11 ms·

Moravec's Paradox

155 points by jkuria 7y ago

jiggawatts 7y ago
This is also why brain mass is roughly proportional to body mass, but not very proportional to general intelligence. A blue whale has a 7kg brain, about 5x the size of the typical human brain, but doesn't appear to have even human-level intelligence let alone 5x super-human intelligence.
- jkuria 7y ago
  Hmmh, but a whale's sensori-motor skills are quite rudimentary compared to a human's. A human can manipulate objects, walk, run, dance, swim, jump. A whale can only swim and maybe do a fairly restricted set of dives?
  - inflatableDodo 7y ago
    Have a look at dolphins playing with bubble rings - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bT-fctr32pE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bT-fctr32pE - and making labyrinths out of suspended mud to catch fish with - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzfqPQm-ThU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzfqPQm-ThU
    - jkuria 7y ago
      We are talking about Whales not dolphins. Dolphins have always been the subject of researches for their higher than average intelligence.
  - anfilt 7y ago
    Don't forget that pretty much every part of your's and a whales body has nerves in it to detect pain & contract muscles. More body mass means more nerves that need to send and receive information from the central nervous system. So even assuming a constant amount nerve endings in cm^3 of flesh between whales and humans a whale will have significantly more.
  - goatinaboat 7y ago
    Whales can do the DSP for sonar, humans can’t.
    - anfilt 7y ago
      there are blind people who can use essentially echo location to get an idea of their surroundings.
- gus_massa 7y ago
  It's better to compare the weight using brain/body^(2/3) than using body/body directly. With that correction most of the paradox disappear. More info in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient
  - anfilt 7y ago
    From understanding never density in mammals is mostly the same. So large body mass means more nerves that have to communicate with central nervous system. Also some people have argued that fish can't feel pain or are less sensitive to due to their lower nerve density from my understanding. A whale is a mammal so I would assume it's going to have similar nerve density. Which means the brain has to be able to take input from a larger volume of body so that brain in large animals would make sense to be larger.
  - chalst 7y ago
    SSC had an interesting post on the EQ: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/25/neurons-and-intelligence-a-birdbrained-perspective/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/25/neurons-and-intelligen...
- nico 7y ago
  The brain size comparison and its relationship to body mass is super interesting. The intelligence comparison is a little bit too simplistic though. How do you define intelligence? Are we humans really "more intelligent" than whales? There are a lot of human behaviors that are not intelligent at all, and which seem to be a lot less intelligent than what whales do (and pretty much any other animal on the planet for that matter).
  - sweeneyrod 7y ago
    Such as?
    - nico 7y ago
      Such as war and indiscriminate destruction of our environment
      - sweeneyrod 7y ago
        What makes this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War different from human war? And other species certainly do destroy their environments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_species https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_species it's just that we don't consider them morally culpable.
        nico 7y ago
        Great links and examples, very good point. Which brings us back to the original point: are humans actually more intelligent than animals? I don't think so. It's a human self-aggrandizing illusion to believe we are somehow "better" in any way to animals.
- JetSetWilly 7y ago
  Does a whale have more muscles to control than a human? Is its environment more complex to navigate - swimming through water vs balancing , walking running and jumping? Does it have more bones making its body more complex to maneuver? Are its eyes larger with many more rods and cones, looking at a more complex environment and requiring greater neuron counts to interpret? I think the answer to most (though not all) of these questions is no. Just because a body is bigger doesn't necessarily make it more complex to control surely? For the most part large mammals have the same number of muscles and bones as a small one, and past a certain body size eyes don't get particularly larger. I seem to recall that even very large dinosaurs could have comparatively tiny brains compared to mammals - did they control their bodies clumsily and observe the world much less acutely than mammals? So I have always found this explanation a bit suspect - it is a "just so" story because we observe that whales and elephants don't seem all that smart yet they have bigger brains and bodies but that doesn't make the explanation true by itself. Has there been any actual research that supports the hypothesis that large bodies require bigger brains to control?
