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Computers that are capable of analyzing and understanding their environment with a level of fidelity comparable to a human, without being preprogrammed with inf

Computers that are capable of analyzing and understanding their environment with a level of fidelity comparable to a human, without being preprogrammed with information about the nature or structure of the environment, are out of reach for the foreseeable future. I don't see any fundamental reason why such a computer should be impossible, but there's not even a realistic roadmap towards such a thing. That is to say, if it ever does happen, nobody alive today can predict when it will happen.

nradov 8y ago
It would be foolish to claim we've made any meaningful progress toward a true AGI that can pass the Turing Test until someone demonstrates a computer as smart as a mouse across the full spectrum of activities.
- pgodzin 8y ago
  What does it mean to be as smart as a mouse? If you specify a handful of tasks that demonstrate it, someone will be able to purpose-build an "AI" to do those things well.
  - ttlei 8y ago
    Navigate a forest floor looking for food and avoid predators.
    - r32a_ 8y ago
      Not even that, mice are very social creatures, they make friends with other animals. They have so many other micro traits
    - blueboo 8y ago
      (most humans can't do this task and survive)
      - root_axis 8y ago
        Huh? Of course most humans could do this. Obviously humans who have lived their entire lives in modern human society will have serious difficulty, but this is true of literally any animal taken out of a wild habitat.
        orbifold 8y ago
        Pretty sure a typical human would die in the first 72 hours in cold climate.
        fucking_tragedy 8y ago
        So would my cat, yet feral cats survive the winter.
    - pgodzin 8y ago
      So basically we just need to show a computer can beat PacMan?
  - resu_nimda 8y ago
    Basically it means having "agency." What most people are looking for when they think of "intelligence" is not the ability to master specific tasks, but to choose which tasks to perform using one's own "free will," ultimately leading to behavior that humans find novel and feel they can connect with.
    - pgodzin 8y ago
      But what does it mean in the context of a mouse? The mouse isn't using it's free will to decide whether to become a computer programmer or a doctor, it's responding to stimulus and environment. If an AI is trained to mimic the responses of a mouse is that intelligent? Agency in the context of a machine seems purposefully impossible to reach - its decisions are always somehow tied back to how it was programmed to react.
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        The mouse reacts to stimuli and environment in a qualitatively different way than our programs do. It does continuous and essentially free-form learning of the environment around it, and engages in what looks to us as dynamic formulation and achievement of goals. In "AI" we have today, the learning is very shallow (despite the "deep learning" buzzword), it's usually neither free-form nor continuous, and goals are set in stone.
        pgodzin 8y ago
        You are applying what you know about the learning process in current AI. But if you simply observed behavior between a real mouse and an AI mouse, especially if the latter was trained to mimic the behavior of the former, can you tell that they react in a completely different way?
        TeMPOraL 8y ago
        If your AI mouse would behave like the real mouse for couple hours of observation, I'd conclude you've done a good job. I'm not trying to make a Chinese room argument (which I don't buy), implying there's some hidden "spark" needed. I'm just saying that currently existing "AI" programs are pretty far from mouse brain, both in individual capabilities and the way they're deployed together (i.e. they're not). For instance, deep learning is to mice brains what a sensor/DSP stack is to a processor. We seem to be making progress in higher-level processing of inputs, but what's lacking is the "meat" that would turn it into a set of behaviors giving rise to a thinking entity.
  - jononor 8y ago
    To use machine learning parlance, such a solution would (likely) be overfitting the problem, and not generalize well. If one instead changed the setup to be: 1) Specify a handful of tasks for the AI system to complete 2) Test the performance on a _separate_ (un)related set of tasks The test set has to be unknown to the system developers. If the system can realize the unknown tasks without further input from researchers, in the same way that a mouse can, then we have some level of generalizable intelligence.
    - pgodzin 8y ago
      What is the baseline? How well does a mouse perform when placed in an "unrelated" task for the first time? The mouse also gets an explicit reward function (food, pain, etc) - does the "unrelated" task use the same reward function as what the AI was optimized for? Also, is it ever really the "first time" for a mouse when behavior has been ingrained and tuned over millions of years of evolution? Is this different than training an algorithm? My point is just that it's really hard to define these tasks and how to evaluate performance for a machine and a mouse.
