121–130 of 176 posts
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What if general learning is uncomputable?
General learning is uncomputable, it's called Solomonoff induction. You don't need general learning, you need something at least as powerful as the mess in a human brain.
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But that's the sort of thing that should be researched: is the question scientifically answerable? The answer is not obviously no. I can think of ways to scientifically test for noncomputability. If I can then certainly much smarter and knowledgeable poeple can. People just assume like yourself it is not and throw lots of money at a certain assumption. If the assumption is wrong, not only is AGI a dead end, but "huma…
I'm not saying it's not scientifically answerable, just that hiring people specifically to answer it is not practical. This type of thing usually comes through unplanned breakthroughs. You can't discover that the earth revolves around the sun just by paying tons of money to researchers and asking them to figure out astronomy. All that would get you would be some extremely sophisticated Copernican cycle-based models.…
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But that's the sort of thing that should be researched: is the question scientifically answerable? The answer is not obviously no. I can think of ways to scientifically test for noncomputability. If I can then certainly much smarter and knowledgeable poeple can. People just assume like yourself it is not and throw lots of money at a certain assumption. If the assumption is wrong, not only is AGI a dead end, but "huma…
OK, what experiments would you design to test whether AGI is possible? Given the decades (centuries?) of thought that have gone into the issue, I'm sure a set of experiments would be valuable.
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Why wouldn't it be? It seems to me that at worst we would have to wait for computers to become as powerful and complex as a human brain, and then simulating human intelligence would be a matter of accurately modelling the connections. Is there doubt as to whether a neuron can be represented computationally?
The mind may be nonphysical.
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Current Cycorp employee here. 1) One-off contracts, sometimes with ongoing licenses, from various large organizations who have use cases for inference. We did a lot of government contracting for a while; now we mostly stay in the private sector. 2) An in-house dialect of Common Lisp that compiles to Java (it predates Clojure). Deployment is still fairly ad-hoc, but we build Containers.
> Common Lisp that compiles to Java To Java bytecode or to Java code ?
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1. No I don't. I don't have to explain how gravity works to know that it does and make scientific claims about its operation. Likewise, I can scientifically demonstrate the mind is non physical and interacts with our physical world without explaining how. 2. If the world is not physically closed then physical theory and natural laws are not violated, since they would not apply to anything beyond the physical world. 3…
I wasn't trying to argue with you, I merely laid out what is commonly thought about the subject matter. Sorry if that sounds patronizing (it's really not meant to). Anyway, if you want to publish a paper defending a dualist position nowadays in any reputable journal, you'll have to address points 1&2 in one way or another, whether you believe you have to or not. It's not as if that problem hadn't been discussed durin…
I know the Lucas Godel incompleteness theorem type arguments. Whether successful or not, the counter arguments are certainly fallacious. E.g. just because I form a halting problem for myself does not mean I am not a halting oracle for uncomputable problems.
But, I have developed a more empirical approach, something that can be solved by the average person, not dealing with whether they can find the Godel sentence for a logic system.
Also, there is a lot of interesting research showing that humans are very effective at approximating solutions to NP complete problems, apparently better than the best known algorithms. While not conclusive proof in itself, such examples are very surprising if there is nothing super computational about the human mind, and less so if there is.
At any rate, there are a number of lines of evidence I'm aware of that makes the uncomputable mind a much more plausible explanation for what we see humans do, ignoring the whole problem of consciousness. I'm just concerned with empirical results, not philosophy or math. As such, I don't really care what some journal's idea of the burden of proof is. I care about making discoveries and moving our scientific knowledge and technology forward.
Additionally, this is not some academic speculation. If the uncomputable mind thesis is true, then there are technological gains to be made, such as through human in the loop approaches to computation. Arguably, that is where all the successful AI and ML is going these days, so that serves as yet one more line of evidence for the uncomputable mind thesis.
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I wrote "computation", not "arithmetic". Human intelligence goes beyond computation / mathematical logic, and you seem to ignore all of that. We haven't got a clue how consciousness works. It's a total mystery.
The aim of AI is intelligence, not human intelligence. It's not to emulate a process; it's to solve problems. If we do build AI, maybe we'll never know if it's conscious. You can't know whether any other human is conscious, either. But you can know whether they make you laugh, or cry, or learn, or love. The knowable things are good enough.
I worked for Cycorp for a few years recently. AMA, I guess? I obviously won't give away any secrets (e.g. business partners, finer grained details of how the inference engine works), but I can talk about the company culture, some high level technical things and the interpretation of the project that different people at the company have that makes it seem more viable than you might guess from the outside. There were s…
Two questions. It's difficult to evaluate CYC given Cycorp's secrecy. Domingos called it something like a colossal failure, which is hard to believe, but it's hard to argue given how little info gets out of Cycorp. So does Cycorp have any interest in changing this? Do they care about improving their reputation in the AI community? How would you compare Cyc (both the knowledge base and the inference engine) with curre…
The internal factors are less about intentionally hiding things and more about not committing any resources to being open. A lot of folks within Cycorp would like for the project to be more open, but it wasn't prioritized within the company when I was there. The impression that I got was that veterans there sort of feel like the broader AI community turned their back on symbolic reasoning in the 80s (fair) and they're generally not very impressed by the current trends within the AI community, particularly w.r.t. advances in ML (perhaps unfairly so), so they're going to just keep doing their thing until they can't be ignored anymore. "Their thing" is basically paying the bills in the short term while slowly building up the knowledge base with as many people as they can effectively manage and building platforms to make knowledge entry and ontological engineering smoother in the future. Doug Lenat is weirdly unimpressed by open-source models, and doesn't really see the point of committing resources to getting anyone involved who isn't a potential investor. They periodically do some publicity (there was a big piece in Wired some time ago) but people trying to investigate further don't get very far, and efforts within the company to open things up or revive OpenCyc tend to fall by the wayside when there's project work to do.
2. I don't know that much about this subject, but it's a point of common discussion within the company. Historically, a lot of the semantic web stuff grew out of efforts made by either former employees of Cycorp or people within a pretty close-knit intellectual community with common interests. OWL/RDF is definitely too simple to practically encode the kind of higher order logic that Cyc makes use of. IIRC the inference lead Keith Goolsbey was working on a kind of minimal extension to OWL/RDF that would make it suitable for more powerful knowledge representation, but I don't know if that ever got published.
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Two questions. It's difficult to evaluate CYC given Cycorp's secrecy. Domingos called it something like a colossal failure, which is hard to believe, but it's hard to argue given how little info gets out of Cycorp. So does Cycorp have any interest in changing this? Do they care about improving their reputation in the AI community? How would you compare Cyc (both the knowledge base and the inference engine) with curre…
1. There are internal and external factors when it comes to Cycorp's secrecy. The external factors come from the clients they work with, who often demand confidentiality. Some of their most successful projects are extremely closely guarded industry secrets. I think people at Cycorp would love to publicly talk a lot more about their projects if they could, but the clients don't want the competition getting wind of the…
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Two easy ones for you: 1) How did they manage to make money for so long to keep things afloat? I'm guessing through some self-sustainable projects like the few business relationships listed in the wiki? 2) What's the tech stack like? (Language, deployment, etc)
1) The money situation has changed over the years, and they've had times where things have boomed or busted - it's been a while since I left but I think they're still in a "boom" phase. There are a lottt more projects with different companies or organizations than the ones listed on the wiki, but they tend to be pretty secretive and I won't name names. The categories of projects that I was familiar with were basicall…
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