  - Balgair 7y ago
    The brain volume largely correlates to body size [0] in mammals. More muscle cells require more nerves to control them which requires more coordination and hence a larger brain. How the mammalian brain divies up this process depends on enviromental factors and the body plan. Dolphins and whales have specific parts of the brain used for ecolocation and the water pressure affects the volume of the brain. Elephants have larger areas devoted to using their trunk. Aye-Ayes have large visual cortices as they hunt inscets in the dark for food. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_size https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_size
inflatableDodo 7y ago
I think this has a related outcome in the commercialisation of automated systems. It seems that it is much easier to create automated systems that outperform highly paid domain knowledge specialists at diagnostic tasks, than it is to get them to reliably deliver pizza as well as an average human with a moped.
- jkuria 7y ago
  Exactly. This is what Steven Pinker Says in the parent article: The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard. The mental abilities of a four-year-old that we take for granted – recognizing a face, lifting a pencil, walking across a room, answering a question – in fact solve some of the hardest engineering problems ever conceived... As the new generation of intelligent devices appears, it will be the stock analysts and petrochemical engineers and parole board members who are in danger of being replaced by machines. The gardeners, receptionists, and cooks are secure in their jobs for decades to come.[7]
  - shandor 7y ago
    To be fair it's not quite that simple. Automation has already been heavily cutting at the so-called low-skill jobs starting from Industrial Revolution. Or by some definition, from the Agricultural one somewhat earlier. But the examples of the gardener and cook that were in your citation are actually quite good, I admit.
    - toast0 7y ago
      The secret to automating repetitive jobs is often finding a different way to do it that provides a similar output, but is more amenable to machinery. A sewing machine doesn't sew at all like most humans, a dishwasher doesn't wash like you would with a sponge etc. Gardening is hard to automate, but harvesting of somethings (grains, mostly) is heavily automated. Cooking is more amenable to augmentation than full automation, but there are exceptions mostly around processed foods.
nico 7y ago
> "In general, we're least aware of what our minds do best", he wrote, and added "we're more aware of simple processes that don't work well than of complex ones that work flawlessly" Fascinating, that could in a way be interpreted to imply that our conscious attention/perception is focused on the things that our minds cannot predict/control and everything else is "automated" (subconscious). That could also be related to our perception of uncertainty and the way we deal with it. Our attention tends to be focused on what we are the most uncertain of.
- shandor 7y ago
  To expand on your point, anecdotally it seems that the human mind works in the same way in other contexts, too. For example: - "Grass is always greener on the other side" - "You only fully appreciate great things when you lose them" - All the people getting anxious or even depressed because social media constantly barrages us with the perfect pictures of perfect peoples' perfect lives, all the while forgetting that on many objective scales the fact that you're even able to get depressed by something like that puts you in the jackpot-winners category in the lottery of life compared to a huge percent of the world's population.
jamesrcole 7y ago
This is a case of where our intuitions and expectations are deeply flawed. It's not a paradox. I think the explanation of it is pretty simple. To ourselves, the unconscious things like vision and bodily movement tend to feel effortless. Whereas the consciously controlled things like reasoning involve conscious effort, and they can feel difficult to us. The "paradox" comes from assuming that the amount of effort or difficulty that we consciously experience corresponds to the actual degree of sophistication of the processing involved.
- msla 7y ago
