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What people mean by generalized and special AI is not consistent in the field, but everyone agrees that the current brand of AI driven by statistical learning t
by mlechha 10y ago
What people mean by generalized and special AI is not consistent in the field, but everyone agrees that the current brand of AI driven by statistical learning techniques and large scale neural networks is far from explaining how even the simplest of nervous systems work. The key obstacle is adaptation. Several people believe that they've more or less solved the recognition problem. However, adaptation is a totally different thing. There are no tools in the current AI toolkit that we can use to make a robot that can go out unsupervised in the real world, do something useful and come back safely. Whereas even the Nematode C. elegans with only 302 neurons is remarkably flexible, it can forage for food, remember cues that prediction food, manage food resources, get away from danger or noxious stimuli etc. This allows it to survive quite well in a world that is constantly changing in unpredictable ways. This is the kind of intelligence that proponents of so called general AI want, and I agree we have a couple of major breakthroughs away.
- squirreltalk 10y agoAnd we have a complete wiring diagram for C. elegans, and no clue how it does any of the things you talked about. So, yeah, general AI is really far off.
- schrodinger 10y agoI have no idea what I'm talking about. But why couldn't we build some sort of bio-computer hybrid system around a simple form of life, like "C. elegans" but augmented with traditional CPUs?
- mlechha 10y agoThat's another option and there are people who do that https://blog.inf.ed.ac.uk/insectrobotics/ https://blog.inf.ed.ac.uk/insectrobotics/.
- mlechha 10y agoTo be honest, the wiring diagram is a bit of a distraction from the really big questions. It has its uses for sure, and is really essential in many situations but overall it gives this illusion that we understand something important about the system, where in reality we don't. Understanding a biological system from its wiring diagram is something like understanding a city by studying its road map.