Live data from Hacker News

Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

nature.com

401–403 of 403 posts

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But not everything can be automated, because some situations are more complex This is where you lost me. You are very right that brains do all kinds of things to regulate the body that we don't usually think of as influencing thought. But we can't model those because they're too complex? I don't think environmental variables are too complex. But (1) if those are important, we can model them too and (2) it may be tha…

Not all decision making is rational. If you are in the jungle and a lion comes at you, you will not have time to sit down and think what to do, and your brain is prepared to act in those situations as well.

I'd say that's an extremely crude understanding of what computers can actually model. There are ways that humans stream through thoughts that depend on tacit knowledge and unconscious connections, and there's no reason why those can't be modeled by a computer. And the equilavence betweeen "rational" (in some informal, human sense of the term, as in talking out loud like spock), and "computable" is just a misunderstanding. Computable contains much more than this naiive conception of what is rational.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#402
post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that Dreyfus has unfortunately set back the cultural understanding of computers by decades, by confidently declaring certain tasks impossible for computers to do, because minds have "insight" or "tacit knowledge" or are "holistic", each of which functionally lets a mind be a ghost in the machine. A lot of the rhetorical momentum comes from pointing at the progress of technology at various stages in human hist…

He is talking about AI as presently conceived when writing. The quote I posted has him explicitly imagining what you say he could not imagine. His critique was in fact INFLUENTIAL for the currently successful approaches.

>The quote I posted has him explicitly imagining

It's him imaging things that he think couldn't be done on computers under one definition, based on vaguely defined terms. Dreyfus was open to another, more expansive definition that included things like 'holistic' and 'tacit' knowledge, which he believed were outside the scope of what computers of a certain sort could do. That distinction turns out to be moot because all the 'new' stuff: e.g. neural networks, GAN, GPT-3 etc are, while in some sense new and innovative, ultimately are running on foundation the same old of logic gates, zeros and ones, and ultimately are, really are, computable in the classical turing machine sense, which is exactly what he had spent his whole career denying. It was a limit of Dreyfus' imagination that he didn't understand that computation, even the kind he criticized, could model the higher order conceptual structures he thought were inaccessible to classical computers. He's not wrong to think that something called 'tacit' knowledge would be important, and would call for specialized approaches and new concepts. Where he went wrong was in veering to the insane, overconfident extreme of denying that these were computable.

Re: Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized

#403
We can't create artificial intelligence because we have absolutely no idea what intelligence and consciousness really are. You can't recreate what you don't understand and we are not even close to understanding what makes us, us.

An analogy I've thought of is this. A modern jetliner is a miracle of engineering, aerodynamics, electronics, and programming. If the average person on the street, such as myself, was tasked with attempting to recreate one the best that would be achieved would be an extremely crude model that could not even achieve the most basic task of an aircraft: taking off and flying. Thus it is with researchers trying to recreate human intelligence.

Post reply on HN