  Quine had three classes of paradox: > A veridical paradox produces a result that appears absurd but is demonstrated to be true nonetheless. Thus the paradox of Frederic's birthday in The Pirates of Penzance establishes the surprising fact that a twenty-one-year-old would have had only five birthdays if he had been born on a leap day. Likewise, Arrow's impossibility theorem demonstrates difficulties in mapping voting results to the will of the people. The Monty Hall paradox demonstrates that a decision which has an intuitive 50–50 chance is in fact heavily biased towards making a decision which, given the intuitive conclusion, the player would be unlikely to make. In 20th-century science, Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel and Schrödinger's cat are famously vivid examples of a theory being taken to a logical but paradoxical end. > A falsidical paradox establishes a result that not only appears false but actually is false, due to a fallacy in the demonstration. The various invalid mathematical proofs (e.g., that 1 = 2) are classic examples, generally relying on a hidden division by zero. Another example is the inductive form of the horse paradox, which falsely generalises from true specific statements. Zeno's paradoxes are 'falsidical', concluding, for example, that a flying arrow never reaches its target or that a speedy runner cannot catch up to a tortoise with a small head-start. > A paradox that is in neither class may be an antinomy, which reaches a self-contradictory result by properly applying accepted ways of reasoning. For example, the Grelling–Nelson paradox points out genuine problems in our understanding of the ideas of truth and description. > A fourth kind, which may be alternatively interpreted as a special case of the third kind, has sometimes been described since Quine's work. > A paradox that is both true and false at the same time and in the same sense is called a dialetheia. In Western logics it is often assumed, following Aristotle, that no dialetheia exist, but they are sometimes accepted in Eastern traditions (e.g. in the Mohists,[12] the Gongsun Longzi,[13] and in Zen[14]) and in paraconsistent logics. It would be mere equivocation or a matter of degree, for example, to both affirm and deny that "John is here" when John is halfway through the door but it is self-contradictory simultaneously to affirm and deny the event. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox
FreeHugs 7y ago
we're least aware of what our minds do best I'm not sure we are aware of anything. If you ask me: How much is 2x3? I might think: That's easy! I just have to imagine 3 stones. Then I imagine two piles of 3 stones. Then I count all those stones. 6! But how did I came up with that? How did I even figure out what the question is about? It's all unconscious and so far we have no clue how to program a system that grasp even these type of easy questions. It could be a nice approach to AI to try and breed (via AI/Genetic Algorithms/Whatever) a system that can solve math questions, independent on how they are phrased.
- Sharlin 7y ago
  To be fair, you have been taught what the symbols 2, x, 3, and 6 mean, and what multiplication means, and how it can be thought of as n sets of m items. 2 and 3 are small enough numbers that subitizing kicks in, which does indeed appear to be an evolved, hardcoded mechanism. But what about 7x9? Most of us have either memorized it, or have to break it down into more elementary operations, using an algorithm that has been, again, taught to us. Never mind something like 435x928. It is certainly possible to teach a machine how to reason about algebra from the first principles, allowing it to solve much, much more complex problems than multiplying small integers. The program doesn't know how it is executed, either, but it does have a much better understanding of what multiplying actually is than most humans.
TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
"it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests" Is this even remotely close to being true? I'm not aware of any AI projects that can match an average human score on a standardised IQ test. In fact I'm not aware of any AI projects that can understand how an IQ test paper works without prior coaching. Most humans won't just attempt the problems but will be able to work out what the questions are asking, even if they have never seen those kinds of questions before. So this seems wholly wrong to me. I don't disagree that basic motor skills and perceptions are an important and difficult part of the puzzle, but I absolutely disagree that abstract thinking is a comparatively trivial solved problem - or that board game solvers are anything other than a warm-up exercise.
- goatlover 7y ago
  That's a problem I have with the paradox. While it's true for some high level cognitive skills, it's not true in general. The general purpose AI has proven to be as hard or harder than the sensory-motor skills. Otherwise, we would have HAL-like computers.
  - mannykannot 7y ago
    Indeed. At the time the paradox was proposed, there had not been much progress in natural language understanding, so the scope of what it considers to be AI has at least one important part missing.
    - Retric 7y ago
      Language is a low level task. You don’t think about decoding “purple” or associating it with a color that’s automatic. Similarly decoding letter shapes etc. Even forming responses is very automatic. You yell “Stop” you don’t think what’s the best phrase to convey they are about to hit a car. Though like breathing you can pay attention and do something else.
