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An agent can be intelligent without it learning how to read human language. Look around, most organisms in our world communicate using extremely simple binary l

An agent can be intelligent without it learning how to read human language. Look around, most organisms in our world communicate using extremely simple binary language or don't communicate verbally at all. Yet, they are intelligent enough to do very complicated tasks which current robots fail to do. Intelligence is an easier problem than language, and thus should be solved before language. What a sigh of relief to read a refreshing take on the real progress of AI. Yes, it's stuck, and that's the real problem of AI, that we haven't been able to do anything significant after perception. However, unlike the author, I don't think the solution is to nationalize AI research (we're not close enough for that), but to fund more non-deeplearning research for 5-10 years, and then we might see some progress in non-perception tasks.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
observation 9y ago
> Look around, most organisms in our world communicate using extremely simple binary language or don't communicate verbally at all. Yes. > Yet, they are intelligent enough to do very complicated tasks which current robots fail to do. True. > Intelligence is an easier problem than language, and thus should be solved before language. Wrong. This is the classic mistake everybody makes, including people in Computer Science. Because if that were so our robots would already be clambering backwards through chairs (per the metaphor in the article). You have to think of deep evolutionary history. It took centuries to come up with advanced mathematics, so in some strange to humans sense, this isn't that hard. Same with language, it only took tens of thousands of years. For Nature to learn how to develop a nervous system capable of flexibly interacting with the environment, culminating in our brains, took hundreds of millions of years. This isn't an claim that we have to wait that long to re-engineer such powers, but it is to point out that if the possibility space for developing a nervous system was much larger than for the same organisms to learn language... tldr; Walking is hard. We have been conflating what is easy for us, with what is objectively easy, because we don't appreciate the Deep Time that Nature has been working with. I suspect we will develop EMs (brain emulations, a sort of short cut) before we understand what we are doing but I hope that is wrong.
- mannykannot 9y ago
  If I am following you correctly, you are arguing that walking is a harder problem than language because it took much longer to evolve. This seems to assume that a facility for language and advanced mathematics is independent of the existence of a nervous system capable of flexibly interacting with the environment, but it seems plausible, indeed probable, that language, consciousness and math depend heavily on the prior neural infrastructure, and their development was the most recent step in a process that has been going on since the evolution of the first synapse. On the other hand, I am skeptical of the somewhat popular view that the key to generalized AI is to make robots that interact more thoroughly with their environment, and that they will then find their own way to language and consciousness. Partly, this is because I do not think that if you intentionally pursue the robotic goal, you will necessarily create the sort of infrastructure that is generalized enough to be the basis for the emergence of language.
  - observation 9y ago
    > If I am following you correctly, you are arguing that walking is a harder problem than language because it took much longer to evolve. This is a thorny subject. So I am saying that in some objective way, walking is harder than language because Nature took millions/billions of years to traverse the solution space. Then... once we had a huge number of preconditions existing, then we had the development of language. I am not saying that this means if it takes 10 years to develop language with some artificial means that it will take 100,000 years to develop walking. What I am pointing to is that we ought to appreciate that if even blind natural selection took that long, then the possibility space to develop a nervous system must be much larger than we have anticipated. As evidence of this: consider how (at least in popular culture, but also in comp sci in the old days) we developed chess playing computers and it was broadly assumed that breakthroughs in getting robots to walk and talk would soon follow through. That did not happen. It was a natural assumption but it was wrong. > This seems to assume that a facility for language and advanced mathematics is independent of the existence of a nervous system capable of flexibly interacting with the environment, but it seems plausible, indeed probable, that language, consciousness and math depend heavily on the prior neural infrastructure, and their development was the most recent step in a process that has been going on since the evolution of the first synapse. I don't know the answer to that. On different days I think one or the other is true. On Day #1 I think Nature obviously required walking before talking, but we could develop them differently, just has we didn't need to develop better horses to produce cars. On Day #2 I think to myself there's a deeper sense in which you really do require walking before talking because otherwise why didn't Nature develop biological microlife which evolved communications ability long before it developed legs. So... > On the other hand, I am skeptical of the somewhat popular view that the key to generalized AI is to make robots that interact more thoroughly with their environment, and that they will then find their own way to language and consciousness. We cannot be certain consciousness or intelligence are high probability events once you have life. We could be like those French artifact makers who made such exquisite mechanical toys for the aristocracy but ultimately got nowhere whereas the English inventors meddling with water and steam power really kicked off a revolution. Who is Silicon Valley is genuinely looking at the fundamentals of A-Life or AI? OpenAI? MIRI? Stanford? DARPA?
mannykannot 9y ago
There seems to be something very different between language (and language-mediated behavior), and almost all of the behavior found in other animals. While the former and at least some of the latter can reasonably be described as categories of intelligence, one can not necessarily argue for claims about the former from facts about the latter.
amelius 9y ago
Perhaps we should make a list of increasingly difficult problems to solve. Image recognition is at the front of the list, and we can cross it off. What is next?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

