3 ms·

> (edit: I'm not claiming he's a field expert in a week guys, just that he can probably learn the basics pretty fast, especially given ML tech shares many base

> (edit: I'm not claiming he's a field expert in a week guys, just that he can probably learn the basics pretty fast, especially given ML tech shares many base maths with graphics) This may be his biggest impediment. ML has gotten very far with looking at problems as linear algebraic systems, where optimizing a loss function mathematically yields a good solution to a precisely defined (and well circumscribed) classification or regression problem. These techniques are very seductive and very powerful, but the problems they solve have almost nothing in common with AGI. Put another way, Machine Learning as a field diverged from human learning (and cognitive science) decades ago, and the two are virtually unrecognizable to each other now. Human learning is the best example of AGI we have, and using ML tech as a way to get there may be a seductive dead end.

visarga 7y ago
Humans are not AGI's. We're specialised in human survival, not general intelligence. We're pretty limited in intelligence in many ways, actually, and the environment doesn't support generality. Without a proper challenge an agent would not become super intelligent. The cost of developing such an intelligence would conflict with the need to minimise energy for survival.
- TeamSlytherin 7y ago
  It's best to think about AGI as... at what point can you drop out of high school and still do well in life (or do you even need high school). It's true that it's not a survival issue, but sadly, it's not a test of "pure knowledge" either. There is a great deal of social structure, even "fluff" that is only relevant for interaction (like getting an 80's reference).
  - visarga 7y ago
    > at what point can you drop out of high school and still do well in life That means you're specialised in survival. If you do well in life, you have a higher chance of procreation. Your genes survival depends on it. General Intelligence is like Free Will - a fascinating concept with no base in reality. A mental experiment.
- mrmonkeyman 7y ago
  Human survival, like composing hackernews comments and learning about Golang.
- nathias 7y ago
  We are AGI, the general part comes from language and specialization of brains for language use.
  - toasterlovin 7y ago
    We can communicate well about pretty much anything (we think, at least). That doesn't mean we possess the intellectual tool kit to handle basically any intellectual task. I think it's easy to think that we do, but that is just as easily explained by the fact that we've evolved for millions of years to be well suited to the environments we usually find ourselves in. We wouldn't refer to our bodies as general purpose bodies. They may seem that way, at times, since they've also been tuned by millions of years of evolution to be well suited to most of the environments we find ourselves in. But put our bodies in a different environment (like the ocean, or the desert, or really high altitudes) and it becomes immediately obvious that they're not general purpose, but instead a collection of various adaptations. Similarly, when you put humans in novel intellectual environments, it seems pretty clear that we're not general intelligences. After all, the math involved in balancing a checkbook is much simpler than the math involved in recognizing 3D objects, yet we do the simple task only with great difficulty, while the difficult task is done without struggle.
  - visarga 7y ago
    No, if we were we could figure out the genetic code, or how a neural net makes its decisions. But we can't because, among other things, we have a limited working memory of 7-12 objects. Programmers know how it is to live at the edge of the capacity of the mind to grasp the big picture. We always reinvent the wheel in the quest to make our code more grasp-able and debuggable. Why? Because it's often more complex than can be handled by the brain. An AGI would not have such limitations. Our limitations emerged as a tradeoff between energy expenditure and ability to solve novel tasks. If we had a larger brain, or more complicated brain, we would require more resources to train. But resources are limited, we need to be smart while being scrappy. For the record I don't think there is any general intelligence on our planet. A general intelligence would need access to all kinds of possible environments and problems. There is no such thing. There's also the no free lunch theorem - it might not apply directly here, but it gives us a nice philosophical intuition about why AGI is impossible. > We have dubbed the associated results NFL theorems because they demonstrate that if an algorithm performs well on a certain class of problems then it necessarily pays for that with degraded performance on the set of all remaining problems. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_theorem Another argument relies on the fact that words are imprecise tools in modelling reality. Language is itself a model and as all models, it's good at some tasks and bad at other tasks. There is no perfect language for all tasks. Even if we use language we are not automatically made 'generally intelligent'. We're specialised intelligences.

visarga 7y ago

Humans are not AGI's. We're specialised in human survival, not general intelligence. We're pretty limited in intelligence in many ways, actually, and the environment doesn't support generality. Without a proper challenge an agent would not become super intelligent. The cost of developing such an intelligence would conflict with the need to minimise energy for survival.

TeamSlytherin 7y ago
It's best to think about AGI as... at what point can you drop out of high school and still do well in life (or do you even need high school). It's true that it's not a survival issue, but sadly, it's not a test of "pure knowledge" either. There is a great deal of social structure, even "fluff" that is only relevant for interaction (like getting an 80's reference).
- visarga 7y ago
  > at what point can you drop out of high school and still do well in life That means you're specialised in survival. If you do well in life, you have a higher chance of procreation. Your genes survival depends on it. General Intelligence is like Free Will - a fascinating concept with no base in reality. A mental experiment.
mrmonkeyman 7y ago
Human survival, like composing hackernews comments and learning about Golang.
nathias 7y ago
We are AGI, the general part comes from language and specialization of brains for language use.
- toasterlovin 7y ago
  We can communicate well about pretty much anything (we think, at least). That doesn't mean we possess the intellectual tool kit to handle basically any intellectual task. I think it's easy to think that we do, but that is just as easily explained by the fact that we've evolved for millions of years to be well suited to the environments we usually find ourselves in. We wouldn't refer to our bodies as general purpose bodies. They may seem that way, at times, since they've also been tuned by millions of years of evolution to be well suited to most of the environments we find ourselves in. But put our bodies in a different environment (like the ocean, or the desert, or really high altitudes) and it becomes immediately obvious that they're not general purpose, but instead a collection of various adaptations. Similarly, when you put humans in novel intellectual environments, it seems pretty clear that we're not general intelligences. After all, the math involved in balancing a checkbook is much simpler than the math involved in recognizing 3D objects, yet we do the simple task only with great difficulty, while the difficult task is done without struggle.
- visarga 7y ago
  No, if we were we could figure out the genetic code, or how a neural net makes its decisions. But we can't because, among other things, we have a limited working memory of 7-12 objects. Programmers know how it is to live at the edge of the capacity of the mind to grasp the big picture. We always reinvent the wheel in the quest to make our code more grasp-able and debuggable. Why? Because it's often more complex than can be handled by the brain. An AGI would not have such limitations. Our limitations emerged as a tradeoff between energy expenditure and ability to solve novel tasks. If we had a larger brain, or more complicated brain, we would require more resources to train. But resources are limited, we need to be smart while being scrappy. For the record I don't think there is any general intelligence on our planet. A general intelligence would need access to all kinds of possible environments and problems. There is no such thing. There's also the no free lunch theorem - it might not apply directly here, but it gives us a nice philosophical intuition about why AGI is impossible. > We have dubbed the associated results NFL theorems because they demonstrate that if an algorithm performs well on a certain class of problems then it necessarily pays for that with degraded performance on the set of all remaining problems. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_theorem Another argument relies on the fact that words are imprecise tools in modelling reality. Language is itself a model and as all models, it's good at some tasks and bad at other tasks. There is no perfect language for all tasks. Even if we use language we are not automatically made 'generally intelligent'. We're specialised intelligences.