51–60 of 256 posts
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> How do people keep mistaking pattern matching with intelligence? Isn't that true? At what level you call something intelligent rather than just a clever pattern recognition?
Making inferences is beyond pattern matching.
> 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…
> Just because we can easily imagine it does not make it easily achievable or even possible. 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.
Of course we have absolutely nothing to indicate that would be the case, but we also don't understand the brain well enough yet.
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Can you provide an example?
I believe chess prodigies were supposed to derive their superiority by inference but studies have shown that a large portion of that superiority was due to superior pattern matching.
> 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…
The question is if we are able to get an AI to the level of intelligence where it can look at its own code and spot an opportunity to improve it, and the ability to do so, and whether or not the computational capacity immediately available to it is sufficient to reach a level where it is smart enough to find ways to obtain more resources.
The threshold for improvement can be very low if it has enough time and resources to compensate.
E.g in the most extreme case it just needs the ability to randomly flip bits and test the result, but that would require extreme resources for the initial improvements.
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> Just because we can easily imagine it does not make it easily achievable or even possible. 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.
But is it possible with the technology we have discovered so far? > It is without question possible, because we exist. It is also possible to do it quickly, because again, we exist. It's apparent that we don't know everything.
I think I feel comfortable saying that it is possible to do with the technology we have. Because 'intelligence' is almost certainly some form of computable function, which means that a turing complete computer can compute it.
It is of course possible that there exists some special function outside of turing completeness and intelligence is one of those, but we don't know of anything like that, so the best bet to make is that that is not the case.
> It's apparent that we don't know everything.
No, but we do know some things. And thus far we've been able to at least begin to design systems capable of performing any well-defined task. We don't have any reason, at the moment, to believe synthesizing an intelligence is an especially difficult problem, relative to say, lots of other open problems in science and technology.
MIRI pretty much demolished this here https://intelligence.org/2017/01/13/response-to-ceglowski-on...
I honestly don't think anything in that post 'demolishes' the criticism or even advances some sort of argument. It's just a huge wall of text full of weird analogies which is quite typical for these 'rationalist' community posts. People like Bostrom or Yudkowsky have one thing in common. They are not engineers and they stand to gain financially (in fact it is what pays their bills) to conjure up non-scientific pie in…
When something is shown to be doable in principle, it's often not clear how difficult it will be in practice.
In 1932, Ernest Rutherford thought nuclear energy would not be a viable source of energy, let alone weaponized. In 1933, Leo Szilard filed a patent on the concept of the neutron-induced nuclear chain reaction. At this point in time, nuclear fission was not yet known and actually making nuclear energy viable was a pipe dream.
As we all know, in 1945, the first nuclear weapons were used. Until the day that the weapons were used, German physicists thought that nuclear weapons would not be used in the war because, while possible in principle, the actual construction of a working device would require a herculean effort that no nation would expend in time for the war.
The German physicists weren't too far off in estimating how difficult nuclear weapons were. They just failed to predict that the US would throw 130,000 people, including most of their top minds, at the problem for years.
Now, we have no idea how difficult superintelligence will be. But the possibility that we're a couple of breakthroughs and a Manhattan project away from superintelligence is real, and I want a hell of a lot more than one philosopher and an eccentric fanfic writer working on this.
EDIT: No offense to Yudkowsky. I thought the fanfic was fairly good and, more importantly, achieved its purpose.
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But is it possible with the technology we have discovered so far? > It is without question possible, because we exist. It is also possible to do it quickly, because again, we exist. It's apparent that we don't know everything.
> But is it possible with the technology we have discovered so far? I think I feel comfortable saying that it is possible to do with the technology we have. Because 'intelligence' is almost certainly some form of computable function, which means that a turing complete computer can compute it. It is of course possible that there exists some special function outside of turing completeness and intelligence is one of tho…
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> But is it possible with the technology we have discovered so far? I think I feel comfortable saying that it is possible to do with the technology we have. Because 'intelligence' is almost certainly some form of computable function, which means that a turing complete computer can compute it. It is of course possible that there exists some special function outside of turing completeness and intelligence is one of tho…
Turing computable does not mean it can be computed in a reasonable amount of time with a classical computer. There are many things that are known to be computable that we will never be able to compute on a classical or even quantum computer. We do not know that the brain is not quantum equivalent or better.
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Because we have things like Quantum Field Theory that tells us the energy scales it's valid for, and it's experimentally checked to be valid for those scales. Since the brain doesn't presumably contain supernovas, black holes or particle accelerators, that means that we have a basic theory covering the mechanics down.
One thing we do know is that we don't yet fully comprehend how the brain works. It's a little early to say it contains nothing we cannot simulate. Quantum interactions do not require high energy physics.
Suggesting that AIs have to look or behave like human brains in order to have human level intelligence is like suggesting that airplanes must flap their wings in order to fly. It seems far more plausible to me that any AI we build will be as alien to our way of thinking as a F-15 Eagle is to a bald eagle. Given that, I think it's important that we think about how we communicate with this AI, and how we ensure that it follows what we command it to do, rather than going off in its own direction, with negative consequences for human civilization.
I think that the negative consequences of current AI should be warning enough that we need to worry about future, more capable AI.
I can't help but take a stab. 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…
> Complex Motivations. Maybe, but if not we are screwed. And this is the key: we need to get lucky every time. If we're wrong even once and a 'bad AI' gets created and obtains the ability to copy and modify itself, we've unleashed the most dangerous virus ever and putting it back in the box will be near impossible.