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Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized
- sega_sai 6y agoI posted the article because it is thought provoking, although I disagree with it. The reason is for example statements like this "The real problem is that computers are not in the world, because they are not embodied." "And I shall argue that they cannot pass the full Turing test because they are not in the world, and, therefore, they have no understanding." First I think that whether something is embodied or not doesn't matter. Our senses in the end could be likely approximated by arrays of numbers fed to a computer, so I don't think lack of body is such an issue. Regarding understanding by machines, that is clearly the issue for current AI, but at least based on what I know about modern machine translation, there is already something that works with concepts/abstract terms and their relations, which looks to me like a beginning for abstract reasoning...
- jchrisa 6y agoMy hunch agrees with the paper. Because computers operate on the rational numbers instead of the real numbers, they can never be embodied. They are always in a simulation...
- mattnewton 6y agoMaybe I don’t understand your point, but our senses are also compressed to some extent. Your synapses fire or don’t fire, providing digitized input for some of your senses like hearing. At any point there is a discrete amount of hormones in your body. etc etc. That doesn’t seem categorically different from any man made sensor.
- jchrisa 6y agoOur sensorium could be indistinguishable from how it'd be in a simulation without impacting my point. Software can hop from host to host (all Turing machines can simulate each other) but living intelligence is embodied. Because of this, no matter how "smart" computers get, we can't trust them not to do stupid stuff. They are smart like that kid in high school who comes up with a formula to turn the world into silly putty, and is stupid enough to use it. There is more than one kind of intelligence, here the argument is that some kinds of intelligence require having skin in the game.
- sgillen 6y agoBut would it be impossible to have artificial “skin in the game”? Is there no robot body that could serve this purpose?
- selestify 6y agoWhy isn’t computer hardware already as “embodied” in the physical world as our brain matter is?
- mcguire 6y agoWe can't trust people not to do stupid stuff.
- D-Coder 6y ago> They are smart like that kid in high school who comes up with a formula to turn the world into silly putty, and is stupid enough to use it. So that kid isn't intelligent?
- credit_guy 6y agoThis is like saying CD players will never be as good as vinyl record players because the first use digital signals (rational numbers) and the second analogue (real numbers).
- grogenaut 6y agoif you want to be pedantic record players are also digital because they can't represent anything tighter than an atom or the molecule of vinyl
- mindcrime 6y agoIsn't everything digital to a point, since we can't ever measure anything smaller than the Planck length?
- jchrisa 6y agoI'm on record saying heterodox things about the Nyquist theorem and SACD 1-bit DAC, so you are on topic. :)
- credit_guy 6y agoIn that case, since we are here and it's Friday and everyone needs to take it easy from time to time, here's my proof that we don't live in a simulation: according to [1], ray tracing is computationally undecidable. For example, say you are in a museum at night, and a light bulb turns on in a room on the third floor, is it still dark in some room on the first floor? This problem is undecidable using the axioms of geometric optics. Of course, geometric optics is like real numbers, and the actual world is discrete: light is a finite collection of photons. So, you can do the simulation by simply emitting a number of photons from each light source and tracing them all the way until they are all absorbed. We can still live in a simulation, but one without algorithmic shortcuts, a simulation where you simulate every single photon. Now, I'm sure you can come up with your own version of proof that we can't live in a simulation using Nyquist's theorem. If you do, and your Friday is not too busy, please share. [1] https://users.cs.duke.edu/~reif/paper/tygar/raytracing.pdf https://users.cs.duke.edu/~reif/paper/tygar/raytracing.pdf
- cowboysauce 6y ago> Because computers operate on the rational numbers instead of the real numbers, Computers are just devices that perform computations. It's perfectly possible to construct computers that operate on values that are continuous and not discrete. In fact, such computers have been constructed before. They are know as analog computers and were used for things like numerically solving differential equations.
- karmakaze 6y agoThis is not even true. We have symbolic processing that can manipulate and formulate with non-rational expressions. This article is so worthless.
