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I never understand the odd advantage that brains are assumed to have over machines when comparing power consumption. >... AlphaGo ... was able to beat a world-

I never understand the odd advantage that brains are assumed to have over machines when comparing power consumption. >... AlphaGo ... was able to beat a world-champion human player of Go, but only after it had trained ... running on approximately a million watts. (Its opponent’s brain, by contrast, would have been about fifty thousand times more energy-thrifty, consuming twenty watts.) A human brain has a severe limitation though. It can't consume more or less energy even if it I wanted to. AlphaGo could double, triple, etc its power consumption and expect to improve its performance. The brain also took decades to train. Computers also have the advantage of being identical. You can't train any brain to be a master level Go player. I just don't see brains as the high watermark of intelligence. They occupy a very specific niche in what I assume is a vast unbounded landscape of possible intelligences.

pron 10y ago
> The brain also took decades to train. The brain of an insect doesn't take decades to train, and we're currently unable to match its capabilities, either. > I just don't see brains as the high watermark of intelligence. They occupy a very specific niche in what I assume is a vast unbounded landscape of possible intelligences. That is a hypothetical claim because we don't know what intelligence is. Surely, some algorithms are much better at some tasks than the human brain, but that has been the case since the advent of computing, and it does not make them intelligent. Intelligence, or how we would currently define it colloquially and imprecisely, is an algorithm or a class of algorithms with some specific capabilities. Could those capabilities be taken further than the human brain? We certainly can't say that they cannot, but it's not obvious that they can, either. The only kind of intelligence we know, our own, comes with a host of disadvantages that may be features of the particular algorithm employed by the brain and/or to limitations of the hardware, but they could possibly be essential to intelligence itself. Who knows, maybe an intelligence with access to more powerful hardware would be more prone to incapacitating boredom and depression or other kinds of mental illness. This is just one hypothetical possibility, but given how limited our understanding of intelligence is, there are plenty of possible roadblocks ahead. Even if a higher intelligence than humans' is possible, its hypothetical achievements are uncertain. Some of the greatest problems encountered by humans are not constrained by intelligence but by resources and observations, and others (e.g. politics) are limited by powers of persuasion (that also don't seem to be simply correlated with intelligence). For example, what's limiting theoretical physics isn't brains but access to experiments, and what's limiting certain optimization problems are computational limits, for which our own intelligence, at least, does not give good approximate solutions at all.
- return0 10y ago
  > The brain of an insect doesn't take decades to train, and we're currently unable to match its capabilities, either. It's not particularly useful to simulate insects. We can far surpass some of their capabilities, but the goal is not to make an insect-robot, just like we didn't care to make a mechanical horse.
  - lend000 10y ago
    Insect intelligence is already being emulated (poorly) because of its useful applications in swarm behavior. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603337/a-100-drone-swarm-dropped-from-jets-plans-its-own-moves/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603337/a-100-drone-swarm-...
  - nharada 10y ago
    Both of these are under active development Robotic insects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboBee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboBee Robotic horses: http://www.bostondynamics.com/robot_bigdog.html http://www.bostondynamics.com/robot_bigdog.html
    - return0 10y ago
      Those are mostly interested in biomimetic movement rather than intelligence. They do have some applications, but i don't think they ve convinced the world that mimicking organisms is necessarily optimal.
  - pron 10y ago
    > We can far surpass some of their capabilities We could far surpass many of the human brain's capabilities from the moment computers were invented. That's what computers are for. But it doesn't mean we've come close to human intelligence, and we're not very close to insect intelligence now. As others have commented, getting to insect intelligence may be quite useful. In any event, that would at least likely put us on the path. Right now, the fact that computers can do more and more things that only humans could does not mean those approaches are getting us close to human intelligence. It just means that we've discovered more useful algorithms, but those algorithms are not necessarily on the path to human intelligence any more than the AI of the 1950s.
Cybiote 10y ago
The crow, gibbon or even jumping spider did not take decades to train. Yet each is capable of feats whether power is accounted for or not (but especially so when) that no algorithm can match in terms of sensor fusion, online learning sample efficiency and adaptive decision making. > AlphaGo could double, triple, etc its power consumption and expect to improve its performance. The problem of heat makes this a suboptimal route. And in the specific case of AlphaGo, the gains from additional hardware eventually saturated.
- posterboy 10y ago
  >The crow, gibbon or even jumping spider did not take decades to train Rather they took millennia of evolution.

