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David Deutsch On Artificial Intelligence

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Re: David Deutsch On Artificial Intelligence

#21

Post by ansible »

rdtsc wrote: post #17
ansible wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the other conventional wisdom is that we get our theories by building mental models. I throw a ball, and I can either remember how it flew in the past and use that to predict, I can also built a mental model from first principles to find out what will happen. Maybe run a short 5 second idealized simulation in my head and I can predict what might happen. Well then I might realize that there was wind that my…

Interesting. I do visualize in my head how kinetic energy depletes as it goes higher and potential energy increases. It is like a bubble that shrinks. I see motion vectors and how they change. Other examples are a conflict between 3 people, kind of see a graph of relationships with different colored arrows and how they change.

Interesting. I do visualize in my head how kinetic energy depletes as it goes higher and potential energy increases. It is like a bubble that shrinks. I see motion vectors and how they change.

I do similar sorts of things... it is excellent that you have trained yourself to think that way. But for time critical tasks such as catching a fly ball, that doesn't work so well. We have lots of different processes we use for different situations.

Re: David Deutsch On Artificial Intelligence

#23

Post by 3rd3 »

> The very laws of physics imply that artificial intelligence must be possible.

What if the chemical reactions that our intelligence depends on somehow allow for computations using real numbers? We wouldn’t be able to reproduce these processes with our means of computation then.

Re: David Deutsch On Artificial Intelligence

#24

Post by paganel »

murbard2 wrote: post #2

How on earth is Bayesianism a form of behaviorism" ? And what is it with the cult of Popper. Popperism isn't "underrated", it's considered the gold standard of epistemology despite being a vague philosophical theory full of holes. Contrast that with Solomonoff induction which has a rigorous grounding and which offers hypothesis testing and rejection as a trivial subcase.

> Contrast that with Solomonoff induction which has a rigorous grounding and which offers hypothesis testing and rejection as a trivial subcase.

I may be wrong, but I still couldn't find anyone that could convince me that Hume's response to induction was not valid. From here (which was linked to in the Solomonoff induction wiki page) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor#Practical_consi...

> The pragmatist may go on, as David Hume did on the topic induction, that there is no satisfying alternative to granting this premise. Though one may claim that Occam's razor is invalid as a premise helping to regulate theories, putting this doubt into practice would mean doubting whether every step forward will result in locomotion or a nuclear explosion. In other words still: "What's the alternative?

Again, and this is also my opinion, I think we're afraid to admit that either we don't know anything at all or that most of the things that we "know" are based on intrinsic faith, with the accent on the word "faith". Granted, this is at least a 2,500 years problem, dating back to the Old Greeks.

Re: David Deutsch On Artificial Intelligence

#25

Post by mathattack »

ArbitraryLimits wrote: post #20
nzp wrote: post #16

I can just say that Deutsch is another victim of what being good at theoretical physics tends to do to one's mind. The amount of intellectual hubris and arrogance we can develop is staggering. Sheldon Cooper is not really a parody, it's what many theoretical physicists actually think (but are to socially adapted to say out loud), as in: "Penny - I'm a physicist. I have a working knowledge of the entire universe and e…

Speaking as someone with a physics degree, I like to quote Peter Thiel (for once): > This is why physics Ph.D’s are notoriously difficult to work with; because they know fundamental things, they think they know all things. - http://blakemasters.com/post/22866240816/peter-thiels-cs183-...

Perhaps also why physicists can be dangerous in Finance. They have all the math skills, but they can also have a little too much faith in those skills.

Re: David Deutsch On Artificial Intelligence

#26

Post by ssivark »

nzp wrote: post #16

I can just say that Deutsch is another victim of what being good at theoretical physics tends to do to one's mind. The amount of intellectual hubris and arrogance we can develop is staggering. Sheldon Cooper is not really a parody, it's what many theoretical physicists actually think (but are to socially adapted to say out loud), as in: "Penny - I'm a physicist. I have a working knowledge of the entire universe and e…

XKCD: Physicists -- http://xkcd.com/793/ :-)

EDIT: I linked to XKCD here... cuz never miss an opportunity for xkcd! Also, I just finished reading the article, so I'll add my comments on the content.

