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Question for the AGI believers out there: We have this, state of the art, AI which can turn the screws and hone in on some underlying reality about “how to win

Question for the AGI believers out there: We have this, state of the art, AI which can turn the screws and hone in on some underlying reality about “how to win at Chess”, a formal game. Great. How does this then extend into the social domain, where AGI would be operating? Like, how does AlphaZero optimize for “how to slow Climate Change”? I can’t even fathom how it would even understand climate change without an army of scientists publishing new work for it to consume. And then on top of that it will need to understand how it’s adversary, Putin, will try to optimize for the opposite, “ensure global warming to open up our shipping routes and arable land”. It just seems like a non-starter to me. Saying you could win at chess, so winning at geopolitics is just a scaling problem to me is like saying I can drink a bowl of miso soup so drinking the ocean is just a scaling problem. It would seem to me that intelligence at the highest levels isn’t constrained by foreknowledge, it’s constrained by the consequences of past decisions made during the (inevitably ongoing) interactive learning phase.

RivieraKid 9y ago
> Like, how does AlphaZero optimize for “how to slow Climate Change”? It doesn't, AlphaZero is a domain specific AI. That's like asking: "Like, how does differential equation solver slow climate change?". AlphaZero can learn to play a narrow class of games given the rules, that's all it does. But I agree with your sentiment obviously. We're n technological breakthroughs away from AGI, where n is unknown. We have approximately zero idea how to move from DNNs to AGI - or weather DNNs are the right approach.
- epaga 9y ago
  Yeah, seems like weather DNNs might be the right approach for solving Climate Change.
romaniv 9y ago
> Like, how does AlphaZero optimize for “how to slow Climate Change”? I think that's a bit ambitious. GAI is not obliged to solve all the world's problems. But I would ask a more modest question: how could AlphaZero approach problems like web service integration? These problems are definitely solvable, but converting them to optimization problems is the really difficult part that requires genuine intelligence.
- erikpukinskis 9y ago
  I thought was the point of AGI though, that it can formulate (formalize?) optimization problems from informal specifications.
  - DougBTX 9y ago
    Wikipedia says: > Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the intelligence of a machine that could successfully perform any intellectual task that a human being can. It is far from clear that humans can answer "how to slow climate change", so it seems like an artificially high bar to set for AGI.
krastanov 9y ago
You are putting the cart before the horse. Neural Networks is just one tool, that is particularly good for fitting a parameterized model to data. Nobody serious is saying that you just need a big neural network and a bunch of data to create a real general AI. On the other hand we can be optimistic about future technologies on the basis of "first principles" (like the existence of the human brain) without being certain how to build those technologies yet.
the8472 9y ago
I'm not sure your question makes sense. The zero-foreknowledge, 100% self-play thing happens in the context of simulated chess games, which translate fairly well into the real world since there isn't much additional interference with external factors. You don't even have to read your opponent's face to win. If you want to extrapolate from there to the case of "how to slow climate change while considering politics" then you would have to simulate the whole game of "playing dressed ape at planetary scale" too. > It would seem to me that intelligence at the highest levels isn’t constrained by foreknowledge, it’s constrained by the consequences of past decisions made during the (inevitably ongoing) interactive learning phase. This on the other hand does not seem like a particularly big obstacle. AIs can learn from automated systems such as chatbots, alexa-style gadgets, by observing human interactions, omitting half of the conversation and trying to reconstruct it, etc. Humans are constrained by a limited lifetime and not being able to parallelize their experience, AIs could gobble up billions of hours of human-human, human-AI interaction and AI-AI interaction data and generate more when needed.
apricot 9y ago
> Like, how does AlphaZero optimize for “how to slow Climate Change”? Do you want AIs exterminating humans? Because that's how you get AIs exterminating humans.
- V-2 9y ago
  So we need to get the question right and down to all the details - how much are we ready to sacrifice eg. (in this case) for environment sake, etc. I believe every developer has found themselves in a situation where they'd be describing their problem in a StackOverflow question, only to realize half way through what the answer is. Just because they forced themselves to phrase the problem clearly and looked at it from a fresh perspective. That's the "rubber duck" effect at work. Who knows if we won't bump into this phenomenon pretty often when it comes to high level AI :) Merely setting the whole thing up will often provide such quality research and a solid answer before actually submitting the problem to the AI

RivieraKid 9y ago

> Like, how does AlphaZero optimize for “how to slow Climate Change”? It doesn't, AlphaZero is a domain specific AI. That's like asking: "Like, how does differential equation solver slow climate change?". AlphaZero can learn to play a narrow class of games given the rules, that's all it does. But I agree with your sentiment obviously. We're n technological breakthroughs away from AGI, where n is unknown. We have approximately zero idea how to move from DNNs to AGI - or weather DNNs are the right approach.

epaga 9y ago
Yeah, seems like weather DNNs might be the right approach for solving Climate Change.

romaniv 9y ago

> Like, how does AlphaZero optimize for “how to slow Climate Change”? I think that's a bit ambitious. GAI is not obliged to solve all the world's problems. But I would ask a more modest question: how could AlphaZero approach problems like web service integration? These problems are definitely solvable, but converting them to optimization problems is the really difficult part that requires genuine intelligence.

erikpukinskis 9y ago
I thought was the point of AGI though, that it can formulate (formalize?) optimization problems from informal specifications.
- DougBTX 9y ago
  Wikipedia says: > Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the intelligence of a machine that could successfully perform any intellectual task that a human being can. It is far from clear that humans can answer "how to slow climate change", so it seems like an artificially high bar to set for AGI.

krastanov 9y ago

You are putting the cart before the horse. Neural Networks is just one tool, that is particularly good for fitting a parameterized model to data. Nobody serious is saying that you just need a big neural network and a bunch of data to create a real general AI. On the other hand we can be optimistic about future technologies on the basis of "first principles" (like the existence of the human brain) without being certain how to build those technologies yet.

the8472 9y ago

I'm not sure your question makes sense. The zero-foreknowledge, 100% self-play thing happens in the context of simulated chess games, which translate fairly well into the real world since there isn't much additional interference with external factors. You don't even have to read your opponent's face to win. If you want to extrapolate from there to the case of "how to slow climate change while considering politics" then you would have to simulate the whole game of "playing dressed ape at planetary scale" too. > It would seem to me that intelligence at the highest levels isn’t constrained by foreknowledge, it’s constrained by the consequences of past decisions made during the (inevitably ongoing) interactive learning phase. This on the other hand does not seem like a particularly big obstacle. AIs can learn from automated systems such as chatbots, alexa-style gadgets, by observing human interactions, omitting half of the conversation and trying to reconstruct it, etc. Humans are constrained by a limited lifetime and not being able to parallelize their experience, AIs could gobble up billions of hours of human-human, human-AI interaction and AI-AI interaction data and generate more when needed.

apricot 9y ago

> Like, how does AlphaZero optimize for “how to slow Climate Change”? Do you want AIs exterminating humans? Because that's how you get AIs exterminating humans.

V-2 9y ago
So we need to get the question right and down to all the details - how much are we ready to sacrifice eg. (in this case) for environment sake, etc. I believe every developer has found themselves in a situation where they'd be describing their problem in a StackOverflow question, only to realize half way through what the answer is. Just because they forced themselves to phrase the problem clearly and looked at it from a fresh perspective. That's the "rubber duck" effect at work. Who knows if we won't bump into this phenomenon pretty often when it comes to high level AI :) Merely setting the whole thing up will often provide such quality research and a solid answer before actually submitting the problem to the AI