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Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

nature.com

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Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#101

Post by Der_Einzige »

jchrisa wrote: post #5
sega_sai wrote: post #2

I posted the article because it is thought provoking, although I disagree with it. The reason is for example statements like this "The real problem is that computers are not in the world, because they are not embodied." "And I shall argue that they cannot pass the full Turing test because they are not in the world, and, therefore, they have no understanding." First I think that whether something is embodied or not do…

My hunch agrees with the paper. Because computers operate on the rational numbers instead of the real numbers, they can never be embodied. They are always in a simulation...

This actually makes sense to me, but for those who aren't familiar with set theory, you may want to link this for context:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_hypothesis

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#102

Post by chess_buster »

Balgair wrote: post #74
vidarh wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not very well understood, but the process is known to exist and work. To assume it can't even in principle be replicated would be an extraordinary claim. Yet the article suggests artificial intelligence can not exist even in principle.

I mean, from a biochem perspective, it's flabbergasting that intelligence exists at all. The brain is so noisy. To me, it's not far fetched to say that you can't make it happen again. Though I think it's technically possible. We're missing something big with intelligence. We know neurons and synapses a little bit. We know a few dozen neurons a little, though it's complexity is crazy big. But that gap between a normal…

Counter perspective: The process by which the brain produces intelligence might not be complex at all. Maybe it is just a simple algorithm which, when applied en masse, produces it. See for example the neocortex is made up of billions of cortical columns which are all basically the same architecture.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#103

Post by chess_buster »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #94
dwaltrip wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t beat around the bush. Are you implying life is supernaturally sustained? That would be quite the claim. If not, then the history of science strongly suggests we can eventually learn the mechanisms of life and intelligence and then find a way to imperfectly yet sufficiently reimplement them.

Are you suggesting life is supernaturally sustained? No. I am simply suggesting that creating life (and intelligence) from inert materals may involve more than "just chemistry". In the same way that lead can not be turned into gold by "just chemistry". I welcome knowledge and proof to the contrary but thus far, there is none.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07289-x

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#104

Post by ogogmad »

cowboysauce wrote: post #15
jchrisa wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My hunch agrees with the paper. Because computers operate on the rational numbers instead of the real numbers, they can never be embodied. They are always in a simulation...

> Because computers operate on the rational numbers instead of the real numbers, Computers are just devices that perform computations. It's perfectly possible to construct computers that operate on values that are continuous and not discrete. In fact, such computers have been constructed before. They are know as analog computers and were used for things like numerically solving differential equations.

You don't need analog computation. The theory of Computable Real Analysis still assumes a digital computer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_analysis

See here for a concrete application of the theory: https://icfp19.sigplan.org/details/icfp-2019-papers/15/Sound...

Another application is the Android calculator, which computes over exact real numbers in the sense described by Computable Analysis.

Finally, it's debatable whether analog computation achieves true computation over the real numbers. The presence of physical noise, and the fact that many physical quantities (like electrical charge) are ultimately discrete at the quantum level, implies that it doesn't really work AFAICT.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#105

Post by awakeasleep »

doliveira wrote: post #26
jqpabc123 wrote: post #3

It is difficult to build/create something you don't understand. A computer is just a playback machine for binary logic. We know that "intelligence" can create binary logic. We don't know if binary logic can create "intelligence". Claims that it is possible are really more "religious" than scientific at this point.

What is "religious" is this inclination to treat human intelligence as this magical thing that works outside the laws of nature, as if our neurons and our brain were something other than just chemistry doing very complex things. That would be quite an extraordinary claim that requires equally extraordinary evidence.

I'm missing a step. Is there a proof that all nature can be simulated with binary logic?

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#106

Post by jqpabc123 »

doliveira wrote: post #75
jqpabc123 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Life in general and your brain in particular may very well be more than "just chemistry". We really don't know. What we do know at this point is that no amount of "just chemistry" has ever managed to create even the most rudimentary form of "life" from inert chemicals. And the only working models we have for "intelligence" at this point are inextricably bound to life.

Yeah, demons may be pushing chemicals down your neurons or your soul is giving tiny electrical shocks to the axons. Anything is possible. One would think that the synthesis of urea back in 1828 would at least weaken this argument, but hey...

Nice straw man.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#107

Post by chess_buster »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #65
hutzlibu wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A computer is just a playback machine for binary logic." If you have code changing code, based on input, which is a neural net, then you have a bit more.

All purely binary logic. It can't be anything more --- this is all the hardware understands.

Wrong. The process is more than the operations. A computer is not just a playback machine like a mechanical loom.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#108

Post by simon_000666 »

Imagine you tried to replicate your PC by creating a simulation of the CPU. Sure you could probably simulate some of the functions without too much difficulty, but the value of the PC is not in it’s CPU alone, it’s in the interaction of all the components, the screen, the ram, the disk, the keyboard, the GPU. Isolated these components provide a fraction of the value they do when they are combined and simulating the whole PC is an order of magnitude at least greater than simulating only the CPU because you also need to simulate the environment it’s in. I think this is what the author of the article is trying to say, not that it’s totally impossible just that we are nowhere near doing what needs to be done to effectively recreate the highly emergent properties (strong AI) of the human body.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#109

Post by woeirua »

enitihas wrote: post #31
vidarh wrote: post #21

Any article making such a claim need to start with explaining what evidence they have that human brains are not computing devices that can be replicated or simulated. Because absent evidence that there is something fundamental preventing us from one day copying the structure of a human brain and ending up with a working device, whatever claims they make are hand-waving.

I think you missed the main point, replicated economically. Given unlimited budget, I think simulating the human brain might be possible if one could use a powerful enough computer for evey neuron.

Ah, but this point has yet to be proved to even a small degree. Neural models of very simple organisms do tend to show that adequate connectome models appear to be enough to produce similar behaviors, but we know for a fact that there's a ton of biochemistry going on in the brain that we will not be able to replicate with just the connectome.

If I were a betting person, I would wager that the connectome is enough to get something like intelligence, but that without the biochemistry the entire system is unstable in some way. The chemistry that we see in the brain is far more complicated than what would be required to minimally sustain the cells. There's a reason all of this chemistry is going on, and unfortunately I think we're going to find that intelligence just cannot exist as we know it without the chemistry. If that's true, then we're talking hundreds of years before we have computers powerful enough to model the chemistry at the requisite level.

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