pron 10y ago

> The brain also took decades to train. The brain of an insect doesn't take decades to train, and we're currently unable to match its capabilities, either. > I just don't see brains as the high watermark of intelligence. They occupy a very specific niche in what I assume is a vast unbounded landscape of possible intelligences. That is a hypothetical claim because we don't know what intelligence is. Surely, some algorithms are much better at some tasks than the human brain, but that has been the case since the advent of computing, and it does not make them intelligent. Intelligence, or how we would currently define it colloquially and imprecisely, is an algorithm or a class of algorithms with some specific capabilities. Could those capabilities be taken further than the human brain? We certainly can't say that they cannot, but it's not obvious that they can, either. The only kind of intelligence we know, our own, comes with a host of disadvantages that may be features of the particular algorithm employed by the brain and/or to limitations of the hardware, but they could possibly be essential to intelligence itself. Who knows, maybe an intelligence with access to more powerful hardware would be more prone to incapacitating boredom and depression or other kinds of mental illness. This is just one hypothetical possibility, but given how limited our understanding of intelligence is, there are plenty of possible roadblocks ahead. Even if a higher intelligence than humans' is possible, its hypothetical achievements are uncertain. Some of the greatest problems encountered by humans are not constrained by intelligence but by resources and observations, and others (e.g. politics) are limited by powers of persuasion (that also don't seem to be simply correlated with intelligence). For example, what's limiting theoretical physics isn't brains but access to experiments, and what's limiting certain optimization problems are computational limits, for which our own intelligence, at least, does not give good approximate solutions at all.

return0 10y ago
> The brain of an insect doesn't take decades to train, and we're currently unable to match its capabilities, either. It's not particularly useful to simulate insects. We can far surpass some of their capabilities, but the goal is not to make an insect-robot, just like we didn't care to make a mechanical horse.
- lend000 10y ago
  Insect intelligence is already being emulated (poorly) because of its useful applications in swarm behavior. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603337/a-100-drone-swarm-dropped-from-jets-plans-its-own-moves/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603337/a-100-drone-swarm-...
- nharada 10y ago
  Both of these are under active development Robotic insects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboBee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboBee Robotic horses: http://www.bostondynamics.com/robot_bigdog.html http://www.bostondynamics.com/robot_bigdog.html
  - return0 10y ago
    Those are mostly interested in biomimetic movement rather than intelligence. They do have some applications, but i don't think they ve convinced the world that mimicking organisms is necessarily optimal.
- pron 10y ago
  > We can far surpass some of their capabilities We could far surpass many of the human brain's capabilities from the moment computers were invented. That's what computers are for. But it doesn't mean we've come close to human intelligence, and we're not very close to insect intelligence now. As others have commented, getting to insect intelligence may be quite useful. In any event, that would at least likely put us on the path. Right now, the fact that computers can do more and more things that only humans could does not mean those approaches are getting us close to human intelligence. It just means that we've discovered more useful algorithms, but those algorithms are not necessarily on the path to human intelligence any more than the AI of the 1950s.

Cybiote 10y ago

The crow, gibbon or even jumping spider did not take decades to train. Yet each is capable of feats whether power is accounted for or not (but especially so when) that no algorithm can match in terms of sensor fusion, online learning sample efficiency and adaptive decision making. > AlphaGo could double, triple, etc its power consumption and expect to improve its performance. The problem of heat makes this a suboptimal route. And in the specific case of AlphaGo, the gains from additional hardware eventually saturated.

posterboy 10y ago
>The crow, gibbon or even jumping spider did not take decades to train Rather they took millennia of evolution.