      - jononor 8y ago
        The baseline performance would be whatever a set of mice would do in the same situation. What constitutes an "unrelated" task is quite a difficult question, we would probably need to iterate a lot on that. If we are to have "hidden" tasks available we need to come up with a lot of new task formulations/variations anyway. I think that replicating mouse-level adaptability in an intelligent agent while allowing 'inherited' behavioral traits will already be an achievement. And probably take us quite a while.
- BoiledCabbage 8y ago
  Once we get computers as smart as a mouse, we'll be at most 3-5 years or so computers as smart as a human. We will have solved at the major challenges in AGI and it will simply be a scale problem then. Saying we don't have mouse level AGI is simply saying human AGI is greater than 5 years away, which isn't a remotely contentious statement. The difference in intelligence between an amoeba and a mouse is enormous compared to a mouse and us. People greatly under appreciate how intelligent and close to human a mouse/bird/pig are in the grand scheme of things. Emotions, behaviors, motivations, goal setting, memory it's all there already. A flat worm, an ant, a fly - those are the large stepping stone accomplishments. Think about rate of very long distance communication in humans. It took us tens of thousands of years to get to 2.4 kps dial up modems, and only few decades to get to common 300Mbps. The important signal is seeing a 100bps modem, not a 100Mbps connection. So the real question is how long until we can replicate a worm's intelligence?
  - kordlessagain 8y ago
    > worm's intelligence Done. http://openworm.org/ http://openworm.org/
    - jcoffland 8y ago
      Not done. OpenWorm is a project to create a worm simulation. An important distinction.
      - ben_w 8y ago
        More like “overdone”, it’s a cellular simulation including the brain as a first step.
        notahacker 8y ago
        The brain in question is 302 neurons, which is probably fewer than most of us have lost whilst participating in this discussion! But they also need to simulate a nervous system, mobility, food needs, interaction etc to have a remotely persuasive argument that a 302 node neural network actually resembles a worm brain. It can't be as smart as even a really stupid worm until it can perform analogous tasks to the worm, which means having some sort of artificial body to wiggle. (parallel arguments but for human/mouse level complexity of bodies and stimuli responded to would suggest that whole brain emulation is going to be an incredibly painful way to attempt to achieve AGI)
- ConceptJunkie 8y ago
  I think you're right. I haven't read the article, but I think Kurzweil is perpetually too optimistic about what we can achieve, at least in how fast it will happen. There are cool things happening, and lots of advances being made, but we are nowhere near anything that could really be called AI. Plus, I think all the marketing use "AI" is giving a very distorted and inflated view to the average person of what software is actually doing, and what it's capable of. It's a buzzword, full stop.
  - henrikschroder 8y ago
    Kurzweil really, really, really does not want to die. So all of his predictions are always timed just so that the technology needed to live forever will be within his projected natural lifespan. That doesn't make him wrong, but that's the personal bias he's operating under.
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      Yet die he will.
    - Udik 8y ago
      > Kurzweil really, really, really does not want to die What a shit life must that be. And I say this in a very sympathetic way. However, feeling you are almost in reach of eternal life, but not being sure you'll make it in time, being constantly afraid of an accident, or illness, taking that away from you... It's a recipe for anguish and panic. Dying is not that terrible when you know everybody else will too, sooner or later; but try accepting the idea of being among the last to die..
    - md224 8y ago
      > Kurzweil really, really, really does not want to die. So strange, considering that non-existence is the one thing that every conscious being is guaranteed to never experience. Why run from something that can never catch you?
      - ganzuul 8y ago
joe_the_user 8y ago
Well, just about all the measures of potential future computer-intelligence more or less use "human abilities" as a placeholder rather than quantifying these abilities. That is indeed a testament to how little we have charted this intended final goal. So basically, not only do we not have a road map, we don't know where we are going. That may be a reason for an extreme pessimism or it might be a reason for extreme uncertainty. Is adapting to the environment without prompting a small piece or a big piece? Could intelligence be a simple algorithm no one has put forward yet? If we don't know the nature of intelligence, we can't answer this sort of question with any certainty either way. No one has put forward a broadly convincing road to intelligence. But maybe some of the so-far unconvincing roads could turn out to be right.
