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What does "understanding" mean?
Understanding while not completely described by situational awareness definitely has some relationship to it and you could probably use similar constructs for defining it
https://numenta.com/blog/2019/01/16/the-thousand-brains-theo...
He basically argues we all have 1000s of little, but interacting models of all sorts of things going on in our brain all at the same time. He calls them reference frames and it’s those that create intelligence.
‘Understanding’ would come naturally out of having those.
Fascinating book which I’m probably explaining much less well that he does.
Earlier 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".
Right, so you’ve demonstrated that the phenomenon exists. Now, what defines that phenomenon, exactly?
One of those capabilities would be the ability to contextual an object/statement within multiple frames of reference while also being able to compare and contrast the different instances of those contextualized objects/statements.
This is what allows a child to identify a bird as any number of physical specimens of different species (chicken, goose, eagle, sparrow), while also identifying cartoon depictions that talk and simple drawings (Twitter icon) as birds as well... while also "understanding" that while the Twitter icon can be called a bird, it is not actually a real bird ("Ceci n'est pas une pipe") and it would not be expected to sing or fly like a backyard sparrow (unless it was animated, which would make still make sense to a child).
I think this also what rise to our ability to "understand" jokes, puns, and other turns of phrase - "I just flew in from Boston, and boy are my arms tired!" - this dumb joke requires a number of concepts that need to be contextualized before you can "get" the absurdity of stating that a human might tire out their arms while flying... like you might think a bird would.
I can say something like ‘a tiger is just a lion with stripes’ to a 3 year old and they now ‘understand’ what a tiger is almost as well as if they saw a picture of one. They could definitely identify one from a picture now.
This kind of understanding won’t work with an AI because we don’t understand what characteristics it has latched into when identifying a lion. For all we know it’s that the background of each lion image its been trained on has a blue sky. Or the tigers are all looking at the camera.
I think the ability to pick apart what you know and learn new things by reasoning about that knowledge is the key to if understanding is taking place.
The first time I played a chess game was back in the early 1980's. While it beat me I felt an eerie "presence" in the machine that was sentient. I didn't know then about chess code so it was easier for me to anthropomorphize the machine (but it was the main reason I became interested in computers.)
A computer "understanding" the difference between "how do I melt a block of ice" and "how do I melt my lover's icy heart" would be looking at the context and the relation of the words to each other. The computer might also predict I was sad if I asked the latter question. If I were a non-technical user I might think the computer felt empathy and be amazed by it.
If I came upon a computer that "understands" I would want to determine if it understands like Richard Feynman or if it understands like my dog. My dog operates on a limited set of patterns, so that seems doable, but on the other hand, I've seen videos and heard stories of dogs exhibiting inventive and creative behavior that is unexpected. One such case is dogs that get lost and manage to find their way home thousands of miles away.
tldr; I'm jaded. I know it's buggy code all the way down with computers.
Anyone who has kids and teaches them things will know AI learns and ‘understands’ very differently. I can say something like ‘a tiger is just a lion with stripes’ to a 3 year old and they now ‘understand’ what a tiger is almost as well as if they saw a picture of one. They could definitely identify one from a picture now. This kind of understanding won’t work with an AI because we don’t understand what characteristic…
I see your point however.
What does it mean for humans to understand? There are many times in the past where i thought i understood something and then i grow older and i see the holes.
My thought is that we've got three types of "understanding":
1) social understanding
2) intuitive understanding
3) structural understanding
Intuitive understanding is anything where we start to use flowery language like "experience" or "gut". You're really good at it, but just giving someone a flow chart isn't good enough. They have to have gone through the experience themselves. Driving is a good example. We make people take a test, but if just giving them diagrams and rules was good enough, then we wouldn't need a test where you actually drive and requirements about a certain number of hours of supervised driving.
Structural understanding is anything that can be put to rules. So there's a lot of mathematics and algorithm stuff here. A simple example might be playing tic tac toe. The game is simple enough that you can write down a few rules that allow you to never lose.
EDIT:
My categories don't really answer the question, but they do give profiles and categories to look out for.
Social understanding is good because it statistically learns to avoid lethal pitfalls. Like, if there's a dangerous well in the forest that people fall down and die in. A society might start telling people to not go in the forest because other people go in there and die. However, the society doesn't know why this is good advice.
Intuitive understanding is good because it allows you to quickly statistically learn how to deal with imperfect and chaotic systems while getting good results.
Structural understanding is good because it allows you to break free of the statistics of the previous two understandings. You can get exact results. Also it lets you break free of issues that come from distantly causal action + consequence. A person's intuition might not tell them that dumping toxic waste into the water is a good idea because things don't go bad until a lot of waste has already been dumped. Similarly a society might make a similar judgement if the failure is far enough away from the actions that kick it off. However, if you understand the structural relationships between things then you'll have an idea that toxic waste should not be consumed.
My personal take is that blanket understanding is too hard of a task to define, so we ought to cheat and talk about types of understanding. In my mind, understanding a thing means not only that you can answer, but also that you can justify your answer. So different kinds of understanding point to different kinds of justifications.
In math classes, you’ll be asked not only to state whether a thing is true or false, but also to show that it’s true or false, giving an answer as well as a proof. In a literature class, you don’t just make a point, you also have to support it in natural language. Same with science classes, supporting things with data and logic.
The closest we have right now in ML (widely) is statistical measurements on holdout data. It’s 99% accurate on other things, so it’s 99% likely to be right on this too, if this was sampled from something just like the holdout. We also (less widely) have a little cottage industry of post-hoc explanations that try to explain models predictions.
I’d love to see models that can do better than post-hoc explanations. I want a model that “understands in terms of predicate logic” that can spit out an answer with a checkable proof. Or “understands in terms of a knowledge graph” or “understands in terms of a set of human anatomy facts” or “understands in terms of natural language arguments” or any number of things that can spit out an answer as well as a justification.
Just asking for blanket understanding means we have to define blanket understanding, but there’s a lot of limited understanding that’s still better than what we have today.