7 ms·

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 an

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)
      - ben_w 8y ago
        > 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. It has those things[1]. There’s a video of its simulated body wiggling around on the project’s github repository. [1] except possibly food, I was skimming the page.
        notahacker 8y ago
        Sure, I've even seen the wiggles; I was making the point that's why they needed it to yield anything that could be compared with the real thing (though I'm not sure it has food and reproduction simulated yet, and I'd imagine a large portion of the worm's limited capability for cognition is ultimately directed to pursuing those ends)
        goatlover 8y ago
        It needs to be able to survive and reproduce in an environment like a real worm does to prove that it's just as intelligent, and not just wiggle around.
        dtsdtsdts 8y ago
        "To get a quick idea of what this looks like, check out the latest movie. In this movie you can see a simulated 3D C. elegans being activated in an environment. Its muscles are located around the outside of its body, and as they contract, they exert forces on the surrounding fluid, propelling the body forward via undulutory thrust. In this model, the neural system is not considered and patterns of muscle contraction are explicitly defined" http://docs.openworm.org/en/0.9/projects/ http://docs.openworm.org/en/0.9/projects/
        jcoffland 8y ago
        > In this model, the neural system is not considered and patterns of muscle contraction are explicitly defined. In other words, the simulated worm brain is not yet even capable of causing the wiggling seen in the video. So the question remains, what can the simulated neurons do, f anything?
- mattkrause 8y ago
  Alas, it's not even close to "done." It's a work in progress and a surprisingly difficult one. For context, the worm (c. elegans, at least) has a very stereotyped nervous system with 302 neurons. The anatomy, down to the cellular level, is known incredibly well. Their behavioral repertoire is not huge and they're fairly easy to study. Nevertheless, we can't even simulate a worm very accurately. (There was a good twitter thread about why yesterday: https://twitter.com/OdedRechavi/status/1086992699528544256 https://twitter.com/OdedRechavi/status/1086992699528544256) The human eyeball has about 120M rods, 6.5M cones, and projects to a brain containing ~86B neurons, which is about 8-9 orders of magnitude more cells. The number of possible interactions scales even faster. In summary, we're not close, not at all....
  - mateo1 8y ago
    When biology comes into play, you can see how weak our understanding and abilities are. We can barely simulate small proteins of a few thousand atoms. Accurately simulating an entire cell is (at the moment) in the realm of science fiction. Only inaccurate abstractions can be used to model it. However I have to object in a way about the brain. To me, there's an unanswered question: Is the rest of the human brain as simple and "generic" as the convolutional neural networks we made inspired by the vision system? Or is each networks' architecture and "algorithms" developed specifically for a task? In the latter case we might still be a very long way from anything resembling AGI. However my personal estimation is that most of the things we do can be modeled using existing tools when scaled and modified appropriately (ie RNNs). There's also the ugly job of stitching those systems together, but it's not that different from what happens in nature.
KineticLensman 8y ago
> Once we get computers as smart as a mouse, we'll be at most 3-5 years But how long did it take Nature to get from a mammal with mouse-level intelligence to a human-level brain. I think 200-ish million years [0]. You might be right that a mouse is a good indicator of high-level intelligence and that you don't need human-level intelligence to make a good AI, but there might still be some considerable way to go until we have an AI that can significantly outperform us. [Edit - I agree that natural selection wasn't aiming or directed, and thus wasn't forced to be as fast as we could be. But a human's higher brain functions might not be simple incremental improvements over a mouse's, and there could still be a long way to go] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammal
- ConceptJunkie 8y ago
  How long did it take Nature to get from nothing to a mouse? About 20 times as long. So I think the estimate of 3-5 years might be realistic, but the artificial mouse is a long way away, IMO.
- CuriousSkeptic 8y ago
  Nature wasn’t really aiming. So it’s not a valid basis of time estimates. How long did it take nature to go from T-Rex to chickens? There’s no reason to believe human level intelligence to be an inevitable result of evolution. It just happend.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Keep in mind that nature uses a somewhat directional random process. How much of those 200-ish million years were spent waiting on selection pressures to promote bigger brains?
- fucking_tragedy 8y ago
  > But how long did it take Nature to get from a mammal with mouse-level intelligence to a human-level brain Not that I agree with the sentiment in the GP, but it took a relatively short time from the first development of multicellular life until nervous systems developed and an even shorter amount of time to go from small mammal intelligence to human intelligence. However, evolution isn't about "progress" as we understand it. The most we can say with regards to intelligence and evolution is that human intelligence satisfied a niche that existed at a certain place and time.
biztos 8y ago
Maybe this isn't what you meant, but I'm curious why you would put a Fly ahead of an Ant in the stepping stones. Can you make a Turing Ant without a Turing Ant Colony?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
throwawaymath 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. Why? What challenges?
nradov 8y ago
You have no rational basis for that 3 - 5 year estimate. That's just picking numbers out of the air.
- metalliqaz 8y ago
  The basis is the complexity growth trend that we have already observed in computing (and most other human endeavors)
  - nradov 8y ago
    There is zero evidence that progress toward AGI follows Moore's Law. And we observe much slower complexity growth in most other human endeavors.
    - metalliqaz 8y ago
      But there's a lot of evidence that computer power follows Moore's law. All that matters is that the growth is exponential. Evolution took a billion years to evolve multi-cellular life, but the jump from apes to humans took far less than a million years.
      - root_axis 8y ago
        Computer processing power is not growing at an exponential rate. The physical limitations of Moore's law are well known and imminent.
        metalliqaz 8y ago
        Moore's law is essentially tracking the transistor density on silicon. We may be pushing up against physics in that area, but that is not the same thing as processing power. Our systems grow ever more complex. Each generation enables new tools that enable the creation of the next. When Moore's law finally crashes and burns, we will compensate using other technologies. Multicore and multiprocessing, shifting work to the cloud, advanced materials, etc. Hell, even quantum could take off in the next decade or two. I see no reason whatsoever to believe that we just give up and rest once we've reached the limits of silicon transistors.
byteface 8y ago
mouse, crow, worm, human, all running on neurons. You simulate one you can simulate a berzillion.

