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The tree climbers may well build a rocket and land on the moon anyhow. I think it’s a good idea not to add unwarranted mystery to the subject. We have good re

The tree climbers may well build a rocket and land on the moon anyhow. I think it’s a good idea not to add unwarranted mystery to the subject. We have good reason to believe our computers are underpowered for the task. This is a challenge, and while I think it’s going very fast, our collective sense of proportion of the timeline seems optimistic. In my view, if it happens this century, humans will have achieved an impressive feat. If we continue with geometric increases in flops/watt, maybe the rosy predictions will be closer than expected. I suppose what I’m implying is that nervous systems are doing computation, and not something mysterious that we don’t understand. The tree climbers knew they needed to climb higher and realized they’ll need another tool not a different understanding of spatial geometry.

YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
>> The tree climbers may well build a rocket and land on the moon anyhow. Sticking with the OP's analogy, the number of people who think it is impossible to get to the mooon in any way is much, much smaller than the number of people who, misunderstanding how tree-climbing works, believe that is the way, that climbing to the moon is just a manner of climbing trees better than we presently do and that if everyone keeps climbing trees someone will reach the moon any time now. The problem of course, is that there are no trees that reach all the way to the moon. We can keep climbing all we want and we'll never reach as high as the moon. To get to the moon, we need a radically different approach. A rocket, perhaps- certainly! But, how long have people been climbing trees for, before the first rocket was made? And where are the people proposing rocket designs, in modern AI research?
- bachbach 8y ago
  > And where are the people proposing rocket designs, in modern AI research? We like people like Geoffrey Hinton as their work produces results - he is the first to admit you can't get there from here. I think it's the people who are concerned with fundamentals, like the people at the Sante Fe Institute - complex adaptive systems. In the beginning we believed in programming AI from the axioms of mathematics - not many people believe that now. A bit like configuring an animal from atoms. Difficult, pointless. The first story is that 'fundamentals' might mean some evolutionary framework being required to plug in results from other areas like computer vision and machine learning, my guess would be something from genetic algorithms. The other story is there exists a 'God Algorithm' that all sapient beings possess - but I find that difficult to believe. Another story is that we simply have to start from the start - literally everything we know is nearly worthless because consciousness is too unlikely with computer hardware - that the entire history of computing is a dead end. Great for human technology but just not the route to a synthetic version of biological beings. I suspect we're more biased against this possibility than we should be. I hope that it is the first story - my rationale is that biological intelligence and consciousness is not as far away as we think it is. If we look to evolution we see these vast periods of time in which nature works on different paths and it's only in the last few moments that an animal begins building cities and civilizations. There are also lots of the neurological version of transition fossils if you look around - lots of animals exist that exhibit human level cognitive abilities and some of them outright outrank us. I'm sure you've seen those birds assessing situations and solving puzzles, heard of monkeys coming up with original innovations like salted potatoes - a lot of animals outperform human children. My thought is that when/if we break Moravec's Paradox and develop a robot that can walk, really walk, then we're some way towards developing machines that perform comparably to biological brains. The catch is that people who think a walking robot is trivial are so wrong - it is spectacularly difficult. Boston Dynamics is impressive until you understand that a three or four year old is the Albert Einstein of getting about on arms and legs. Show me a robot that can mimic a human walking down the street and I'll stand up at the other side of this internet connection and start clapping. Most people start to change the definition of walking because that is easier than admitting we can't do something that looks easy. I didn't say give a machine locomotive power by changing the shape of the machine or its environment. I said walk - I meant walk. 1950 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj0Mr3mLujE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj0Mr3mLujE A toy, but not bad for £16.00 66 years, a team of experts and millions of dollars. 2016 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVlhMGQgDkY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVlhMGQgDkY We could be waiting until 2082 or longer.
