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You need to learn without someone telling you what the answer is. Most of the time for biological intelligence there isn't an oracle describing the truth at eve

You need to learn without someone telling you what the answer is. Most of the time for biological intelligence there isn't an oracle describing the truth at every moment of life to judge actions/decisions against. There is: Death, without reproducing. If an organism dies quickly but left children, they were biologically successful. If you didn't, then your evolutionary branch goes away. I'm not sure this can be simulated, but it might be worth trying. Biological brains are the product of a billion years of the above strategy, so hopefully it's feasible to do the same thing. Don't people already do that? Well, no. The strategy implies some sort of physics simulation with general rules, not a specific ruleset tuned to your domain.

striking 9y ago
>> Most of the time for biological intelligence there isn't an oracle describing the truth at every moment of life to judge actions/decisions against. [emphasis mine] > There is: Death, without reproducing. The problem is that it's not describing the truth at every moment of life, just the total approximate fitness of that lifeform by the end of its lifetime. It would be time consuming and cost-inefficient to simulate many possible configurations of actors until the end of their lifetimes.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  Yet it's the only strategy that we're absolutely certain produces intelligent life.
  - striking 9y ago
    Are you absolutely certain we qualify as intelligent life? edit: This comment isn't a joke, I mean this seriously. Modeling a system after ourselves may not be the best idea if we're not the best possible system.
    - sillysaurus3 9y ago
      An interesting question, but if we make a program that makes wry jokes about what it means to be alive or argues persuasively about its own freedoms, the world will notice.
    - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
      It's a good question, and I think the answer is - up to a point. We're biased towards individualism and the illusion of personal intelligence making clever decisions using its own resources, but in fact our real intelligence is collective. Individually, most humans are a little bit smarter than other animals, but not much. Humans are also excellent mimics. We learn by copying, and a lot of what we consider intelligence is copied behaviour and copied beliefs - often applied unconsciously. So we've created systems - spoken language, writing, science, technology - that can externalise, collect, and preserve the best of our learning, so the species as a whole, including average humans, can get the benefit of it. This works fine as far as it does, but our political and economic systems are still founded on animal logic (i.e. personal advantage no matter the cumulative long-term cost) instead of conscious collective intelligence amplification and species optimisation. Based on this, AI won't get far unless someone invents an analogous way to externalise and abstract learning, so different AI projects can bootstrap each other, and there are common systems for abstraction and generalisation. Unsupervised learning isn't going to be all that interesting unless it can do that. It'll be a fun toy for certain classes of problems, but it won't be anywhere close to an AGI.
    - BearGoesChirp 9y ago
      I think I'm more scared of creating an intelligent life form that isn't modeled after us. Maybe an irrational fear, but one I have regardless.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - kahoon 9y ago
      You can define 'intelligent life' however you want. No matter how high you set the bar though, an algorithm that reproduces the intelligence of the average human and can be run in parallel at speeds unhinged by biological constraints would provide immense power, wouldn't it?
  - hyperpallium 9y ago
    Well, that it did produce intelligence once; not that it necessarily always does. Although I do tend to think that given enough time (some millions of years), other intelligence will evolve on earth, from parrots or elephants or dolphins or octipuses or something. Though there's no evidence of a brain growth spurt that led to us, in other species; and it's not settled why we had it.
zodiac 9y ago
Of course you need some objective function and feedback about how well you're doing wrt that. In RL this is true too. The feedback needed for backpropagation might be, for each action you take in life, what your chance of death is right after that action
cityhall 9y ago
That's a different problem. Some things are hard wired by biology, but individual organisms learn during their lives in spite of vague feedback. That's what we're trying to replicate.

striking 9y ago

>> Most of the time for biological intelligence there isn't an oracle describing the truth at every moment of life to judge actions/decisions against. [emphasis mine] > There is: Death, without reproducing. The problem is that it's not describing the truth at every moment of life, just the total approximate fitness of that lifeform by the end of its lifetime. It would be time consuming and cost-inefficient to simulate many possible configurations of actors until the end of their lifetimes.

sillysaurus3 9y ago
Yet it's the only strategy that we're absolutely certain produces intelligent life.
- striking 9y ago
  Are you absolutely certain we qualify as intelligent life? edit: This comment isn't a joke, I mean this seriously. Modeling a system after ourselves may not be the best idea if we're not the best possible system.
  - sillysaurus3 9y ago
    An interesting question, but if we make a program that makes wry jokes about what it means to be alive or argues persuasively about its own freedoms, the world will notice.
  - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
    It's a good question, and I think the answer is - up to a point. We're biased towards individualism and the illusion of personal intelligence making clever decisions using its own resources, but in fact our real intelligence is collective. Individually, most humans are a little bit smarter than other animals, but not much. Humans are also excellent mimics. We learn by copying, and a lot of what we consider intelligence is copied behaviour and copied beliefs - often applied unconsciously. So we've created systems - spoken language, writing, science, technology - that can externalise, collect, and preserve the best of our learning, so the species as a whole, including average humans, can get the benefit of it. This works fine as far as it does, but our political and economic systems are still founded on animal logic (i.e. personal advantage no matter the cumulative long-term cost) instead of conscious collective intelligence amplification and species optimisation. Based on this, AI won't get far unless someone invents an analogous way to externalise and abstract learning, so different AI projects can bootstrap each other, and there are common systems for abstraction and generalisation. Unsupervised learning isn't going to be all that interesting unless it can do that. It'll be a fun toy for certain classes of problems, but it won't be anywhere close to an AGI.
  - BearGoesChirp 9y ago
    I think I'm more scared of creating an intelligent life form that isn't modeled after us. Maybe an irrational fear, but one I have regardless.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - kahoon 9y ago
    You can define 'intelligent life' however you want. No matter how high you set the bar though, an algorithm that reproduces the intelligence of the average human and can be run in parallel at speeds unhinged by biological constraints would provide immense power, wouldn't it?
- hyperpallium 9y ago
  Well, that it did produce intelligence once; not that it necessarily always does. Although I do tend to think that given enough time (some millions of years), other intelligence will evolve on earth, from parrots or elephants or dolphins or octipuses or something. Though there's no evidence of a brain growth spurt that led to us, in other species; and it's not settled why we had it.

zodiac 9y ago

Of course you need some objective function and feedback about how well you're doing wrt that. In RL this is true too. The feedback needed for backpropagation might be, for each action you take in life, what your chance of death is right after that action

cityhall 9y ago

That's a different problem. Some things are hard wired by biology, but individual organisms learn during their lives in spite of vague feedback. That's what we're trying to replicate.