Earlier quoted context omitted.
carbon chemistry + thermodynamics
!= "luck"
so you think cells had some insight on how to evolve themselves?
John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
821–830 of 930 posts
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#822Earlier quoted context omitted.
Humans are not AGI's. We're specialised in human survival, not general intelligence. We're pretty limited in intelligence in many ways, actually, and the environment doesn't support generality. Without a proper challenge an agent would not become super intelligent. The cost of developing such an intelligence would conflict with the need to minimise energy for survival.
It's best to think about AGI as... at what point can you drop out of high school and still do well in life (or do you even need high school). It's true that it's not a survival issue, but sadly, it's not a test of "pure knowledge" either. There is a great deal of social structure, even "fluff" that is only relevant for interaction (like getting an 80's reference).
> at what point can you drop out of high school and still do well in life
That means you're specialised in survival. If you do well in life, you have a higher chance of procreation. Your genes survival depends on it.
General Intelligence is like Free Will - a fascinating concept with no base in reality. A mental experiment.
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#823Earlier quoted context omitted.
> On top of that is some kind of coarse planner giving goals to the lower level systems. There are counterexamples, such as AlphaGo which is all about planning and deep thinking. It also combines learning with evolution (genetic selection).
True, but AlphaGo is specialized on a very specific task where planning and deep thinking is a basic requirement for high level play. We don't need to think 10 "turns" ahead when trying to walk through a door, we just try to push or pull on it. And if the door is locked or if there's another person coming from the opposite side we'll handle that situation when we come across it.
It took us millions/billions of years of evolution and a couple of years of training in real life to be able to walk through a door. It's not a simple task even for humans. It requires maintaining a dynamic equilibrium which is basically solving a differential equation just to keep from falling.
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#824Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Agreed about the meaningful choices and dynamically generated reactions from NPC, but general AI is not needed for this in my opinion. Maybe, but it would be an impressive demonstration of AI that would be very different to what has shown for Go, Chess and StarCraft. I think a compelling AI written short story for example would be leagues ahead of what is required to write a convincing chatbot e.g. you need an over…
AI-generated "true" fiction seems like scifi to me. Of course an hypothetical "Turing Test" of fiction-writing might be able to fool some people, and in an age where Netflix has been accused of producing content "by algorithm" this seems increasingly possible, but... ... what is "true" or "good" fiction is up for debate. In fact, it's a debate that can never be solved, because there is no right answer except what it…
> Of course an hypothetical "Turing Test" of fiction-writing might be able to fool some people, and in an age where Netflix has been accused of producing content "by algorithm" this seems increasingly possible, but...
So it feels like you should be able to procedurally generate stories at least something by combining common story arches, templates, character archetypes etc. without too much effort but I've yet to find any compelling examples of this anywhere. When you look into the problem more, you realise it's a lot harder than it seems.
We've seen lots of examples of chat bots that are said to pass the Turing Test but really aren't that intelligent at all so a "Turing Test of fiction writing" as you put sounds like a super interesting next step to me.
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#825Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Horses don’t plan though[...]” Can you expand on this statement? While I have no way to “debug” a horse’s brain in real-time, my experiences suggest they absolutely conduct complex decision-making while engaging in activities. Two examples which immediately come to mind where I believe I see evidence of “if this, then that” planning behavior: 1. Equestrian jumping events; horses often balk before a hurdle 2. Herds o…
The context was this quote: > intelligence is mostly about getting through the next 10-30 seconds of life without screwing up In this context horses don't plan or have much capacity for shared learning, at least not as far as I know. Quote: “This study indicates that horses do not learn from seeing another horse performing a particular spatial task, which is in line with most other findings from social learning exper…
> intelligence is mostly about getting through the next 10-30 seconds of life without screwing up
This is probably a variant of Andrew Ng's affirmation that ML can solve anything a human could solve in one second, with enough training data.
But intelligence actually has a different role. It's not for those repeating situations that we could solve by mere reflex. It's for those rare situations where we have no cached response, where we need to think logically. Reflex is model-free reinforcement learning, and thinking is model-based RL. Both of them are necessary tools for taking decisions, but they are optimised for different situations.