      - mannykannot 7y ago
radiospiel 7y ago
It was probably only by coincidence with the publishing of this link that this morning someone from IP 46.123.245.139 changed "Hans Moravec" in the wikipedia article to "Matej Moravec" . Right @gardkor?
- JadeNB 7y ago
  What's the background to this comment? At least for me, this comment, together with the calling out by name of a specific user, is context free—besides why anyone, or this particular person, would do this, I have no idea what the significance of 'this' (the substitution of a different first name) even is—and seems not to contribute much to this conversation except for casting aspersions (possibly well deserved or possibly not; without context I have no way of knowing).
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
cyrtophora 7y ago
The mind is the layer that we use to make sense of the world, it is designed to see outside because of the way the world works, but it is difficult to see inside. Every concept that we can come up with is articulated in terms of concepts that have been stored in the minds memory (inference) the funny thing is that we are born with almost empty minds as we grow older it starts to feel up to the point where we cant even think without using language which is also not inborn but is acquired here on earth through the mind. The problem is to see behind this layer. If we observe the mind through the mind we only see that it is a mechanism for storage, processing and inference of the stored data. Learning is simply finding new inferences between data or acquiring new data from the senses that are connected to the mind. But as humans we are biologically limited, our senses can not even pick up everything this already implies that the what we know through the mind will always be limited (unless if you believe in evolution and that our senses will evolve). Meditation does this with a sort of denial of the knowledge that we acquired through the mind (closely related to the nature of the ego) that is why highly spiritual people often say perceived reality is an illusion, and to some a deity is a way to see outside of the box. AI is trying to simulate the mind with what we know about it through it. I also feel like this is what the incompleteness theorem is about, we have some sort of axioms of Intelligence that we got through the mind but these finite axioms can not proof all the dynamics of Intelligence.
- desertrider12 7y ago
  I would say the biggest challenge with general AI is that our brains are NOT empty when we’re born, and we have no way to map those connections. We don’t have memories yet, but we’re wired to recognize faces, learn languages and use sensory data. If a baby’s brain was empty, we could most likely bootstrap a human on an exaflop supercomputer today by feeding it the things a baby would see/hear.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
mabbo 7y ago
And this is why logistics companies aren't replacing humans with robots very quickly. Simply put, robots today do not have the combination of speed, accuracy, gentleness, strength and 'hand-eye' coordination needed to do simple tasks that a 6 year old could learn in minutes. You want a 4 ton pallet lifted from spot A to spot B? There's a robot arm that can do that same task over and over flawlessly. You move that pallet 12 inches to the left and rotate it 10 degrees? Best case, it realizes it can't do it and stops trying. Worst case, you have 4 tons of probably-broken goods thrown all over the place. There's always examples of specific subsets being done well- a robot that can grab and align parts quickly (so long as they don't overlap and they're the expected parts); a robot that can carefully reach into a cluttered container and grab just one item (but only one item per minute vs a human's 20); a robot that can carefully lift an egg without damaging it (provided the egg is within acceptable size and weight bounds). You want the whole package of skills? For now, you need a human.
- tabtab 7y ago
  Re: "You move that pallet 12 inches to the left and rotate it 10 degrees? Best case, it realizes it can't do it and stops trying. Worst case, [chaos]" Maybe it only has to be 90% accurate. A remote-control human operator can help those who get stumped. Record the problem scenarios for later analysis to improve the next version. The bot will gradually improve, and human intervention will gradually shrink. This applies to cars also. Auto-cars can contact humans if stumped, such as lane closures or officers directing traffic. This includes both the passenger (if qualified) and remote-control operators. The bot will be conservative such "when it doubt, ask for help". As it learns to solve problems via experienced-based tuning (above), there will be fewer times it has to ask a human.
ThomPete 7y ago
As have often been pointed out. A cleaning lady is going to have her job longer than a radiologist.