- ogogmad 6y agoYou don't need analog computation. The theory of Computable Real Analysis still assumes a digital computer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_analysis See here for a concrete application of the theory: https://icfp19.sigplan.org/details/icfp-2019-papers/15/Sound-and-robust-solid-modeling-via-exact-real-arithmetic-and-continuity https://icfp19.sigplan.org/details/icfp-2019-papers/15/Sound... Another application is the Android calculator, which computes over exact real numbers in the sense described by Computable Analysis. Finally, it's debatable whether analog computation achieves true computation over the real numbers. The presence of physical noise, and the fact that many physical quantities (like electrical charge) are ultimately discrete at the quantum level, implies that it doesn't really work AFAICT.
- caymanjim 6y agoIt seems likely that absolutely nothing is analog. The best theories about physics are all quantized. The only things that we don't have strong quantum theories about are things we barely understand, like time and gravity. And that's just because we haven't found the quanta yet.
- ethanwillis 6y agoIt has been a minute since I picked up my information theory book. However if I remember correctly continuous signals (that is functions of the reals) can be represented without loss with a finite (but sufficient number of) discrete samples.
- sgillen 6y agoAs long as all those reals are computable ;) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_number https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_number
- ggggtez 6y agoIt's fully possible for a computer to do symbolic math without reducing the symbols to a decimal.
- sgillen 6y agoOf course! I meant my comment to be tongue in cheek, but saying that some numbers are uncomputable is not incompatible with symbolic math on a computer. Note that for example Pi is computable, despite having an infinite decimal expansion.
- airstrike 6y ago> Because computers operate on the rational numbers instead of the real numbers, they can never be embodied. They are always in a simulation... I read the exact opposite argument yesterday but not from an AGI perspective: https://getpocket.com/explore/item/a-new-theory-explains-how-consciousness-evolved https://getpocket.com/explore/item/a-new-theory-explains-how...
- vidarh 6y agoThe counter-point to this: Brains. Brains are computational devices that are embodied.
- guhayun 6y agoCamera pixels are pretty real to me
- ogogmad 6y agoActually, digital computers can compute over the real numbers. They can compute quite a lot over the real numbers, even. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_analysis#Basic_results https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_analysis#Basic_resu... This even has some concrete applications. See this: https://icfp19.sigplan.org/details/icfp-2019-papers/15/Sound-and-robust-solid-modeling-via-exact-real-arithmetic-and-continuity https://icfp19.sigplan.org/details/icfp-2019-papers/15/Sound... Finally, saying that digital computers can't compute functions of the form Real -> Real is like saying that a computer can't compute functions of the form (Int -> Int) -> (Int -> Int). In other words, it's like saying that higher order functions are impossible.
- Der_Einzige 6y agoThis actually makes sense to me, but for those who aren't familiar with set theory, you may want to link this for context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_hypothesis
- mcguire 6y ago"Real numbers" have some problems. Information density, for one. Imagine a real number, say 0.27777..., represented as a point on a piece of string, with zero being one end and 1.0 being the other. That point represents infinite information density. It also would seem to run afoul of some of quantum mechanics.
- mchusma 6y agoThanks for posting, I also disagree with it. I think using this authors high level stance is that only the human physical experience can lead to general intelligence. By this logic a blind person or quadrapeligic might not be generally intelligent.
- dynamite-ready 6y agoNot quite. The unconscious management of the internal systems that keep us alive are as much a part of that physical experience, as our motor-sensory apparatus. In fact, some neurologists suggest that these unconscious urges are the most likely governors of 'conscious' action. That's a gross oversimplification... Dr Antonio Domasio explores the idea in fine detail in his books. Particularly 'The Self Comes to Mind'.
- ddrdrck_ 6y agoAbsolutely not. People with disabilities still experience the world. See Helen Keller. Your reasoning would only apply to people with no sense and no way to communicate at all.
- ggggtez 6y agoIt doesn't seem to be required that an animal have sensory information. [1] I'm not convinced by the argument that a computer can't think just because it doesn't experience the world. If anything, experiments like (1) show that we may be able to better understand how brains work if we get rid of all the "noise" from external stimulation so we can better understand the signals. [1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/random-search-wired-into-animals-may-help-them-hunt-20200611/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/random-search-wired-into-anim...
- _bxg1 6y agoAs others have said, I think this is a better argument against machines emulating humanness than it is against the broader category of "general intelligence". For me it always comes down to: If we assume the human mind to be a physical, deterministic phenomenon, then an informational, deterministic system could simulate it. It's as simple as that. To take the brute-force route, every atom in a human body could be simulated, which would include its intelligence. Now, that says nothing about time-scale or practicality. It doesn't even say anything about whether electronic computers as we know them can achieve the physical density necessary to simulate something so complex, given the natural resources we have available. But in principle, unless you believe in the metaphysical, there's no denying that AGI is something that can exist.
