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

161–170 of 403 posts

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#161

Post by mekkkkkk »

Strilanc wrote: post #141

> In the book [Dreyfus] argued that an important part of human knowledge is tacit. Therefore, it cannot be articulated and implemented in a computer program. [...] [...] [...] These skills cannot just be learned from textbooks. They are acquired by instruction from someone who knows the trade. This is a classic example of the Mind Projection Fallacy [1], where a property of how you think is assumed to be a property o…

Very true. It seems closely related to the problem with qualia, which I've always thought of similarly.

Instinctively it seems impossible to describe the color green to someone who has never seen it. Seeing it seems to add "something" that is impossible to acquire in any other way. But this is because of our physical limitations, rather than the existence of some ephemeral quality. If we would have total knowledge and full ability of introspection, I don't see why we wouldn't be able to accurately predict the subjective experience of any input, including colors.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#162

Post by flywheel »

dynamite-ready wrote: post #144
abetusk wrote: post #131

Here is, to me, the relevant line: "Hubert Dreyfus, who argued that computers, who have no body, no childhood and no cultural practice, could not acquire intelligence at all. One of Dreyfus’ main arguments was that human knowledge is partly tacit, and therefore cannot be articulated and incorporated in a computer program. " I have not read the rest of the article but in the introduction it's stated: "The article furt…

I'm not sure. If we think about it mechanically, and the output of the a computer system is a function of it's input, then perhaps we are woefully underestimating the role of the body as both a monitor and input system.

I don't think an artificial intelligence has to resemble anything we would recognize as human intelligence, while still being "intelligent". The motivations of humans and the motivations of computers are very different. If we can give a computer motivation, as well as a way to act and react within an environment, and a framework for learning (neural networks?) then what it "thinks" will be determined by the experience of its own existence. I'm not sure we're there yet.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#163

Post by leereeves »

mkl wrote: post #154
abetusk wrote: post #131

Here is, to me, the relevant line: "Hubert Dreyfus, who argued that computers, who have no body, no childhood and no cultural practice, could not acquire intelligence at all. One of Dreyfus’ main arguments was that human knowledge is partly tacit, and therefore cannot be articulated and incorporated in a computer program. " I have not read the rest of the article but in the introduction it's stated: "The article furt…

I don't think it has anything to do with souls. Most "knowledge" deep learning systems have seems tacit to me: it would be practically impossible for people to write programs that articulate and incorporate that knowledge without machine learning (people tried, for decades), and it certainly isn't "derived from formal principles of reasoning" in anything but a tangential mathematical sense. (I too have not read the w…

I'd argue that deep learning is derived from formal principles of mathematical reasoning in a very concrete sense. Deep learning learns a predictive function of the features that minimizes the loss function (with some caveats). If the loss function and training data are well chosen, that minimizes the probability of being wrong.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#164

Post by SiVal »

abetusk wrote: post #131

Here is, to me, the relevant line: "Hubert Dreyfus, who argued that computers, who have no body, no childhood and no cultural practice, could not acquire intelligence at all. One of Dreyfus’ main arguments was that human knowledge is partly tacit, and therefore cannot be articulated and incorporated in a computer program. " I have not read the rest of the article but in the introduction it's stated: "The article furt…

Tacit knowledge is knowledge that results from adapting to experience, like learning to tie shoelaces with practice, rather than something like finding the derivative of sin(x) by the usual mathematical proof method (reasoning step by formal step).

Every deep learning system has tacit knowledge: it knows a chair when it sees one but can't explain how it knows. It just adapted its connections to training until it got it right most of the time.

So computers are provably capable of what, in humans, is defined as tacit knowledge and can be given sensors and actuators to learn from. A car can learn to parallel park with practice. It can't explain how it does it, but you can copy the trained system into a new car.

I don't see why you couldn't produce a combination of sensors and actuators that vastly exceeds what any human is capable of.

But AGI isn't that. It's a variety of information processing techniques (algorithms) deployed as a toolbox managed by meta-techniques (more algorithms) that know how to deploy the others in various combinations. We don't yet know much about the management algorithms, but I don't see any reason in principle why we couldn't eventually find some and invent others.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#165

Post by dwaltrip »

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.

Gold can be made from lead (and other inputs) using knowledge that is generally classified as nuclear physics. It’s not very practical or economical, so no one does it — but it can be done. It’s true that this isn’t “chemistry”. Not sure if you were making a deeper point.

Perhaps to truly understand life we need to look deeply at physics, geology, fluid dynamics, and many other specialized fields, in addition to chemistry. And maybe we will need some new discoveries in these areas than have not yet been made. Is that all?

I don’t think there is really much contention between that and the idea that life is “just chemistry”. I would bet most people saying that are totally fine with what I wrote above and are likely just trying to be concise with their words.

Unless you mean more than you are plainly saying, this seems like splitting hairs about the taxonomy of scientific understanding. Understanding is understanding, regardless of how you categorize it.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#166

Post by Balgair »

chess_buster wrote: post #102
Balgair wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A few generations of biologists have tried to reason it out. I think it's safe to say that whatever is going on is either very complex or we just do not have the right tool to study it right now.

Something really new, like radios were to communication, or steel hulls to shipping, is needed in bio to get things moving apace. The tools we have are really great, but they are a bit slow it seems.

Also, the neocortex is somewhat stereotypical, but those long range projections that come in/out at every layer are the things that make the brain so hard to understand. Everything is flying everywhere all at once.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#167

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

This is possibly the worst article I have ever seen in Nature.

It is barely at the level of an undergraduate essay on AI (or AGI or ANI, as the author prefers). A hand-waving argument about "computers not being in the world" that relies on not bothering to define "computers", "being in" or "the world". Convenient avoidance of almost every more subtle anti-Searle/anti-Dreyfus critic (notably Dennett). Almost wilfull narrowing of a much broader argument about the nature of reality and the connection between causality and conventional parametric science, when these things lie at the heart of the author's argument (such as it is).

It is amazing that Nature chose to publish this.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#168

Post by mrmonkeyman »

Strilanc wrote: post #141

> In the book [Dreyfus] argued that an important part of human knowledge is tacit. Therefore, it cannot be articulated and implemented in a computer program. [...] [...] [...] These skills cannot just be learned from textbooks. They are acquired by instruction from someone who knows the trade. This is a classic example of the Mind Projection Fallacy [1], where a property of how you think is assumed to be a property o…

This is not the same at all and you misunderstood the argument.

Your biker example would be the same if one could show a software entity completely mastering bike dynamics in its first try by reason, pure deduction from first principles.

On the other hand, if you 'train' a bike program - eg let it fail million times - first, that would be a perfect example of tacit knowledge. Nothing to do with reason, just pure experience building on itself. That is actually what a human would do although we lack the ability to be copied.

Post reply on HN