155 points by jkuria 7y ago

This is also why brain mass is roughly proportional to body mass, but not very proportional to general intelligence. A blue whale has a 7kg brain, about 5x the size of the typical human brain, but doesn't appear to have even human-level intelligence let alone 5x super-human intelligence.

jkuria 7y ago
Hmmh, but a whale's sensori-motor skills are quite rudimentary compared to a human's. A human can manipulate objects, walk, run, dance, swim, jump. A whale can only swim and maybe do a fairly restricted set of dives?
- inflatableDodo 7y ago
  Have a look at dolphins playing with bubble rings - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bT-fctr32pE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bT-fctr32pE - and making labyrinths out of suspended mud to catch fish with - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzfqPQm-ThU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzfqPQm-ThU
  - jkuria 7y ago
    We are talking about Whales not dolphins. Dolphins have always been the subject of researches for their higher than average intelligence.
- anfilt 7y ago
  Don't forget that pretty much every part of your's and a whales body has nerves in it to detect pain & contract muscles. More body mass means more nerves that need to send and receive information from the central nervous system. So even assuming a constant amount nerve endings in cm^3 of flesh between whales and humans a whale will have significantly more.
- goatinaboat 7y ago
  Whales can do the DSP for sonar, humans can’t.
  - anfilt 7y ago
    there are blind people who can use essentially echo location to get an idea of their surroundings.
gus_massa 7y ago
It's better to compare the weight using brain/body^(2/3) than using body/body directly. With that correction most of the paradox disappear. More info in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient
- anfilt 7y ago
  From understanding never density in mammals is mostly the same. So large body mass means more nerves that have to communicate with central nervous system. Also some people have argued that fish can't feel pain or are less sensitive to due to their lower nerve density from my understanding. A whale is a mammal so I would assume it's going to have similar nerve density. Which means the brain has to be able to take input from a larger volume of body so that brain in large animals would make sense to be larger.
- chalst 7y ago
  SSC had an interesting post on the EQ: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/25/neurons-and-intelligence-a-birdbrained-perspective/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/25/neurons-and-intelligen...
nico 7y ago
The brain size comparison and its relationship to body mass is super interesting. The intelligence comparison is a little bit too simplistic though. How do you define intelligence? Are we humans really "more intelligent" than whales? There are a lot of human behaviors that are not intelligent at all, and which seem to be a lot less intelligent than what whales do (and pretty much any other animal on the planet for that matter).
- sweeneyrod 7y ago
  Such as?
  - nico 7y ago
    Such as war and indiscriminate destruction of our environment
    - sweeneyrod 7y ago
      What makes this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War different from human war? And other species certainly do destroy their environments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_species https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_species it's just that we don't consider them morally culpable.
      - nico 7y ago
        Great links and examples, very good point. Which brings us back to the original point: are humans actually more intelligent than animals? I don't think so. It's a human self-aggrandizing illusion to believe we are somehow "better" in any way to animals.
JetSetWilly 7y ago
Does a whale have more muscles to control than a human? Is its environment more complex to navigate - swimming through water vs balancing , walking running and jumping? Does it have more bones making its body more complex to maneuver? Are its eyes larger with many more rods and cones, looking at a more complex environment and requiring greater neuron counts to interpret? I think the answer to most (though not all) of these questions is no. Just because a body is bigger doesn't necessarily make it more complex to control surely? For the most part large mammals have the same number of muscles and bones as a small one, and past a certain body size eyes don't get particularly larger. I seem to recall that even very large dinosaurs could have comparatively tiny brains compared to mammals - did they control their bodies clumsily and observe the world much less acutely than mammals? So I have always found this explanation a bit suspect - it is a "just so" story because we observe that whales and elephants don't seem all that smart yet they have bigger brains and bodies but that doesn't make the explanation true by itself. Has there been any actual research that supports the hypothesis that large bodies require bigger brains to control?
- Balgair 7y ago
  The brain volume largely correlates to body size [0] in mammals. More muscle cells require more nerves to control them which requires more coordination and hence a larger brain. How the mammalian brain divies up this process depends on enviromental factors and the body plan. Dolphins and whales have specific parts of the brain used for ecolocation and the water pressure affects the volume of the brain. Elephants have larger areas devoted to using their trunk. Aye-Ayes have large visual cortices as they hunt inscets in the dark for food. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_size https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_size

