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Jeff Hawkins: Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence [video]

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Re: Jeff Hawkins: Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence [video]

#61

Post by qseraserasera »

UnpossibleJim wrote: post #8
devoply wrote: post #4

Once intelligence is "solved", most humans are completely and utterly screwed.

There's the "Wally vs. Star Trek" theory of Artificial Intelligence (I know it sounds goofy, but it makes a difference when looking towards the direction of AI). If you look at the direction AI will take, science fiction is really all we have to go on and we have three platforms: Terminator - To be avoided at all costs (everyone agrees) Wally - AI does its best to "take care" of us, turning us into infantile, unthink…

I think the aspect that is missing for a lot of these hypotheticals is the amount of input we allow the AI to receive.

In the Star Trek model we see the input directly limited to the data in the ship and surrounding visual areas (as far as i'm aware)

In the Wally model we see that the input is limited to a single optic/auditory/ect location.

We have a potential network that input can come from everywhere cameras, phones connected to the internet of everything. I think it really comes down to with how we want to interact with AI and how much input should it have to directly interface with us.

Also it's very hard to know even during deployment how accurate an AI will have a grasp on human want and interaction. A lot of people are worried about the 'non-consenting' information potentially available to the net. Very few people, if any, will ever really be able to address it should an AI be created and deployed.

Re: Jeff Hawkins: Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence [video]

#62

Post by gnode »

derefr wrote: post #50
howlin wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's important to recognize that the cortex is a relatively late addition to the structure of the brain. Brains have been learning about the world and how to behave appropriately long before some mammals developed such a large region here. It's much more likely that the core functionality to be an autonomous agent in the world is encoded in the limbic system (e.g. basal ganglia, hypothalamus, mid brain and brain stem…

Certainly those regions are doing something in humans; and certainly those regions had those functions in species without a cortex. But the implication that these regions' presence in the human brain implies they're the ultimate arbiter of the same functionality there, isn't guaranteed to be true. Brains really do use "subsumption" (in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsumption_architecture sense) to accomplish va…

> There's no evidence that I know of that the limbic system and the cortex are in this sort of relationship

It's true that in mammals (possessing a neocortex) the cortex takes over various processes traditionally performed by the limbic system. Complete removal of the cortex in rats demonstrates that behaviour can revert to entirely limbic control: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/564358

While the cortex can definitely be / become "in charge" of complex intelligent behaviours, it may still need the brain's phylogenically older machinery to bootstrap it.

Re: Jeff Hawkins: Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence [video]

#63

Post by fjfaase »

What about bird intelligence? The modern view is that the parts of the bird brain use to be called the pallium actually are organized in a similar way as the neocortex. Although a bird brain is usually smaller than the mammal brain, it has in many case the same amount of neurons. Actually, a high percentage of neurons are located in the pallium than in the neocortex. Please note that our cerebellum contains more than half of the number of neurons in the brain.

Re: Jeff Hawkins: Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence [video]

#64

Post by joe_the_user »

gnode wrote: post #31

I think the cortex is attractive to AI research because its highly uniform micro-anatomy suggests there is a simple algorithm behind general intelligence to be found within. While intelligent behaviours appear to reside in the cortex, the limbic system is heavily involved in learning and cognition generally. Additionally, animals lacking a cortex, like birds, are still capable of many intelligent behaviours typically…

I wonder whether the cortex may be a kind of FPGA wired up by the limbic system, not naturally containing the machinery for general learning, and a red herring to the pursuit of general intelligence.

The challenge is to discover the nature of "general intelligence", I'd say. To me, it seems like GE would not actually be a set of specific behaviors but rather a processes that integrates, extends, mediates between, connects etc specific behaviors. Probably whatever-does-GE would both program and be-programmed-by the limbic system and whatever other systems it relates to, and given this the cortex like a good candidate given that it accompanies the human ability to active "generally" (and it is quite possible that similar functionality might reside in a different system in different brains see comment by derefr: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20328311).

