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

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#381

Post by godelski » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 10:38 PM UTC

theptip wrote: post #371

dane-pgp wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We do know that embodiment is a sufficient condition for general intelligence: if we assume humans have general intelligence then it is clearly a sufficient condition. I'm not sure what you mean by "sufficient condition" here. Consider: "We do know that having a moustache is a sufficient condition for general intelligence: if we assume moustachioed humans have general intelligence then it is clearly a sufficient co…

It’s philosophical/logical jargon referring to whether one event causes another: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessity_and_sufficiency You’re rightly confused because the GP formulated a non-sequitur. Embodiment is if anything a necessary, but not sufficient condition for the human brain to develop intelligence. It’s not a sufficient condition on its own for general intelligence; cats are embodied too.

I would not agree that embodiment is a necessary condition for human level intelligence.

The reason I use sufficient is more broad. A cat does have intelligence. Human level? No. Intelligence? Yes. As I explained in the post, embodiment enables a rich feature space, which is what makes it a sufficient condition. It isn't just the simple act of having a body, but the ability to interact with the environment creating a more rich environment. I cannot think of any creature (by definition all having bodies) that doesn't have some form of intelligence. But we need to distinguish "human level" intelligence from "intelligence" and "human level" from "human like." These are different things.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

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Post by craftinator » Sat, Jul 11, 2020, 11:17 PM UTC

mbrock wrote: post #315

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…

Hubert Dreyfus in his 1986 book "Mind Over Machine": > The digital computer, when programmed to operate by taking a problem apart into features and combining them step by step according to inference rules, operates as a machine—a logic machine. However, the computer is so versatile it can also be used to model a holistic system. Indeed, recently, as the problems confronting the AI approach remained unsolved for more…

This book is the technological equivalent of buying a big truck to compensate for having a small penis.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

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Post by coldtea » Sun, Jul 12, 2020, 12:43 AM UTC

cageface wrote: post #207

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…

This seems like a weak argument to me. We don't really understand how human intelligence works yet so how can we claim that computers will never realize similar intelligence? We don't know for a fact that human intelligence depends on these things. I'm personally skeptical that we'll see AGI any time soon but I don't think we know enough to say this definitively.

>This seems like a weak argument to me. We don't really understand how human intelligence works yet so how can we claim that computers will never realize similar intelligence?

My comment doesn't say that "computers will never realize similar intelligence".

It says that they will never realize it through reasoning - and rule based systems, 1960s-1990s AI style.

Which isn't the way we realize it either, even if we don't fully understand how we do realize it yet.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

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Post by User23 » Sun, Jul 12, 2020, 1:20 AM UTC

deleuze wrote: post #252

User23 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's funny, because I'd argue that the belief that "the universe is a Turing machine" is a kind of secular religion. Hardcore physicalists often betray themselves as not only being bad materialists but actually just idealists in denial.

I have to confess I take some pleasure in asking people that say we're living in a simulation "oh, you're a creationist?"

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

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Post by bena » Sun, Jul 12, 2020, 1:28 AM UTC

vidarh wrote: post #339

bena wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It exists, therefore we can make it." I don't find that line of thought compelling. Although you can argue that we already do it because we, as a species, reproduce. It could be quite possible that our level of intelligence is not reproducible by the means we have chosen. It could be that there is something inherent in our entire composition that allows for our particular expression of intelligence and consciousness…

It's indeed quite possible it is not reproducible by building digital computers out of silicon, sure, but that does not prevent us from picking another way of building them. I'm very much sympathetic to the idea that there could potentially be aspects about the specific structure of a brain that is necessary to produce intelligence, or at least necessary for sentience. But does not inherently make it impossible to re…

And I go back to our lack of a fundamental definition of what we're trying to accomplish.

Tell me what it is first. Define "artificial general intelligence" in a way that is generally accepted.