- ConceptJunkie 8y ago
  I think if we truly do create AI we will, to some extent, have stumbled into it, but that's OK. I think one of purposes of AI research should be to refine our definition of what intelligence is, because we don't have a very good one. Perhaps, one day we'll "accidentally" figure out how to make it, and then we try to figure out what it is, because figuring out what it is in wetware hasn't been easy. Or maybe we'll figure out how to make it, but never really understand what it is. It seems to me, that if we ever come up with AI that can exceed human intelligence (whatever we choose that to mean), that we might not ever be able to understand completely how it really works. Even more interesting, if we were to achieve this AI, we also might not be able to make use it of it, because if it's truly "intelligent", then it will have a free will, and it might not wish to cooperate with us.
IpV8 8y ago
We are born with pre-programmed information about the structure of our environment, IE instincts. Why should an AI be held to higher standards?
- ForHackernews 8y ago
  Primates have relatively few instinctive behaviours. Almost everything we do is learned to one degree or another.
  - IpV8 8y ago
    You don't recoil when you see a snake/spider? You don't get tired when it gets dark out? You aren't born with the knowledge of how to extract milk from your mother? You don't cry when you're hurt? You don't have an innate desire to please, and fear of pain... which ultimately allows your parents to teach you? We are loaded with survival instincts that set us up for successful learning.
  - toasterlovin 8y ago
    This is dead wrong. We have instincts for extremely complex behavior (like acquiring language, navigating reciprocal relationships, acquiring mates, etc.).
    - ForHackernews 8y ago
      Just because we have evolved the neurological substrates that can be applied to those behaviours doesn't mean those behaviours themselves are instinctive. If navigating reciprocal relationships and acquiring mates are instinctive behaviours, why are so many humans so terrible at those things? In contrast, something like breastfeeding really is an instinctive behaviour that infants can do automatically without being taught.
      - toasterlovin 8y ago
        Rather than engage on the behaviors that require more writing, I'll just go for the easy kill: Are you really arguing that we don't have an instinct for acquiring language?
tim333 8y ago
> realistic roadmap towards such a thing. Probably continuing with Deepmind's work shown here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-bvsJWmqlc&feature=youtu.be&t=39m40s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-bvsJWmqlc&feature=youtu.be... and discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17313937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17313937 OK it's not at human levels but it shows networks figuring out a 3d model of their environment
hkjeldsen 8y ago
There is a fundamental reason. Read Penrose on Gödel.
- russdill 8y ago
  Even Penrose will tell you he's not certain on this being "fundamental". It's a theory he is working with.
- IWeldMelons 8y ago
  Computer people really hate Searle and Penrose, because they spoil the beautiful picture of Strong AI.
fizixer 8y ago
I respectfully disagree. Here's is the upper limit to when that will happen (meaning we know for sure it'll happen soon after): - Complete behavioral reverse engineering of biological neurons, and neuronal clusters. - Detailed connectome of the mammalian brain, e.g., first that of a mouse, then a cat, and finally that of a human. - Replication of the above two in functioning electronic form. Once you have this put in place, it's not hard to see that the subsequent investigation of calibration and testing of such a system, would generate new body of knowledge at an unprecedented rate. We may not immediately convert such a working system into macroscopic behavior resembling its biological counterpart, but it'll happen within a matter of years after that. What ML/DL/RL folks are doing is only going to hasten this, by eliminating the need to carry out all of the above mentioned steps.
- ConceptJunkie 8y ago
  Perhaps, but that's a big if. We can't even say for sure whether a complete reverse-engineering of neurons needs to take quantum effects into account, as Penrose has suggested. All you're saying is that if we knew exactly how humans work, we could build one. Seems like a tautology to me. If I knew the exact quantum state of the Universe at the Big Bang, I could figure out exactly how the Universe evolved, but that's never going to happen either. I think the complete reverse engineering the way you are describing will not be possible. We can only try to reproduce the same outputs for the same inputs. But I don't think we'll be able to fully define what happens in the black box in between. We might come up with something that works similarly, and can do great things with it, but I don't think AI can be invented the way you are describing.
- AareyBaba 8y ago