- raindeer3 6y agoWhy do we need the assume a deterministic system? As long as it physical and we believe physics can be described with computation, we can simulate it. Some randomness doesn't matter.
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- 13415 6y agoI'd recommend Daniel Dennett's talk If Brains are Computers, Who Designs the Software? as a counterpoint to this article [1]. Dennett's talk is a bit long but I mostly enjoyed it, especially when he points out the computerphobia of many of his colleagues. Of course, it's easier for me to agree with Dennett than for many other people, because I'm a computationalist in the philosophy of mind and suspect that consciousness is an emergent property of certain computations. It might in theory even be possible to realize that by analytical insight - though probably not in practice. I'm generally not a fan of the philosophy of mind, though, because it mostly consists of speculation and intuition pumping. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTFoJQSd48c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTFoJQSd48c
- koreth1 6y ago> I'm a computationalist in the philosophy of mind and suspect that consciousness is an emergent property of certain computations. I'm not a philosopher of any variety and this always seemed like a much more plausible scenario to me than some kind of consciousness magic sauce. It is pretty amazing to watch the intellectual contortions people will twist themselves into to avoid reaching this conclusion. Like deep down they are certain their lived experience can't possibly be an effect of purely physical processes, but they need to couch that belief in sufficiently convoluted words that they can convince themselves they aren't just talking about souls.
- jqpabc123 6y agoIt is difficult to build/create something you don't understand. A computer is just a playback machine for binary logic. We know that "intelligence" can create binary logic. We don't know if binary logic can create "intelligence". Claims that it is possible are really more "religious" than scientific at this point.
- eli_gottlieb 6y agoThe real question is whether Universal Turing Machines, or some equivalently powerful formalism, can create "intelligence".
- loosetypes 6y agoHow is that not the same question with fluffier terminology?
- eli_gottlieb 6y agoBoolean circuits are memoryless, and a strictly weaker class of computation than Turing machines.
- jupp0r 6y agoExtraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. In light of our limited understanding of how the brain works, claiming it is not possible to recreate its functions inside a computer programming is a much stronger claim than to assume that it’s possible and we just don’t know how. Unless we see a mathematical proof that it’s impossible, I think people who claim that it’s impossible are the same as people who claimed that only birds can fly and that it is impossible for machines to roam the skies.
- bena 6y agoThis is just flipping the burden of proof around. What is your proof that it can be done? "But planes" is not proof. I'm of the opinion that we don't even know what questions we are trying to answer. What is intelligence? What is consciousness? Can you explain them in concrete terms that are acceptable to everyone and don't have any notable exceptions? That's going to be the first step to being anywhere close to realizing general a.i..
- mu_sub_naught 6y agoMuch of the revenue generated from space engineers sales (over 10M copies sold on Steam) went towards an "AGI" pursuit.
- michaelmrose 6y agoIf natural processes can only be artfully and artificially arranged to perform computation and not thinking how is it that we are having this conversation.
- marta_morena_25 6y agoIngenious. Another article like "We will never travel faster than lightspeed", or "We will never be able to live forever", or as people back in the stone age would have said "We will never have a fission reactor". When will people finally realize that we know absolutely NOTHING about what's possible and whats not. Science made baby steps. We are 100 years in. And yeah, we know everything right? Yeah General AI... Not gonna happen.
- enitihas 6y agoThe difference is, people in stone age had no idea what nuclear fission means. They might have believed you, albeit superstitiously, if you told them that there will be food everywhere one day. Interestingly, the examples you cite seem to be in a decreasing order of difficulty, with several orders of magnitude more of effort required. AGI is gonna be much easier than living forever, which seems should be easier than travelling faster than light.
- jessaustin 6y agoISTM that AGI would swiftly result in vastly extended lifespans, at least for those fortunate enough to be at the control knobs. In that sense, they are at the same difficulty level.
- bloak 6y agoI would have thought it's possible to pass the Turing test without being "in the world". But you'd have to be much more intelligent than an average human to do that, because you'd be successfully imitating something that is nothing like you.
