4 ms·

> neuroscientist say: "why didn't you talk to us 15 years ago? We could have told you that!". Interested to hear about these. I can honestly not remember any.

ghaff 9y ago
There's been this tension over whether achieving apparent human levels of artificial intelligence requires thinking like and following processes associated with human learning and intelligence pretty much forever. Today, computational capability and data have gotten us to a place where there's been a big step forward while largely ignoring how it relates to human-level thought. (After all, we got powered flight by largely ignoring how birds fly.) In fact, cognitive science largely split off as a separate field but there's a school of thought that algorithms and big data are only going to take things to a certain point and you're not going to get to things like fully autonomous vehicles under general conditions without different approaches that involve better understanding the physical world.
- bluetwo 9y ago
  Actually, previous to the Wright brothers, the dominant theories of flight involved studying how birds flew and theorizing what parts were important and trying to replicate them. You could get a degree in this area of study. I do agree that different approaches are needed. In the case of flight it was the realization that the airfoil is important and the rest is window dressing.
  - jv22222 9y ago
    Am I right in thinking the study of fish/sharks and fluid dynamics helped with the breakthrough?
    - mgraczyk 9y ago
      No, it was bicycles that guided the intuition that control should be based on roll rather than rudder yaw. That was the key innovation that the Wrights contributed at the time of their first flight.
    - jv22222 9y ago
      Not sure why the downvote, but this is what I was thinking about: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_dynamics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_dynamics Nothing to do with origins of flight but interesting and related to why flight works.
  - c06n 9y ago
    Actually before the Wright Brothers came a guy called Otto Lilienthal who figured that out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Lilienthal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Lilienthal
- ufmace 9y ago
  From what I've read, the Wright brother's main innovation was that 3-axis control was needed to maintain flight, which they also copied from birds. Which means that copying birds is fine, you just have to know what parts to copy (mechanisms to control direction in all 3 axes) and which to ignore (flapping wings isn't practical given the power sources and construction materials we have, but soaring on stationary wings is a good place to start). Which in turn means that saying "Just copy nature, they've been doing this for 1bn years" or "don't bother copying nature, we need different stuff" both aren't very useful.
  - unclebucknasty 9y ago
    >Which means that copying birds is fine, you just have to know what parts to copy The analogy between acheiving AGI and achieving flight is invalid on its face and yields no useful information. Nothing can be drawn from the latter about the former. Flight is mechanical. AGI is not. However, until now, ML and other AI techniques have focused largely on mechanics (stuffing data into an algorithm), which is why such analogies with nature are tempting. But, that approach won't suffice for AGI. The breakthrough for AGI will come through an approach that backs away from brute force and attacks the problem from a meta-perspective; building on the core blocks of what intelligence is. The approach will be relatively simple, once the core foundation of the integrative learning process is understood, which is the much more difficult task. Execution will then involve establishing a base case that implements, not learning, but the capacity to learn. This will then be replicated across generations, compounding exponentially until what we recognize as AGI emerges. As well, the required computing power is likely to be significantly less than is commonly believed. This raw brute-force ML-style approach again misleads us here.
- posterboy 9y ago
  Why are planes called wings? And while the propeller or turbine is largely missing from birds, it contains many wings as well. I'm not convinced.

ghaff 9y ago

There's been this tension over whether achieving apparent human levels of artificial intelligence requires thinking like and following processes associated with human learning and intelligence pretty much forever. Today, computational capability and data have gotten us to a place where there's been a big step forward while largely ignoring how it relates to human-level thought. (After all, we got powered flight by largely ignoring how birds fly.) In fact, cognitive science largely split off as a separate field but there's a school of thought that algorithms and big data are only going to take things to a certain point and you're not going to get to things like fully autonomous vehicles under general conditions without different approaches that involve better understanding the physical world.

bluetwo 9y ago
Actually, previous to the Wright brothers, the dominant theories of flight involved studying how birds flew and theorizing what parts were important and trying to replicate them. You could get a degree in this area of study. I do agree that different approaches are needed. In the case of flight it was the realization that the airfoil is important and the rest is window dressing.
- jv22222 9y ago
  Am I right in thinking the study of fish/sharks and fluid dynamics helped with the breakthrough?
  - mgraczyk 9y ago
    No, it was bicycles that guided the intuition that control should be based on roll rather than rudder yaw. That was the key innovation that the Wrights contributed at the time of their first flight.
  - jv22222 9y ago
    Not sure why the downvote, but this is what I was thinking about: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_dynamics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_dynamics Nothing to do with origins of flight but interesting and related to why flight works.
- c06n 9y ago
  Actually before the Wright Brothers came a guy called Otto Lilienthal who figured that out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Lilienthal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Lilienthal
ufmace 9y ago
From what I've read, the Wright brother's main innovation was that 3-axis control was needed to maintain flight, which they also copied from birds. Which means that copying birds is fine, you just have to know what parts to copy (mechanisms to control direction in all 3 axes) and which to ignore (flapping wings isn't practical given the power sources and construction materials we have, but soaring on stationary wings is a good place to start). Which in turn means that saying "Just copy nature, they've been doing this for 1bn years" or "don't bother copying nature, we need different stuff" both aren't very useful.
- unclebucknasty 9y ago
  >Which means that copying birds is fine, you just have to know what parts to copy The analogy between acheiving AGI and achieving flight is invalid on its face and yields no useful information. Nothing can be drawn from the latter about the former. Flight is mechanical. AGI is not. However, until now, ML and other AI techniques have focused largely on mechanics (stuffing data into an algorithm), which is why such analogies with nature are tempting. But, that approach won't suffice for AGI. The breakthrough for AGI will come through an approach that backs away from brute force and attacks the problem from a meta-perspective; building on the core blocks of what intelligence is. The approach will be relatively simple, once the core foundation of the integrative learning process is understood, which is the much more difficult task. Execution will then involve establishing a base case that implements, not learning, but the capacity to learn. This will then be replicated across generations, compounding exponentially until what we recognize as AGI emerges. As well, the required computing power is likely to be significantly less than is commonly believed. This raw brute-force ML-style approach again misleads us here.
posterboy 9y ago
Why are planes called wings? And while the propeller or turbine is largely missing from birds, it contains many wings as well. I'm not convinced.