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There are a number of "things" that we should "teach" machines to create ones that are "truly intelligent". Besides this kind of "cause / effect reasoning", one

There are a number of "things" that we should "teach" machines to create ones that are "truly intelligent". Besides this kind of "cause / effect reasoning", one could argue that an intelligent machine needs some baseline levels of what you might call "intuitive metaphysics", and "intuitive epistemology". You could probably argue that the cause/effect stuff is subsumed by one of these at a certain level of abstraction, but I think it makes sense to treat them as separate. Related to the idea of "cause/effect" and possibly falling into the overall rubric of "intuitive metaphsyics" is some notion of the passage of time. That is, in human experience we link things as "causal" when they happen in a certain sequence, and within a certain degree of temporal proximity. Eg, "I touched the hot burner then instantaneously felt excruciating pain" is an experience that we learn from. "I walked through the door and four days later I felt pain in my knee" probably is not. Our machines probably also need baseline levels of some sort of intuitive versions of Temporal Logic and Modal Logic as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_logic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_logic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_logic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_logic

Barrin92 7y ago
I'd agree with that and I think winograd schema make this very obvious, take for example: (1) John took the water bottle out of the backpack so that it would be lighter. (2) John took the water bottle out of the backpack so that it would be handy What does it refer to in each sentence? It's very obvious that a machine that solves this must understand physics, have a rudimentary ontology about objects and human intuition and so on. I think it's straight-up sad how little progress there has been on these very fundamental problems which articulate what common sense and intelligent agents are about.
- foota 7y ago
  Hah. I did some experimenting with language model tasks here. I re-phrased the sentence as "John took the water bottle out of the backpack in order to make lighter|less heavy|handy the" etc. The only way it would complete with something other than the water bottle was "John took the water bottle out of the backpack in order to lighten the " and it completed with 'load' The most amusing was a task to fill in the blank with "John took the water bottle out of the backpack so that [MASK] would be lighter" The model was 98% confident the blank should be 'it' facepalm Interestingly enough when I change the fill in the blank sentence to: "John took the water bottle out of the backpack so that the [MASK] would be lighter." The result was: "23.9% liquid 13.4% water 7.7% contents 6.5% weight" and the last two are pretty close. I ran these tests on https://demo.allennlp.org/ https://demo.allennlp.org/.
- mLuby 7y ago
  Can this be CAPTCHA instead of goddamn crosswalks? Asking for a friend…
  - gambiting 7y ago
    As a non-native English speaker I'm struggling here a little bit. I'm guessing that you mean that in the second sentence, "it" refers to the bottle not the backpack? But that certainly wouldn't have been my first answer to this question(in general any sort of captchas that are based on language skills are not great, not everyone who consumes your content speaks your language).
    - mLuby 7y ago
      Yep, excellent point. Oh well, back to squinting at traffic lights…

Barrin92 7y ago

I'd agree with that and I think winograd schema make this very obvious, take for example: (1) John took the water bottle out of the backpack so that it would be lighter. (2) John took the water bottle out of the backpack so that it would be handy What does it refer to in each sentence? It's very obvious that a machine that solves this must understand physics, have a rudimentary ontology about objects and human intuition and so on. I think it's straight-up sad how little progress there has been on these very fundamental problems which articulate what common sense and intelligent agents are about.

foota 7y ago
Hah. I did some experimenting with language model tasks here. I re-phrased the sentence as "John took the water bottle out of the backpack in order to make lighter|less heavy|handy the" etc. The only way it would complete with something other than the water bottle was "John took the water bottle out of the backpack in order to lighten the " and it completed with 'load' The most amusing was a task to fill in the blank with "John took the water bottle out of the backpack so that [MASK] would be lighter" The model was 98% confident the blank should be 'it' facepalm Interestingly enough when I change the fill in the blank sentence to: "John took the water bottle out of the backpack so that the [MASK] would be lighter." The result was: "23.9% liquid 13.4% water 7.7% contents 6.5% weight" and the last two are pretty close. I ran these tests on https://demo.allennlp.org/ https://demo.allennlp.org/.
mLuby 7y ago
Can this be CAPTCHA instead of goddamn crosswalks? Asking for a friend…
- gambiting 7y ago
  As a non-native English speaker I'm struggling here a little bit. I'm guessing that you mean that in the second sentence, "it" refers to the bottle not the backpack? But that certainly wouldn't have been my first answer to this question(in general any sort of captchas that are based on language skills are not great, not everyone who consumes your content speaks your language).
  - mLuby 7y ago
    Yep, excellent point. Oh well, back to squinting at traffic lights…