- vumgl 6y agoAchieving Strong AI makes no sense because we don't understand the human brain and how it works. Even if a non-biological AGI passes the hardest imaginable Turing test, there will be arguments against it because "it is still not like us".
- vidarh 6y agoAny article making such a claim need to start with explaining what evidence they have that human brains are not computing devices that can be replicated or simulated. Because absent evidence that there is something fundamental preventing us from one day copying the structure of a human brain and ending up with a working device, whatever claims they make are hand-waving.
- enitihas 6y agoI think you missed the main point, replicated economically. Given unlimited budget, I think simulating the human brain might be possible if one could use a powerful enough computer for evey neuron.
- vidarh 6y agoThe article title makes an unqualified claim about realisation, and so it was what I responded to, but the article itself also makes the same strong claim: > A closer look reveals that although development of artificial intelligence for specific purposes (ANI) has been impressive, we have not come much closer to developing artificial general intelligence (AGI). The article further argues that this is in principle impossible, and it revives Hubert Dreyfus’ argument that computers are not in the world. This is not an argument about cost - the article argues that it is "in principle impossible". Any argument about cost I think is also irrelevant: We know from the existence of the brain and how a brain is produced that it is possible to produce one relatively cheaply via biological processes. It seems highly unlikely that our ability to produce an artificial brain will not eventually approach the cost of growing one, because the "worst case" scenario is for us to find ethical ways of growing brain matter via biological processes and hook them up to computers, and it would seem unlikely that we will not eventually find cheaper ways of doing so than growing full mammalian bodies with it, and that we can not find any ways of optimising the process.
- Balgair 6y agoHow the brain grows and develops in humans is not very well understood. We mostly use animal models to understand the nervous system, not humans. As an example of why this is problematic: mouse embryos pretty much turn inside out at day 3, and are the only known mammal to do this. All others, including humans, don't. Why and how are unknown, as are the effects on long term development. Basically, mice are better subjects than zebrafish, but not very good being humans. The limiting factor is not budget or time, but 'stomach'. How elastic are your ethics?
- joefourier 6y agoThis article seems to be yet another long-winded attempt to say that human beings have some sort of "soul" or "vital essence" that computers don't, but since those ideas are out of vogue, it uses obfuscated language to make the same point without explicitly saying it. See: > which have allegedly shown that our decisions are not the result of “some mysterious free will”, but the result of “millions of neurons calculating probabilities within a split second” > the quotations are “nothing but” the result of chemical algorithms and “no more than” the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells. How can they then be true? The article is suggesting that human beings cannot say true things about the world or themselves if human intelligence is no more than chemical algorithms and nerve cells, and that proponents of physicalism are therefore contradicting themselves. This is a fairly bizarre argument. The use of "allegedly" with regards to explaining human decisions as a result of neurons further reinforces the claim that therefore, there must be some mysterious free will, a human soul, or here a "social context", to explain human consciousness. The trouble with vitalism or claims of a human soul should be fairly self-evident in the modern age, and claiming that denying it is "scientism" is utter nonsense. They then mix it up by saying that computers are not in the physical world and do not have a body, therefore cannot be generally intelligent like humans. This is obviously false, what is a robot if not a computer with a body? Computers can interact with the world using sensors and actuators, there's no theoretical reason that they could not match or exceed human physical capabilities (they already do in narrow instances).
- vidarh 6y agoIt always mystifies me to what extent people insist on trying to hold on to this fantasy of free will, while remaining unable to define free will in a way that does not devolve to "magic" or some attempt to obscure a deterministic description behind smoke and mirrors. At least some of the latter (e.g. a portion of compatibilists etc.) will if pressed admit that their "free will" is an effect or illusion of mind layered on top of determinism, but for a lot of people the very idea that they don't have actual agency seems entirely impossible to accept.
- ggggtez 6y agoThe offender I hear most often now a days is trying to use Quantum Mechanics to bring free-will back into play. The idea being that if any part of nature is unpredictable, then that could be a mechanism for where free-will might come from. Except that would be like saying your phone is conscious just because it gets bombarded by cosmic waves that sometimes cause bitflips. Just because the machine isn't 100% predictable, doesn't mean that those cosmic waves have any specific goal in mind.
