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John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

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Re: John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

#301

Post by seanhunter »

marviel wrote: post #267

> Now, the smart money still says it’s done by a team of researchers, and it’s cobbled together over all that. But my reasoning on this is: If you take your entire DNA, it’s less than a gigabyte of information. So even your entire human body is not all that much in the instructions, and the brain is this tiny slice of it —like 40 megabytes, and it’s not tightly coded. So, we have our existence proof of humanity: What…

A really good example of a smart person reasoning from completely made up assumptions to a punchy-sounding but almost-certainly wildly wrong conclusion.

Just because our DNA can be efficiently encoded doesn't mean that our brain is a tiny proportion of that encoding. Your DNA doesn't change much from when you're born to when you die (random degredation aside) and yet your cognative abilities change beyond all recognition. Why is that? Well maybe there's more to what's in the brain than just what's encoded in your DNA.

Secondly, how does he get to the 40Mb number? I don't think we know anywhere near enough to know how much information it would take to encode a brain, but 40Mb seems just made up. For starters, consider the amount of random stuff you can remember from your entire life. Are you saying that all can be encoded in just 40Mb? Seems very unlikely.

Re: John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

#302

Post by vacuumcl »

seanhunter wrote: post #301
marviel wrote: post #267

> Now, the smart money still says it’s done by a team of researchers, and it’s cobbled together over all that. But my reasoning on this is: If you take your entire DNA, it’s less than a gigabyte of information. So even your entire human body is not all that much in the instructions, and the brain is this tiny slice of it —like 40 megabytes, and it’s not tightly coded. So, we have our existence proof of humanity: What…

A really good example of a smart person reasoning from completely made up assumptions to a punchy-sounding but almost-certainly wildly wrong conclusion. Just because our DNA can be efficiently encoded doesn't mean that our brain is a tiny proportion of that encoding. Your DNA doesn't change much from when you're born to when you die (random degredation aside) and yet your cognative abilities change beyond all recogni…

He is saying that the "base code" / DNA which makes up the brain might be only 40MB (for example). Not that what eventually emerges from that (such as our memories and learned abilities) can be captured with just 40MB. It's similar to how the Game of Life can be implemented in just a few lines, but very complex behavior can emerge from that. The key is to find a sufficiently simple but general model from which intelligence equal to our own can emerge given sufficient training.

Re: John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

#303

Post by bitshiftfaced »

marviel wrote: post #267

> Now, the smart money still says it’s done by a team of researchers, and it’s cobbled together over all that. But my reasoning on this is: If you take your entire DNA, it’s less than a gigabyte of information. So even your entire human body is not all that much in the instructions, and the brain is this tiny slice of it —like 40 megabytes, and it’s not tightly coded. So, we have our existence proof of humanity: What…

We also have to import the "physics" package, so maybe it requires more than the estimated 40mb after all.

Re: John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

#304

Post by sershe »

seu wrote: post #214

> Well, you can tie that into a lot of questions, like, ‘Is human population a good thing?’ ‘Is immigration a good thing, where we seem to have been able to take advantage of new sources of humanity that are willing to engage in economic activities and be directed by the markets?’ > The world is a hugely better place with our 8 billion people than it was when there were 50 million people kind of like living in caves…

> He seems to ignore a lot about what the living conditions for people were throughout history, and have a blind trust in the positive power of 'human progress'.

Eh? A contender for the most self-contradictory sentence I've ever read ;) The best reason to believe in positive power of "human progress" is, specifically, not ignoring "what the living conditions for people were throughout history".

