Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

nature.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 403 posts

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#111

Post by mcguire »

"The modern project of creating human-like artificial intelligence (AI) started after World War II, when it was discovered that electronic computers are not just number-crunching machines, but can also manipulate symbols. It is possible to pursue this goal without assuming that machine intelligence is identical to human intelligence. This is known as weak AI."

Eeee, errr, well, no, it's not. Strong AI is the pursuit of human-level (not human-like), general purpose intelligence. Weak AI is the pursuit of solutions to difficult individual problems or classes of problems. Source: my AI classes, ca. 1989.

This article isn't starting well.

Edit: And I'm back after reading it all.

There are two important points when evaluating philosophical arguments about artificial intelligence.

1. Have they introduced dualism? (Usually, it's "how have they snuck in dualism without admitting it." Sometimes it's easy to see, as in Searle's Chinese Room thing. Othertimes not so much.)

2. What happens if you continue with their own questions? Does it lead to an unpalatable (or simply wrong) conclusion?

"The main thesis of this paper is that we will not be able to realize AGI because computers are not in the world."

To start with number 2, who exactly is "in the world"? A blind person? A deaf person? A quadriplegic person? A deaf-blind-mute-quadriplegic-from-birth person? That poor bastard from Johnny Got His Gun? How about this laptop? A robot? A robot that is indistinguishable from a human being without physiological tests? The author started out with an elaborate discussion of human-like and non-human-like general intelligence, but now has unrolled that (Without suitable caution signs. Health and Safety are going to be pissed.) and is now only interested in human-like artificial general intelligence, only in something that resembles a human being: "As Hubert Dreyfus pointed out, we are bodily and social beings, living in a material and social world. To understand another person is not to look into the chemistry of that person’s brain, not even into that person’s “soul”, but is rather to be in that person’s “shoes”. It is to understand the person’s lifeworld." (And I'm going to go out on another limb and ask how well anyone, anywhere, understands some other persons' lifeworld. I don't think that is possible.)

"However, there is a problem with both these quotations. If Harari and Crick are right, then the quotations are “nothing but” the result of chemical algorithms and “no more than” the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells. How can they then be true?"

And here we have number 1. If materialism is right, how can those quotations be true? How can anything said or done by humans be true? They can't be; they're just biochemical algorithms, neurons, and molecules. Truth requires a soul, and a soul could completely grok some other person's lifeworld. Obviously.

So clearly, nothing even remotely like Watson or AlphaGo would be intelligent. (Even if they're not intended to be general intelligences. Yes, he spent the last part of the article complaining that two systems weren't something that they were never intended to be, in spite of spending a large time at the beginning delineating that very difference.)

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#112

Post by blackrock »

I think in order for AGI to be realized, the machine must be able to have algorithms that can dynamically work with new data, that it receives from its sensors, interprets it, and classify it.

It must generate its own data, and classify it, organize it, compartmentalize it, and regularly subdivide it. And most importantly, it needs to be able to invalidate it. It needs to operate on a ”most likely” scenario, based on its own gathered evidence. Where the scenario is true, until it isn’t, and then it needs to find the new scenario.

All of the data and information in the world, can not be encoded for the AGI, and manually spoon fed to it. This is the fallacy. It doesn’t scale. It cannot work, because it doesn’t operate on the “most likely” scenario. The whole concept would fall apart and crumble in on itself.

This data fidelity issue was the problem that ultimately killed the symbolic AI attempts in the 70s, with all the Lisp programming, where they attempted to manually give knowledge to a robot. And then, after running out of money, they realized that they just couldn’t sustain creating all of the data manually.

And the problem with today’s Deep Learning AI, is that it’s just a very fancy pattern matcher. It’s like a very fancy regular expression searcher, to give an analogy.

The problem with today’s AI attempt, is the same problem that doomed the 1970s attempt: namely, the lack of data fidelity. At some point, you can’t have a human go around classifying everything for you.

