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One can say that the human mind consist of millions of not very special parts. It's the aggregate, the complexity of which they interact that makes it special.

One can say that the human mind consist of millions of not very special parts. It's the aggregate, the complexity of which they interact that makes it special. Once you start to connect all these seemingly non-special abilities in deep learning the "magic" starts to happen. You get something that is more than the sum of it's parts. Of course it's not DL in itself thats interesting but the potential emergent complex relationships.

reckoner2 9y ago
Has anyone been able to do this? Is anyone working on it? I only follow the field as a hobby, but as far as I can tell we are nowhere near getting to this point. I think the ability to combine all these parts in a way that the sum is greater than it's parts is going to require many many breakthroughs still.
- DiThi 9y ago
  The problem is that we don't really know for sure. We kind of predict things by extrapolating what we know and what we have, but we can never be sure there won't be any sudden breakthroughs.
- ThomPete 9y ago
  The thing is that it's most likely not something anyone does per se but something that happens with enough complexity. If you happen to believe evolutionary theory is the most convincing then we weren't built either but a byproduct of emergent complexity. It is my belief that humans are pattern recognizing feedback loops and carriers of information. We externalized some of that into books and built libraries to be able to keep even more than humans can remember as individuals and now have technology to save even more information and even manipulate it in ways impossible up until 80 years ago or so. I am fairly certain that a technology is part of nature and that technology based conscience is nothing like our limited conscience but something rather different. The end result will not be like humans just better but nothing like humans at all but much better at the carrying of information part. And so with that (my personal belief) perspective in mind no one is going to be able to do it it will happen as a by-product. Please keep in mind that I saying "we exeternalized" in the same way we say "selfish genes" it's not a conscious effort as such but rather something which happen to be favorized in the game of life. Why that is I have no idea but I am fairly certain humans aren't the last species. But yes it's all very speculative I just haven't been able to find better explanations for now.
fnl 9y ago
That's just another version of the trap GP spoke about. About a decade ago everybody was expecting emergent complex behavior from all kinds of evolutionary, intelligent ("swarm") systems. Didn't happen, seen that. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_intelligence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_intelligence
- logicallee 9y ago
  >Didn't happen, ...yet. See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14770230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14770230
  - fnl 9y ago
    "Never" is a strong prediction. But yes, ANNs have nothing in common with BNNs (biological ... :-)) at all, other than taking them as a very rough abstraction for teaching the basic intuition of the chained up tensor transformations. The hard thing is to predict the when, or even if, of AI. If it will happen, it will be a sudden, light-switch like moment. I don't think AI can happen gradually. At least the first artificially scentient entity will be a moment much like a singularity some love to predict in the near future... But as to when that moment will occur, or even if, I think we have no real data that shows we are any closer today than say 10 or 30 years ago. Pattern matching, no matter how complex, isn't "all there is" to intelligence and conciseness. EDIT: OP changed his reply from "will never happen" to "hasn't happened yet" while I was replying, explaining why mine might read a bit strange now... :-)
    - somenewacc 9y ago
      > If it will happen, it will be a sudden, light-switch like moment. I don't think AI can happen gradually. But our own intelligence happened gradually.
      - mcbits 9y ago
        Human intelligence at the individual level evolved pretty gradually, but there hasn't been enough time for biology to explain our advancement in the last 10,000 years or 500 years. Culture and social organization are the essential nurturing factors there. Every human genius would be out foraging for roots, perhaps reinventing the wheel or the lever, if it grew up without the benefit and influence of a society that makes greater achievement possible. Modern science and high technology that we attribute to human intelligence are really the products of a superintelligence (not to be conflated with consciousness) acting through us as appendages. I think it's entirely possible (even likely) that all of the components of a new computational superintelligence already exist, but they are still "hunting and gathering" in the halls of academia or the stock market or biotech or defense...

reckoner2 9y ago

Has anyone been able to do this? Is anyone working on it? I only follow the field as a hobby, but as far as I can tell we are nowhere near getting to this point. I think the ability to combine all these parts in a way that the sum is greater than it's parts is going to require many many breakthroughs still.

DiThi 9y ago
The problem is that we don't really know for sure. We kind of predict things by extrapolating what we know and what we have, but we can never be sure there won't be any sudden breakthroughs.
ThomPete 9y ago
The thing is that it's most likely not something anyone does per se but something that happens with enough complexity. If you happen to believe evolutionary theory is the most convincing then we weren't built either but a byproduct of emergent complexity. It is my belief that humans are pattern recognizing feedback loops and carriers of information. We externalized some of that into books and built libraries to be able to keep even more than humans can remember as individuals and now have technology to save even more information and even manipulate it in ways impossible up until 80 years ago or so. I am fairly certain that a technology is part of nature and that technology based conscience is nothing like our limited conscience but something rather different. The end result will not be like humans just better but nothing like humans at all but much better at the carrying of information part. And so with that (my personal belief) perspective in mind no one is going to be able to do it it will happen as a by-product. Please keep in mind that I saying "we exeternalized" in the same way we say "selfish genes" it's not a conscious effort as such but rather something which happen to be favorized in the game of life. Why that is I have no idea but I am fairly certain humans aren't the last species. But yes it's all very speculative I just haven't been able to find better explanations for now.

fnl 9y ago

That's just another version of the trap GP spoke about. About a decade ago everybody was expecting emergent complex behavior from all kinds of evolutionary, intelligent ("swarm") systems. Didn't happen, seen that. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_intelligence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_intelligence

logicallee 9y ago
>Didn't happen, ...yet. See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14770230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14770230
- fnl 9y ago
  "Never" is a strong prediction. But yes, ANNs have nothing in common with BNNs (biological ... :-)) at all, other than taking them as a very rough abstraction for teaching the basic intuition of the chained up tensor transformations. The hard thing is to predict the when, or even if, of AI. If it will happen, it will be a sudden, light-switch like moment. I don't think AI can happen gradually. At least the first artificially scentient entity will be a moment much like a singularity some love to predict in the near future... But as to when that moment will occur, or even if, I think we have no real data that shows we are any closer today than say 10 or 30 years ago. Pattern matching, no matter how complex, isn't "all there is" to intelligence and conciseness. EDIT: OP changed his reply from "will never happen" to "hasn't happened yet" while I was replying, explaining why mine might read a bit strange now... :-)
  - somenewacc 9y ago
    > If it will happen, it will be a sudden, light-switch like moment. I don't think AI can happen gradually. But our own intelligence happened gradually.
    - mcbits 9y ago
      Human intelligence at the individual level evolved pretty gradually, but there hasn't been enough time for biology to explain our advancement in the last 10,000 years or 500 years. Culture and social organization are the essential nurturing factors there. Every human genius would be out foraging for roots, perhaps reinventing the wheel or the lever, if it grew up without the benefit and influence of a society that makes greater achievement possible. Modern science and high technology that we attribute to human intelligence are really the products of a superintelligence (not to be conflated with consciousness) acting through us as appendages. I think it's entirely possible (even likely) that all of the components of a new computational superintelligence already exist, but they are still "hunting and gathering" in the halls of academia or the stock market or biotech or defense...