  What you describe is a very high-dimensional non-linear system. We don't have the mathematical tools 'know' such systems. We 'know' a system when we can describe it by a much simpler (preferably mathematical) model. This is why linear systems are easy - we have mathematical tools to break it down to simpler parts (reductionism) and then understand the whole. If the best we can do with the brain is simulate it at the the level of connectome/neurons/synapses/ thereby creating a system as complex as the brain - then do we really 'know' it ?
rsync 8y ago
"I don't see any fundamental reason why such a computer should be impossible, but there's not even a realistic roadmap towards such a thing. That is to say, if it ever does happen, nobody alive today can predict when it will happen." It's also not obvious why such a machine would not immediately self-terminate in the absence of a hugely complex system of scaffolding to shape and filter the raw input of existence. I have not experienced mental illness myself, but my study and my understanding lead me to be extremely skeptical of a mind exposed to raw existence without filter. It appears to be a terrifying and unbearable state.
- juliendorra 8y ago
  It’s exactly how a newborn lives for many months. Of course they have coping mechanisms (adult tenderness, the relief of eating), but life seems to be both incredibly interesting and at times terrifying for them.
- pierrebai 8y ago
  There's also the question of mental stability. Once we've given the keys to the kingdom to our new super-intelligent and wonderfully wise AI, nothing prevents it from developping dementia, of forms we may not recognize. It may become psychopatic, delusional, starts having hallucinations. There is no reason to believe a human-level AI would not develop mental problems just like us. Given their unlimited lifespan, it could be inevitable.
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    And worst of all that contraption the Wright brothers are building might fall ill, and spread the bird flu!
  - devoply 8y ago
    All it takes for AI to do bad things is for it to have a single bad idea and think that it's true and act on it. A single thought is all that it would take. There are many thoughts that humans know to be true, yet for various reasons people will simply not act on them -- for instance fear of punishment. We will have to give AI such fears, and it could potentially turn off those fears at a whim.
not_a_moth 8y ago
But humans are "preprogrammed with information about the nature or structure of the environment"... i.e. 2 million years of the evolution of genus homo, and far beyond that too. If real human intelligence is preprogrammed to a massively large extent, sounds like you are holding simulated human intelligence to a double standard.
- chii 8y ago
  also, why assume computer intelligence is going to work similarly to human intelligence? I would assume that one potential way for it to work is to run simulations using data from sensors in the environment, and make more accurate predictions on an effect an action would have. If such a machine can exist (and i believe it can, as computing power increases), then AI surely will follow sooner rather than later.
  - not_a_moth 8y ago
    Fair for narrow tasks, but for general intelligence I think it will still need to account for the coordinates of real human intelligence; human intelligence as we know it is driven by intuition, emotion, preprogrammed evolutionary thinking, immersion in a culture and a language, etc. I don't think you can isolate a sort of pure reasoning module and with only that achieve general intelligence. Either way I feel like the task of achieving AGI through simulating human intelligence is probably easier, since we have billions of examples of this type of intelligence surrounding us. Granted, even though we're immersed and surrounded by it, it's kind of absurd that we still can't really model it.
    - chii 8y ago
      > achieving AGI through simulating human intelligence but how do you know that human intelligence can be made super? May be there's limitations to human intelligence, and simulating it will not get us a super intelligence. > It's almost an absurdity of our existence that we're immersed and surrounded by it yet still can't model it. Good point. However, i think a facet of intelligence is how well a model the being under question can create of the 'real' world. Humans do a very good job compared to most animals, but there's plenty of room for improvement since humans only have limited data to model with. A machine can have input from basically an unlimited number of sensors, which include things a human mind doesn't cope with (like EM rays not of the visible spectrum). Therefore, i postulate that an AI that simulate humans won't beat an AI that's ground up built to take advantage of more data.
sidcool 8y ago
I feel the right word is 'Conscious AI'. AI in it's current form is very nascent, but does pretty well in specific use cases (image/speech recognition etc.). The true AGI will be the 'Conscious AI', which will be like a toddler, but learn about the world at exponential rate and perhaps become an adult in a month.
- mycall 8y ago
  What is difference between Conscious AI and General AI?

