Probabilistic AI can't be AI

Post by middayc » Sun, Feb 09, 2014, 3:08 PM UTC

resu_nimda wrote: post #19

then people would be naturally great at probability Where do you get that conclusion? Think of a baseball player with exceptional hand-eye coordination, who also knows absolutely nothing about any of the math or calculus behind it. There is a vast chasm between conscious and subconscious thought (where the latter might be viewed as the underlying "intelligence model"). I don't agree that a (partially) probabilistic m…

Ok, based on yours and many other similar comments below I only now see where my argument isn't understood as I wanted it to be. Not that I think that now you and others will agree with me, but just to make this clear.

I do not think that people would "then be consciously good at probability" (I said naturally / later added instinctively), but that the results of their unconscious processes / intuition, would then be better matching the probability-wise view of the problem. While I think that exactly the intuition seems to fail the most at probability (planes, terror attacks, ...).

Post by Houshalter » Sun, Feb 09, 2014, 7:23 PM UTC

middayc wrote: post #29

Houshalter wrote: post #21

I originally intended to make a comment about how wrong this is because almost all approaches to AI and ML are deeply rooted in probability and statistics. The entire problem of intelligence is based on making accurate predictions and then acting on them. But there is some truth in this. Humans are terrible at probability and that's something I wouldn't have expected if I didn't already know it. It is a clue as to wh…

I am not saying that it doesn't use something that efectively is a probability calculation anywhere in the system, but that that isn't the main or the most important "engine". I agree with your comment on "first learning thousands of other concepts". But that is a ton of (hierarchical) concepts that have to bo stored somehow and isn't then the storage/retrieval itself maybe more cruicial to the whole function than an…

Perhaps but my understanding is that, at least for vision, the brain learns by trying to predict nearby neurons as well as the future, thus learning an internal model of the world.

Algorithms that do something like this are called Deep Learning and have recently proven extremely effective at machine vision and other tasks. They don't all work by prediction per se but they do learn to compress the input down to a smaller representation of features that can be used to recreate it and are very related to prediction.

Re: Probabilistic AI can't be AI

Re: Probabilistic AI can't be AI