My theory on this is that embodiment will be necessary (but not sufficient) as the physical world provides a consistent data model where high order learning can be built on. In effect this becomes the model to bootstrap off of.
Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized
361–370 of 403 posts
Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
Call us when they can back up this assertion in double blinded tests.
They can rather easily discern between the two in double blind tests. The vinyl recording has a noticeable amount of noise in it. Vinyl record players can't exceed the kinds of signal to noise ratios that human hearing can detect. The more ridiculous claims are the audiophiles who pretend to distinguish between ultra high sample rate audio and 44100Hz or 48000Hz sampled audio.
You are comparing the wrong things in the test. Play the vinyl record, recording it in cd quality, then compare that recording with the original vinyl. They won’t be able to tell the difference.
Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I believe I cannot not fit into a toothpaste tube for entirely different reasons than "nobody has ever done it." The latter is the assertion here.
Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Stating that it has yet to be done is a fact --- and facts are not ignorance
Stating that it has not been done has no implications on whether it can be done, which is the claim being made.
Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What does "embodied in the world as a living organism" even mean? Being embodied as a machine wouldn't be sufficient? Living organisms are "just" machines. I also don't see any reason why embodyment should be a prerequisite for thinking.
Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized
#366Here 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…
Maybe Dreyfus's course already did this, but it's worthwhile reading other perspectives into Heidegger. Rorty kind of shoehorns him into a pragmatist, while Graham Harman does, well, Graham Harman philosophy. His book "Tool-being" cannot be recommended enough.
I was actually introduced to Heidegger via "Tool-being" and read Dreyfus's "Being in the world" later. I think honestly I didn't pay much attention to Dreyfus's arguments since I had just read Harman's book, which is argumentatively and anticipatively of objections etc. to the extreme.
Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 interpret…
This is interesting. Is aeroplane flight akin to bird or insect flight? Rolling down the tarmac, peering out the window, the planes look more like elongated fish bodies than soft bird bodies, or compact insect bodies. Our planes rather swim in the air than fly in it, I think.
Our flight is some other kind of thing (whatever we uncovered the model-able, salient properties of flight to be). Computer consciousness might similarly be some other kind of thing. And that’d be ok.
But can they be equated? Only at some abstraction level. A plane is obviously not a bird or an insect or a fish. Aeroplane flight is not bird or insect flight either, nor is it swimming. But it is safe travel through the air, from one earth-bound destination to another.
Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Secondly it seems plausible that a person locked in a room with a radio to communicate with the outside world would eventually acquire intelligence without ever fully experiencing the world. I'm not sure about that. A person locked in a room with a radio would probably go crazy or recess into some primitive mental state. Also, the article specifically claims that General Intelligence has this requirement of embodim…
>A person locked in a room with a radio would probably go crazy or recess into some primitive mental state. Hellen Keller managed to do well without vision or hearing.
This is an interesting remark, but she still had touching and was also able to perceive vibrations. She was therefore able to _interact_ with other people. More importantly other people were willing to interact with her. Also I believe the fact she was not born deaf and blind but was able to experience the world normally at least for the first 19 months of her life is of extreme importance.
Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized
#369I 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…
Thanks for posting, I also disagree with it. I think using this authors high level stance is that only the human physical experience can lead to general intelligence. By this logic a blind person or quadrapeligic might not be generally intelligent.
Absolutely not. People with disabilities still experience the world. See Helen Keller. Your reasoning would only apply to people with no sense and no way to communicate at all.
Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized
#370I’ve always been quite skeptical of philosophers arguing that a given potential scientific achievement is impossible; logic alone cannot be used to answer practical questions like these, much though philosophers would like to claim this field.
On to concrete criticisms, most of this article is irrelevant; you can skip straight to the last few paragraphs as the arguments there are largely unsupported and stand on their own:
> Conclusion: computers are not in the world The main thesis of this paper is that we will not be able to realize AGI because computers are not in the world.
I think it’s a valid criticism of the current breed of ANI algorithms, and is a problem that we will need to address (though it might turn out to be less of a problem than the author thinks). But to claim that computers will _never_ inhabit the world, and are logically incapable of doing so, seems trivially refutable to me.
Why can’t an AGI have a childhood wired up to a robotic body, where it interacts with people and the world, thereby learning a tacit model of physical and social causality? Currently this might be science fiction, but to say it cannot happen in a hundred, or a thousand years seems arrogantly certain to me, and to claim it is logically impossible is to be epistemologically confused.