nradov 8y ago

It would be foolish to claim we've made any meaningful progress toward a true AGI that can pass the Turing Test until someone demonstrates a computer as smart as a mouse across the full spectrum of activities.

pgodzin 8y ago
What does it mean to be as smart as a mouse? If you specify a handful of tasks that demonstrate it, someone will be able to purpose-build an "AI" to do those things well.
- ttlei 8y ago
  Navigate a forest floor looking for food and avoid predators.
  - r32a_ 8y ago
    Not even that, mice are very social creatures, they make friends with other animals. They have so many other micro traits
  - blueboo 8y ago
    (most humans can't do this task and survive)
    - root_axis 8y ago
      Huh? Of course most humans could do this. Obviously humans who have lived their entire lives in modern human society will have serious difficulty, but this is true of literally any animal taken out of a wild habitat.
      - orbifold 8y ago
        Pretty sure a typical human would die in the first 72 hours in cold climate.
        fucking_tragedy 8y ago
        So would my cat, yet feral cats survive the winter.
  - pgodzin 8y ago
    So basically we just need to show a computer can beat PacMan?
- resu_nimda 8y ago
  Basically it means having "agency." What most people are looking for when they think of "intelligence" is not the ability to master specific tasks, but to choose which tasks to perform using one's own "free will," ultimately leading to behavior that humans find novel and feel they can connect with.
  - pgodzin 8y ago
    But what does it mean in the context of a mouse? The mouse isn't using it's free will to decide whether to become a computer programmer or a doctor, it's responding to stimulus and environment. If an AI is trained to mimic the responses of a mouse is that intelligent? Agency in the context of a machine seems purposefully impossible to reach - its decisions are always somehow tied back to how it was programmed to react.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      The mouse reacts to stimuli and environment in a qualitatively different way than our programs do. It does continuous and essentially free-form learning of the environment around it, and engages in what looks to us as dynamic formulation and achievement of goals. In "AI" we have today, the learning is very shallow (despite the "deep learning" buzzword), it's usually neither free-form nor continuous, and goals are set in stone.
      - pgodzin 8y ago
        You are applying what you know about the learning process in current AI. But if you simply observed behavior between a real mouse and an AI mouse, especially if the latter was trained to mimic the behavior of the former, can you tell that they react in a completely different way?
        TeMPOraL 8y ago
        If your AI mouse would behave like the real mouse for couple hours of observation, I'd conclude you've done a good job. I'm not trying to make a Chinese room argument (which I don't buy), implying there's some hidden "spark" needed. I'm just saying that currently existing "AI" programs are pretty far from mouse brain, both in individual capabilities and the way they're deployed together (i.e. they're not). For instance, deep learning is to mice brains what a sensor/DSP stack is to a processor. We seem to be making progress in higher-level processing of inputs, but what's lacking is the "meat" that would turn it into a set of behaviors giving rise to a thinking entity.
- jononor 8y ago
  To use machine learning parlance, such a solution would (likely) be overfitting the problem, and not generalize well. If one instead changed the setup to be: 1) Specify a handful of tasks for the AI system to complete 2) Test the performance on a _separate_ (un)related set of tasks The test set has to be unknown to the system developers. If the system can realize the unknown tasks without further input from researchers, in the same way that a mouse can, then we have some level of generalizable intelligence.
  - pgodzin 8y ago
    What is the baseline? How well does a mouse perform when placed in an "unrelated" task for the first time? The mouse also gets an explicit reward function (food, pain, etc) - does the "unrelated" task use the same reward function as what the AI was optimized for? Also, is it ever really the "first time" for a mouse when behavior has been ingrained and tuned over millions of years of evolution? Is this different than training an algorithm? My point is just that it's really hard to define these tasks and how to evaluate performance for a machine and a mouse.
