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

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#241

Post by koreth1 » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 3:55 AM UTC

13415 wrote: post #152

sega_sai wrote: post #2

I posted the article because it is thought provoking, although I disagree with it. The reason is for example statements like this "The real problem is that computers are not in the world, because they are not embodied." "And I shall argue that they cannot pass the full Turing test because they are not in the world, and, therefore, they have no understanding." First I think that whether something is embodied or not do…

I'd recommend Daniel Dennett's talk If Brains are Computers, Who Designs the Software? as a counterpoint to this article [1]. Dennett's talk is a bit long but I mostly enjoyed it, especially when he points out the computerphobia of many of his colleagues. Of course, it's easier for me to agree with Dennett than for many other people, because I'm a computationalist in the philosophy of mind and suspect that consciousn…

> I'm a computationalist in the philosophy of mind and suspect that consciousness is an emergent property of certain computations.

I'm not a philosopher of any variety and this always seemed like a much more plausible scenario to me than some kind of consciousness magic sauce. It is pretty amazing to watch the intellectual contortions people will twist themselves into to avoid reaching this conclusion. Like deep down they are certain their lived experience can't possibly be an effect of purely physical processes, but they need to couch that belief in sufficiently convoluted words that they can convince themselves they aren't just talking about souls.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#242

Post by yters » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 4:05 AM UTC

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…

I don't think it is dualist, or at least I didn't get that impression reading Dreyfus. It is more that knowledge is part of a system as a whole and cannot be captured piecemeal, which is how we'd have to do it if we created AI by hand.

But, I don't think that argument is especially strong. Knowledge doesn't seem to be tied up in the system, otherwise we wouldn't have abstract subjects like math. Additionally, if knowledge is a function of a certain process of developmwnt, we can at least in theory reproduce any physical process computationally.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#243

Post by pier25 » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 4:09 AM UTC

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

I think what it means is not about codifcation, but that to achieve GI machines would need to go through human experiences that are not possible to a machine.

I don't agree, but I think that's the point the paper makes.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#244

Post by User23 » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 4:10 AM UTC

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…

The Church-Turing thesis only states that the lambda calculus and Turing machines can compute the same functions. It has nothing to do with materialism or dualism and it certainly doesn’t state that the universe is a Turing machine.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#245

Post by baddox » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 4:18 AM UTC

SiVal wrote: post #164

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…

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…

> Every deep learning system has tacit knowledge: it knows a chair when it sees one but can't explain how it knows.

A traditional computer program that can find the derivative of sin(x) also can not explain how it knows.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#246

Post by ibeckermayer » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 4:18 AM UTC

sasaf5 wrote: post #216

I came to this article expecting a logical proof of why AI was impossible, but instead found the following tautological argument: hard AI, which I define as intelligence with tacit knowledge, which in turn I define as knowledge that cannot be ran in algorithms, is impossible to be ran in algorithms. Disappointing. My counterpoint: is there anything that cannot be ran in algorithms? The way I see it the only thing sto…

The primary thing stopping you from simulating every atom in a brain is a lack of knowledge about atoms and the brain. AFAIK we can't even simulate hydrogen and oxygen atoms with enough detail to get the emergent properties of water.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#247

Post by pier25 » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 4:18 AM UTC

I know nothing about AI but my ignorant impression is that there are essentially two ways to achieve AGI:

1) We somehow model GI artificially, which seems like an impossible task.

2) Or instead we just model the fundamental neural mechanisms (dentrites, axons, etc) and find a way to copy the state of a brain into a sufficiently powerful computer.

Is this correct or are there different approaches?

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#248

Post by taberiand » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 4:19 AM UTC

ddingus wrote: post #231

coldtea wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The complexity that makes human intelligence possible is already accessed by a brain-in-a-box through a limited set of interfaces; it's just a mushy organic brain and bone box rather than an electronic brain and steel box.

It's probably reasonable to argue that an AGI would require interfaces to all of the outside world's complexity to be self aware, but there's nothing stopping us from building it those interfaces.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#249

Post by Noos » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 4:25 AM UTC

simonh wrote: post #224

mkl wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not teaching a computer to walk, that's building a walking machine. Subtle difference, but it's easy to prove; no matter how well you build a Boston dynamics robot, it will never like walking in the same way your TV will never like entertaining people. There's no "I" there to learn.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#250

Post by juliangamble » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 4:25 AM UTC

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #167

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…

Not disagreeing with this.

Does anyone have a reasonable article or book making this point (for or against) that is well-researched and argued?