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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 th

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.

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.