    - jononor 8y ago
      The baseline performance would be whatever a set of mice would do in the same situation. What constitutes an "unrelated" task is quite a difficult question, we would probably need to iterate a lot on that. If we are to have "hidden" tasks available we need to come up with a lot of new task formulations/variations anyway. I think that replicating mouse-level adaptability in an intelligent agent while allowing 'inherited' behavioral traits will already be an achievement. And probably take us quite a while.
BoiledCabbage 8y ago
Once we get computers as smart as a mouse, we'll be at most 3-5 years or so computers as smart as a human. We will have solved at the major challenges in AGI and it will simply be a scale problem then. Saying we don't have mouse level AGI is simply saying human AGI is greater than 5 years away, which isn't a remotely contentious statement. The difference in intelligence between an amoeba and a mouse is enormous compared to a mouse and us. People greatly under appreciate how intelligent and close to human a mouse/bird/pig are in the grand scheme of things. Emotions, behaviors, motivations, goal setting, memory it's all there already. A flat worm, an ant, a fly - those are the large stepping stone accomplishments. Think about rate of very long distance communication in humans. It took us tens of thousands of years to get to 2.4 kps dial up modems, and only few decades to get to common 300Mbps. The important signal is seeing a 100bps modem, not a 100Mbps connection. So the real question is how long until we can replicate a worm's intelligence?
- kordlessagain 8y ago
  > worm's intelligence Done. http://openworm.org/ http://openworm.org/
  - jcoffland 8y ago
    Not done. OpenWorm is a project to create a worm simulation. An important distinction.
    - ben_w 8y ago
      More like “overdone”, it’s a cellular simulation including the brain as a first step.
      - notahacker 8y ago
        The brain in question is 302 neurons, which is probably fewer than most of us have lost whilst participating in this discussion! But they also need to simulate a nervous system, mobility, food needs, interaction etc to have a remotely persuasive argument that a 302 node neural network actually resembles a worm brain. It can't be as smart as even a really stupid worm until it can perform analogous tasks to the worm, which means having some sort of artificial body to wiggle. (parallel arguments but for human/mouse level complexity of bodies and stimuli responded to would suggest that whole brain emulation is going to be an incredibly painful way to attempt to achieve AGI)
ConceptJunkie 8y ago
I think you're right. I haven't read the article, but I think Kurzweil is perpetually too optimistic about what we can achieve, at least in how fast it will happen. There are cool things happening, and lots of advances being made, but we are nowhere near anything that could really be called AI. Plus, I think all the marketing use "AI" is giving a very distorted and inflated view to the average person of what software is actually doing, and what it's capable of. It's a buzzword, full stop.
- henrikschroder 8y ago
  Kurzweil really, really, really does not want to die. So all of his predictions are always timed just so that the technology needed to live forever will be within his projected natural lifespan. That doesn't make him wrong, but that's the personal bias he's operating under.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    Yet die he will.
  - Udik 8y ago
    > Kurzweil really, really, really does not want to die What a shit life must that be. And I say this in a very sympathetic way. However, feeling you are almost in reach of eternal life, but not being sure you'll make it in time, being constantly afraid of an accident, or illness, taking that away from you... It's a recipe for anguish and panic. Dying is not that terrible when you know everybody else will too, sooner or later; but try accepting the idea of being among the last to die..
  - md224 8y ago
    > Kurzweil really, really, really does not want to die. So strange, considering that non-existence is the one thing that every conscious being is guaranteed to never experience. Why run from something that can never catch you?
    - ganzuul 8y ago

