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Karl Friston: a neuroscientist who might hold the key to true AI

wired.com

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Re: Karl Friston: a neuroscientist who might hold the key to true AI

#81

Post by andrewfromx »

amelius wrote: post #64
andrewfromx wrote: post #62

I think true AI will not be a computer program that suddenly becomes human like. It will be a human that becomes more and more cyborg like https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/01/thomas-reardon-and-ctrl-la... Soon humans will have more and more brain surgery adding cyborg features to their non-artificial-intelligence, just their natural-intelligence until at some point, they will be so machine like, boom, AI.

Reminds me of the philosophical question of what happens to one's consciousness if you'd replace their neurons, one at a time, by electronic equivalents.

Who’s going first https://www.neuralink.com/ ? 50% off if you mention hacker news and free brain ointment for after surgery pain.

Re: Karl Friston: a neuroscientist who might hold the key to true AI

#82

Post by [deleted] »

marmaduke wrote: post #66

I’ve seen Friston speak a few times. My favorite quote along these lines is that “your arm moves because you predict it will, and your motor system seeks to minimize prediction error.” He’s been a huge figure in human neuroscience, bringing statistics to all those psychologists with fMRI scanners

[deleted]

Re: Karl Friston: a neuroscientist who might hold the key to true AI

#83

Post by SubiculumCode »

temperfidelis2x wrote: post #61
SubiculumCode wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least provide a summary. I mean, "After completing his medical studies, Friston moved to Oxford and spent two years as a resident trainee at a Victorian-era hospital called Littlemore. Founded under the 1845 Lunacy Act, Littlemore had originally been instituted to help transfer all “pauper lunatics” from workhouses to hospitals. By the mid-1980s, when Friston arrived, it was one of the last of the old asylums on t…

In that case the wikipedia article is probably a decent starting point to see whether you are interested or not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_energy_principle

I'd agree but the "free energy principle" is first mentioned a good 1,000+ words into the article.

Re: Karl Friston: a neuroscientist who might hold the key to true AI

#84

Post by snrji »

atschantz wrote: post #41
snrji wrote: post #10

By no means will I be ever able to grasp Friston's theory, but the free energy minimisation vaguely reminds me of Curiosity-driven reinforcement learning. Can anyone with more understanding than me confirm or deny this apparent resemblance?

There is a large overlap, for instance, the popular VIME exploration algorithm [1] uses part of the free energy objective function. However, free energy isn't a theory of curiosity per se, its posed as description of self-organisation. It just so happens that you can express the free energy functional in terms of epistemic (curious) and instrumental (reward) components. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.09674

Excuse me, another followup question (can't edit on mobile): can you ELI5 how do exploitation and exploration "emerge" naturally instead of the tradeoff being explicitly coded as in RL?

Re: Karl Friston: a neuroscientist who might hold the key to true AI

#85

Post by snrji »

paraschopra wrote: post #50
snrji wrote: post #10

By no means will I be ever able to grasp Friston's theory, but the free energy minimisation vaguely reminds me of Curiosity-driven reinforcement learning. Can anyone with more understanding than me confirm or deny this apparent resemblance?

There are similarities. The difference in two approaches are: - FEP is Bayesian in nature, while there's usually no notion of uncertainties in curiosity driven RL - In FEP, there's no explicit weighting of explore/exploit tradeoff. It automatically emerges from equations - FEP, since it's Bayesian, allows for more complex reasoning (like counterfactuals) - Curiosity driven RL is scalable while FEP is not feasible for…

Excuse me, another followup question (can't edit on mobile): can you ELI5 how do exploitation and exploration "emerge" naturally instead of the tradeoff being explicitly coded as in RL?

Re: Karl Friston: a neuroscientist who might hold the key to true AI

#87

Post by poslathian »

calebm wrote: post #69

This almost sounds like a special case of Jeremy England's dissipation-driven adaptation theory. Does anyone know the overlap/differences between these theories (other than specificity)?

Ctrl-F England and here you are. I’ve been searching for someone more informed than me that has compared and contrasted the two but haven’t found anything.

Re: Karl Friston: a neuroscientist who might hold the key to true AI

#88

Post by [deleted] »

amelius wrote: post #64
andrewfromx wrote: post #62

I think true AI will not be a computer program that suddenly becomes human like. It will be a human that becomes more and more cyborg like https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/01/thomas-reardon-and-ctrl-la... Soon humans will have more and more brain surgery adding cyborg features to their non-artificial-intelligence, just their natural-intelligence until at some point, they will be so machine like, boom, AI.

Reminds me of the philosophical question of what happens to one's consciousness if you'd replace their neurons, one at a time, by electronic equivalents.

[deleted]

Re: Karl Friston: a neuroscientist who might hold the key to true AI

#89

Post by damnson »

Intelligence automatically emerging in nature is very likely and an obvious requirement to humans rising to be the dominant species on earth. FEP makes it seem like this is a new idea. How we think about the meta, and reconstruct ideas from our own perspective has been embedded in human adaptation as long as recorded history. To model "true" AI from a human perspective using FEP you need to model AI from the initial frame of reference, where human intelligence emerged automatically. This could perhaps be done through manipulating a fundamental components of our brains or simulating scenarios where this could of happened.

Re: Karl Friston: a neuroscientist who might hold the key to true AI

#90

Post by ss2003 »

diego_moita wrote: post #26

I hate this Wired style of "journalism": 99% of hype, hyperbole and anecdotes wrapped in 1% of evidence and substance.

It is a really annoying read. If there is really something to FEP you certainly won't find it on this article. If you can't explain something so that a ten year old can understand it, you don't really know it. According to this article no one really knows FEP. But the worst of it is the subjectivity of Friston's approach. He likes routine. He gets all out of sorts if his regular activity is disrupted. He doesn't like surprise, so he concludes the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything is avoiding surprise. Very self serving. Well guess what, there are plenty of people (and other organisms too!) that like surprises! And they do quite well, thank you. With out an appreciation and actual inclination to seek out surprises the drive to exploration would be snuffed out. Without that drive new habitats and opportunities are left untapped and wasted. It's fine that he doesn't like surprises. That doesn't make it a good basis for AI consciousness or to explain living creatures in general.
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