Is it possible? I don't know because I don't even know what we're trying to do.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

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Post by PaulDavisThe1st » Sun, Jul 12, 2020, 3:38 AM UTC

codr7 wrote: post #378

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not demanding that they are successful at "defining what can't be exactly defined". I would just like them to make an effort to do so. The author's whole claims about "being in the world" and "tacit knowledege" are quite amenable to further, useful definition and expansion. For example, do they mean by "tacit" "not subject to an implementation in a way that could include an electronic digital computing device?" O…

Ok, so show me a robot that has any clue how to ride a bike from observing others trying. And it's not going to happen, because we're not there yet.

Show me a human who learned how to ride a bike by watching others.

My impression is that the general dynamics robots are already on a path that isn't hard to imagine becoming quite animal-learning like in the reasonable near-term future. Their body (as with any animal) is a mostly-given, as are the available control systems. Couple this to a NN-style learning process that takes place inside the robot rather than over there in the programmer's development system, and I'm not really sure I see an important distinction given the parameters of your question.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

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Post by handol » Sun, Jul 12, 2020, 6:19 AM UTC

avador wrote: post #367

glenstein wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Flight and consciousness are not in any way compareable concepts. For pete's sake, it's an analogy, not a direct comparison, and it is perfectly valid as such when interpreted with due charity. You can say "Brains are complicated. They took time and evolution. That sure is hard. See how hard it is?" The same can be said of flight at a certain level of abstraction as a valid analogy, which can be charitably interpret…

This is interesting. Is aeroplane flight akin to bird or insect flight? Rolling down the tarmac, peering out the window, the planes look more like elongated fish bodies than soft bird bodies, or compact insect bodies. Our planes rather swim in the air than fly in it, I think. Our flight is some other kind of thing (whatever we uncovered the model-able, salient properties of flight to be). Computer consciousness might…

"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." - Dijkstra

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

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Post by lone-commenter » Sun, Jul 12, 2020, 8:13 AM UTC

simonh wrote: post #379

lone-commenter wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don’t understand something. It’s a complicated phenomenon. So it’s impossible to replicate? I think the “argument” is so silly it doesn’t need to be disproved. If one wants to prove something impossible they’d better avoid logical fallacies. A priori we can’t say that it’s impossible, nor that it’s certainly doable.

Except that like flight it’s already been done - by evolution. I’m very confident that people will be ‘proving’ that it’s impossible like this article, right up to the day we actually do it.

I meant that it's dubious whether we can reproduce a brain-like machine until we'll understand the matter well enough to either prove it possible or impossible.

Anyway, I feel like you. If it's been done once, it can't be impossible in any meaningful sense.

Further, the argument from lack of understanding would work only if knowledge (and science) could not advance any further; but that's tough to prove -- not to say that it's used over and over in faith vs. reason debates to the point it's become annoying -- so the argument is quite weak.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

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Post by mbrock » Sun, Jul 12, 2020, 8:30 AM UTC

craftinator wrote: post #382

mbrock wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hubert Dreyfus in his 1986 book "Mind Over Machine": > The digital computer, when programmed to operate by taking a problem apart into features and combining them step by step according to inference rules, operates as a machine—a logic machine. However, the computer is so versatile it can also be used to model a holistic system. Indeed, recently, as the problems confronting the AI approach remained unsolved for more…

This book is the technological equivalent of buying a big truck to compensate for having a small penis.

Uhhhhhh

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#390

Post by htfu » Sun, Jul 12, 2020, 9:17 AM UTC

Strilanc wrote: post #141

> In the book [Dreyfus] argued that an important part of human knowledge is tacit. Therefore, it cannot be articulated and implemented in a computer program. [...] [...] [...] These skills cannot just be learned from textbooks. They are acquired by instruction from someone who knows the trade. This is a classic example of the Mind Projection Fallacy [1], where a property of how you think is assumed to be a property o…

> It's true, for humans, that it is simply not possible to be told how to ride a bike and then be good at riding a bike. No matter how carefully and completely you explain to a human what they will have to do, when you put them on a bike for the first time they will struggle.

I'm not sure that's automatically true. The way we learn riding bikes, as young children, yes of course. But someone who was already an expert skateboarder, inliner, equestrian, fighter pilot etc, somehow without ever having ridden a bike, likely wouldn't struggle. Balance, lack of fear and general trust in your instruments definitely transfers.