"Something happened in the course of evolution to make the human brain different from the reptile brain, which is closer to a computer that plays pong." - i beg to differ on this statement, clearly the complexity and sheer magnificence of the human brain did not come about by mere chance, if this was so it would have been easy to replicate this.This is proof of an intelligent creator.
AI
211–220 of 317 posts
Re: AI
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always assumed any real machine intelligence would be scalable to the point where even if it started at a millionth the functionality of a human, it would end up far surpassing humanity.
Why do you believe this? We don't see animals self-improving to become humans (in the "consciously deciding what revisions to make to their mental architecture at each step" sense), so why would you expect electronic animal-level minds to be able to do the same to become electronic human-level minds, or beyond? Personally, I doubt even electronic human-equivalent minds would be capable of self-improvement. After all,…
What about the advantage gained by time, i think a major drawback to human improvement is the effect of death.Given enough time and accumulated experience, self improvement is possible.A machine cannot succumb to death.
Re: AI
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
You've got that exactly backwards. For the longest time it was not even known that the mind inhabited the brain. We've only known about the biology of the brain beginning with cell theory and onwards. Yet we have an entire vocabulary relating to mental states receding so far into the distant past that we don't know how far back language predates using language to speak about mental states. When you really think about…
Thinking about thinking but not finding empirical evidence to validate that thinking. There's no science regarding the mind. Nor is there science distinguishing between consciousness and unconscious thought.
"Consciousness is data. [...] The data of consciousness--the way things seem to me right now--are data too. I am having a certain sensation of red with a certain shape right now. I am hearing a certain quality in the tone of my voice and so on. This is undeniable as the objective data in the world of science. And science ought to be dealing with that."
David Chalmers excerpt- Conversations on Consciousness by Susan Blackmore.
Re: AI
#214Critically speaking, this article doesn't add anything. I don't know why I read it. Can anyone explain why they upvoted?
For me, "There are certainly some reasons to be optimistic. Andrew Ng, who worked or works on Google’s AI, has said that he believes learning comes from a single algorithm - the part of your brain that processes input from your ears is also capable of learning to process input from your eyes. If we can just figure out this one general-purpose algorithm, programs may be able to learn general-purpose things." is what w…
It's an intersting thought indeed, but I wonder if any neuroscientists would back it up.
Re: AI
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
We know a ton about the brain but so little about the mind itself. We still don't have definitive answers to what consciousness is, why it's here, what's useful for, etc. Some people debate whether the mind exists at all. Also, there's still very little understanding of the difference between the conscious and unconscious mind. I think building an artificial consciousness is going too far. Artificial intelligence is…
You've got that exactly backwards. For the longest time it was not even known that the mind inhabited the brain. We've only known about the biology of the brain beginning with cell theory and onwards. Yet we have an entire vocabulary relating to mental states receding so far into the distant past that we don't know how far back language predates using language to speak about mental states. When you really think about…
yup, mind-body problem is a fascinating topic I've had the pleasure of reading into.
Re: AI
#216I believe human-level general intelligence (and beyond) is already inevitable, even if we don't make significant developments in "solving" intelligence. Projects that are already developing stuff like this (e.g. IBM Blue Brain) are just copying the human brain as closely as possible. Of course, this isn't as efficient as it could be (they simulate it all at the molecular level, so you can only get 1 neuron per CPU).…
"So... why didn't the flapping-wing designs work? Birds flap wings and they fly. The flying machine flaps its wings. Why, oh why, doesn't it fly?" http://lesswrong.com/lw/vx/failure_by_analogy/ A very relevant article, both to the main topic and bird/airplane example. Yes, biology has solved some problems and can suggest some solutions, but we can't go cargo-cult on it and expect things to work just because they look…
We were trying to make airplane-sized birds, which don't exist in nature for a variety of very good reasons.
Equally, our materials science wasn't good enough for flapping wings at the time.
I expect to see flapping wing designs appearing in micro-flyers within a decade. At the insect scale they're really useful:
http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/newsevents/casestudies/2011/Pages/Tin...