xamuel 8y ago
Beneath the marketing, ML is a souped-up version of "draw a line through these points". Great for image recognition etc. But the line/curve/manifold won't just suddenly "wake up" once we add enough points. There's something deeper missing (maybe something related to recursion or self-reflection?) and we don't even know what it is, much less how to add it. Yes maybe we'll make a breakthrough and build a rocket tomorrow but it won't be because of any insight we gained from tree-climbing.
- jarcane 8y ago
  It's like the Singularitists who passionately believe we're somehow going to transfer our consciousness into a machine, despite the fact that thousands of years of philosophy and science from countless angles of study have yet to actually solve the question of what consciousness even is.
  - pas 8y ago
    Or, it's solved, and people stubbornly refuse to believe, that it's not much. A software that runs in your brain that makes you think that you are conscious, gives you the feeling of agency when your predictions and the world match up. The hard problem is how to wire up adaptivity and the specialized faculties.
bachbach 8y ago
> We have good reason to believe our computers are underpowered for the task. What are those reasons? It appeared to me as if we had amassed a terrific reservoir of computational ability - but we wasted nearly all because it was expedient to waste resources when they were ample. If I gave you a computer with 1 billion times the processing ability of current supercomputers, can you convince me that you'd be capable of replicating the functionality of a biological brain?
- state_less 8y ago
  Do we have a terrific reservoir of computational ability though? The number are important because they seem to be about a million times too inefficient. A human brain might take 36.8e15 computations per second [1] and does all this using about ~20 watts! That's pretty impressive at around 1.84e+15 ops / watt vs our current 6e+9 ops / watt [2] from silicon. We have to make about a million times more efficient processors to match the brains efficiency. My 4lb laptop takes what feels like forever to do a limited deep learning task given how inefficient it is. If you gave just me the sort of computer needed, that alone would very likely not be sufficient. I just don't think we should draw too strong of a negative conclusions before we all have the necessary equipment to match the work of the brain. But if myself and fellow computer users did have access to efficient powerful computers, we'd probably want to write algorithms that allowed us to make many attempts at the solution per second. I'd imagine writing a simulator to project many agents into where they are competing for resources and many of these simulations taking place concurrently. Something of a multiverse of simulation and optimization. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_performance_by_orders_of_magnitude https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_performance_by_orders... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_per_watt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_per_watt
  - bachbach 8y ago
    > Do we have a terrific reservoir of computational ability though? We do (and I wrote a long post with a list of bullet points proving so before I just deleted it), but I don't think we should waste time debating whether this is true or not true. We're on the same side after all, your objective is my objective. > But if myself and fellow computer users did have access to efficient powerful computers, we'd probably want to write algorithms that allowed us to make many attempts at the solution per second. I'd imagine writing a simulator to project many agents into where they are competing for resources and many of these simulations taking place concurrently. I recommend you look at David Krateneur's ideas, he has a video called "The Stupid Ways That We Have Thought About Intelligence". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pi7h6nmkvAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pi7h6nmkvAM > Something of a multiverse of simulation and optimization. An artificial imagination really. I really recommend watching that video.

YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago

>> The tree climbers may well build a rocket and land on the moon anyhow. Sticking with the OP's analogy, the number of people who think it is impossible to get to the mooon in any way is much, much smaller than the number of people who, misunderstanding how tree-climbing works, believe that is the way, that climbing to the moon is just a manner of climbing trees better than we presently do and that if everyone keeps climbing trees someone will reach the moon any time now. The problem of course, is that there are no trees that reach all the way to the moon. We can keep climbing all we want and we'll never reach as high as the moon. To get to the moon, we need a radically different approach. A rocket, perhaps- certainly! But, how long have people been climbing trees for, before the first rocket was made? And where are the people proposing rocket designs, in modern AI research?

bachbach 8y ago
> And where are the people proposing rocket designs, in modern AI research? We like people like Geoffrey Hinton as their work produces results - he is the first to admit you can't get there from here. I think it's the people who are concerned with fundamentals, like the people at the Sante Fe Institute - complex adaptive systems. In the beginning we believed in programming AI from the axioms of mathematics - not many people believe that now. A bit like configuring an animal from atoms. Difficult, pointless. The first story is that 'fundamentals' might mean some evolutionary framework being required to plug in results from other areas like computer vision and machine learning, my guess would be something from genetic algorithms. The other story is there exists a 'God Algorithm' that all sapient beings possess - but I find that difficult to believe. Another story is that we simply have to start from the start - literally everything we know is nearly worthless because consciousness is too unlikely with computer hardware - that the entire history of computing is a dead end. Great for human technology but just not the route to a synthetic version of biological beings. I suspect we're more biased against this possibility than we should be. I hope that it is the first story - my rationale is that biological intelligence and consciousness is not as far away as we think it is. If we look to evolution we see these vast periods of time in which nature works on different paths and it's only in the last few moments that an animal begins building cities and civilizations. There are also lots of the neurological version of transition fossils if you look around - lots of animals exist that exhibit human level cognitive abilities and some of them outright outrank us. I'm sure you've seen those birds assessing situations and solving puzzles, heard of monkeys coming up with original innovations like salted potatoes - a lot of animals outperform human children. My thought is that when/if we break Moravec's Paradox and develop a robot that can walk, really walk, then we're some way towards developing machines that perform comparably to biological brains. The catch is that people who think a walking robot is trivial are so wrong - it is spectacularly difficult. Boston Dynamics is impressive until you understand that a three or four year old is the Albert Einstein of getting about on arms and legs. Show me a robot that can mimic a human walking down the street and I'll stand up at the other side of this internet connection and start clapping. Most people start to change the definition of walking because that is easier than admitting we can't do something that looks easy. I didn't say give a machine locomotive power by changing the shape of the machine or its environment. I said walk - I meant walk. 1950 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj0Mr3mLujE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj0Mr3mLujE A toy, but not bad for £16.00 66 years, a team of experts and millions of dollars. 2016 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVlhMGQgDkY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVlhMGQgDkY We could be waiting until 2082 or longer.

xamuel 8y ago

Beneath the marketing, ML is a souped-up version of "draw a line through these points". Great for image recognition etc. But the line/curve/manifold won't just suddenly "wake up" once we add enough points. There's something deeper missing (maybe something related to recursion or self-reflection?) and we don't even know what it is, much less how to add it. Yes maybe we'll make a breakthrough and build a rocket tomorrow but it won't be because of any insight we gained from tree-climbing.

jarcane 8y ago
It's like the Singularitists who passionately believe we're somehow going to transfer our consciousness into a machine, despite the fact that thousands of years of philosophy and science from countless angles of study have yet to actually solve the question of what consciousness even is.
- pas 8y ago
  Or, it's solved, and people stubbornly refuse to believe, that it's not much. A software that runs in your brain that makes you think that you are conscious, gives you the feeling of agency when your predictions and the world match up. The hard problem is how to wire up adaptivity and the specialized faculties.

bachbach 8y ago

> We have good reason to believe our computers are underpowered for the task. What are those reasons? It appeared to me as if we had amassed a terrific reservoir of computational ability - but we wasted nearly all because it was expedient to waste resources when they were ample. If I gave you a computer with 1 billion times the processing ability of current supercomputers, can you convince me that you'd be capable of replicating the functionality of a biological brain?

state_less 8y ago
Do we have a terrific reservoir of computational ability though? The number are important because they seem to be about a million times too inefficient. A human brain might take 36.8e15 computations per second [1] and does all this using about ~20 watts! That's pretty impressive at around 1.84e+15 ops / watt vs our current 6e+9 ops / watt [2] from silicon. We have to make about a million times more efficient processors to match the brains efficiency. My 4lb laptop takes what feels like forever to do a limited deep learning task given how inefficient it is. If you gave just me the sort of computer needed, that alone would very likely not be sufficient. I just don't think we should draw too strong of a negative conclusions before we all have the necessary equipment to match the work of the brain. But if myself and fellow computer users did have access to efficient powerful computers, we'd probably want to write algorithms that allowed us to make many attempts at the solution per second. I'd imagine writing a simulator to project many agents into where they are competing for resources and many of these simulations taking place concurrently. Something of a multiverse of simulation and optimization. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_performance_by_orders_of_magnitude https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_performance_by_orders... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_per_watt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_per_watt
- bachbach 8y ago
  > Do we have a terrific reservoir of computational ability though? We do (and I wrote a long post with a list of bullet points proving so before I just deleted it), but I don't think we should waste time debating whether this is true or not true. We're on the same side after all, your objective is my objective. > But if myself and fellow computer users did have access to efficient powerful computers, we'd probably want to write algorithms that allowed us to make many attempts at the solution per second. I'd imagine writing a simulator to project many agents into where they are competing for resources and many of these simulations taking place concurrently. I recommend you look at David Krateneur's ideas, he has a video called "The Stupid Ways That We Have Thought About Intelligence". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pi7h6nmkvAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pi7h6nmkvAM > Something of a multiverse of simulation and optimization. An artificial imagination really. I really recommend watching that video.