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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

#351

Post by osigurdson »

peterfirefly wrote: post #313
osigurdson wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don't understand is how accounting has not been completely automated at this point. AI isn't even strictly needed, just arithmetic. If we can't completely automate accounting, then there is no hope for any other field.

Because the hard part is to make sense of a box full of unsorted scraps of paper, some of them with barely legible handwriting on them. Much of accountancy is the process of turning such boxes into nice rows of numbers. Once you have the numbers, the arithmetic is trivial.

>> box full of unsorted scraps of paper

Seems like an easy job for AI. Take all scraps of paper out of box, record a video of all scraps, AI make sense of the handwriting and other things. Eventually make a robo that allows you to dumb the scraps into an accounting box that does all of this automatically - fish out receipts, scan, OCR, understand meaning, do arithmetic, done.

Honestly, who would miss this kind of work?

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

#352

Post by cactusplant7374 »

mogacom wrote: post #244

Carmack is clearly a brilliant guy, but it feels like he's fallen into the trap of overfitting on his previous successes and believing they generalise into other domains. No doubt his experience and innovations in computer graphics gives him a good insight into problems in vision, etc. but I don't see anything particularly original or orthogonal in what he's saying with regards to "general AI".

The experts in the field say we need a philosophical breakthrough. Isn't everyone else inexperienced in this regard?

https://aeon.co/essays/how-close-are-we-to-creating-artifici...

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

#353

Post by martin_drapeau »

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…

Can you tell us what is wrong with progress? Any examples?

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

#354

Post by seanhunter »

m3kw9 wrote: post #314
seanhunter wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The brains structure is derived from dna but it contains learning capabilities that comes after the initial creation. Pretty much like how 5 lines of code can get you image recognition, of course it uses lots of libs, but I can still do that myself with 5 lines. The training is the hard part

Yes exactly. The only training we know of currently that works is for a biological human being to live a decent proportion of their life.

For me his statement is one of those things that is sort of not even wrong, like when people say humans only have two eyes and can drive a car therefore an automated driving system must be possible with only cameras. On the face of it, this seems like it could be true but of course it handwaves away the hardest and most mysterious part of intelligence and focusses instead on the easy bit that we already know reasonably well.

It's exactly like if someone said they had a secret formula to be an NBA superstar which is:

1. Be really tall

2. Be really agile

3. Be really good at basketball

Like yeah of course but all the hard parts are left out.

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

#355

Post by seanhunter »

vacuumcl wrote: post #302
seanhunter wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 intell…

I understand that, but that is an extremely banal observation if you think about it, because the fact that there is this incredible emergent behavior from a simple starting system is the heart of the mystery here.

One of the things that everyone is sort of skipping over is the "sufficient training" part. There is no bootstrap reinforcement learning possible for AGI. You can't alphago this sucker and have it play simulations against itself because the whole idea of generality is that there isn't a simple rule framework in which you could run such a simulation. So training any kind of AGI is a really hard problem.

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

#356

Post by braindead_in »

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 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 and whatever.

There is a theory that hunter-gatherers were much more happier compared to us because they were more in tune with the natural environment, had fewer sources of stress, and were more connected to their community than modern humans.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/10/01/5510187...

From the article.

> Today people [in Western societies] go to mindfulness classes, yoga classes and clubs dancing, just so for a moment they can live in the present. The Bushmen live that way all the time!

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

#357

Post by anthonypasq »

seanhunter wrote: post #355
vacuumcl wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 intell…

I understand that, but that is an extremely banal observation if you think about it, because the fact that there is this incredible emergent behavior from a simple starting system is the heart of the mystery here. One of the things that everyone is sort of skipping over is the "sufficient training" part. There is no bootstrap reinforcement learning possible for AGI. You can't alphago this sucker and have it play simu…

hes specifically answering the question of why he thinks he has any chance of success doing this independently when there are giant organizations funding this.

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

#358

Post by cercatrova »

artificialLimbs wrote: post #262
cercatrova wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then better to remove such bullshit jobs even further.

So that those people won't have any jobs at all?

None of us will have jobs at all soon enough.

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

#359

Post by sershe »

seu wrote: post #341
sershe wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

Let me correct my sentence: there's a blind belief that _technological_ progress automatically equates to better life conditions. And to clarify: I'm not saying "all technology is bad", but rather "not all technological progress is automatically good for humanity". As an example, living conditions of hunter-gatherers were way, way better than living conditions of the first people in cities, and I'd argue, depending o…

On average technology has been overwhelmingly good. The GP is too vague, but what is the alternative to blind progress being proposed - some ethicist deciding what's good? When has that ever work out well? I'm pretty sure it has 100% track record of failure, I don't believe modern ethicists will do any better than luddites, inquisition, or Paul Elrich just because they have better manners. In fact I think less of a bioethicist than of an inquisitor, at least the latter had general ignorance as an excuse.

I, personally, think "techno-utopianists" don't go far enough. The contributions of some supposed non-technological progress - even to an extent of the institutional progress, but especially of some supposed cultural/ethical values improving, etc. - is overrated. Ultimately, it's all downstream of technology - only the technology enables the complex economy of abundance, and combined they allow good institutions to propagate. Even modern societies, as soon as they become poor, quickly start losing a veneer of "ethical progress". And we don't even usually see actual technological degradation.

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

#360

Post by brutusborn »

milsorgen wrote: post #50
brutusborn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People can find their own outlets if given the basic necessities and enough time. I fear this attitude will lead to job programs where people work a 9-5 and achieve essentially nothing, I.e. bullshit jobs.

>People can find their own outlets if given the basic necessities and enough time. This has not been my experience. People need something to do but not many people know that about themselves. It leads to a lot of... 'wasteful' behaviors, rather than enriching ones. I think it's going to be something that has to be taught to people, a skill like any other. Albiet a little more abstract than some.

There definitely has to be a cultural shift but I think the shift can’t truly happen until most things are automated. There needs to be a critical mass of people who are fully devoted to their interests, currently there is too much demand for labour and so dedicating your time to your interests is alien to most people. When the value of labour approaches zero for most people, work becomes pointless and something must fill the vacuum.
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