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To be honest I haven’t understood much of this. Am I also the only one who’s very skeptical of AI? I see no correlation between what we call “biological thinki

To be honest I haven’t understood much of this. Am I also the only one who’s very skeptical of AI? I see no correlation between what we call “biological thinking” and computation. Even though I don’t know much of the theory behind AI, to me it’s similar to saying that since we have lots of simple calculators, we can arrange them together in some specific way and emergent intelligence will arise. Sure yes I mean but you can say that about everything: let’s arrange a bunch of forks together and intelligence might emerge. And actually from a math point of view you could luckily arrange some forks together and have intelligence since intelligence seems to emerge from an arrangement of atoms. I don’t see why computation has to get a go at intelligent, while anything else not. What’s so unique about computation?

tlb 7y ago
The last 80 years have had a string of successes for arranging simple calculators in ways that produce impressive results. Google search, world champion chess players, Fortnite are all examples. I don't know of any impressive results with arranging forks. If there were, you could model the fork behavior on computers and probably run it 1000000x faster. It's certainly possible that some other elements than the simple calculators we use today will lead to the big breakthrough in AI. Perhaps quantum computation is needed. But right now, arrangements of simple calculators seem like the most promising.
- goatlover 7y ago
  > The last 80 years have had a string of successes for arranging simple calculators in ways that produce impressive results. I view that as biological intelligence figuring out all sorts of clever ways to make calculating tools produce impressive results. > Perhaps quantum computation is needed. But why invoke physics if we're comparing biological intelligence to our computing tools? Isn't it enough to note the big differences? And here I'm not talking so much brain function as I am being a living, social animal that has to survive with a vast human culture. This is the difference between looking at computers as as stepping stones to artificial replacements as opposed to enhancing our abilities. The AI stuff captures the imagination, promises fully automated utopias, scares us with apocalyptic scenarios, and is the stuff of lots of SciFi. While the reality is that computers have always been tools aiding human intelligence. For some reason we view these tools as one day being like Pinocchio. The mythos of the movie AI is based on that vision where the robot boy becomes obsessed with a the blue fairy turning him into a real boy so his adoptive biological mother will love him and take him back. But maybe like in the movie, someday the sentient robots will show up and gave our robot boy his wish.
szemet 7y ago
Universal computation is about information processing, and information processing is definitely an important thing that intelligent agents are doing. (I wrote universal computation - to mske a distinction to common physical processes like what forks usually do - we may obviously say that a glass of water computes in a second where water molecules of that water will be in a second, but that is too direct and missing the abstraction level that my mind has (sensing and modelling my environment) or a universal turing machine has (manipulating symbols which may stand for(modell) something)
- swiley 7y ago
  We don't know that human thought actually can run on a Turing Machine though.
IggleSniggle 7y ago
The unique part about computation is that we can throw an immense amount of energy at specific problems in isolation to force rapid evolution, and backtrack to snapshots easily if we don’t like where we ended up. You can select for an intelligent swarm of fruit-flies, but it’s going to take you a lot longer to get your result than if you could simulate the whole process. Now, if it’s simulated, will you be able to walk your final result back to meat-world DNA? Not unless you included that level of detail in your simulation, which would be extraordinarily expensive to do and fraught with problems due to the scale. But even then, the simulation gives you some advantages: affect the flow of time, backtrack in time to explore other paths under alternate simulated conditions, etc. In the real world, you can’t have that kind of perfect reproducibility.
robbiep 7y ago
https://xkcd.com/505/ https://xkcd.com/505/
- saghm 7y ago
  Before I clicked, I expected it to be this one: https://xkcd.com/419/ https://xkcd.com/419/
cr0sh 7y ago
A little late on this, but... > Am I also the only one who’s very skeptical of AI? I see no correlation between what we call “biological thinking” and computation. I think you're confusing several things together here, possibly (partly?) because: > Even though I don’t know much of the theory behind AI, I'll try to give you (to the best of my understanding, which may be faulty, so be aware of that) a "10000 foot understanding" - and hopefully (not likely) I won't drone on and bore you to death. So we have here three things: Something we call "AI", something called "biological thinking" (I'm not exactly sure what you mean by this - but I'll assume for now you mean the process of "though" humans do with their brains), and "computation". Of the three, computation is probably the simplest to define: It's what happens when a program - a set of rules - is run and followed. Usually there is some "input" or data that flows into these sets of rules, and at the end of the running of the program or process, there is an output. It is possible that the program may not "halt" (ie, stop); it may loop forever, and output something forever. Or it might hit a condition that does cause it to stop. Regardless, that set of rules being run (whether those rules are those of law, those of mathematics, a recipe to bake a cake, etc) is what causes computation. I won't go into it deeply, but what Wolfram believes (whether he is right or not is for others to decide) is that there are simple programs - or sets of rules - throughout nature, and that these programs are executed due to natural processes, and that from these programs running, and thus performing computation, their output is what we see in our world. Furthermore, according to Wolfram, the computation being done is equivalent throughout nature; whether it is done on the substrate of silicon (ie, a computer), or the substrate of physics in a stream computing eddies and whirlpools... Ok - enough of that; let's move on. Biological Thinking... As I noted, I think you are simply referring to the process that humans (and perhaps other creatures) using their brains to take in information via their senses, do some "processing" on it, and then output something (perhaps speech, or moving around, etc). Or maybe output nothing at all; just "thinking" or "ruminating" about something. Do we understand how this works? No. We are studying it, and making fits and starts of progress, but it's been very slow going. We don't know how to define certain things, or even if they are definable, or if they are simply fictions of the brain; some things are - for instance, there have been studies that show that you make a decision to do something before you are consciously aware of making the decision to do something, and your brain makes up a story after the fact to explain it. There are many, many other weird things like this that our brains do. We don't know why. We also don't know how they play into or alter our perception of "free will" - of if that is even a real thing. One thing we do know - to a certain level - is how brains actually "work". I won't go into details - but yes, neurons, action potentials, spiking, etc. We think that certain other chemical things may be at play, among other theories and ideas - we not completely sure it's all "electrical" (and actually at the synapse level, it's chemical - well, ion exchange and such - which is kinda electrical, but kinda not, too). But we know electricity plays a large role in how our brains work, how neurons work, and how they communicate with each other. We also know they work together in networks, seemingly jumbled and disorganized at the cellular level, but not completely, and less so at higher levels. So in short, we believe that "biological thinking" occurs due to networks of neurons communicating using mostly electrical activity, coupled with various chemical and other activity. It would be akin to looking at a factory and only being able to understand how the individual parts of each machine work together, and maybe certain subsystems of those machines, but still have no understanding of how the factory produces what it does, but believing it had to be in a large part because of those individual parts working together. Forests and trees, as you can certainly tell... ...part 2 follows...
jmoss20 7y ago
Look at it this way: programs are a list of procedural rules, combined with input to yield output. Computers are physical objects that take that input, follow the rules (the program), and produce the output. Humans (via intelligence) can also follow these rules, and produce the same output for a given input. So if some arrangement of forks gave rise to intelligence, then they would necessarily be a computer. The central question is whether intelligence is something over and above computation. Coming down on this would be require either: (a) an example of something intelligence can do that a computer (with the right program) cannot, or (b) some proof as to why no such example can exist. I'm not confident we have the right philosophical tools to even approach this question right now. What does it mean for human intelligence to do a thing that a computer cannot? Say you do X -- I might just ask you to write down how you did it. If you are precise enough in how you did it, you've just given me a program. Alternatively, even if you can't write it down, it seems plausible we could (in theory) write down the rules of physics. Then, given as input the state of your brain, we might iterate those rules forward and produce the output. Going a bit off track here, but it seems to me that the only way intelligence could not be computed would be if intelligence was in some way non-physical -- and more, causal (so, not just epiphenomenal), it would actually have to be useful.

