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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

#341

Post by rutherblood »

dwaltrip wrote: post #86
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.

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.

let's say he believes that. even then his belief would be as understandable & justifiable as yours. Wagging a finger and saying history of science suggest this and that is just that, belief. Just because something happened before you think it'll happen again and again. I do sympathize with your pov and even agree with it, but let's not beat around the bush as you say and let's just call this what our povs are: faith in science yet to come. Ours is no more righteous than the other.

EDIT: some grammar

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#342

Post by rutherblood »

mcguire wrote: post #132
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.

No amount of "just chemistry" has yet managed to create... Keep in mind that no amount of rocketeering has ever put a man on Mars, but that hardly constitutes a proof, or even serious evidence, that it is impossible. Arguments from ignorance are a terrible thing.

I haven't yet managed to fit inside a toothpaste tube. But you believe in the impossibility of this right? There is no absolute belief or disbelief. It is all a continuous gradation. Some things we can bring ourselves to belief in if there is sufficient cause. Not arguing for or against the original point but just your argument and condescension.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#343

Post by jqpabc123 »

hutzlibu wrote: post #321
jqpabc123 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A computer is not just a playback machine like a mechanical loom. What is it then? Magic? The fact that you don't understand how it works doesn't make it magical. Every program ever written for your desktop computer was ultimately "compiled" into a long series of simple binary logic operations that your computer blindly repeats at very high speed. For every set of inputs, it recreates the same output --- kinda like a…

A video player is just a static playback machine. A computer is dynamic playback machine, which can change what "to play" and how to play it over time. Indeed magic, for anyone who does not understand it.

Dynamic = Binary Logic

By it's nature, binary logic is "dynamic".

A computer is just a playback machine for binary logic.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#344

Post by glenstein »

engineeringwoke wrote: post #324
krisoft wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That quoted sentence argues that we do not have AGI now. I have no counterargument against that. We do not have AGI now. That sentence on the other hand fails to argue it is impossible to develop AGI. Someone before the invention of the aeroplane could have said: Our only known good model for flying is birds and insects. It took billions of years of the universe churning at random to accidentally generate birds and i…

Flight and consciousness are not in any way compareable concepts. We literally cannot perceive the constraints of the latter's underlying physical system. Sometimes I feel computer scientists choose to misunderstand physicists because it would make them feel stupid if they did understand.

>Flight and consciousness are not in any way compareable concepts.

For pete's sake, it's an analogy, not a direct comparison, and it is perfectly valid as such when interpreted with due charity.

You can say "Brains are complicated. They took time and evolution. That sure is hard. See how hard it is?" The same can be said of flight at a certain level of abstraction as a valid analogy, which can be charitably interpreted as such without the need for claiming anyone is purposely choosing to misunderstand physics.

The fact that the examples of brains and of flight given to us by nature sure seem complicated doesn't establish as a matter of principle that their salient properties can't be modeled in machines, and that's the real thing that's at stake. Disputing that requires a different kind of argument than saying "gosh it sure is complicated", and that's what the analogy is pointing out.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#345

Post by glenstein »

mbrock wrote: post #315
SiVal wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hubert Dreyfus in his 1986 book "Mind Over Machine": > The digital computer, when programmed to operate by taking a problem apart into features and combining them step by step according to inference rules, operates as a machine—a logic machine. However, the computer is so versatile it can also be used to model a holistic system. Indeed, recently, as the problems confronting the AI approach remained unsolved for more…

I think that Dreyfus has unfortunately set back the cultural understanding of computers by decades, by confidently declaring certain tasks impossible for computers to do, because minds have "insight" or "tacit knowledge" or are "holistic", each of which functionally lets a mind be a ghost in the machine.

A lot of the rhetorical momentum comes from pointing at the progress of technology at various stages in human history, especially the fits and starts of AI/Language research in the mid 20th century, and remarking at how little progress has been made.

And the terms used to define how computers were are also vague.

>Given the nature of inference engines, AI's representations must be formal ones

When AI trained on images of dog faces "dreams" on an image, and progressively twists flowers and purses into dog faces and noses, is the connection made between patterns and dog faces "formal" ? Are the images generated by ThisPersonDoesNotExist informal? The ways computers work on data now deals with abstractions & fuzziness in a way that I think Dreyfus did not imagine to be possible. I think Dreyfus wanted to say that the higher-level methods that we now employ to generate images, human-like language, transpose art styles and create nearly photorealistic faces are on a foundation of principles that are new and distinct from the characteristic principles that he understood to be central to computing. But all of our new progress is implemented on a foundation of silicon and bits, too, which simulate neural networks, meaning those are just as computational as the desktop calculator app. I think Dreyfus just couldn't imagine that 'computing' could include all this extra stuff, and, to take a term from Dennet, Dreyfus mistook his failure of imagination for an insight into necessity.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#346

Post by rsecora »

>>> We know this phenomenon from everyday life. Most of us are experts on walking. However, if we try to articulate how we walk, we certainly give a description that does not capture the skills involved in walking.