inflatableDodo 7y ago

I think this has a related outcome in the commercialisation of automated systems. It seems that it is much easier to create automated systems that outperform highly paid domain knowledge specialists at diagnostic tasks, than it is to get them to reliably deliver pizza as well as an average human with a moped.

jkuria 7y ago
Exactly. This is what Steven Pinker Says in the parent article: The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard. The mental abilities of a four-year-old that we take for granted – recognizing a face, lifting a pencil, walking across a room, answering a question – in fact solve some of the hardest engineering problems ever conceived... As the new generation of intelligent devices appears, it will be the stock analysts and petrochemical engineers and parole board members who are in danger of being replaced by machines. The gardeners, receptionists, and cooks are secure in their jobs for decades to come.[7]
- shandor 7y ago
  To be fair it's not quite that simple. Automation has already been heavily cutting at the so-called low-skill jobs starting from Industrial Revolution. Or by some definition, from the Agricultural one somewhat earlier. But the examples of the gardener and cook that were in your citation are actually quite good, I admit.
  - toast0 7y ago
    The secret to automating repetitive jobs is often finding a different way to do it that provides a similar output, but is more amenable to machinery. A sewing machine doesn't sew at all like most humans, a dishwasher doesn't wash like you would with a sponge etc. Gardening is hard to automate, but harvesting of somethings (grains, mostly) is heavily automated. Cooking is more amenable to augmentation than full automation, but there are exceptions mostly around processed foods.

nico 7y ago

> "In general, we're least aware of what our minds do best", he wrote, and added "we're more aware of simple processes that don't work well than of complex ones that work flawlessly" Fascinating, that could in a way be interpreted to imply that our conscious attention/perception is focused on the things that our minds cannot predict/control and everything else is "automated" (subconscious). That could also be related to our perception of uncertainty and the way we deal with it. Our attention tends to be focused on what we are the most uncertain of.

shandor 7y ago
To expand on your point, anecdotally it seems that the human mind works in the same way in other contexts, too. For example: - "Grass is always greener on the other side" - "You only fully appreciate great things when you lose them" - All the people getting anxious or even depressed because social media constantly barrages us with the perfect pictures of perfect peoples' perfect lives, all the while forgetting that on many objective scales the fact that you're even able to get depressed by something like that puts you in the jackpot-winners category in the lottery of life compared to a huge percent of the world's population.

jamesrcole 7y ago

This is a case of where our intuitions and expectations are deeply flawed. It's not a paradox. I think the explanation of it is pretty simple. To ourselves, the unconscious things like vision and bodily movement tend to feel effortless. Whereas the consciously controlled things like reasoning involve conscious effort, and they can feel difficult to us. The "paradox" comes from assuming that the amount of effort or difficulty that we consciously experience corresponds to the actual degree of sophistication of the processing involved.

