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Artificial intelligence: Our final invention?

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Re: Artificial intelligence: Our final invention?

#91

Post by mietek »

wlievens wrote: post #87
mindcrime wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IF we take it as given that an AGI must think exactly like a human, then I might say I agree with you. We aren't necessarily close to emulating a human being in software, and I'm actually doubtful we will for a VERY long time. BUT... if we only care about the outcome and the utility of the AGI, and don't expect it to be fully "human like" then I think that Watson (and Deep Blue, etc.) do represent steps on that road.…

> if we only care about the outcome and the utility of the AGI, and don't expect it to be fully "human like" I'm not even sure whether that's a meaningful distinction. Searle's Chinese Room et cetera. I'm with you in the wing analogy, I fully agree. I just don't think Watson or Deep Blue is a significant approach even in that direction. Human-like or not, we have certain expectations from our hypothetical AGI in term…

The Chinese Room argument is unconvincing.

The man in the room may not understand Chinese, but he is using a dictionary, which to a casual observer appears suspiciously thick. Just how thick would the dictionary need to be in order to provide a sensible response for all possible lines of enquiry?

Searle's argument reduces a room which understands Chinese to a dictionary which understands Chinese. A strange loop indeed.

With regard to serious systems attempting to solve AGI — are you aware of Jeff Hawkins' work on hierarchical temporal memory?

Re: Artificial intelligence: Our final invention?

#92

Post by twinge »

foob wrote: post #50
User1398 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the universe just a bunch of math? This leads me to wonder if we have any control over our lives. Isn't every action I take simply the result of all my senses, my previous knowledge, the environment, and the people around me? For example, if the universe just went 1 hour back in time, why would anything go differently the second time around? Unless you can prove something is truly random in the universe, and no…

You're thinking of the universe in a very classical sense. Our current understanding of physics is that quantum mechanical outcomes are truly random. Not just that we don't know what will happen but that it is inherently not predetermined before it happens. You can read up on Bell's Theorem ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell's_theorem ) if you want to learn a bit more about this. If you "ran" the universe over again…

You're roughly describing the "Quantum Mind". Critics allege it's been discredited because quantum mechanical processes don't occur on the scale of most neuronal activity.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind

Re: Artificial intelligence: Our final invention?

#93

Post by badmofo666 »

wlievens wrote: post #81
mindcrime wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People must really understand that Watson is, like almost any successful AI (not AGI) product today, "just" a huge statistical pattern matching machine. Arguably, that's all a human brain is as well. I don't want to start some big debate here over symbolic reasoning versus statistical pattern matching, but there seems to be quite a bit of contemporary thought along the lines of our brains being largely based on "patt…

It can however only do one flavour of pattern matching whereas we combine our mental facilities dynamically. And to wnticipate your "well, that's nothing a computer can't do"... show me any work in the direction of serious AGI!

Sounds like what you're talking about is decision theory. Or, when mixed with learning: reinforcement learning. The monte carlo AIXI approximation would be an example. But, it really only works well on small toy problems (I.e. problems where the agent has only a small number of available actions it can perform).

Re: Artificial intelligence: Our final invention?

#94

Post by badmofo666 »

motters wrote: post #7

Some counter-points on this narrative, with which I'm very familiar. 1. Philosophers and AI theoreticians have a hard time defining what they mean by the term "intelligence". Talking about systems millions of times more intelligent than a human is nonsense unless you can define what it is you're talking about. 2. Whatever intelligence is it only makes any sense within the context of some environment. Environments imp…

I think the best definition of intelligence is something like: "the ability of an agent to maximize its rewards by taking actions in some environment." In this sense, you could quantify intelligence by the agent's total reward over some time window, or how fast an agent learned the optimal strategy.

Re: Artificial intelligence: Our final invention?

#96

Post by maaku »

maaku wrote: post #73
TrainedMonkey wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not know that, can you please point me to people with better credentials that discuss the topic in such detail?

Ben Goertzel, who is a bona fide AI researcher and was connected with SIAI/MIRI before a leadership split, has written about the topic: http://multiverseaccordingtoben.blogspot.com/2010/10/singula... http://jetpress.org/v22/goertzel-pitt.htm You might find some other related commentary with the search term "scary idea", which is what Ben has labeled Yudkowsky's side of the FOOM debate typified by the "That Alien Mess…

Regarding Hugo de Garis, I should qualify that he does believe some sort of Terminator/Matrix-like war against the machines is the most likely outcome, but he places this far in the future indicating that he definitely doesn't believe in a Yudkowsky-like hard-FOOM. He's also the only AI researcher I know that takes Hollywood-like human/machine war seriously, myself included.

Re: Artificial intelligence: Our final invention?

#97

Post by wlievens »

mietek wrote: post #91
wlievens wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if we only care about the outcome and the utility of the AGI, and don't expect it to be fully "human like" I'm not even sure whether that's a meaningful distinction. Searle's Chinese Room et cetera. I'm with you in the wing analogy, I fully agree. I just don't think Watson or Deep Blue is a significant approach even in that direction. Human-like or not, we have certain expectations from our hypothetical AGI in term…

The Chinese Room argument is unconvincing. The man in the room may not understand Chinese, but he is using a dictionary, which to a casual observer appears suspiciously thick. Just how thick would the dictionary need to be in order to provide a sensible response for all possible lines of enquiry? Searle's argument reduces a room which understands Chinese to a dictionary which understands Chinese. A strange loop indee…

I'm not saying I necessarily support Searle's position. I do think it's an interesting thought experiment. To be honest, if it quacks and walks, I'm not one who'll be arguing that it isn't sapient.

I haven't followed any recent research, sorry.

Re: Artificial intelligence: Our final invention?

#98

Post by wlievens »

badmofo666 wrote: post #93
wlievens wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can however only do one flavour of pattern matching whereas we combine our mental facilities dynamically. And to wnticipate your "well, that's nothing a computer can't do"... show me any work in the direction of serious AGI!

Sounds like what you're talking about is decision theory. Or, when mixed with learning: reinforcement learning. The monte carlo AIXI approximation would be an example. But, it really only works well on small toy problems (I.e. problems where the agent has only a small number of available actions it can perform).

Thing is, humans come up with new "actions" all the time. If you drop that abstraction, and reduce our actions to "controlling information flow in our bodies" then the action space becomes unfathomably huge.

Re: Artificial intelligence: Our final invention?

#99

Post by gjmulhol »

mindcrime wrote: post #60
gjmulhol wrote: post #23

I am a big fan of what Joe Lonsdale calls human-computer symbiosis. He says that humans are good at certain things and computers are good at other things. For example, computers are good at looking at huge amounts of data. Humans are good at finding intuitive patterns in data. Though in time computers will undoubtedly start to be better at these things, I do not think that in my lifetime (or Matt's daughter's) we wil…

I had not heard of Joe Londsale before now, but just as an FYI in case you weren't aware... the term "man-computer symbiosis" (which means, as far as I can ascertain, the same thing as "human-computer symbiosis") predates Lonsdale by decades[1], and was being used by J.C.R. Licklider[2] back in the 1960's. [1]: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._C._R._Lickl…

Interesting. I did not know of him. I was always certain that Lonsdale did not come up with it totally on his own, but I do think that Palantir is a company that has done this very well.

Thanks for pointing this out. Very interesting!

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