All the article is based on statements like the previous one. Scientifically is possible to nullify it with a counterargument.

[1] Boston dynamics Atlas. https://youtu.be/rVlhMGQgDkY

[2] Boston dynamics parkour. https://youtu.be/_sBBaNYex3E

QED.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#347

Post by nl »

engineeringwoke wrote: post #308
simonh wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the sort of conflation of completely unrelated concepts as I found in the article. What on Earth has healing got to do with reasoning? You even say our bodies do it without conscious prompting, in other words it’s a completely irrelevant issue. Yes computers aren’t biological, they aren’t life, but so what? Why does that constrain their ability to interact with and learn from the world? AGI is defined…

For all the pontificating about souls as a means to discredit OP's beliefs, you all seem to avoid this statement: > Our only known good model for a machine that can create our consciousness is us. It took billions of years of the universe churning at random to accidentally generate us. We have no clue how to replicate that scale. Would you please provide a counterargument? Do you understand how difficult this really…

It's not entirely a given that consciousness is needed for intelligence.

It's also not clear what consciousness is. Plenty of animals are self-aware, but they don't have human level intelligence.

We only have a single example of general intelligence. It seems possible that there could be other kinds of general intelligence that don't require consciousness.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#348

Post by glenstein »

biswaroop wrote: post #189
acituan wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are taking huge liberties in forming equivocations which mislead your conclusion. The tacit knowledge description only talks about the acquisition process of the knowledge, not that the knowledge itself is outside bounds of rationality or the physical world. By the same token when you claim "humans have intelligence that is impossible to express through reason or codification" the entire argument hinges on the ac…

This is a good point, but I will add, from close discussions with Dreyfus, his position was that it's impossible because it's fundamentally impossible, not because it's intractable. (see my other comment for more)

Thank you, this is helpful.

I have been interested in this debate for perhaps a decade now, and to me one of the most important things to get clear is whether skeptics are just claiming X is really hard, or whether they are claiming it's impossible as a matter of principle, which are two very different things. I think this discussion is about the latter rather than the former, but that many people talk about the former as if it's relevant to the latter.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#349

Post by glenstein »

Noos wrote: post #249
simonh wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have read it and you’re not missing anything. One of the examples of tacit knowledge they give is walking and that therefore it is impossible to teach a computer to walk. They should watch one of the videos from Boston Dynamics.

That's not teaching a computer to walk, that's building a walking machine. Subtle difference, but it's easy to prove; no matter how well you build a Boston dynamics robot, it will never like walking in the same way your TV will never like entertaining people. There's no "I" there to learn.

>That's not teaching a computer to walk, that's building a walking machine.

I think that's redefining teaching so that teaching, whatever it is, includes a subjective human 'ghost' inside of it.

But Dreyfus wasn't just saying that machines can do those things, only without a soul. Dreyfus was arguing that things such as walking are clever and subtle in ways that depend on tacit knowledge to execute successfully, and things that depend on it simply aren't even achievable by machines at all, because the nature of those tasks is such that they require a special magical soul. Being able to do the task at all, with or without a special magical soul, stands as a counterpoint to the argument Dreyfus had been making for half of the 20th century.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#350

Post by User23 »

xyzzyz wrote: post #306
rutherblood wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"That is, the physical world, including human cognition, can be realized by a Turing machine." How did you get to the conclusion that all physical world is computable? Rather a huge jump i would say. Sure some things are, but "all of it" would rather be a BIG assumption. Physical theories of the world are limited to our current state of observations and knowledge of the world, they AREN'T the actual world. Who is to…

How did you get to the conclusion that all physical world is computable? That’s not the conclusion, that’s the whole thesis. The whole point of it is that yes, it’s not provable, but so far we haven’t seen anything to suggest the contrary. All of our current physical theories are very much computable, for example.

This belief is widespread, but mistaken. It tries to slip in a conjecture as an axiom in the unstated leg of the enthymeme. It’s the worst sort of hand waving, but the conclusion apparently flatters the biases of those who wish to believe it such that they happily overlook the sloppiness.

Also our physical theories are only computable with an arbitrary halt thrown in at some level of accuracy deemed good enough. And there too theoretically questionable trickery like renormalization is used to reduce the problem to a tractable size.

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