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Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

nature.com

221–230 of 403 posts

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#221

This is possibly the worst article I have ever seen in Nature. It is barely at the level of an undergraduate essay on AI (or AGI or ANI, as the author prefers). A hand-waving argument about "computers not being in the world" that relies on not bothering to define "computers", "being in" or "the world". Convenient avoidance of almost every more subtle anti-Searle/anti-Dreyfus critic (notably Dennett). Almost wilfull n…

Note, is not in the the flagship journal, it's an affiliated journal under the Nature imprint. There are about 40 other such: https://www.nature.com/siteindex (see under "N"). It's a Springer joint. Note that the counterpart journal, Science , is published by the AAAS, and is not for profit the way Nature is. If you're interested in science, Science is a great one-stop shop and it's about $120 per year. Sometimes one…

Note, is not in the the flagship journal, it's an affiliated journal under the Nature imprint.

Oh. Yes, there are lots of those. They publish too many overhyped battery technology articles. Don't know how bad it is in other fields.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#223

Here is, to me, the relevant line: "Hubert Dreyfus, who argued that computers, who have no body, no childhood and no cultural practice, could not acquire intelligence at all. One of Dreyfus’ main arguments was that human knowledge is partly tacit, and therefore cannot be articulated and incorporated in a computer program. " I have not read the rest of the article but in the introduction it's stated: "The article furt…

Sociopaths can pretend to be like normal people. An AI with non-human intelligence can do its own thing and just mimic human behavior with sufficient fidelity to fool us. Dumb machines can already employ usable conversational interfaces. In 100 years, less dumb machines will be far more convincing.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#224
post #154

Here is, to me, the relevant line: "Hubert Dreyfus, who argued that computers, who have no body, no childhood and no cultural practice, could not acquire intelligence at all. One of Dreyfus’ main arguments was that human knowledge is partly tacit, and therefore cannot be articulated and incorporated in a computer program. " I have not read the rest of the article but in the introduction it's stated: "The article furt…

I don't think it has anything to do with souls. Most "knowledge" deep learning systems have seems tacit to me: it would be practically impossible for people to write programs that articulate and incorporate that knowledge without machine learning (people tried, for decades), and it certainly isn't "derived from formal principles of reasoning" in anything but a tangential mathematical sense. (I too have not read the w…

I have read it and you’re not missing anything. One of the examples of tacit knowledge they give is walking and that therefore it is impossible to teach a computer to walk. They should watch one of the videos from Boston Dynamics.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how you can say computers have no body and no childhood. I think someone who doesn't know computers very well just doesn't see it, but they actually have both.

I think I know computers well. But I have no idea what "body" and "childhood" computers have. Can you please explain?

Their body is their hardware, sensors, interfaces and means of changing the world through controlled devices which can include robot arms and legs or vehicles. Computers can learn and be trained to do things and get better at them, such as using genetic algorithms and machine learning. They’re rudimentary, but real.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point isn't bike riding. Bike riding is an example of a class of problems, and your solution begs the question. The point is that humans and computers operate differently. The human approach is based on adaptive experiential heuristics. The computer approach is based on explicit formalism. (Even in neural networks, there's still a formal model. It's just made of weightings instead of logic paths.) The epistemolog…

> The problem isn't getting a computer to ride a bike, it's getting a computer to learn to ride a bike how a human learns. This is just a more sophisticated way of assuming that there's something human-intrinsic about bike riding. Human-like is not the only way to approach doing or learning. Whatever works, works.

I could not agree more there is no evidence of any kind that there is some process that is human-intrinsic from perspective of neuroscience and computer science. Furthermore learning is just subset of intelligence, it seems to me most arguments are about concept of intelligence where such concept has different meaning for each participant.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very true. It seems closely related to the problem with qualia, which I've always thought of similarly. Instinctively it seems impossible to describe the color green to someone who has never seen it. Seeing it seems to add "something" that is impossible to acquire in any other way. But this is because of our physical limitations, rather than the existence of some ephemeral quality. If we would have total knowledge an…

Maybe, but since we don’t have that knowledge, we can’t program it.

A friend of mine was the project manager for a project to develop one of the first color matching systems for paint stores. My friend is colorblind. At least for him, the project was very much a matter of programming knowledge that he could not possess.

I've gotten color matching done at Home Depot, to get paint for repairing my house. It's uncanny.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#228
Yes, it's a rerun of Dreyfus.

A more useful question is "what can't machine learning do"? Each generation of AI technology has solved some problems, then hit a wall. (I had the unfortunate experience of going through Stanford CS in the mid-80s, when expert systems had hit a wall but the faculty was in denial about that.)

Is there some way to get "common sense", defined as "knowing if something bad is going to happen before you do it", from machine learning? So far, no. DARPA is funding work on it, though.[1] The Allen Institute even has a competition.[2] Both are verbal, though; they work on text statements.

[1] https://www.darpa.mil/program/machine-common-sense

[2] https://www.tau-nlp.org/csqa-leaderboard

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very true. It seems closely related to the problem with qualia, which I've always thought of similarly. Instinctively it seems impossible to describe the color green to someone who has never seen it. Seeing it seems to add "something" that is impossible to acquire in any other way. But this is because of our physical limitations, rather than the existence of some ephemeral quality. If we would have total knowledge an…

Maybe, but since we don’t have that knowledge, we can’t program it.

And we will NOT know what knowledge we have unless we program it.
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