic physical reaction. We know about more subatomic structures but I think the crux of the argument is about the same.
Argument from cats. Remembering that the cat represents humanity: $5 for a group of neurons which will make the cat sit at this point (which happens to be at the entrance into a cat carrier), then $5 for making the cat backpedal a little.
Emus. There are many tactics humans can't use for various reasons (saturation nuclear bombardment, for example). It doesn't say much about intelligence, but more about economics and ethic.
Slavic Pessimism. So we'll get problems on nth try, when AI is sufficiently fine, but security measures are still a mess, because there was no chance yet to battle test them.
Complex Motivations. Maybe, but if not we are screwed.
Actual AI. Why not from actual general AI, like in humans? Or use wall clock time and not the amount of data. AlphaZero: zero to superhuman in tens of hours.
My Roommate. Argument from ignorance. If we don't know how to build general AI now, then we surely will not be able to shape its motivations when we will know.
Brain Surgery. The idea that a brain surgery skill requires specifically designed circuitry and cannot be learned and therefore improved by improvements of general learning/planning capacity is... curious, I guess.
Childhood. Maybe, or maybe it already has very good knowledge of the world from previous attempts that we did in Slavic Pessimism argument.
Gilligan's Island. Well, if someone wants their AI to reinvent all the technology, or to build an AI and then not use it to design better technologies, they can do it. Why everyone will be doing it is not so clear.
*Added some "the"s.
Being able to simulate a brain with electronics, if it is possible, is not enough. You have to simulate it without a large increase in the space or time requirements. If there are 100B neurons in the human brain but it takes 100B^2 transistors to simulate it or the simulation takes polynomial time to complete a task that the human brain requires only linear time for, it's a bust.
Just because we can easily imagine it does not make it easily achievable or even possible.
If smart, intelligent humans are the ones that's going to make artificial superintelligence, wouldn't that make us more intelligent than them? Unless AI can create a more intelligent versions of themselves on its own, I have second thoughts believing this idea.
That would be premise 6.
> But there's also the risk of a runaway reaction, where a machine intelligence reaches and exceeds human levels of intelligence in a very short span of time. This always puzzles me. I don't have enough knowledge about AI to be objective about that kind of statement. But deep down, I feel skeptic about it. Not long ago I saw an episode of a show occuring in the late 80's. This kid had just received a computer as a gi…
> If we knew enough, and had the technology, we could exactly copy its structure and emulate its behavior with electronic components, just like we can simulate very basic neural anatomy today. Being able to simulate a brain with electronics, if it is possible, is not enough. You have to simulate it without a large increase in the space or time requirements. If there are 100B neurons in the human brain but it takes 10…
It is without question possible, because we exist. It is also possible to do it quickly, because again, we exist. The only thing that is unclear is:
1. How hard it is to do artificially.
2. How far from optimum the human mind is, and how complex it is to improve upon it.