Given that, I still think AGI is possible, but a major rethinking is necessary to achieve it. The Deep Learning neural net ideas of today, will not achieve it.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#113

Post by woeirua »

When we talk about AGI, everyone always takes it for granted that an AGI would be human-like. But I think if you look at the complexity of the brain, and how poor our attempts to emulate it have been so far, I think it is almost a virtual certainty that the first successful attempts at AGI will create non-human intelligence. In many ways, I expect that our creations will find us to be as unrelatable as we consider dolphins or other highly intelligent animals.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#114

Post by ebg13 »

simon_000666 wrote: post #108

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 w…

> 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

That's fine. We can (and do) do those too. Pretending otherwise is weird. Authors of these kinds of articles always seem to start from positions that woefully misunderstand or misrepresent present scientific theory and capability. Like there's this weird information barrier where historians and philosophers of science regularly skip the part that involves understanding what's going on even though they're still supposed to talk about it.

> you also need to simulate the environment it’s in

You literally don't for the same reason that we don't have to simulate our own environment. The simulated me can just be in the same environment that I am. The environment isn't going anywhere.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#115

Post by rsa25519 »

I often see AGI being discounted based on machines lacking expressiveness. Of course, text isn't as complex as human expression (I assume?), but isn't that how we're communicating right now? I think it's expected to assume each other have General Intelligence. If so, wouldn't it be unfair to hold machines to a higher standard?

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#116

Post by WealthVsSurvive »

simon_000666 wrote: post #108

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 w…

Well, of course. The line is the body. The human body is a line of ergodic behavior stemming back to the origin of not merely the species, but of life itself: a chemical that said "I am that I am" and became life by continuing form or not continuing form. You and I will do the same. The form is ultimately shaped by the environment. What made the environment? Now enter Human. What of this form made it so unique? The recognition of ergodic behavior itself! Now the beast could see the result of its behavior and so birthed prophesy, nightmares, & dreams. So that it might continue. Or not. I think ultimately, we're coming at the problem of AI from the wrong end, if we're attempting to mimic biological intelligence. I think the direction AI is taking has tremendous applications that will reshape humankind, but I do not think it will be comparable; it will be something new: the son of Man, not alive, not dead, all-seeing, judging and impartial to emotion. Either that, or we will place upon it's throne a sword and all shall perish.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#117

Post by Invictus0 »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #88
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.

There is quite a bit of evidence that your brain is analog, not digital. There is lots of evidence that it is both chemical and electrical in nature And while it is capable of logic, it does not rely strictly on any specific form of logic. In other words, the only working models we have for "intelligence" are nothing like the silicon binary switches we are attempting to use to replicate it.

Analog can be represented in digital: we can mathematically prove this. It's not at all reasonable to say that AGI cannot be achieved because it doesn't use a certain type of material.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#119

Post by goatlover »

quibbler wrote: post #13
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.

We know that machines with AGI are possible - humans are such machines. Maybe you could discuss whether classical computers could achieve AGI, but I think overall the quest is to build machines with AGI, not necessarily in the form of classical computers.

> humans are such machines.

Humans are animals. Part of the paper defends the notion that a lot of human intelligence is tacit based on being embodied in the world as a living organism. The idea that humans are biological robots is only one that came about as metaphor when we created machines and some similarities were noted.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#120

Post by jessaustin »

enitihas wrote: post #27
marta_morena_25 wrote: post #12

Ingenious. Another article like "We will never travel faster than lightspeed", or "We will never be able to live forever", or as people back in the stone age would have said "We will never have a fission reactor". When will people finally realize that we know absolutely NOTHING about what's possible and whats not. Science made baby steps. We are 100 years in. And yeah, we know everything right? Yeah General AI... Not…

The difference is, people in stone age had no idea what nuclear fission means. They might have believed you, albeit superstitiously, if you told them that there will be food everywhere one day. Interestingly, the examples you cite seem to be in a decreasing order of difficulty, with several orders of magnitude more of effort required. AGI is gonna be much easier than living forever, which seems should be easier than…

ISTM that AGI would swiftly result in vastly extended lifespans, at least for those fortunate enough to be at the control knobs. In that sense, they are at the same difficulty level.
Post reply on HN