Re: John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

#305

Post by throwaway4aday »

marviel wrote: post #267

> Now, the smart money still says it’s done by a team of researchers, and it’s cobbled together over all that. But my reasoning on this is: If you take your entire DNA, it’s less than a gigabyte of information. So even your entire human body is not all that much in the instructions, and the brain is this tiny slice of it —like 40 megabytes, and it’s not tightly coded. So, we have our existence proof of humanity: What…

That's only the code describing the molecular hardware which is mostly just a description of a neuron. We don't as yet know how the neurons decide to specialize and organize themselves into a brain but one guess is that they are exploiting the physical principals that govern atomic and molecular interactions so the "code" for this might not even be present in the DNA itself it would be the physics of "a group of molecules of this shape interacting with another group of molecules of that shape will orient and form a boundary that looks like this and that boundary will do X when another molecule with a different shape comes along" the sheer intricacy of such systems is mind boggling. It's like building a working car out of magnets and bubblegum.

Re: John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

#306

Post by weatherlight »

eloff wrote: post #198
qbasic_forever wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We still have a form of slavery in the US. Prison labor is forced work that earns pennies a day: https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/captive-labor-exploit...

Why is that a bad thing? Most of those people are a burden to society. Let them pay it down a little. I mean I’d rather they were getting free education and preparing themselves for reintegration into society, but it’s not a perfect world. Prisons in the US are oriented towards punishment and labor can be a part of that. They should be oriented towards rehabilitation.

Any system that financially profits off its prisoners' labor. Inadvertently, create a market for that labor and commodifies it.

Slavery is bad and people have rights.

> They should be oriented towards rehabilitation.

Exactly.

Re: John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

#307

Post by serverholic »

seu wrote: post #214

> Well, you can tie that into a lot of questions, like, ‘Is human population a good thing?’ ‘Is immigration a good thing, where we seem to have been able to take advantage of new sources of humanity that are willing to engage in economic activities and be directed by the markets?’ > The world is a hugely better place with our 8 billion people than it was when there were 50 million people kind of like living in caves…

I’ve come to strongly resent the techno-utopian mindset that unfortunately plagues the tech world.

Tech for the sake of tech with zero thought about how it will affect humanity.

Re: John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

#308

Post by throwaway4aday »

bilsbie wrote: post #270

Not AGI related but this has always bothered me. I know he’s super talented but I always wonder how many other equally talented software engineers never get noticed and toil away at crappy jobs. What’s the trick to becoming a celebrity if you’re talented?

In Carmack's case it was "lock yourself in a room for 14 hours a day coding" and get yourself a hype man (and artist/programmer) like Romero. More seriously, find a software niche that hasn't been widely marketed yet. You don't need to invent anything, just find something that's being done but hasn't been done good enough to reach a wide audience. Network with people that have a similar interest and form a company once you've got an idea worth pursuing.

Re: John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

#309

Post by m3kw9 »

seu wrote: post #214

> Well, you can tie that into a lot of questions, like, ‘Is human population a good thing?’ ‘Is immigration a good thing, where we seem to have been able to take advantage of new sources of humanity that are willing to engage in economic activities and be directed by the markets?’ > The world is a hugely better place with our 8 billion people than it was when there were 50 million people kind of like living in caves…

If you got less people there is still no guarantee less percentage of people are gonna be suffering.

Feeling bad because more people are in your view is “suffering” is all in your head.

Re: John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence

#310

Post by _gabe_ »

seu wrote: post #214

> Well, you can tie that into a lot of questions, like, ‘Is human population a good thing?’ ‘Is immigration a good thing, where we seem to have been able to take advantage of new sources of humanity that are willing to engage in economic activities and be directed by the markets?’ > The world is a hugely better place with our 8 billion people than it was when there were 50 million people kind of like living in caves…

> The problem with Carmack and many like him, is that they think of themselves as purely rational beings operating within scientific frameworks and based purely on scientific results, but whenever they step outside the technical fields in which they work, they are ignorant and dogmatic.

I'm just curious, do you happen to work in a technical field and consider yourself rational and scientific? And if you do, why do you presuppose that your views are automatically correct? Couldn't it also hold that your views may be ignorant and dogmatic if you apply the same scrutiny to yourself that you do to Carmack?

And if you don't work in a technical field, then I guess this is all irrelevant anyways. I just don't like when I see people making these types of arguments where you can't speak on a subject that you're not actively pursuing a PhD in, and then they proceed to do exactly that.

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