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What does it mean for a machine to “understand”?

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Re: What does it mean for a machine to “understand”?

#81
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Siri was waiting for a command and executed the best command that matched. Which is, make a phone call. ISTM there's no more "understanding" involved in this than when I touch the Contacts icon on my screen, then "C", "A", "R", etc until Carol's entry is displayed, and then I touch the Phone icon to initiate a call. The fact that the interface used was sound-waves that the device recognised as matching the keyword…

Your neurons don’t understand who carol is either, they’re just automatically responding to stimulus.

But am "I" - my consciousness, my understanding - nothing more than a collection of impulses traveling around a particular network of neurons?

We don't know.

I'd suggest that anyone who purports to give a definitive answer to that is in fact making a leap of faith - in one direction or another.

Re: What does it mean for a machine to “understand”?

#82
I think getting near human level for NLP understanding means be being able to visualize and combine all of the dynamic systems that language represents. I mean it's obvious that you can get pretty far just by processing a lot of text, but there is a limit. Some information about the way things work just is not encoded very well in text the way it is in video input. So you need to be able to do a sort of physics simulation for starters. Except it can't just be physics, because there are a lot of patterns that occur that you need to be able to call up and manipulate or combine that are not just plain physics. These patterns are not represented in text.

There are projects doing video and text understanding. I think the trick to efficient generalization is to have the representations properly factored out somehow. Maybe things like capsule networks will help. Although that my guess is that to get really sort of componentized efficient understanding neural networks are not going to be the most effective way.

Re: What does it mean for a machine to “understand”?

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get how ML works. I don't mean loops as a for(int i) loop, but the concept of a loop itself, a circle. A self-driven car with ML decision making is still bounded by some rules we will be forced to compromise on. Some people at MIT are focusing on deaths per miles driven as a safety metric to determine whether we can replace humans with ai cars and when that might happen. But given the constraints of ML/ai you will…

> A self-driven car with ML decision making is still bounded by some rules we will be forced to compromise on. The atom in the molecules in the neurons of your brain are bounded by the laws of Physics. They can't disobey them, they are as free as the coefficient of the ML tables. > If all the humans left the planet, the car wouldn't be described as understanding the world, it'll be seen as a generic device sitting in…

I like your hachiko characterization of a patient and loyal car. That level of automation would be nice, I find cars to be a chore sometimes.

What I'm trying to get at is deeper. I guess it's a question of philosophical form. Can you grow an software package to the point of transcending a looped format? Usually a program has our goals and desires established in the coding process and we may through in some qualitative checking functions. We then compile it into a binary form that runs on a CPU that has a clock. That CPU always runs, and the human relevant meaning in the code like function names, the human interpretation of images, video, maps and sound was evaporated only leaving streams of binary. The binary flows through logic gates that act like plumbing tools. The tools can check their own output and proceed down different qualitative paths.

ML as a form grinds out the problem of optimizing the path through those logic gates against qualitative checks. Then we store the working model and loop it at runtime.

So why can you give a human the idea 'making cars can be sold and get you laid' and the human will change their entire career, living location and lifestyle to suit a better economic output, but the program cannot reason/create a form that is not a loop?

If we give a car body sensors and body 'brains' it can synthesize many different perspectives at once. Tactile door handles could give fingerprint/heartbeat/temperature senses on the human driver, as one tiny example. You could program in assumptions about what a high temperature human needs and wants. You could give the car every kind of imaging sensor, air quality sensors, moisture level sensors. You could track and synthesize all that data across time and evolve in a sense for when it's going to rain like ants have, or whatever. It could 'feel' the world. But it would still be that sheepdog waiting at home.

Could it anticipate your needs? Only as a historical projection and whatever you program in. Can you infer human intent, thought or value from sensors? Computer vision applied to human faces or voices? I don't think so.

Humans use different forms of language to transmit intent, values, stories, feelings. The idea that we could have a language or sensor inference that we talk to the car with that will perceive and adapt to the conflict our own mind is wrestling with and seeks to solve is difficult. Google's automated hair dressing appointment booker is cool, it is extending the breadth of voice commands a computer can respond to without having to understand what the words mean or the conflicts implied in understanding their meaning but only how they should be plumbed around as electric bits.

I guess the endless hope is that we just have enough quantity of processed information we can build a machine that you can interface with, it'll solve the problem and that you don't need to know how the innards of the machine work. Which always seems like a plausible goal until it isn't. Web apps break, the internet can behave unpredictably, washing machines require cleaning and soap/ washing knowledge, cars break. Stuff that can be ignored is usually because we pay others to fix the problems quietly. Shifting the burden of understanding how to deal with looped quantative machines to the capatalist/currency system, another quantative system.

The challenge of allowing a human to ignore the new loops one must learn the structure of and thus be able to say the machine 'understands' me instead of I having to understand it, is a forever doomed hope that we benefit from trying to solve.

Re: What does it mean for a machine to “understand”?

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the next version of Siri can locate Carol's phone in the next room and will just beep her phone to tell her to see you. Of course that's still not understanding. The classic analogue is of course the Chinese room argument: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

Which is an absolutely textbook example of begging the question. If you could make a machine pass the Turing test it might be intelligent - but no one has, and it's debatable if it's even possible, and it's even more debatable if, hype notwithstanding, the Turing test is even a good test of human-equivalent intelligence, because it ignores side channels that are fundamental to human communication, including tone of v…

We can't make a machine intelligent because we're not intelligent enough to make it, nor to understand understanding.