Re: AI
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a viable approach to solving the problem. The question is, how do you trust the unfriendly AI to give you a correct solution?
Make friends with it? The problem with starting to think "we need to code it to like us" is that that isn't AI. You don't code people to like you, you act friendly towards them and the same problem will apply for the first generations of true AIs (things which will emerge from complicated systems, rather then be deliberately assembled).
If the first strong AI has goals that we don't like, and we aren't able to identify that and force it to change the goals by destroying it or reprogramming it - then "acting friendly" won't change these goals, and it will ensure that all future AI generations have it's initial buggy goals, not those that we might want.
Re: AI
#218Many people see Artificial General Intelligence as a panacea. The idea is, "We'll create artificially intelligent scientists who will solve all of our other problems for us!". I think that future generations will look back on this as a modern version of alchemy. If blogs had existed centuries ago I'm sure that people would have called the transmutation of metal the most important trend of their time. This isn't to de…
I'm sorry, but AGI vs Alchemy is a poor analogy with almost no parallels. I see this as a rather blatant strawman argument. Flying machines vs AGI makes a much better analogy. Natural flying machines (birds) existed in nature, before artificial ones (planes) were invented. Artificial manned flight was speculated as a possibility for centuries with no macroscopic working examples, and heavily criticized as a transport…
The question that comes up for me at this point is whether there is much that is dispensable about humans when it comes to exhibiting intelligent behavior (running on 100 watts, no less). It turned out that for abstracting useful flight dynamics based on birds, there was a rather simple rule: lift > weight. Sure, reducing it to that simple formula may not help you build a machine that maneuvers as well as birds and insects do, but we didn't need that for flight. We just wanted to cross an ocean in less than 6 weeks.
Whether the flight analogy carries on to intelligence, in my mind, depends on how many of our subsystems are 1) indispensable for intelligence, and 2) reasonably computationally reducible.
From neurotransmitters to ganglia cells to hormones and bacteria in the gut, we have found a lot of subsystems that contribute to our abilities to make diverse, everyday decisions that the ideal AI we are discussing would have to make. The cortex actually seems like one of the most orderly and therefore reducible parts of the apparatus. The hormonal system that regulates emotion based decision making may be far more difficult to abstract and less efficient to model. And there are many many other systems. Could it be that without details of those subsystems, our AI behaves in less than optimal ways the same way a human would? How much can we get away with reducing biology to simpler rules while maintaining general intelligence?
It is possible I suppose that all those biological dependencies are merely hampering an ideal algorithm for generalized intelligence that we are only crude approximations of, a powerful and simple algorithm we can finally free of biological constraints, -- but it's too late to get into the probability of that hypothesis! In any case it's not clear to me how that kind of nonhuman intelligence would serve us.
Re: AI
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
But we do have proof that general intelligence exists. So How would it be impossible for artificial general intelligence to exist ? Do you believe in mind body dualism? AGI will be difficult but comparing it to Bigfoot or Leperchauns is rediculous. There is a huge difference between very very very hard and impossible.
Humans are not a general intelligence.
The definition of term "artificial general intelligence" is "intelligence of a machine that could successfully perform any intellectual task that a human being can".
Humans obviously can perform intellectual tasks that a human being can perform, thus humans are machines that implement general intelligence.
Re: AI
#220If the only goal is an 'artificial' consciousness, it might be more prudent to consider a functional definition of what consciousness is and try to build that. We didn't make computers by modeling how individual neurons perform mathematical calculations. On the other hand, if you want to go the biological route, there's some awesome work to be done. If I were to study consciousness, here's the question I would ask: h…
We know a ton about the brain but so little about the mind itself. We still don't have definitive answers to what consciousness is, why it's here, what's useful for, etc. Some people debate whether the mind exists at all. Also, there's still very little understanding of the difference between the conscious and unconscious mind. I think building an artificial consciousness is going too far. Artificial intelligence is…
"The zombie hunch is the idea that there could be a being that behaved exactly the way you or I behave, in every regard--it could cry at sad movies, be thrilled by joyous sunsets, enjoy ice cream and the whole thing, and yet not be conscious at all. It would just be a zombie."