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Not entirely sure that is a fair description of human-style learning. Our overall problem to solve is 'survive and reproduce'. Anything else can be seen as just

by jononor 10y ago

Not entirely sure that is a fair description of human-style learning. Our overall problem to solve is 'survive and reproduce'. Anything else can be seen as just a sub-problem of that. Humans are taught by other humans how to solve problems since the day they are born. Our DNA passes on a millions of generations worth of learning from our ancestors about how to solve problems.

Cybiote 10y ago
It is a fair description. That being: able to enumerate a large number of arbitrary goals and define a large number of basic pattern classifiers/feature extractors. When people give credit to the human designers for AlphaGo's wins, that it is really a win for humanity, I disagree. The wins are alphago's even if the design is of human ingenuity. When You say that the outputs of human ingenuity should be credited to Evolution, I similarly disagree. You might as well credit evolution for AlphaGo's win. While it is true that Evolution invented the first AGI (and in some though not all ways, a superior intelligence to it), it still makes sense to separate the products of human learning from whatever structural priors DNA passed along. I'll also point out that compared to most animals, humans actually have weaker priors and spend a lot of their early days learning to learn.
jnicholasp 10y ago
Tangential quibble: For anything that could be called "human-style" learning, which presumably requires abstract intelligence and cultural transmission, we're probably looking at something that has existed only during the period of human behavioral modernity - commonly taken to date from roughly 40-50,000 years ago. Assuming a generation is ~20 years (and there are some arguments that the average generation might have been closer to 25 years), that's only 2500 generations. I think it's fascinating that we have developed from un-self-reflective animals, to abstract thinkers on the verge of creating wholly new abstract-thinking entities from scratch, in only two and half thousand steps. Especially given that the majority of the technical knowledge necessary was developed only in the last 500 years, or 25 generations.

by jononor 10y ago

Cybiote 10y ago

It is a fair description. That being: able to enumerate a large number of arbitrary goals and define a large number of basic pattern classifiers/feature extractors. When people give credit to the human designers for AlphaGo's wins, that it is really a win for humanity, I disagree. The wins are alphago's even if the design is of human ingenuity. When You say that the outputs of human ingenuity should be credited to Evolution, I similarly disagree. You might as well credit evolution for AlphaGo's win. While it is true that Evolution invented the first AGI (and in some though not all ways, a superior intelligence to it), it still makes sense to separate the products of human learning from whatever structural priors DNA passed along. I'll also point out that compared to most animals, humans actually have weaker priors and spend a lot of their early days learning to learn.

jnicholasp 10y ago

Tangential quibble: For anything that could be called "human-style" learning, which presumably requires abstract intelligence and cultural transmission, we're probably looking at something that has existed only during the period of human behavioral modernity - commonly taken to date from roughly 40-50,000 years ago. Assuming a generation is ~20 years (and there are some arguments that the average generation might have been closer to 25 years), that's only 2500 generations. I think it's fascinating that we have developed from un-self-reflective animals, to abstract thinkers on the verge of creating wholly new abstract-thinking entities from scratch, in only two and half thousand steps. Especially given that the majority of the technical knowledge necessary was developed only in the last 500 years, or 25 generations.