Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

docs.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 252 posts

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#91

Post by skummetmaelk »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #64
Will_Do wrote: post #7

That was really interesting. I'm interested why he's so pessimistic about the simulating a brain approach. Yes it's the boring and obvious approach but it also seems the most direct. Also found this quote interesting > Might have to make it illegal to evolve AI strains or an upper bound of computation per person and closely track all computational resources on earth.

The pessimism over simulating a human brain is two-fold. First, the human brain is built on a computational substrate that is completely and utterly unlike silicon. It is extremely inefficient to effect computation by simulating a computing model on silicon that is almost pathological for silicon to express. The abstract computational model of the human brain necessarily has an equivalent direct expression in computi…

Silicon is actually closer to the brain than you might think. Neurons transfer charge by diffusion, so do transistors operating in sub-threshold. The problem is that we almost exclusively use transistors operating above threshold because it is required for digital logic.

Analog CMOS circuits can approach the energy efficiency of real neurons.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#92

Post by abecedarius »

Will_Do wrote: post #7

That was really interesting. I'm interested why he's so pessimistic about the simulating a brain approach. Yes it's the boring and obvious approach but it also seems the most direct. Also found this quote interesting > Might have to make it illegal to evolve AI strains or an upper bound of computation per person and closely track all computational resources on earth.

For much more discussion, see http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/brain-emulation-roadmap-report.pdf

My take is that it's a lot of R&D work, and it's not clear which approach will get to a human level first nor which is safer. The emulation approach seems lower variance to me than an intelligence-from-scratch approach, even though there's tons of variance there too. We're just looking at a very uncertain future.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#93

Post by MarkMc »

mythrwy wrote: post #67
rdlecler1 wrote: post #29

Background: I did AI and Philosophy of Mind in undergrad, an MSc focused on ALife, then a PhD at Yale under a Macarthur Fellow who developed the theoretical framework for the 'evolution of Evolvability' where I worked on computational evolutionary biology. I can say we're not going to blindly brute force our way forward, but instead we'll need to reverse engineer nature's core algorithms to generate hard AI. Every ti…

Background: Some guy on the Internet with an unrelated Bachelors degree he didn't study that hard for and has picked up a little Python and Javascript somewhere along the way. I know of no biological forms that have evolved wheels. But wheels have turned out to be a hell of a lot faster than fins or legs. I see no reason "intelligence" has to follow the pathways or limitations of biology or neurology at all. Although…

I would also point to heavier-than-air flight. For thousands of years people tried to mimic flapping wings of birds, but in the end it was the unnatural propellor and fixed wing design that gave us flight.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#94

Post by jamiek88 »

skummetmaelk wrote: post #90
mythrwy wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Background: Some guy on the Internet with an unrelated Bachelors degree he didn't study that hard for and has picked up a little Python and Javascript somewhere along the way. I know of no biological forms that have evolved wheels. But wheels have turned out to be a hell of a lot faster than fins or legs. I see no reason "intelligence" has to follow the pathways or limitations of biology or neurology at all. Although…

Wheels are useless if you don't have roads. EDIT: Please explain your downvotes here? Don't you people see that this, coupled with there being no useful intermediate stage before developing a full wheel, prevents evolution from "inventing" it.

Well that's not true at all.

See: Wheelbarrow; amongst many wheeled devices I can think of immediately.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#95

Post by tim333 »

chanakya wrote: post #65

What is the best book/reference to understand why there seems to be general agreement that AGI/"broad" AI will happen? TFA compares the relative likelihood of the various approaches, but says nothing about the absolute likelihood of any of them. Are there signs of AGI we can see today? Is there an argument/data which links the huge improvements we're seeing in narrow AI to the likelihood of AGI?

Best is pretty subjective but you might like Wait But Why's thing https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revol...

We have AI algorithms today like the DeepMind Atari playing stuff that are general and so you could call AGI but that are way below human intelligence. Basically things advance every year in hardware and software and so will probably get there one day.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#96

Post by adrianN »

chanakya wrote: post #77
ktRolster wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best argument I've heard is that we can use a computer to model any physical process.....the brain is a physical process, therefore we can use a computer to model the brain. If you think that there is some process in the brain that would be theoretically impossible for computers to model, that would be an interesting topic of discussion.