msla 7y ago
Quine had three classes of paradox: > A veridical paradox produces a result that appears absurd but is demonstrated to be true nonetheless. Thus the paradox of Frederic's birthday in The Pirates of Penzance establishes the surprising fact that a twenty-one-year-old would have had only five birthdays if he had been born on a leap day. Likewise, Arrow's impossibility theorem demonstrates difficulties in mapping voting results to the will of the people. The Monty Hall paradox demonstrates that a decision which has an intuitive 50–50 chance is in fact heavily biased towards making a decision which, given the intuitive conclusion, the player would be unlikely to make. In 20th-century science, Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel and Schrödinger's cat are famously vivid examples of a theory being taken to a logical but paradoxical end. > A falsidical paradox establishes a result that not only appears false but actually is false, due to a fallacy in the demonstration. The various invalid mathematical proofs (e.g., that 1 = 2) are classic examples, generally relying on a hidden division by zero. Another example is the inductive form of the horse paradox, which falsely generalises from true specific statements. Zeno's paradoxes are 'falsidical', concluding, for example, that a flying arrow never reaches its target or that a speedy runner cannot catch up to a tortoise with a small head-start. > A paradox that is in neither class may be an antinomy, which reaches a self-contradictory result by properly applying accepted ways of reasoning. For example, the Grelling–Nelson paradox points out genuine problems in our understanding of the ideas of truth and description. > A fourth kind, which may be alternatively interpreted as a special case of the third kind, has sometimes been described since Quine's work. > A paradox that is both true and false at the same time and in the same sense is called a dialetheia. In Western logics it is often assumed, following Aristotle, that no dialetheia exist, but they are sometimes accepted in Eastern traditions (e.g. in the Mohists,[12] the Gongsun Longzi,[13] and in Zen[14]) and in paraconsistent logics. It would be mere equivocation or a matter of degree, for example, to both affirm and deny that "John is here" when John is halfway through the door but it is self-contradictory simultaneously to affirm and deny the event. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox

FreeHugs 7y ago

we're least aware of what our minds do best I'm not sure we are aware of anything. If you ask me: How much is 2x3? I might think: That's easy! I just have to imagine 3 stones. Then I imagine two piles of 3 stones. Then I count all those stones. 6! But how did I came up with that? How did I even figure out what the question is about? It's all unconscious and so far we have no clue how to program a system that grasp even these type of easy questions. It could be a nice approach to AI to try and breed (via AI/Genetic Algorithms/Whatever) a system that can solve math questions, independent on how they are phrased.

Sharlin 7y ago
To be fair, you have been taught what the symbols 2, x, 3, and 6 mean, and what multiplication means, and how it can be thought of as n sets of m items. 2 and 3 are small enough numbers that subitizing kicks in, which does indeed appear to be an evolved, hardcoded mechanism. But what about 7x9? Most of us have either memorized it, or have to break it down into more elementary operations, using an algorithm that has been, again, taught to us. Never mind something like 435x928. It is certainly possible to teach a machine how to reason about algebra from the first principles, allowing it to solve much, much more complex problems than multiplying small integers. The program doesn't know how it is executed, either, but it does have a much better understanding of what multiplying actually is than most humans.

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago

"it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests" Is this even remotely close to being true? I'm not aware of any AI projects that can match an average human score on a standardised IQ test. In fact I'm not aware of any AI projects that can understand how an IQ test paper works without prior coaching. Most humans won't just attempt the problems but will be able to work out what the questions are asking, even if they have never seen those kinds of questions before. So this seems wholly wrong to me. I don't disagree that basic motor skills and perceptions are an important and difficult part of the puzzle, but I absolutely disagree that abstract thinking is a comparatively trivial solved problem - or that board game solvers are anything other than a warm-up exercise.

goatlover 7y ago
That's a problem I have with the paradox. While it's true for some high level cognitive skills, it's not true in general. The general purpose AI has proven to be as hard or harder than the sensory-motor skills. Otherwise, we would have HAL-like computers.
- mannykannot 7y ago
  Indeed. At the time the paradox was proposed, there had not been much progress in natural language understanding, so the scope of what it considers to be AI has at least one important part missing.
  - Retric 7y ago
    Language is a low level task. You don’t think about decoding “purple” or associating it with a color that’s automatic. Similarly decoding letter shapes etc. Even forming responses is very automatic. You yell “Stop” you don’t think what’s the best phrase to convey they are about to hit a car. Though like breathing you can pay attention and do something else.
    - mannykannot 7y ago

radiospiel 7y ago

It was probably only by coincidence with the publishing of this link that this morning someone from IP 46.123.245.139 changed "Hans Moravec" in the wikipedia article to "Matej Moravec" . Right @gardkor?