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#826Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you think what he's done was easily foreseeable as possible, you haven't been paying much attention to headlines the past fifteen years.
It's only obvious in retrospect. Every step along the way, there has been thousands of people saying "this is impossible" or "this is theoretically possible, but it can't be engineered" or "this is possible in principle, but it will be so costly to develop that it doesn't make sense". When AGI is developed, it will seem obvious in retrospect. Participating engineers will receive middle-brow dismissals saying that thi…
Exactly.
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#827Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very true. Newton was an alchemist first and foremost and spent the vast majority of his time practicing alchemy rather than -what today one would call- science. One has to wonder what private reasons/results a genius of his magnitude had, in order to do that. This little known fact is so embarrassing to some institutions [2], that they made up a new word "chymistry" in order to further obscure the issue and not outr…
> One has to wonder what private reasons/results a genius of his magnitude had, in order to do that. Is there a reason to expect that someone who wanted to investigate the laws of the composition and reactivity of matter, in the late 1600s/early 1700s, would end up studying chemistry rather than alchemy? Sure, Boyle had introduced “chemistry” as an idea in 1661 (before Newton was born), but I imagine that alchemy wou…
Alchemy was never an academic field. It was a tradition veiled in secrecy, requiring years of private work and knowledge transmission through strict and very narrow (typically teacher-student) channels.
Your point has been brought up before -usually as an attempt by established institutions to whitewash and explain away Newton's idiosyncrasies- but there is no evidence whatsoever to back it. On the contrary, what we know (and there is a lot we do know thanks to his writings) about Newton and alchemy absolutely indicates him being immersed in the Hermetic worldview and alchemical paradigm. Clearly, Newton was practicing alchemy not as a way to look for novel techniques or as a way to bridge the old and new worlds together, but primarily because he was a devout believer.
Newton -a profound genius- stood at the threshold of two worlds colliding. He was also a groundbreaking scientist in optics/mechanics/mathematics. He was aware of Boyle's chemical research. Knowing all of that, he _absolutely_ chose to dedicate his life to alchemy. That is immensely interesting.
"Much of Newton's writing on alchemy may have been lost in a fire in his laboratory, so the true extent of his work in this area may have been larger than is currently known. Newton also suffered a nervous breakdown during his period of alchemical work, possibly due to some form of chemical poisoning (perhaps from mercury, lead, or some other substance)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton%27s_occult_studie...
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#828He should first work on figuring out if AGI is possible. Why assume the human mind is computable?
That's exactly what a scientist would say. Engineers invent things because nobody told them they were impossible.
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#829Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with the "field of researchers" is that most of us aren't geniuses. We're just plugging away at problems, like normal people. The opportunity for a genius is to come in, synthesize all existing information on the subject, and then come up with a novel approach to the whole thing. In some part, I think that is what Elon Musk has been able to do effectively. He comes into a field that already exists, reads…
I don't see Elon as a genius at any kind of engineering. Everything he's done there was pretty easily foreseeable as being physically possible. What he is remarkably good at is selecting daring and potentially market-changing business goals, and executing against them consistently and aggressively despite naysayers. It's easy to say that it's probably possible to land a orbital rocket first stage. But who would bet a…
Just an aside, Elon did not start Tesla. He was an early investor and part of his deal with the company was to be able to claim to be a founder.
Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence
#830Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes but it sounds weird to me because Carmack has spent his whole life involved with games but has not been known for an interest in game AI before.
Game AI has nothing to do with AGI (or even regular AI) beyond the surface level description OP provided. The reason game AI hasn't progressed in the last few decades isn't because technology is holding us back - after all we can already achieve impressive machine learning feats using current-gen GPUs - it's because bad NPC AI is by design , so players can learn to overcome them and succeed. Very few people want to p…
> it's because bad NPC AI is by design, so players can learn to overcome them and succeed.
That's part of it, but there are other factors too. The more complex the AI, the harder (i.e. more expensive) the game is to tune and test. Game producers and designers are naturally very uncomfortable shipping a game whose behavior they can't reasonably predict.
This is a big part of why gamers always talk about loving procedural generation in games but so few games actually do it. When the software can produce a combinatorial number of play experiences, it's really hard to ensure that most of the ones players will encounter are fun.