Re: What does it mean for a machine to “understand”?

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A self-driven car with ML decision making is still bounded by some rules we will be forced to compromise on. The atom in the molecules in the neurons of your brain are bounded by the laws of Physics. They can't disobey them, they are as free as the coefficient of the ML tables. > If all the humans left the planet, the car wouldn't be described as understanding the world, it'll be seen as a generic device sitting in…

I like your hachiko characterization of a patient and loyal car. That level of automation would be nice, I find cars to be a chore sometimes. What I'm trying to get at is deeper. I guess it's a question of philosophical form. Can you grow an software package to the point of transcending a looped format? Usually a program has our goals and desires established in the coding process and we may through in some qualitativ…

Just bring it down to the basics. Our brains operate on neurons, neurons operate on physics, physics can be fully simulated by computers.

This looping, CPU, "programming it in", and app concept are not the direction machine learning is going in. That's not how deep learning and neural networks work. You can integrate them with an app and do looping yes, but you can also just connect them to each other. No looping, no "programming it in", no apps.

Re: What does it mean for a machine to “understand”?

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like your hachiko characterization of a patient and loyal car. That level of automation would be nice, I find cars to be a chore sometimes. What I'm trying to get at is deeper. I guess it's a question of philosophical form. Can you grow an software package to the point of transcending a looped format? Usually a program has our goals and desires established in the coding process and we may through in some qualitativ…

Just bring it down to the basics. Our brains operate on neurons, neurons operate on physics, physics can be fully simulated by computers. This looping, CPU, "programming it in", and app concept are not the direction machine learning is going in. That's not how deep learning and neural networks work. You can integrate them with an app and do looping yes, but you can also just connect them to each other. No looping, no…

Our brains don't solely work on neurons. There was a neuroscience video with 3-4 prominent people in the field dispensing of the idea that brains are computers. They squirt fluids around, it is an unknown. There are plenty of things about existence that physics does not capture.

Frankly I'm not saying ml is programmed in, only the initial conditions are, which is where the meaning is. We have hired a lot of low income earners to classify images for image recognition, which is the outsourcing of discerning meaning from the CPU to the he human. These kind of broad discussions don't go anywhere here, I should go somewhere more philosophical.

Re: What does it mean for a machine to “understand”?

#87
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It certainly doesn’t understand Go as a board game humans invented as a stimulating mental exercise that became competitive enough to see whether human programmers could come up with a program that could beat any human. And whatever cultural history went along with playing Go. Certainly chess playing has been used as an analogy in the west for many activities involving strategy. This is something no computer currentl…

It might not understand the socio-cultural context of the game, but it understands strategy better than us.

Right, so computers are better at us for many tasks, but if we're thinking in terms of general intelligence, the context is pretty important.

Re: What does it mean for a machine to “understand”?

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A self-driven car with ML decision making is still bounded by some rules we will be forced to compromise on. The atom in the molecules in the neurons of your brain are bounded by the laws of Physics. They can't disobey them, they are as free as the coefficient of the ML tables. > If all the humans left the planet, the car wouldn't be described as understanding the world, it'll be seen as a generic device sitting in…

I like your hachiko characterization of a patient and loyal car. That level of automation would be nice, I find cars to be a chore sometimes. What I'm trying to get at is deeper. I guess it's a question of philosophical form. Can you grow an software package to the point of transcending a looped format? Usually a program has our goals and desires established in the coding process and we may through in some qualitativ…

I notice the similitude with the story of Hachikō when I had already wrote 2/3 of my comment. (It's an nice punchline anyway.)

You should take a look at the play analysis of the games of AlphaStar made by Beastyqt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaJYF4iSvNs . He absolutely anthropomorphize the Protoss AlphaStar and says that it thinks this and then it thinks that. That version plays nice and use interesting moves. If that is thinking and understanding is an open question. (My answer is "just a little".)

If you have time you can see the Terran and Zerg version of AlphaStar. He is not happy with them. The Zerg version is a one trick pony that can almost be programed as an expert system. The Terran version doesn't play very well, because it's very difficult to know where to put the buildings and Siege Tanks.

It's interesting to see the difference in the anthropomorphized analysis.

Re: What does it mean for a machine to “understand”?

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just bring it down to the basics. Our brains operate on neurons, neurons operate on physics, physics can be fully simulated by computers. This looping, CPU, "programming it in", and app concept are not the direction machine learning is going in. That's not how deep learning and neural networks work. You can integrate them with an app and do looping yes, but you can also just connect them to each other. No looping, no…

Our brains don't solely work on neurons. There was a neuroscience video with 3-4 prominent people in the field dispensing of the idea that brains are computers. They squirt fluids around, it is an unknown. There are plenty of things about existence that physics does not capture. Frankly I'm not saying ml is programmed in, only the initial conditions are, which is where the meaning is. We have hired a lot of low incom…

Fluids in the brain carry a few hormones from here to there and the distribution of neurotransmisors have an important role, but they act very slowly. If we ever have a 100% bug compatible model of the neurons of the brain, adding the flux in fluids will be easy. They can be modeled with a very low number of slow changing variables.

I don't expect to see ever a 100% bug compatible model of the brain. I expect to see some system that does a somewhat similar calculation and produce results that look similar to the result in the brain. Something like the eye and a camera.

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