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)
    - ben_w 8y ago
      > 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. It has those things[1]. There’s a video of its simulated body wiggling around on the project’s github repository. [1] except possibly food, I was skimming the page.
      - notahacker 8y ago
        Sure, I've even seen the wiggles; I was making the point that's why they needed it to yield anything that could be compared with the real thing (though I'm not sure it has food and reproduction simulated yet, and I'd imagine a large portion of the worm's limited capability for cognition is ultimately directed to pursuing those ends)
      - goatlover 8y ago
        It needs to be able to survive and reproduce in an environment like a real worm does to prove that it's just as intelligent, and not just wiggle around.
      - dtsdtsdts 8y ago
        "To get a quick idea of what this looks like, check out the latest movie. In this movie you can see a simulated 3D C. elegans being activated in an environment. Its muscles are located around the outside of its body, and as they contract, they exert forces on the surrounding fluid, propelling the body forward via undulutory thrust. In this model, the neural system is not considered and patterns of muscle contraction are explicitly defined" http://docs.openworm.org/en/0.9/projects/ http://docs.openworm.org/en/0.9/projects/
        jcoffland 8y ago
        > In this model, the neural system is not considered and patterns of muscle contraction are explicitly defined. In other words, the simulated worm brain is not yet even capable of causing the wiggling seen in the video. So the question remains, what can the simulated neurons do, f anything?
mattkrause 8y ago
Alas, it's not even close to "done." It's a work in progress and a surprisingly difficult one. For context, the worm (c. elegans, at least) has a very stereotyped nervous system with 302 neurons. The anatomy, down to the cellular level, is known incredibly well. Their behavioral repertoire is not huge and they're fairly easy to study. Nevertheless, we can't even simulate a worm very accurately. (There was a good twitter thread about why yesterday: https://twitter.com/OdedRechavi/status/1086992699528544256 https://twitter.com/OdedRechavi/status/1086992699528544256) The human eyeball has about 120M rods, 6.5M cones, and projects to a brain containing ~86B neurons, which is about 8-9 orders of magnitude more cells. The number of possible interactions scales even faster. In summary, we're not close, not at all....
- mateo1 8y ago
  When biology comes into play, you can see how weak our understanding and abilities are. We can barely simulate small proteins of a few thousand atoms. Accurately simulating an entire cell is (at the moment) in the realm of science fiction. Only inaccurate abstractions can be used to model it. However I have to object in a way about the brain. To me, there's an unanswered question: Is the rest of the human brain as simple and "generic" as the convolutional neural networks we made inspired by the vision system? Or is each networks' architecture and "algorithms" developed specifically for a task? In the latter case we might still be a very long way from anything resembling AGI. However my personal estimation is that most of the things we do can be modeled using existing tools when scaled and modified appropriately (ie RNNs). There's also the ugly job of stitching those systems together, but it's not that different from what happens in nature.

