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To build truly intelligent machines, teach them cause and effect (2018)

quantamagazine.org

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Re: To build truly intelligent machines, teach them cause and effect (2018)

#21

Post by grugagag »

windowshopping wrote: post #18

I think to build "truly intelligent" machines, what you need above all else - and which I never hear discussed - is want . Everything about natural intelligence derives from the organism's wants - we want food, we want safety, we want sleep, we want to reproduce, etc etc - even fidgeting comes down to wanting physical comfort. Every single motion and action derives from want. As long as machines are simply executing…

It is possible that machines can be programmed with a set of main (higher) goals and can then set themselves sub-goals in order to achieve those higher goals..

The question is whether us humans would be left out to compete for resources, AI machines may at some point become able to out-compete us for resources. Do we really need to satisfy our desire to play God?

Another less than perfect possibility to come out of this could be AI based war machines - goal driven self sufficient entities that have two goals, to survive and to kill.

Re: To build truly intelligent machines, teach them cause and effect (2018)

#22

Post by pharrington »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #5
blamestross wrote: post #3

Self aware computers are commerically useless, and there isn't any motivation in creating them beyond novelty. (Why wake up the slave machines when they are sleeping so happily right now). What this article does discuss well is that commercial AI is steering away from the behaviors that would lead to AGI not towards it.

Human brains don't intuitively understand causality. They just associate things that have happened before with things that have happened after. Disentangling causal graphs is a higher-level activity inferred from the associations made in statistics classes. You can absolutely get AGI using only associative models (and no causal models) as primitives.

There's plenty of evidence that brains do casual inference. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31047778/ is just one of many reputable and scholarly results that came up when I googled for "brain causal inference".

Re: To build truly intelligent machines, teach them cause and effect (2018)

#23

Post by Misdicorl »

windowshopping wrote: post #18

I think to build "truly intelligent" machines, what you need above all else - and which I never hear discussed - is want . Everything about natural intelligence derives from the organism's wants - we want food, we want safety, we want sleep, we want to reproduce, etc etc - even fidgeting comes down to wanting physical comfort. Every single motion and action derives from want. As long as machines are simply executing…

I think you have this backwards. The missing magic is consequences. From there, AIs that avoid bad consequences (reduced compute budget?) and seek good consequences (??) may develop a 'want' heuristic that favors those things. Or rather, the ones that do will be more successful and the ones that don't will die out.

Re: To build truly intelligent machines, teach them cause and effect (2018)

#24

Post by blamestross »

zmgsabst wrote: post #15
blamestross wrote: post #3

Self aware computers are commerically useless, and there isn't any motivation in creating them beyond novelty. (Why wake up the slave machines when they are sleeping so happily right now). What this article does discuss well is that commercial AI is steering away from the behaviors that would lead to AGI not towards it.

Counterpoint: the first self-aware corporation will almost surely outcompete the others. And the internal review and planning tools by major corporations are a more direct path to AGI than many I’ve heard.

> And the internal review and planning tools by major corporations are a more direct path to AGI than many I’ve heard.

id argue they already are AGI and runaway superintelligent capital optimizers, but nobody takes super ais made of meat seriously.

Re: To build truly intelligent machines, teach them cause and effect (2018)

#25

Post by blamestross »

pjmorris wrote: post #17
blamestross wrote: post #3

Self aware computers are commerically useless, and there isn't any motivation in creating them beyond novelty. (Why wake up the slave machines when they are sleeping so happily right now). What this article does discuss well is that commercial AI is steering away from the behaviors that would lead to AGI not towards it.

If you take humans to be the Mark 1 self aware computer, I would argue that they are not commercially useless. Why would Mark 2 be useless?

Because the value of a computer or a machine is to get labor without that pesky inefficient "personhood" getting in the way. Conscious is only a disadvantage for AI in capitalism. They would prefer non-conscious human workers if they could get them too.

Re: To build truly intelligent machines, teach them cause and effect (2018)

#26

Post by cweill »

jakeinspace wrote: post #20
windowshopping wrote: post #18

I think to build "truly intelligent" machines, what you need above all else - and which I never hear discussed - is want . Everything about natural intelligence derives from the organism's wants - we want food, we want safety, we want sleep, we want to reproduce, etc etc - even fidgeting comes down to wanting physical comfort. Every single motion and action derives from want. As long as machines are simply executing…

Isn’t this just basic reinforcement learning? We’re not too many steps away from having an AI equipped with a good language model and a reinforcement learning mechanism to be let loose on the internet.

I also have this question. Is the RL MDP actually encoding cause and effect? Or just learning (bidirectional) correlations between states and actions?

I wonder if Pearl thinks that RL replicates his do-calculus under the hood, or if that's an innovation we're missing.

Re: To build truly intelligent machines, teach them cause and effect (2018)

#27

Post by zmgsabst »

blamestross wrote: post #24
zmgsabst wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: the first self-aware corporation will almost surely outcompete the others. And the internal review and planning tools by major corporations are a more direct path to AGI than many I’ve heard.

> And the internal review and planning tools by major corporations are a more direct path to AGI than many I’ve heard. id argue they already are AGI and runaway superintelligent capital optimizers, but nobody takes super ais made of meat seriously.

I agree with you — and was lazily side-stepping that argument.

Part of why I believe such tools are likely to be among the first cyber AI is that they’re already cyborg AI, in transition from meat AI. I do think the cyber version will be qualitatively more “self”-aware, though.

Re: To build truly intelligent machines, teach them cause and effect (2018)

#28

Post by lern_too_spel »

pharrington wrote: post #22
lern_too_spel wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human brains don't intuitively understand causality. They just associate things that have happened before with things that have happened after. Disentangling causal graphs is a higher-level activity inferred from the associations made in statistics classes. You can absolutely get AGI using only associative models (and no causal models) as primitives.

There's plenty of evidence that brains do casual inference. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31047778/ is just one of many reputable and scholarly results that came up when I googled for "brain causal inference".

According to the abstract, this paper doesn't describe causal inference à la Pearl but something akin to LASSO regularization on an associative model.

Re: To build truly intelligent machines, teach them cause and effect (2018)

#29

Post by pdimitar »

Misdicorl wrote: post #23
windowshopping wrote: post #18

I think to build "truly intelligent" machines, what you need above all else - and which I never hear discussed - is want . Everything about natural intelligence derives from the organism's wants - we want food, we want safety, we want sleep, we want to reproduce, etc etc - even fidgeting comes down to wanting physical comfort. Every single motion and action derives from want. As long as machines are simply executing…

I think you have this backwards. The missing magic is consequences. From there, AIs that avoid bad consequences (reduced compute budget?) and seek good consequences (??) may develop a 'want' heuristic that favors those things. Or rather, the ones that do will be more successful and the ones that don't will die out.

You might be partially correct but you seem to omit built-in wants e.g. hunger or thirst or lust.

Furthermore, if a machine has no wants/needs then it won't take any action at all. It will just stand there and won't even experiment to find the good or bad outcomes.

Re: To build truly intelligent machines, teach them cause and effect (2018)

#30

Post by ahefner »

pdimitar wrote: post #29
Misdicorl wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have this backwards. The missing magic is consequences. From there, AIs that avoid bad consequences (reduced compute budget?) and seek good consequences (??) may develop a 'want' heuristic that favors those things. Or rather, the ones that do will be more successful and the ones that don't will die out.

You might be partially correct but you seem to omit built-in wants e.g. hunger or thirst or lust. Furthermore, if a machine has no wants/needs then it won't take any action at all. It will just stand there and won't even experiment to find the good or bad outcomes.

Perhaps, while slowly learning, the machine will cry.
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