observation 9y ago

> Look around, most organisms in our world communicate using extremely simple binary language or don't communicate verbally at all. Yes. > Yet, they are intelligent enough to do very complicated tasks which current robots fail to do. True. > Intelligence is an easier problem than language, and thus should be solved before language. Wrong. This is the classic mistake everybody makes, including people in Computer Science. Because if that were so our robots would already be clambering backwards through chairs (per the metaphor in the article). You have to think of deep evolutionary history. It took centuries to come up with advanced mathematics, so in some strange to humans sense, this isn't that hard. Same with language, it only took tens of thousands of years. For Nature to learn how to develop a nervous system capable of flexibly interacting with the environment, culminating in our brains, took hundreds of millions of years. This isn't an claim that we have to wait that long to re-engineer such powers, but it is to point out that if the possibility space for developing a nervous system was much larger than for the same organisms to learn language... tldr; Walking is hard. We have been conflating what is easy for us, with what is objectively easy, because we don't appreciate the Deep Time that Nature has been working with. I suspect we will develop EMs (brain emulations, a sort of short cut) before we understand what we are doing but I hope that is wrong.

mannykannot 9y ago
If I am following you correctly, you are arguing that walking is a harder problem than language because it took much longer to evolve. This seems to assume that a facility for language and advanced mathematics is independent of the existence of a nervous system capable of flexibly interacting with the environment, but it seems plausible, indeed probable, that language, consciousness and math depend heavily on the prior neural infrastructure, and their development was the most recent step in a process that has been going on since the evolution of the first synapse. On the other hand, I am skeptical of the somewhat popular view that the key to generalized AI is to make robots that interact more thoroughly with their environment, and that they will then find their own way to language and consciousness. Partly, this is because I do not think that if you intentionally pursue the robotic goal, you will necessarily create the sort of infrastructure that is generalized enough to be the basis for the emergence of language.
- observation 9y ago
  > If I am following you correctly, you are arguing that walking is a harder problem than language because it took much longer to evolve. This is a thorny subject. So I am saying that in some objective way, walking is harder than language because Nature took millions/billions of years to traverse the solution space. Then... once we had a huge number of preconditions existing, then we had the development of language. I am not saying that this means if it takes 10 years to develop language with some artificial means that it will take 100,000 years to develop walking. What I am pointing to is that we ought to appreciate that if even blind natural selection took that long, then the possibility space to develop a nervous system must be much larger than we have anticipated. As evidence of this: consider how (at least in popular culture, but also in comp sci in the old days) we developed chess playing computers and it was broadly assumed that breakthroughs in getting robots to walk and talk would soon follow through. That did not happen. It was a natural assumption but it was wrong. > This seems to assume that a facility for language and advanced mathematics is independent of the existence of a nervous system capable of flexibly interacting with the environment, but it seems plausible, indeed probable, that language, consciousness and math depend heavily on the prior neural infrastructure, and their development was the most recent step in a process that has been going on since the evolution of the first synapse. I don't know the answer to that. On different days I think one or the other is true. On Day #1 I think Nature obviously required walking before talking, but we could develop them differently, just has we didn't need to develop better horses to produce cars. On Day #2 I think to myself there's a deeper sense in which you really do require walking before talking because otherwise why didn't Nature develop biological microlife which evolved communications ability long before it developed legs. So... > On the other hand, I am skeptical of the somewhat popular view that the key to generalized AI is to make robots that interact more thoroughly with their environment, and that they will then find their own way to language and consciousness. We cannot be certain consciousness or intelligence are high probability events once you have life. We could be like those French artifact makers who made such exquisite mechanical toys for the aristocracy but ultimately got nowhere whereas the English inventors meddling with water and steam power really kicked off a revolution. Who is Silicon Valley is genuinely looking at the fundamentals of A-Life or AI? OpenAI? MIRI? Stanford? DARPA?

mannykannot 9y ago

There seems to be something very different between language (and language-mediated behavior), and almost all of the behavior found in other animals. While the former and at least some of the latter can reasonably be described as categories of intelligence, one can not necessarily argue for claims about the former from facts about the latter.

amelius 9y ago

Perhaps we should make a list of increasingly difficult problems to solve. Image recognition is at the front of the list, and we can cross it off. What is next?