JadeNB 7y ago
What's the background to this comment? At least for me, this comment, together with the calling out by name of a specific user, is context free—besides why anyone, or this particular person, would do this, I have no idea what the significance of 'this' (the substitution of a different first name) even is—and seems not to contribute much to this conversation except for casting aspersions (possibly well deserved or possibly not; without context I have no way of knowing).

deleted 7y ago

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cyrtophora 7y ago

The mind is the layer that we use to make sense of the world, it is designed to see outside because of the way the world works, but it is difficult to see inside. Every concept that we can come up with is articulated in terms of concepts that have been stored in the minds memory (inference) the funny thing is that we are born with almost empty minds as we grow older it starts to feel up to the point where we cant even think without using language which is also not inborn but is acquired here on earth through the mind. The problem is to see behind this layer. If we observe the mind through the mind we only see that it is a mechanism for storage, processing and inference of the stored data. Learning is simply finding new inferences between data or acquiring new data from the senses that are connected to the mind. But as humans we are biologically limited, our senses can not even pick up everything this already implies that the what we know through the mind will always be limited (unless if you believe in evolution and that our senses will evolve). Meditation does this with a sort of denial of the knowledge that we acquired through the mind (closely related to the nature of the ego) that is why highly spiritual people often say perceived reality is an illusion, and to some a deity is a way to see outside of the box. AI is trying to simulate the mind with what we know about it through it. I also feel like this is what the incompleteness theorem is about, we have some sort of axioms of Intelligence that we got through the mind but these finite axioms can not proof all the dynamics of Intelligence.

desertrider12 7y ago
I would say the biggest challenge with general AI is that our brains are NOT empty when we’re born, and we have no way to map those connections. We don’t have memories yet, but we’re wired to recognize faces, learn languages and use sensory data. If a baby’s brain was empty, we could most likely bootstrap a human on an exaflop supercomputer today by feeding it the things a baby would see/hear.
- deleted 7y ago
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mabbo 7y ago

And this is why logistics companies aren't replacing humans with robots very quickly. Simply put, robots today do not have the combination of speed, accuracy, gentleness, strength and 'hand-eye' coordination needed to do simple tasks that a 6 year old could learn in minutes. You want a 4 ton pallet lifted from spot A to spot B? There's a robot arm that can do that same task over and over flawlessly. You move that pallet 12 inches to the left and rotate it 10 degrees? Best case, it realizes it can't do it and stops trying. Worst case, you have 4 tons of probably-broken goods thrown all over the place. There's always examples of specific subsets being done well- a robot that can grab and align parts quickly (so long as they don't overlap and they're the expected parts); a robot that can carefully reach into a cluttered container and grab just one item (but only one item per minute vs a human's 20); a robot that can carefully lift an egg without damaging it (provided the egg is within acceptable size and weight bounds). You want the whole package of skills? For now, you need a human.

tabtab 7y ago
Re: "You move that pallet 12 inches to the left and rotate it 10 degrees? Best case, it realizes it can't do it and stops trying. Worst case, [chaos]" Maybe it only has to be 90% accurate. A remote-control human operator can help those who get stumped. Record the problem scenarios for later analysis to improve the next version. The bot will gradually improve, and human intervention will gradually shrink. This applies to cars also. Auto-cars can contact humans if stumped, such as lane closures or officers directing traffic. This includes both the passenger (if qualified) and remote-control operators. The bot will be conservative such "when it doubt, ask for help". As it learns to solve problems via experienced-based tuning (above), there will be fewer times it has to ask a human.

ThomPete 7y ago

As have often been pointed out. A cleaning lady is going to have her job longer than a radiologist.