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One of the more useful heuristics I've heard is that when humans make split second decisions (like recognizing a face in an image or choosing the next word to s
by sdenton4 11y ago
One of the more useful heuristics I've heard is that when humans make split second decisions (like recognizing a face in an image or choosing the next word to say) there's only time for a few - like five to seven - layers of neurons to fire between impulse and action. These are the sort of tasks that neural networks are currently making great progress on.
But things like long-term planning and goal formation aren't in this quick-reflex domain. (Though humans are arguably pretty bad at these sorts of activity too, on average.)
We're also generally training neural nets to succeed at well-defined, bounded tasks, which don't really require long term planning so much. The video-game playing work at Deep Mind is actually a pretty important step forward, though; they're doing impressive stuff with domain-transfer (learning multiple games with a single network), and as one goes further with games, we might start seeing longer-term planning and concept formation. (eg, if we start seeing awesome StarCraft players...)
There's a case to be made, though, that we humans just trained on a big, broad objective function - survive, thrive, and multiply - with training applied across millions of years. And a good deal of intense local training over the first ten years of life, using a massively parallel computer that far outstrips any data center.
The question for strong AI seems to rest heavily on how much extraneous work there is done in biology, and whether we end up with a system so complex that it requires eighteen years of training time. If creating a single strong AI actually requires that much effort, we don't have to worry too much about skynet, methinks.
But we certainly don't have to worry about them spontaneously arising when we train with simple objective functions.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoNote: even if training a single AI would require 18+ years, copying it will still be split-second. By this very token artificial minds have an advantage over meat ones.
- monk_e_boy 11y agoAnd they learn in parallel, google self driving cars and a demo from Nvidia both report new experiences to the cloud which is then 'understood' or parsed I guess and lessons learned are passed down to the other cars. Lessons could also be passed from AI to AI (e.g. fro Google to Ford) by sending the input [training data] and a output [reasonable response to that data] for the other AI to ponder.
- jjaredsimpson 11y agoTo say nothing of the inherent advantages of immortality and self modification.
- knughit 11y agoHumanity is also immortal and self-modifying, it uses human bodies as the unit of program transfer and modification. Humanity's version is extremely slow, of course, and limited in quantity and quality of copies of a good program.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoIndeed. And see how far we've managed to get after we've figured out a good way to pass learned knowledge around.
- otakucode 11y agoTo be fair, we do have quite a handicap in that respect. A machine intelligence could, at least theoretically, pass around perfect copies of its learned knowledge near-instantly (maybe not though... integrating two neural networks that developed separately might be terribly difficult or even impossible... I wonder if anyone has attempted or studied this? If NNA learns to recognize human faces, and NNB learns to recognize text, is there a way to merge them? It's not like you can just average their weights together, especially if using a method that connects/prunes neurons as necessary). Humans, on the other hand, have to translate bioelectrochemical patterns created in very differently structured networks into flapping of a meat strip rhythmically to cause air vibrations that will rumble a thin membrane of meat, feeding electrical impulses into the differing network, and its success depends upon an expansive, and almost completely unknown (to us), body of similar, but not identical, experiences, from hearing the same patterns of sounds while seeing objects or pictures of objects, possibly decades earlier, to accepting unspoken social cues early in development. What is astonishing is that language works at all. It really, really sounds like it shouldn't have a snowballs chance in Hell. And the weird thing is, I've got this niggling suspicion that this handicap is actually a profound strength. That evolution didn't produce so many species of organisms separated by walls of flesh and bone, detached from one another and capable of wandering far apart, then incapable of even expressing fundamentally novel concepts (I mean novel novel, such that your language has no word for it and such that any metaphor would be more misleading than enlightening). We could have evolved such that when holding hands, a flow of specially produced chemicals seep from ones hand to the other, travelling to the brain and making the changes necessary to convey concepts exactly. Bacteria communicate in this way. They change each other. Directly. We could to. But... we don't. And there is maybe a reason for that.
- scaredycat 11y agoI'm not very concerned about any hypothetical future Skynet scenarios at the moment... I am far more fearful of how Nueral Networks can be used today to justify the decisions made by those with the resources to wield them.
- scaredycat 11y agoI'm not very concerned about any hypothetical future Skynet scenarios at the moment... I am far more fearful of how Nueral Networks can be used today to justify the decisions made by those with the resources to wield them.