KineticLensman 8y ago

> Once we get computers as smart as a mouse, we'll be at most 3-5 years But how long did it take Nature to get from a mammal with mouse-level intelligence to a human-level brain. I think 200-ish million years [0]. You might be right that a mouse is a good indicator of high-level intelligence and that you don't need human-level intelligence to make a good AI, but there might still be some considerable way to go until we have an AI that can significantly outperform us. [Edit - I agree that natural selection wasn't aiming or directed, and thus wasn't forced to be as fast as we could be. But a human's higher brain functions might not be simple incremental improvements over a mouse's, and there could still be a long way to go] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammal

ConceptJunkie 8y ago
How long did it take Nature to get from nothing to a mouse? About 20 times as long. So I think the estimate of 3-5 years might be realistic, but the artificial mouse is a long way away, IMO.
CuriousSkeptic 8y ago
Nature wasn’t really aiming. So it’s not a valid basis of time estimates. How long did it take nature to go from T-Rex to chickens? There’s no reason to believe human level intelligence to be an inevitable result of evolution. It just happend.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
Keep in mind that nature uses a somewhat directional random process. How much of those 200-ish million years were spent waiting on selection pressures to promote bigger brains?
fucking_tragedy 8y ago
> But how long did it take Nature to get from a mammal with mouse-level intelligence to a human-level brain Not that I agree with the sentiment in the GP, but it took a relatively short time from the first development of multicellular life until nervous systems developed and an even shorter amount of time to go from small mammal intelligence to human intelligence. However, evolution isn't about "progress" as we understand it. The most we can say with regards to intelligence and evolution is that human intelligence satisfied a niche that existed at a certain place and time.

biztos 8y ago

Maybe this isn't what you meant, but I'm curious why you would put a Fly ahead of an Ant in the stepping stones. Can you make a Turing Ant without a Turing Ant Colony?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

throwawaymath 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. Why? What challenges?

nradov 8y ago

You have no rational basis for that 3 - 5 year estimate. That's just picking numbers out of the air.

metalliqaz 8y ago
The basis is the complexity growth trend that we have already observed in computing (and most other human endeavors)
- nradov 8y ago
  There is zero evidence that progress toward AGI follows Moore's Law. And we observe much slower complexity growth in most other human endeavors.
  - metalliqaz 8y ago
    But there's a lot of evidence that computer power follows Moore's law. All that matters is that the growth is exponential. Evolution took a billion years to evolve multi-cellular life, but the jump from apes to humans took far less than a million years.
    - root_axis 8y ago
      Computer processing power is not growing at an exponential rate. The physical limitations of Moore's law are well known and imminent.
      - metalliqaz 8y ago
        Moore's law is essentially tracking the transistor density on silicon. We may be pushing up against physics in that area, but that is not the same thing as processing power. Our systems grow ever more complex. Each generation enables new tools that enable the creation of the next. When Moore's law finally crashes and burns, we will compensate using other technologies. Multicore and multiprocessing, shifting work to the cloud, advanced materials, etc. Hell, even quantum could take off in the next decade or two. I see no reason whatsoever to believe that we just give up and rest once we've reached the limits of silicon transistors.

byteface 8y ago

mouse, crow, worm, human, all running on neurons. You simulate one you can simulate a berzillion.