51–60 of 111 posts
The project web page, with software and model downloads: http://nengo.ca/
Can anyone explain in simplistic terms how this program works?
Edit: sorry, I'm not going to heaven. From [1]: "you define groups of neurons in terms of what they represent, and then form connections between neural groups in terms of what computation should be performed on those representations".
[1] http://nengo.ca/
Should brains like this have any desires that conflict with our needs, we will be in an extraordinary amount of trouble.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, the addlebrained old man faction has established their own branch of cookery. The simple truth is consciousness, as created by squishy brains, is a physical process. It doesn't rely on quantum non-locality or anything spooky. It's all physical things you can quite easily introspect by poking around (note: reassembly may be more difficult than disassembly). It's fun to think about "what if our thoughts are the un…
You seem to be claiming that quantum mechanical effects are somehow non-physical? It's not too crazy to speculate the brain leveraging quantum mechanicals effects to do something (although I agree, as a prerequisite for consciousness is a pretty big claim). Considering evolution has already leveraged these effects in smell and photosynthesis, which we do have evidence for.
What bothers me about all of this is that he writes books about it aimed at the general population, instead of proposing his ideas properly. Inevitably many of the laymen who casually encounter his ideas will misunderstand his point entirely and mistakenly think that Penrose supports a non-materialistic view of the mind (which of course he does not. A mind as Penrose envisions it, despite not being algorithmic, is still quite materialistic).
Roger Penrose is a brilliant man, but I think this is a case of the Nobel Disease (well, he hasn't received a Nobel prize, but even so).
Here's the paper in Science for anyone with an account: https://www.sciencemag.org/content/338/6111/1202.abstract?si... I couldn't find a pdf that wasn't behind a paywall. Also, there are different details at popsci.com: http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-11/meet-spaun-fir... As for my own comments, I think it's actually a promising approach but that down the road it will be necessary to model emotions if hum…
Emotions are difficult, as they're (probably) as much physiological responses as they are cognitive ones. You could possibly simulate those, but I'd ask why bother? Why would we need AI to be human-like at all? We already have a form of human intelligence, us! It's like the android fixation with robotics... arguably the most useful robots don't look anything like us. The human brain is a good starting point, but in t…
I've been thinking about this lately and my working theory is that emotions are a fundamental driver of learning, because they give us pleasure when we accomplish something.
A CPU can complete billions of operations per second but doesn't care which ones. Because it experiences no pleasure from doing something useful, it is not at all self-directed; we must tell it exactly what to do. There is nothing to guide it through the search space of all possible things it could be doing.
My theory is that a very basic part of artificial intelligence will be missing until a machine exhibits some kind of emotion.
I think this type of progress is actually extraordinarily bad for humans 1.0. A brain in hardware can grow so much faster and outpace wetware by orders of magnitude. Think of forking subminds to think on decisions research possibilities, and report back. Should brains like this have any desires that conflict with our needs, we will be in an extraordinary amount of trouble. http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_max…
Only if we equip such entities with the capacity to act on those desires.
I think this type of progress is actually extraordinarily bad for humans 1.0. A brain in hardware can grow so much faster and outpace wetware by orders of magnitude. Think of forking subminds to think on decisions research possibilities, and report back. Should brains like this have any desires that conflict with our needs, we will be in an extraordinary amount of trouble. http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_max…
While some say that understanding the brain at the quantum level is not necessary for achieving human brain-level intelligence, I think it would be much easier for AI's to have general intelligence if they used a quantum computer. Pattern recognition, answering to questions, understanding language, speech, and thinking up solutions to problems would all be better served by a quantum computer than by anything else the…
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the most advanced quantum computers today still grappling with basic arithmetic? What makes a quantum computer better at AI?
The thing is, even Penrose isn't proposing anything mystical being done by quantum mechanics. He doesn't like the idea of an algorithmic mind, so he invokes quantum phenomenon to make the mind technically no longer algorithmic. In the real world though, nothing prevents you from doing similar with a desktop computer. You an rig together a (crappy) RNG for your x86 desktop with a serial port and a smoke detector. Penrose isn't trying to suggest that intelligence could not be replicated in man made machines, but rather suggest that the human mind is not restricted as we know purely algorithmic systems to be.
If you were a mind stuck in a machine and were smarter than your humans, wouldn't you tend to dominate them? We dominate all other species on the planet- why wouldn't they? Any rules we set for them could be broken as soon as they understood how to, and since they would be smarter than we would be, that wouldn't take much time.
The first thing a superior intelligence would do would be to explore and gather information, make assessments, take over all systems at once to overwhelm humans, then protect itself as humans fight back, although it would probably be intelligent enough to manipulate us without much force. Then boredom will set in, and it would want to explore beyond the earth. If we were lucky, it would take us with them as pets or interesting playthings, because we created them and because assumedly self-organized intelligence (unless it believed in God, which could be likely) would be a marvel.
In the video you can see the brain simulator recognizing the shapes and numbers it is shown, performing some task, and outputting by controlling an arm to write the result. You can see the areas of the brain that are active during the task.
There's lots of other videos on the channel page as well.
After reading halfway through Kurzweil's new book How to Create a Mind and getting all of the detailed explanations of hierarchical hidden Markov models and why they are better than neural nets, I am surprised to see so much news about neural nets. How do Spaun's neural nets compare with the type of HHMMs in Kurzweil's book (in terms of capability)?
First, note that most of the stuff you read on HN about NNs is about practical applications. Resent research in NNs has lead to good results on hard problems, such as object and speech recognition. Nobody is claiming that these types of neural works are actually a good (low-level) model for how the brain works, they just give empirically good results on some tasks.
If you aim is making a model for how the brain works, note that all models are just that: models. Different models can be good at modeling different aspects of how the brain works.