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This analogy doesn't make any sense. Since automobiles were never patterned off anything in biology (they were the improvement of horse drawn carriages), I'm no

This analogy doesn't make any sense. Since automobiles were never patterned off anything in biology (they were the improvement of horse drawn carriages), I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with the analogy. I never said there weren't any developments in neural nets, I'm just saying that few ideas have been taken from neuroscience (there certainly have been some ideas, like convolutions). In fact most things (including most tricks in convolutional neural nets in their current state) a neural net does, we know a brain does not do.

jacquesm 11y ago
All it took for us to make aircraft was to look at birds and to realize something could be done (flying even though you weigh more than the air). The first wanna-be aircraft looked like birds, and some even attempted to work like them. Most of those designs went nowhere. Just like legs got replaced by the wheel in ground transportation aircraft engines and eventually jets replaced the muscles of birds. It doesn't really matter what sets you on a particular part, what matters is the end result. Right now, we have a state of AI that is very much limited by what we know about how our own machinery works. Better understanding of that machinery (just like better understanding of things like aerodynamics, rolling resistance and explosions led to better transportation) will help us in some way or other. And it may take another 50 years before we hit that next milestone, but the current progress all leads more or less directly back to one poor analogy with biological systems. Quite probably there are more waiting in the wings, whether through literal re-implementation or merely as inspiration it doesn't really matter.
- scrollaway 11y ago
  > It doesn't really matter what sets you on a particular part, what matters is the end result. To put it in other words: Birds are limited by evolution. They are not an optimal design - they are a successful reproductive design in a wide ecosystem where flying is a tool. Our intelligence is no different. This is something Feynman addressed in this beautiful talk (in the Q&A iirc): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA
- Flenser 11y ago
  I like the comparison to developing wings. What's interesting about the development of plane wings is that, while we used the underlying physics of how wings work to make plane wings, a plane gets it's trust differently than a bird, and looks and flies differently. Flapping wasn't very useful to us for planes; what things about the way minds work will not be useful for AI? I think once we understand the algorithms behind AI / intelligence / learning, what we choose to make may be very different than what a lot of people currently imagine having AI or robots will to be like.

jacquesm 11y ago

All it took for us to make aircraft was to look at birds and to realize something could be done (flying even though you weigh more than the air). The first wanna-be aircraft looked like birds, and some even attempted to work like them. Most of those designs went nowhere. Just like legs got replaced by the wheel in ground transportation aircraft engines and eventually jets replaced the muscles of birds. It doesn't really matter what sets you on a particular part, what matters is the end result. Right now, we have a state of AI that is very much limited by what we know about how our own machinery works. Better understanding of that machinery (just like better understanding of things like aerodynamics, rolling resistance and explosions led to better transportation) will help us in some way or other. And it may take another 50 years before we hit that next milestone, but the current progress all leads more or less directly back to one poor analogy with biological systems. Quite probably there are more waiting in the wings, whether through literal re-implementation or merely as inspiration it doesn't really matter.

scrollaway 11y ago
> It doesn't really matter what sets you on a particular part, what matters is the end result. To put it in other words: Birds are limited by evolution. They are not an optimal design - they are a successful reproductive design in a wide ecosystem where flying is a tool. Our intelligence is no different. This is something Feynman addressed in this beautiful talk (in the Q&A iirc): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA
Flenser 11y ago
I like the comparison to developing wings. What's interesting about the development of plane wings is that, while we used the underlying physics of how wings work to make plane wings, a plane gets it's trust differently than a bird, and looks and flies differently. Flapping wasn't very useful to us for planes; what things about the way minds work will not be useful for AI? I think once we understand the algorithms behind AI / intelligence / learning, what we choose to make may be very different than what a lot of people currently imagine having AI or robots will to be like.