Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized • Hacker News Board

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#231

Post by ddingus » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 3:18 AM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #182

abetusk wrote: post #131

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…

> So the main argument is that humans have intelligence that is impossible to express through reason or codification. In other words, humans have a literal soul, divorced from physical world No, in other words, humans have tactile, empirical, emotional, social, etc intelligence that is perfectly physical but not available to mere software in a computer. It might be available to software running in humanoid robots, th…

One thing humans, and living things in general have, is enough complexity to be self aware on some level.

There is US, our parts, and the rest of the world, and OTHERS.

A computer, brain in a box, lacks that.

Maybe one embodied in such a way as to be capable of "the self" may display emergent properties similar to how we and the animals do.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#232

Post by historyremade » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 3:18 AM UTC

mullingitover wrote: post #24

This feels a lot like Douglas Hofstadter's elaborate explanation in Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid of how computers will never beat the best human chess players.

He's right. Google spent millions of dollars to beat a chess player, and what a waste of money to fool kids to get into AI.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#233

Post by ddingus » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 3:20 AM UTC

simonh wrote: post #225

wwwwewwww wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They aren't of sufficient complexity and robustness to self identify.

Our bodies offer a closed loop, very robust and complex feedback system.

Our intelligence can process that and learn all sorts of things. Can learn what is "them" and what is other.

Without those things, a computer, as we have constructed them so far, really don't have a childhood.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#234

Post by dragonwriter » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 3:20 AM UTC

analog31 wrote: post #227

goatlover wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> My friend is colorblind. At least for him, the project was very much a matter of programming knowledge that he could not possess.

Being unable to perceive color and color relationships does not equate to being unable to have knowledge of color and color relationships.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#235

Post by simonh » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 3:20 AM UTC

yehbut99 wrote: post #214

SiVal wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tacit knowledge is knowledge that results from adapting to experience, like learning to tie shoelaces with practice, rather than something like finding the derivative of sin(x) by the usual mathematical proof method (reasoning step by formal step). Every deep learning system has tacit knowledge: it knows a chair when it sees one but can't explain how it knows. It just adapted its connections to training until it got…

Computers can’t heal themselves. Our bodies do that on their own without conscious prompting. Humans evolve the complexity of a computers electron states, not the computers own inherent properties. My use doesn’t force transistors to evolve into better transistors. It has no self regeneration. You don’t see the issue in principle but here you have an article by an expert pointing them out. Perhaps be a better listene…

This is exactly the sort of conflation of completely unrelated concepts as I found in the article. What on Earth has healing got to do with reasoning? You even say our bodies do it without conscious prompting, in other words it’s a completely irrelevant issue.

Yes computers aren’t biological, they aren’t life, but so what? Why does that constrain their ability to interact with and learn from the world?

AGI is defined as human like intelligence, human go to the toilet, computers don’t go to the toilet, therefore AGI is impossible. See? It’s easy to “prove” AGI is impossible. That’s really all their argument boils down to. I kept reading the article expecting to hit some essential argument, not to find one. Very disappointing.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#236

Post by 29athrowaway » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 3:31 AM UTC

To better understand the brain, you have to not only talk about its cognitive functions, but all of it. Then you will understand what it is really for.

Your body stays alive by keeping levels within certain range. There are many functions in your body that have as an objective controlling those levels and your brain controls them at different levels of automation. Like your heart rate, sweating, urine output, etc.

But not everything can be automated, because some situations are more complex: finding a place with the right temperature, access to nutrients, and breathable air, etc. That is where decision making comes in... survival-oriented decision making. And that was what resulted in us developing what we today call intelligence.

When you disembody learning, and put it in an abstract evolutionary environment where survival only depends on solving an abstract problem, the result will not necessarily be an "AGI", a self-preserving, self-aware intelligence that is adapted to survive a wide range of scenarios. But if you changed that environment, made it very hostile and constantly changing, it could eventually lead to the evolution of an AGI.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#237

Post by simonh » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 3:34 AM UTC

contravariant wrote: post #184

abetusk wrote: post #131

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…

That's a bit of a straw-man. It does not follow that the existence of knowledge that isn't derived from formal principles of reasoning proves the existence of a soul.

Replace the word soul with some essential quality of reason than humans have that isn’t teachable, and the article is arguing that whatever that is can never be acquired by a computer.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#238

Post by caymanjim » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 3:35 AM UTC

ogogmad wrote: post #104

cowboysauce wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because computers operate on the rational numbers instead of the real numbers, Computers are just devices that perform computations. It's perfectly possible to construct computers that operate on values that are continuous and not discrete. In fact, such computers have been constructed before. They are know as analog computers and were used for things like numerically solving differential equations.

You don't need analog computation. The theory of Computable Real Analysis still assumes a digital computer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_analysis See here for a concrete application of the theory: https://icfp19.sigplan.org/details/icfp-2019-papers/15/Sound... Another application is the Android calculator, which computes over exact real numbers in the sense described by Computable Analysis. Finally, it's…

It seems likely that absolutely nothing is analog. The best theories about physics are all quantized. The only things that we don't have strong quantum theories about are things we barely understand, like time and gravity. And that's just because we haven't found the quanta yet.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#239

Post by analog31 » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 3:35 AM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #234

analog31 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> My friend is colorblind. At least for him, the project was very much a matter of programming knowledge that he could not possess. Being unable to perceive color and color relationships does not equate to being unable to have knowledge of color and color relationships.

True. For instance there's knowledge that can't be directly perceived by any one individual, given variations in our sensory apparatus. Even among so called "normal" sighted people, the sensation of red varies from person to person. I have a normal sighted colleague, and there are "red" LED wavelengths that seem very bright to me, but he can barely see them. The color matching equipment is partly based on an accommodation of those variations.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#240

Post by baddox » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 3:44 AM UTC

mindcrime wrote: post #201

baddox wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's certainly not the case. We can and absolutely have proven things to be impossible.

We can and absolutely have proven things to be impossible. What would you consider to be an example of that? And how does that square with the Problem of Induction which is the hole in our entire system of empirical knowledge generation?

You can’t make a Turing machine which can solve the halting problem or an algorithm which can determine whether any given mathematical statement is true.