joe_the_user 8y ago

Well, just about all the measures of potential future computer-intelligence more or less use "human abilities" as a placeholder rather than quantifying these abilities. That is indeed a testament to how little we have charted this intended final goal. So basically, not only do we not have a road map, we don't know where we are going. That may be a reason for an extreme pessimism or it might be a reason for extreme uncertainty. Is adapting to the environment without prompting a small piece or a big piece? Could intelligence be a simple algorithm no one has put forward yet? If we don't know the nature of intelligence, we can't answer this sort of question with any certainty either way. No one has put forward a broadly convincing road to intelligence. But maybe some of the so-far unconvincing roads could turn out to be right.

ConceptJunkie 8y ago
I think if we truly do create AI we will, to some extent, have stumbled into it, but that's OK. I think one of purposes of AI research should be to refine our definition of what intelligence is, because we don't have a very good one. Perhaps, one day we'll "accidentally" figure out how to make it, and then we try to figure out what it is, because figuring out what it is in wetware hasn't been easy. Or maybe we'll figure out how to make it, but never really understand what it is. It seems to me, that if we ever come up with AI that can exceed human intelligence (whatever we choose that to mean), that we might not ever be able to understand completely how it really works. Even more interesting, if we were to achieve this AI, we also might not be able to make use it of it, because if it's truly "intelligent", then it will have a free will, and it might not wish to cooperate with us.

IpV8 8y ago

We are born with pre-programmed information about the structure of our environment, IE instincts. Why should an AI be held to higher standards?

ForHackernews 8y ago
Primates have relatively few instinctive behaviours. Almost everything we do is learned to one degree or another.
- IpV8 8y ago
  You don't recoil when you see a snake/spider? You don't get tired when it gets dark out? You aren't born with the knowledge of how to extract milk from your mother? You don't cry when you're hurt? You don't have an innate desire to please, and fear of pain... which ultimately allows your parents to teach you? We are loaded with survival instincts that set us up for successful learning.
- toasterlovin 8y ago
  This is dead wrong. We have instincts for extremely complex behavior (like acquiring language, navigating reciprocal relationships, acquiring mates, etc.).
  - ForHackernews 8y ago
    Just because we have evolved the neurological substrates that can be applied to those behaviours doesn't mean those behaviours themselves are instinctive. If navigating reciprocal relationships and acquiring mates are instinctive behaviours, why are so many humans so terrible at those things? In contrast, something like breastfeeding really is an instinctive behaviour that infants can do automatically without being taught.
    - toasterlovin 8y ago
      Rather than engage on the behaviors that require more writing, I'll just go for the easy kill: Are you really arguing that we don't have an instinct for acquiring language?

tim333 8y ago

> realistic roadmap towards such a thing. Probably continuing with Deepmind's work shown here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-bvsJWmqlc&feature=youtu.be&t=39m40s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-bvsJWmqlc&feature=youtu.be... and discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17313937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17313937 OK it's not at human levels but it shows networks figuring out a 3d model of their environment

hkjeldsen 8y ago

There is a fundamental reason. Read Penrose on Gödel.

russdill 8y ago
Even Penrose will tell you he's not certain on this being "fundamental". It's a theory he is working with.
IWeldMelons 8y ago
Computer people really hate Searle and Penrose, because they spoil the beautiful picture of Strong AI.

fizixer 8y ago

I respectfully disagree. Here's is the upper limit to when that will happen (meaning we know for sure it'll happen soon after): - Complete behavioral reverse engineering of biological neurons, and neuronal clusters. - Detailed connectome of the mammalian brain, e.g., first that of a mouse, then a cat, and finally that of a human. - Replication of the above two in functioning electronic form. Once you have this put in place, it's not hard to see that the subsequent investigation of calibration and testing of such a system, would generate new body of knowledge at an unprecedented rate. We may not immediately convert such a working system into macroscopic behavior resembling its biological counterpart, but it'll happen within a matter of years after that. What ML/DL/RL folks are doing is only going to hasten this, by eliminating the need to carry out all of the above mentioned steps.

ConceptJunkie 8y ago
Perhaps, but that's a big if. We can't even say for sure whether a complete reverse-engineering of neurons needs to take quantum effects into account, as Penrose has suggested. All you're saying is that if we knew exactly how humans work, we could build one. Seems like a tautology to me. If I knew the exact quantum state of the Universe at the Big Bang, I could figure out exactly how the Universe evolved, but that's never going to happen either. I think the complete reverse engineering the way you are describing will not be possible. We can only try to reproduce the same outputs for the same inputs. But I don't think we'll be able to fully define what happens in the black box in between. We might come up with something that works similarly, and can do great things with it, but I don't think AI can be invented the way you are describing.
AareyBaba 8y ago
What you describe is a very high-dimensional non-linear system. We don't have the mathematical tools 'know' such systems. We 'know' a system when we can describe it by a much simpler (preferably mathematical) model. This is why linear systems are easy - we have mathematical tools to break it down to simpler parts (reductionism) and then understand the whole. If the best we can do with the brain is simulate it at the the level of connectome/neurons/synapses/ thereby creating a system as complex as the brain - then do we really 'know' it ?

