What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?
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What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?
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Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?
#2What does "understanding" mean?
Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?
#3What does "understanding" mean?
Very droll, but notice that I can write the phrase "Don't make snarky comments" without us having previously agreed on a formal definition of "snark".
Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?
#4When it gets to questions like these I feel that we transcend discussions of technology and end up on questions of philosiphy which aren't going to be going anywhere anytime quick.
I also feel that AI should be used to augment not replace human decision making, it seems that where AI shines is problems that are well defined with well defined solutions, and because the AI doesn't get tired, hungry or distracted it can do that really well, but it fails in novel situations[0]. As such it seems to me our best bet is to have the AI provide suggestions rather than have complete control.
0. What is meant by that is a read an article, can't find it now, about using AI to diagnose breast cancer, what they found is that about 90% of the time the AI could accurately check for breast cancer, but the other 10% of the time was an unusual mammogram or something relatively rare, and in those situations the AI would often misdiagnoise.
Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?
#5What does "understanding" mean?
Very droll, but notice that I can write the phrase "Don't make snarky comments" without us having previously agreed on a formal definition of "snark".
Right, so you’ve demonstrated that the phenomenon exists. Now, what defines that phenomenon, exactly?
Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?
#6What does "understanding" mean?
Very droll, but notice that I can write the phrase "Don't make snarky comments" without us having previously agreed on a formal definition of "snark".
That's because snark is a pre-installed module in the Western Human Online Communication Library Codebase.
The code for "understanding" is part of Generic Human Firmware codebase and is tightly integrated with the OS.
Unfortunately it hasn't been open sourced.
Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?
#7What does "understanding" mean?
What it means for humans to understand has been posited by Jeff Hawkins as a combination of synaptic links within and between cortical columns, resulting in a physical neural construct that activates when stimulated past a sufficient threshold of inbound signals. Constructs can suppress nearby clusters of neurons, or contribute an increase in readiness to signal, or self modulate the activation threshold of constructs within the cortical column.
The findings are consistent with current understanding of neuroscience, and align with discoveries such as grid cells. They also provide a basis for explaining what's actually happening in the brain with phenomena like memory palaces, rapid and efficient physical control of the body, combining sense modalities such as sight and touch when catching a ball, and so on.
Understanding is what happens when your brain has developed a neural structure such that it's able to predict events successfully based on the thing that was understood.
Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?
#8What does "understanding" mean?
This is the important question. After reading Ted Chiang's story "Understand" about this question, a simple working definition could be that to understand something you apprehend the domain of the subject from its substrate. Hence Feynman's "what I cannot create I do not understand," as well.
In this sense, an AI could be said to Understand language if it used it as one of a selection of tools to operate on itself, a peer or other being, or its environment.
Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?
#9What does "understanding" mean?
What it means for humans to understand has been posited by Jeff Hawkins as a combination of synaptic links within and between cortical columns, resulting in a physical neural construct that activates when stimulated past a sufficient threshold of inbound signals. Constructs can suppress nearby clusters of neurons, or contribute an increase in readiness to signal, or self modulate the activation threshold of construct…
Children learn thousands of words growing up not by having the definition read to them from a dictionary but by inferring their meaning based on context.
Likewise we learn general concepts and they can be applied to a wide range of scenarios. I can't see any other way AI could learn unless it mimicks our own.
Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very droll, but notice that I can write the phrase "Don't make snarky comments" without us having previously agreed on a formal definition of "snark".
That's because snark is a pre-installed module in the Western Human Online Communication Library Codebase. The code for "understanding" is part of Generic Human Firmware codebase and is tightly integrated with the OS. Unfortunately it hasn't been open sourced.
It's totally open source, just written in a language we don't (yet) understand.