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There is a huge difference between perception and understanding. http://news.itu.int/reality-check-not-nearly-close-strong-ai-many-believe/ http://news.itu.int

There is a huge difference between perception and understanding. http://news.itu.int/reality-check-not-nearly-close-strong-ai-many-believe/ http://news.itu.int/reality-check-not-nearly-close-strong-ai... > Marcus also observes “a bias in the field which is to assume that everything is learnt.” Marcus makes the argument that human beings do not learn everything by ‘trial-and-error’ – that part of our knowledge is innate, learnt over evolution – leading him to suggest that “we need more innateness if we are going to build intelligent agents … It’s not learning trial-by-trial in the way that our contemporary machines are.”

mjburgess 9y ago
Well, not as much as you think. Perception is structured by concepts which are learnt. Perception is the prototypical mechanism of understanding. Insofar as we talking about "abstractions" we are just using language to model the conceptual structure of perception; and then higher order concepts to model the structure of these "perceptual" concepts. We tend to think of understanding as being equivalent to the linguistic act of accounting for a higher-order concept, when this is really only something humans can do -- and then only with tremendous difficulty needing quite significant methodological assistance from others, etc. This is the mistake Socrates makes when he asks for "definitions", as-if the dog doesn't understand the geography of where he lives only because he has no linguistic model of the concepts he's using. Or as-if the general has no knowledge of justice because he has no precise linguistic model of it. When Potter Steward said in the pornography case, " I know it when I see it " he was literally correct. The concept "pornography" is part of seeing pornography, it is knowledge which structures your perception. The lack of perfect linguistic model for that is neither here nor there, and a bit of a blind alley for AI (and socrates). Animals, including humans, understand a great deal more than any one person can model linguistically. It is this which structures our perception and allows even trivial engagements with our environment.
- dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
  > When Potter Steward said in the pornography case, " I know it when I see it " he was literally correct. Here you refer to categorization, not understanding. From the article I refer to: > “Deep learning is good at certain aspects of perception, particularly categorization, but perception is more than categorization and cognition or intelligence is more than just perception. There are many things that go into intelligence … And what we have made real progress on is perception, but the rest of it, we still haven’t made that much progress collectively in the field.” Understanding, real understanding, the "aha moment", is the very basis of new discoveries and real evolution. What we see now are systems quite good at categorizing, pattern recognition in a given set once prepared correctly and so on. There is no relation whatsoever with real intelligence, as in being able to make a new discovery based on analytical and synthetic skills. There are quite a few voices in the community saying the opposite and maintaining that mimicking intelligent action is practically the same as the intelligent action itself, but there are quite obvious limits to what can be achieved in this way.

mjburgess 9y ago

Well, not as much as you think. Perception is structured by concepts which are learnt. Perception is the prototypical mechanism of understanding. Insofar as we talking about "abstractions" we are just using language to model the conceptual structure of perception; and then higher order concepts to model the structure of these "perceptual" concepts. We tend to think of understanding as being equivalent to the linguistic act of accounting for a higher-order concept, when this is really only something humans can do -- and then only with tremendous difficulty needing quite significant methodological assistance from others, etc. This is the mistake Socrates makes when he asks for "definitions", as-if the dog doesn't understand the geography of where he lives only because he has no linguistic model of the concepts he's using. Or as-if the general has no knowledge of justice because he has no precise linguistic model of it. When Potter Steward said in the pornography case, " I know it when I see it " he was literally correct. The concept "pornography" is part of seeing pornography, it is knowledge which structures your perception. The lack of perfect linguistic model for that is neither here nor there, and a bit of a blind alley for AI (and socrates). Animals, including humans, understand a great deal more than any one person can model linguistically. It is this which structures our perception and allows even trivial engagements with our environment.

dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
> When Potter Steward said in the pornography case, " I know it when I see it " he was literally correct. Here you refer to categorization, not understanding. From the article I refer to: > “Deep learning is good at certain aspects of perception, particularly categorization, but perception is more than categorization and cognition or intelligence is more than just perception. There are many things that go into intelligence … And what we have made real progress on is perception, but the rest of it, we still haven’t made that much progress collectively in the field.” Understanding, real understanding, the "aha moment", is the very basis of new discoveries and real evolution. What we see now are systems quite good at categorizing, pattern recognition in a given set once prepared correctly and so on. There is no relation whatsoever with real intelligence, as in being able to make a new discovery based on analytical and synthetic skills. There are quite a few voices in the community saying the opposite and maintaining that mimicking intelligent action is practically the same as the intelligent action itself, but there are quite obvious limits to what can be achieved in this way.