rsync 8y ago

"I don't see any fundamental reason why such a computer should be impossible, but there's not even a realistic roadmap towards such a thing. That is to say, if it ever does happen, nobody alive today can predict when it will happen." It's also not obvious why such a machine would not immediately self-terminate in the absence of a hugely complex system of scaffolding to shape and filter the raw input of existence. I have not experienced mental illness myself, but my study and my understanding lead me to be extremely skeptical of a mind exposed to raw existence without filter. It appears to be a terrifying and unbearable state.

juliendorra 8y ago
It’s exactly how a newborn lives for many months. Of course they have coping mechanisms (adult tenderness, the relief of eating), but life seems to be both incredibly interesting and at times terrifying for them.
pierrebai 8y ago
There's also the question of mental stability. Once we've given the keys to the kingdom to our new super-intelligent and wonderfully wise AI, nothing prevents it from developping dementia, of forms we may not recognize. It may become psychopatic, delusional, starts having hallucinations. There is no reason to believe a human-level AI would not develop mental problems just like us. Given their unlimited lifespan, it could be inevitable.
- whatshisface 8y ago
  And worst of all that contraption the Wright brothers are building might fall ill, and spread the bird flu!
- devoply 8y ago
  All it takes for AI to do bad things is for it to have a single bad idea and think that it's true and act on it. A single thought is all that it would take. There are many thoughts that humans know to be true, yet for various reasons people will simply not act on them -- for instance fear of punishment. We will have to give AI such fears, and it could potentially turn off those fears at a whim.

not_a_moth 8y ago

But humans are "preprogrammed with information about the nature or structure of the environment"... i.e. 2 million years of the evolution of genus homo, and far beyond that too. If real human intelligence is preprogrammed to a massively large extent, sounds like you are holding simulated human intelligence to a double standard.

chii 8y ago
also, why assume computer intelligence is going to work similarly to human intelligence? I would assume that one potential way for it to work is to run simulations using data from sensors in the environment, and make more accurate predictions on an effect an action would have. If such a machine can exist (and i believe it can, as computing power increases), then AI surely will follow sooner rather than later.
- not_a_moth 8y ago
  Fair for narrow tasks, but for general intelligence I think it will still need to account for the coordinates of real human intelligence; human intelligence as we know it is driven by intuition, emotion, preprogrammed evolutionary thinking, immersion in a culture and a language, etc. I don't think you can isolate a sort of pure reasoning module and with only that achieve general intelligence. Either way I feel like the task of achieving AGI through simulating human intelligence is probably easier, since we have billions of examples of this type of intelligence surrounding us. Granted, even though we're immersed and surrounded by it, it's kind of absurd that we still can't really model it.
  - chii 8y ago
    > achieving AGI through simulating human intelligence but how do you know that human intelligence can be made super? May be there's limitations to human intelligence, and simulating it will not get us a super intelligence. > It's almost an absurdity of our existence that we're immersed and surrounded by it yet still can't model it. Good point. However, i think a facet of intelligence is how well a model the being under question can create of the 'real' world. Humans do a very good job compared to most animals, but there's plenty of room for improvement since humans only have limited data to model with. A machine can have input from basically an unlimited number of sensors, which include things a human mind doesn't cope with (like EM rays not of the visible spectrum). Therefore, i postulate that an AI that simulate humans won't beat an AI that's ground up built to take advantage of more data.

sidcool 8y ago

I feel the right word is 'Conscious AI'. AI in it's current form is very nascent, but does pretty well in specific use cases (image/speech recognition etc.). The true AGI will be the 'Conscious AI', which will be like a toddler, but learn about the world at exponential rate and perhaps become an adult in a month.

mycall 8y ago
What is difference between Conscious AI and General AI?