The brain is a physical entity, yes, so in theory we should be able to model it, assuming we know all the laws it works on with enough precision. This is a big if, but even if that's granted, is there anything which indicates that this is imminent?

Unless we come with a way more efficient theory of intelligence than quantum mechanics we won't be able to just simulate a brain for a very long time. Currently we're struggling to simulate systems with a few dozen atoms, so there is no way to scale basic physical simulation up to a whole brain.

Hopefully we'll figure out a more useable level of abstraction that still allows for intelligent behavior.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#97

Post by skummetmaelk »

jamiek88 wrote: post #94
skummetmaelk wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wheels are useless if you don't have roads. EDIT: Please explain your downvotes here? Don't you people see that this, coupled with there being no useful intermediate stage before developing a full wheel, prevents evolution from "inventing" it.

Well that's not true at all. See: Wheelbarrow; amongst many wheeled devices I can think of immediately.

Wheelbarrow creatures? I don't see how that would be advantageous at all.

Also, try running around with a wheelbarrow in a dense forest.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#98

Post by gradys »

fasquoika wrote: post #88
chanakya wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The brain is a physical entity, yes, so in theory we should be able to model it, assuming we know all the laws it works on with enough precision. This is a big if, but even if that's granted, is there anything which indicates that this is imminent?

I think it depends on how you define "imminent". If we're talking a hundred years, well, a lot can happen in that time. We didn't even have computers a hundred years ago, and now they can do certain things that are considered particularly "human", like have a fairly coherent conversation

I'd be interested to see an example of an AI having a fairly coherent conversation. Most of the impressive seeming examples of this based on response ranking. When a message from a human comes in, the system ranks the responses in its repository of human-written responses to find one that fits.

Because the responses are human-written, they can seem locally coherent, but since the model generally isn't tracking any state, the conversation never really goes anywhere. Also, if you try to talk to one of these response rankers about something it doesn't have any canned responses for, obviously it doesn't work.

Natural language generation on the other hand, where the model writes each response character-by-character or word-by-word, has the potential to do something much more interesting, but the state of the art there isn't quite at the level of "fairly coherent" AFAIK.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#99

Post by bluetwo »

ghaff wrote: post #52
return0 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> neuroscientist say: "why didn't you talk to us 15 years ago? We could have told you that!". Interested to hear about these. I can honestly not remember any.

There's been this tension over whether achieving apparent human levels of artificial intelligence requires thinking like and following processes associated with human learning and intelligence pretty much forever. Today, computational capability and data have gotten us to a place where there's been a big step forward while largely ignoring how it relates to human-level thought. (After all, we got powered flight by la…

Actually, previous to the Wright brothers, the dominant theories of flight involved studying how birds flew and theorizing what parts were important and trying to replicate them. You could get a degree in this area of study.

I do agree that different approaches are needed.

In the case of flight it was the realization that the airfoil is important and the rest is window dressing.

Re: Where will artificial general intelligence come from?

#100

Post by nurettin »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #64
Will_Do wrote: post #7

That was really interesting. I'm interested why he's so pessimistic about the simulating a brain approach. Yes it's the boring and obvious approach but it also seems the most direct. Also found this quote interesting > Might have to make it illegal to evolve AI strains or an upper bound of computation per person and closely track all computational resources on earth.

The pessimism over simulating a human brain is two-fold. First, the human brain is built on a computational substrate that is completely and utterly unlike silicon. It is extremely inefficient to effect computation by simulating a computing model on silicon that is almost pathological for silicon to express. The abstract computational model of the human brain necessarily has an equivalent direct expression in computi…

>> Second, and related, the abstract mathematical nature of intelligence is well-understood and the human brain must be an expression of that.

That's nice, but whenever I researched, I only got vague explanations involving recursion and unicorns.

Post reply on HN