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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

#191

Post by abetusk »

biswaroop wrote: post #187
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 have a perspective on this, since I took a rather engaging philosophy class from the late Prof Dreyfus at Berkeley. As the article hints at, his line of argument was a completely valid criticism of AI based on a set of rules written with symbolic logic. He arrived at this conclusion after studying Heidegger's concept of dasein. The best way to describe dasein is through a classic example [1]: "...the hammer is invo…

Thanks for the comment and confirmation that Dreyfus is essentially a dualist/believes in souls/etc.

I've idly had similar thoughts about the web of interconnections of concepts. Our idea of "cat" is not a single unit but an array of different ideas of body shapes, fur colors, sensory touch experiences, sounds, and other concepts that are rolled into one word.

I've often argued that general artificial intelligence will probably look like a complex series of individual 'utilitarian' components working on concert to achieve what looks to us like consciousness. A kind of "unix philosohpy" of AI: small, targeted tools working in concert to create a larger "operating system" of consciousness.

I've taken a few undergraduate philosophy classes myself in addition to talking to many philosophy grad students. It pains me to see people waste so much time on this subject. Philosophy itself is wonderful. Academic philosophy is a hollow shell where all the significant subjects have branched off into their own disciplines, leaving the husk of theology parading as science. At least theologians have the honesty to admit they study theology.

I would rather learn from engineering lore and draw from their wisdom on how to build complex systems than listen to academic philosophers.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#192

Post by goatlover »

mekkkkkk wrote: post #161
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 an…

Maybe, but since we don’t have that knowledge, we can’t program it.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#193

Post by natch »

I guess the author is not aware of Rodney Brooks or any number of other long existing proponents of having AI be embodied. And that’s not even taking into account that the network, its data, and sensors attached to it, and their data all fill the role of a kind of embodiment in an environment if that’s something the author thinks is missing.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#194

Post by Strilanc »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #181
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…

The point isn't bike riding. Bike riding is an example of a class of problems, and your solution begs the question. The point is that humans and computers operate differently. The human approach is based on adaptive experiential heuristics. The computer approach is based on explicit formalism. (Even in neural networks, there's still a formal model. It's just made of weightings instead of logic paths.) The epistemolog…

> The problem isn't getting a computer to ride a bike, it's getting a computer to learn to ride a bike how a human learns.

This is just a more sophisticated way of assuming that there's something human-intrinsic about bike riding. Human-like is not the only way to approach doing or learning. Whatever works, works.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#195

Post by mturmon »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #176
mturmon wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note, is not in the the flagship journal, it's an affiliated journal under the Nature imprint. There are about 40 other such: https://www.nature.com/siteindex (see under "N"). It's a Springer joint. Note that the counterpart journal, Science , is published by the AAAS, and is not for profit the way Nature is. If you're interested in science, Science is a great one-stop shop and it's about $120 per year. Sometimes one…

Thanks for the clarification. I hadn't noticed the "not in the real Nature" status when reading it.

Sure...the bar for Nature is really high...friends at my work have been through the editorial/revision process there and it's generally very demanding.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#196

Post by mindcrime »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #176
mturmon wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note, is not in the the flagship journal, it's an affiliated journal under the Nature imprint. There are about 40 other such: https://www.nature.com/siteindex (see under "N"). It's a Springer joint. Note that the counterpart journal, Science , is published by the AAAS, and is not for profit the way Nature is. If you're interested in science, Science is a great one-stop shop and it's about $120 per year. Sometimes one…

Thanks for the clarification. I hadn't noticed the "not in the real Nature" status when reading it.

Same. I saw the domain name, and thought "How did this get published in Nature???"

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#197

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

maest wrote: post #175
mturmon wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note, is not in the the flagship journal, it's an affiliated journal under the Nature imprint. There are about 40 other such: https://www.nature.com/siteindex (see under "N"). It's a Springer joint. Note that the counterpart journal, Science , is published by the AAAS, and is not for profit the way Nature is. If you're interested in science, Science is a great one-stop shop and it's about $120 per year. Sometimes one…

Slightly off-topic: I would be interested in keeping up the latest cutting-edge science developements, but I expect a Nature subscription is too heavy-duty for that. Not necessarily because of the price, but I don't think I would end up using it. Instead, what would fit my interests better would be a science newsletter that, say, once a month summarizes the most interesting recent developements and sends them to my i…

Scientific American?

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#198

Post by mturmon »

maest wrote: post #175
mturmon wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note, is not in the the flagship journal, it's an affiliated journal under the Nature imprint. There are about 40 other such: https://www.nature.com/siteindex (see under "N"). It's a Springer joint. Note that the counterpart journal, Science , is published by the AAAS, and is not for profit the way Nature is. If you're interested in science, Science is a great one-stop shop and it's about $120 per year. Sometimes one…

Slightly off-topic: I would be interested in keeping up the latest cutting-edge science developements, but I expect a Nature subscription is too heavy-duty for that. Not necessarily because of the price, but I don't think I would end up using it. Instead, what would fit my interests better would be a science newsletter that, say, once a month summarizes the most interesting recent developements and sends them to my i…

How about one of these e-letters [0] backed up by a Science digital subscription to actually read the content?

Referring to a recent TOC [1], the "Research Articles" would likely be more in-depth than you want, but there are also summarizing "Perspectives", "Features", and "Reviews" that I generally find OK for medium-difficulty reading.

[0] https://www.sciencemag.org/subscribe/get-our-newsletters

[1] https://science.sciencemag.org

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#199

Post by mindcrime »

godelski wrote: post #129

Embodiment being a killer feature for AGI seems weird to me. Not only is "what is a body" vague, but it is entirely possible to build a body. So why would it prevent AGI? We do know that embodiment is a sufficient condition for general intelligence: if we assume humans have general intelligence then it is clearly a sufficient condition. But the question of necessary is more interesting because we have to actually ask…

Embodiment being a killer feature for AGI seems weird to me.

For the record, I have just argued in a different thread, that this stuff is not needed for "AGI", at least not the way I perceive it as being defined. And I believe that way is consistent with others in the field.

But... if you'll allow my use of the distinction between "human level" intelligence and "human like" intelligence, then I will say that I think embodiment is important to the latter. Why? Because I believe a lot of our learning is experiential, and especially the learning that yields a lot of our very basic "model of the world" ideas. Take our "intuitive metaphysics" - there are objects in the world. Objects can't be in two different places at the same time. Two objects can't be in the same place at the same time. Etc. etc. And likewise our "intuitive epistemology" which we use to decide what things are true, and so on. I believe that it will be very difficult (although perhaps not impossible) to give an AI very human like equivalents to these things, as well as "intuitive physics" (things fall over when they're off balance, you can't stand a pencil up on it's sharpened point, etc.) without having it "experience" a lot of these things.

Now the really interesting spin on that is whether or not a virtual body in a simulation would suffice to a degree. If you built a really hyper-realistic "fake world" using a really advanced game engine with somewhat realistic physics and what-not, and "put" the AI "in" that world... maybe it would learn some, or most, or even all, of what we learn. I doubt it would be "all", but who knows?

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#200

Post by mindcrime »

grogenaut wrote: post #19
credit_guy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like saying CD players will never be as good as vinyl record players because the first use digital signals (rational numbers) and the second analogue (real numbers).

if you want to be pedantic record players are also digital because they can't represent anything tighter than an atom or the molecule of vinyl

Isn't everything digital to a point, since we can't ever measure anything smaller than the Planck length?
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