tlb 7y ago

The last 80 years have had a string of successes for arranging simple calculators in ways that produce impressive results. Google search, world champion chess players, Fortnite are all examples. I don't know of any impressive results with arranging forks. If there were, you could model the fork behavior on computers and probably run it 1000000x faster. It's certainly possible that some other elements than the simple calculators we use today will lead to the big breakthrough in AI. Perhaps quantum computation is needed. But right now, arrangements of simple calculators seem like the most promising.

goatlover 7y ago
> The last 80 years have had a string of successes for arranging simple calculators in ways that produce impressive results. I view that as biological intelligence figuring out all sorts of clever ways to make calculating tools produce impressive results. > Perhaps quantum computation is needed. But why invoke physics if we're comparing biological intelligence to our computing tools? Isn't it enough to note the big differences? And here I'm not talking so much brain function as I am being a living, social animal that has to survive with a vast human culture. This is the difference between looking at computers as as stepping stones to artificial replacements as opposed to enhancing our abilities. The AI stuff captures the imagination, promises fully automated utopias, scares us with apocalyptic scenarios, and is the stuff of lots of SciFi. While the reality is that computers have always been tools aiding human intelligence. For some reason we view these tools as one day being like Pinocchio. The mythos of the movie AI is based on that vision where the robot boy becomes obsessed with a the blue fairy turning him into a real boy so his adoptive biological mother will love him and take him back. But maybe like in the movie, someday the sentient robots will show up and gave our robot boy his wish.

szemet 7y ago

Universal computation is about information processing, and information processing is definitely an important thing that intelligent agents are doing. (I wrote universal computation - to mske a distinction to common physical processes like what forks usually do - we may obviously say that a glass of water computes in a second where water molecules of that water will be in a second, but that is too direct and missing the abstraction level that my mind has (sensing and modelling my environment) or a universal turing machine has (manipulating symbols which may stand for(modell) something)

swiley 7y ago
We don't know that human thought actually can run on a Turing Machine though.