The parent post (for this comment) contains a rant about physicists but has no specific rebuttal of the article. David Deutsch's arguments seem very sensible to me, in a completely non-mystical sort of way. I feel he asks questions pointing to the heart of AI. Regarding moving goalposts and stuff, you might like to read Freeman Dyson's (excellent and insightful) article on 'Birds and frogs' where he comments on such things. Deutsch is approaching the problem like a bird, typical AI researchers are approaching the problem in a frog-like manner.

And oh, to state possible biases on record: I'm a physicist :-)

Re: David Deutsch On Artificial Intelligence

#27

Post by tim333 »

There's a certain amount of twaddle in Deutsch's arguments in general but it's quite hard work wading through the argument to see what's wrong. An iffy statement of his here is "the field of ‘artificial general intelligence’ or AGI — has made no progress whatever during the entire six decades of its existence." Which is tricky to totally dispute because of his vagueness as to what AGI is. But let's assume he means thinking like a human. Well fair enough no computer thinks like a human yet but a lot of progress has been made in that direction such as Watson in verbal processing and the Google cars in geospatial awareness. So the argument is kind of misleading. I find his arguments in physics similar - basically not much good but written in a form that is hard work to dispute.

Re: David Deutsch On Artificial Intelligence

#28

Post by jmagoon »

There's something even more fundamental about his own thought process than creativity, which is odd that he doesn't see -- namely, "Why does David Deutsch care about creating an AGI?".

Why is there a drive towards creativity / creation at all? So, creativity is still merely a simulation of a top level human function--you could probably program something to be creative, but how about /wanting/ to be creative? How about not wanting to be creative? How about being obstinate, or bored?

Re: David Deutsch On Artificial Intelligence

#29

Post by varjag »

nzp wrote: post #16

I can just say that Deutsch is another victim of what being good at theoretical physics tends to do to one's mind. The amount of intellectual hubris and arrogance we can develop is staggering. Sheldon Cooper is not really a parody, it's what many theoretical physicists actually think (but are to socially adapted to say out loud), as in: "Penny - I'm a physicist. I have a working knowledge of the entire universe and e…

> He does make a few good points, like the one that quantum phenomena do not give rise to mental processes, but that is trivial in the sense it's obvious to anyone with some knowledge of quantum mechanics on one hand, and what neurons are and how they work on the other.

This didn't prevent Penrose (surprise, another physicist) from establishing his little cult with Quantum Theory of Mind.

Re: David Deutsch On Artificial Intelligence

#30

Post by nzp »

ssivark wrote: post #26
nzp wrote: post #16

I can just say that Deutsch is another victim of what being good at theoretical physics tends to do to one's mind. The amount of intellectual hubris and arrogance we can develop is staggering. Sheldon Cooper is not really a parody, it's what many theoretical physicists actually think (but are to socially adapted to say out loud), as in: "Penny - I'm a physicist. I have a working knowledge of the entire universe and e…

XKCD: Physicists -- http://xkcd.com/793/ :-) EDIT: I linked to XKCD here... cuz never miss an opportunity for xkcd! Also, I just finished reading the article, so I'll add my comments on the content. The parent post (for this comment) contains a rant about physicists but has no specific rebuttal of the article. David Deutsch's arguments seem very sensible to me, in a completely non-mystical sort of way. I feel he asks…

I actually catch myself sometimes saying or thinking the tooltip text. :)

But what Deutsch writes here is somewhat opposite in approach to the problem of how to be annoying--he's trying make a non-physics research area seem fundamentally more complicated than it likely is. I'm willing to say it borders on mysticism, and the only reason I can think of for such behaviour in an otherwise fine scientist is a strong emotional attachment to some romantic idea of what it is to be a human being. There is zero (AFAIK) theoretical or empirical evidence for his grand claims about creativity, and he's playing the old game in AI: goalpost moving. Whenever AI does something that was previously thought to be only achievable by humans, the critics immediately jump and say: "Ah, but that's not really intelligent, is it?"

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