Re: Jeff Hawkins: Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence [video]

#65

Post by Barrin92 »

howlin wrote: post #47
derefr wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While intelligent behaviours appear to reside in the cortex, the limbic system is heavily involved in learning and cognition generally. We understand the limbic system to process motivation and emotion; could the limbic system's activation during cognition not be "explained away" by it being recruited to process the emotional or motivational aspects of sensory or memory data? (Just like how there is visual cortex r…

It's important to recognize that the cortex is a relatively late addition to the structure of the brain. Brains have been learning about the world and how to behave appropriately long before some mammals developed such a large region here. It's much more likely that the core functionality to be an autonomous agent in the world is encoded in the limbic system (e.g. basal ganglia, hypothalamus, mid brain and brain stem…

Exactly. I think when people talk about intelligent machines today what they are most after is autonomous, robust, common sense orientation and agency. It's not the ability to do algebra or reason logically, because we can actually already built systems that are quite good at that.

What we really want is a robot or a car that can orient itself in the abscence of structured data and doesn't glitch out into the wall once it loses its objective. And even primitive animals are very good at that.

Re: Jeff Hawkins: Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence [video]

#66

Post by FeeJai »

jcims wrote: post #2

Just a side note, Lex has been killing it with this podcast. He’s been able to land some remarkable guests for a relatively new show with a niche market. I personally think he does a great job of mixing up the conversation with both technical and philosophical angles. Highly recommended.

Yeah. It is impressive how he manages to self-market and how different he is on various media channels to his real-life personality

Re: Jeff Hawkins: Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence [video]

#67

Post by DuskStar »

clmul wrote: post #60
DuskStar wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this situation, heads of state and corporate executives are as much 'Average Joes' as kings and queens were a few centuries ago.

Yes, but a government and a corporation is much more than their head of state and corporate executive. If the actions of the government have a significant negative effect on a majority of the population, you can be quite sure that the government will be overturned at some point.

Who's going to do the overturning, though? If all you need is mental labor and capital, and AIs can supply mental labor for anyone... Well, the current holders of capital are going to have quite the advantage.

Re: Jeff Hawkins: Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence [video]

#68

Post by raindeer3 »

p1esk wrote: post #30
canistel wrote: post #25

Dileep George, one of the original co-founders of Numenta have since moved on to co-found Vicarious.They were in the news after breaking captcha, that too with commonplace hardware. They are far too secretive, but there is reason to believe that they too are part of the HTM legacy...

They publish occasional DL papers, but results are not impressive, so mainstream DL people ignore them.

The don't do deep learning. Their papers are based on graphical models. Their RCN model can be said to be inspired by Numentas earlier HTM model that dileep developed there, but is very different in fundamental ways.

Re: Jeff Hawkins: Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence [video]

#69

Post by mark_l_watson »

gnode wrote: post #31

I think the cortex is attractive to AI research because its highly uniform micro-anatomy suggests there is a simple algorithm behind general intelligence to be found within. While intelligent behaviours appear to reside in the cortex, the limbic system is heavily involved in learning and cognition generally. Additionally, animals lacking a cortex, like birds, are still capable of many intelligent behaviours typically…

I also find it interesting that birds don’t have a neuro cortex: my pet parrot exhibits a few very intelligent behaviors.

The newer thousand brain theory feels close to correct to me. I used the older HTM for a fairly quick time series anomaly detection experiment and it was generally promising. I would be curious how well a thousand brain approach would work.

Re: Jeff Hawkins: Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence [video]

#70

Post by mark_l_watson »

jcims wrote: post #2

Just a side note, Lex has been killing it with this podcast. He’s been able to land some remarkable guests for a relatively new show with a niche market. I personally think he does a great job of mixing up the conversation with both technical and philosophical angles. Highly recommended.

Absolutely! His interviews are my favorite recurring podcasts. A distant second, but still very good, is Azeem Ahzar’s Exponential View podcasts.
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