IggleSniggle 7y ago

The unique part about computation is that we can throw an immense amount of energy at specific problems in isolation to force rapid evolution, and backtrack to snapshots easily if we don’t like where we ended up. You can select for an intelligent swarm of fruit-flies, but it’s going to take you a lot longer to get your result than if you could simulate the whole process. Now, if it’s simulated, will you be able to walk your final result back to meat-world DNA? Not unless you included that level of detail in your simulation, which would be extraordinarily expensive to do and fraught with problems due to the scale. But even then, the simulation gives you some advantages: affect the flow of time, backtrack in time to explore other paths under alternate simulated conditions, etc. In the real world, you can’t have that kind of perfect reproducibility.

robbiep 7y ago

https://xkcd.com/505/ https://xkcd.com/505/

saghm 7y ago
Before I clicked, I expected it to be this one: https://xkcd.com/419/ https://xkcd.com/419/

cr0sh 7y ago

A little late on this, but... > Am I also the only one who’s very skeptical of AI? I see no correlation between what we call “biological thinking” and computation. I think you're confusing several things together here, possibly (partly?) because: > Even though I don’t know much of the theory behind AI, I'll try to give you (to the best of my understanding, which may be faulty, so be aware of that) a "10000 foot understanding" - and hopefully (not likely) I won't drone on and bore you to death. So we have here three things: Something we call "AI", something called "biological thinking" (I'm not exactly sure what you mean by this - but I'll assume for now you mean the process of "though" humans do with their brains), and "computation". Of the three, computation is probably the simplest to define: It's what happens when a program - a set of rules - is run and followed. Usually there is some "input" or data that flows into these sets of rules, and at the end of the running of the program or process, there is an output. It is possible that the program may not "halt" (ie, stop); it may loop forever, and output something forever. Or it might hit a condition that does cause it to stop. Regardless, that set of rules being run (whether those rules are those of law, those of mathematics, a recipe to bake a cake, etc) is what causes computation. I won't go into it deeply, but what Wolfram believes (whether he is right or not is for others to decide) is that there are simple programs - or sets of rules - throughout nature, and that these programs are executed due to natural processes, and that from these programs running, and thus performing computation, their output is what we see in our world. Furthermore, according to Wolfram, the computation being done is equivalent throughout nature; whether it is done on the substrate of silicon (ie, a computer), or the substrate of physics in a stream computing eddies and whirlpools... Ok - enough of that; let's move on. Biological Thinking... As I noted, I think you are simply referring to the process that humans (and perhaps other creatures) using their brains to take in information via their senses, do some "processing" on it, and then output something (perhaps speech, or moving around, etc). Or maybe output nothing at all; just "thinking" or "ruminating" about something. Do we understand how this works? No. We are studying it, and making fits and starts of progress, but it's been very slow going. We don't know how to define certain things, or even if they are definable, or if they are simply fictions of the brain; some things are - for instance, there have been studies that show that you make a decision to do something before you are consciously aware of making the decision to do something, and your brain makes up a story after the fact to explain it. There are many, many other weird things like this that our brains do. We don't know why. We also don't know how they play into or alter our perception of "free will" - of if that is even a real thing. One thing we do know - to a certain level - is how brains actually "work". I won't go into details - but yes, neurons, action potentials, spiking, etc. We think that certain other chemical things may be at play, among other theories and ideas - we not completely sure it's all "electrical" (and actually at the synapse level, it's chemical - well, ion exchange and such - which is kinda electrical, but kinda not, too). But we know electricity plays a large role in how our brains work, how neurons work, and how they communicate with each other. We also know they work together in networks, seemingly jumbled and disorganized at the cellular level, but not completely, and less so at higher levels. So in short, we believe that "biological thinking" occurs due to networks of neurons communicating using mostly electrical activity, coupled with various chemical and other activity. It would be akin to looking at a factory and only being able to understand how the individual parts of each machine work together, and maybe certain subsystems of those machines, but still have no understanding of how the factory produces what it does, but believing it had to be in a large part because of those individual parts working together. Forests and trees, as you can certainly tell... ...part 2 follows...

jmoss20 7y ago

Look at it this way: programs are a list of procedural rules, combined with input to yield output. Computers are physical objects that take that input, follow the rules (the program), and produce the output. Humans (via intelligence) can also follow these rules, and produce the same output for a given input. So if some arrangement of forks gave rise to intelligence, then they would necessarily be a computer. The central question is whether intelligence is something over and above computation. Coming down on this would be require either: (a) an example of something intelligence can do that a computer (with the right program) cannot, or (b) some proof as to why no such example can exist. I'm not confident we have the right philosophical tools to even approach this question right now. What does it mean for human intelligence to do a thing that a computer cannot? Say you do X -- I might just ask you to write down how you did it. If you are precise enough in how you did it, you've just given me a program. Alternatively, even if you can't write it down, it seems plausible we could (in theory) write down the rules of physics. Then, given as input the state of your brain, we might iterate those rules forward and produce the output. Going a bit off track here, but it seems to me that the only way intelligence could not be computed would be if intelligence was in some way non-physical -- and more, causal (so, not just epiphenomenal), it would actually have to be useful.