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The evolutionary process took billions of years (hundreds of millions for the mammalian brain to be specific) so even though we're intelligent designers we don'
by akiselev 10y ago
The evolutionary process took billions of years (hundreds of millions for the mammalian brain to be specific) so even though we're intelligent designers we don't quite have a precise concept of what intelligence is let alone know how to implement it. We don't know what data structures or processes make true human intelligence so while it's possible we stumble on our own version, working with what we already have as a baseline seems far more practical.
- ThomPete 10y agoOnly if what you set it as criteria to understand the brain you are simulating, it might be that the brain can be simulated without us knowing how. The evolutionary process can be simulated or replicated in digital space and go through iterations much faster no?
- unabst 10y agoTo engineer anything, we need to understand it. The options you are weighing are between understanding the brain so we can write programs that run on robots that would exhibit human-like behavior, and understanding the nature of organic evolution to the point where we could simulate every organism's survival and death that lead to the autonomous design and formation of the human brain. To estimate engineer-ability requires understanding also, but I think we understand enough to know simulating the whole of evolution is not an easier problem.
- ThomPete 10y agoThe brain wasn't built, it emerged. The question really is what he have to engineer. My belief is that it's not the brain we need to build but the environment it can emerge in.
- Retra 10y agoA single human brain is far simpler and smaller than the billions of years of history and the trillions of non-human brains that you're suggesting be reproduced. The human brain did not evolve in isolation. It evolved to fill a niche that was created by a massive amount of history and circumstance.
- dkersten 10y agoIf we can wait hundreds of millions of (simulated) years, then sure. But if we don't want to simulate the environment in the hopes that it will eventually emerge, eg, because we want it sooner rather than later, then we need to engineer it to be so and for that we need some level of understanding.
- pas 10y agoSure, that's the (supervised or unsupervised) learning process in Machine Learning stuff (which is what AI is nowadays, the rest is just rule engines, expert systems, and so on). But as the complexity grows computational requirements grow much faster. So, a brute force approach needs super-duper-exponentially more computation. And so far we are not at that level.
- ThomPete 10y agoDepends on what you mean with bruteforce. I am not talking about blindly randomizing until luck strikes us. Evolution works by incremental change in any given environment no?
- akiselev 10y agoEvolution is blindly randomized mutations except passed through a fitness function. It behaves like a script kiddy using Jack the Ripper to crack a password the size of Hamlet, except natural selection actually does have billion of years and trillions of computational nodes to achieve its end goal (survival, for which intelligence is just another tool).
- ThomPete 10y agoMy point is that the difference between each iteration being completely random and then each iteration building on the previous means that we we going to need far less computing power than one might think.
- pas 10y agoEven if it's not completely random, if we don't have a good model (that is, a not too simple yet very efficient representation of the problem), the complexity instantly leaves us dead in the water. Whole brain simulation is the holy grail, because it's brutally computationally intensive, yet gives us nothing, because it's a black box. (Or a white box, but so white, you can't infer anything from it. It's just a big neural network that just works, things ripple back and forth, and it's sort of watching a busy beaver Turing machine do its work.)