- mullingitover 6y agoThis feels a lot like Douglas Hofstadter's elaborate explanation in Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid of how computers will never beat the best human chess players.
- knodi123 6y agoAnd here's DH just a couple years ago, > If you ask me in principle if it’s possible for a computing hardware to do something like thinking, I would say absolutely it’s possible. Computing hardware can do anything that a brain could do, but I don’t think at this point we’re doing what brains do. We’re simulating the surface level of it, and many people are falling for the illusion. Sometimes the performance of these machines are spectacular.
- mullingitover 6y agoIf we're successfully simulating the surface level of it, the underlying mechanism is (imho) totally irrelevant to the user. If general intelligence is happening, does it really matter if the underlying mechanism is neurons, or transistors, or vacuum tubes?
- goatlover 6y agoThe surface level of intelligence, not the biological implementation. Chess and Go programs have a surface level understanding of board games.
- mcguire 6y agoHere's the fun philosophical question: Do you have a below-surface level understanding of anything? I mean, sure you know that if you do this, something else does that, but do your really understand?
- abecedarius 6y agoThat's unfair. Hofstadter said he thought it wouldn't happen until AI programs were our equals in general; he emphasized he was guessing and that his colleagues would disagree; and the explanation was of his worldview that led to the guess.
- jxy 6y ago> when it was discovered that electronic computers are not just number-crunching machines, but can also manipulate symbols The first sentence shows that the authors know nothing about computation. So, there is nothing substantial to read here.
- blacksqr 6y agoAuthor of linked article asserts that computers cannot achieve general intelligence by: redefining general intelligence as precisely and only the specific experience and behavior of human beings. Author has incorporated the argument's conclusion into its premise, a tautology.
- csours 6y agoIs there a strong argument against the fact that every approach to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) eventually becomes ANI (Artificial Narrow Intelligence)? In other words, as soon as a facet of AI (NLP etc) gets a specific name and context, it is no longer considered part of AGI.
- ersiees 6y agoInteresting idea! Future Me: A computer became better at my job, but I might still claim that it is not generally intelligent because it does not have the same kind of relationships to humans I have.
- michaelmrose 6y agoPerhaps the brain is just a sufficiently capable arrangement of mental organs that would individually be classed as ANI
- bufferoverflow 6y agoThis article will not age well. That's my future prediction.
- 013a 6y agoPersonally, it feels to me that maybe AGI is possible, but a computer capable of it would look nothing like the computers we have today. And, most critically, I'm aware of no highly-progressed research into major new physical hardware systems which more closely resemble our neurons. There are billions of neurons in a brain. There are billions of transistors in a CPU or graphics card. Somehow, somewhere along the line, we convinced ourselves that brain neurons and transistors are fungible. At some layer of abstraction they probably are. But, it seems to me that the sheer number of transistors necessary to emulate a neuron would lead to tertiary negative impacts to the overall system. Imagine, for a second, it takes a billion transistors to emulate one neuron; given we're quickly approaching the physical size limit of the universe in our production of transistors, this means you'd need many chips, and actually many computers, to emulate many neurons. Introduce many computers, and you have to introduce network latency and communication problems; both problems that the brain really does not have. And while you could argue "ok, the simulation will be slower, but it would still work", maybe, just maybe, the latency of communication between neurons is actually a critical component of cognition. In fact, that seems likely to me. Many people are trying to build a brain on tensorflow with their nvidia graphics card originally designed to make unreal tournament run 20% faster. Google was among the first groups with the insight that custom silicon would make training and running these intelligences faster. But, what we're talking about here isn't "running faster"; its running fundamentally differently. We buy supermicro motherboards with PCI busses, plug in silicon that's just a little different than the silicon I use to play Doom Eternal; is it really any surprise that very little progress on AGI has been made? I don't know what chips to truly, more accurately emulate a neuron would look like. I suspect no one knows. I suspect that, if anyone figures it out, it won't be Google, or Microsoft, or Apple, or China, or Russia; organizations with so many processes, procedures, and immediate-term outcome expectations that selling an idea as wild as "we can't use any of the pre-existing computing theory out there, we need to start from scratch" would be impossible, in favor of "can't you just make the Tensorcore V2 20% faster?" If it will be invented, it will be invented by one person, in their garage, with a unique insight and decades of work. But I also suspect that it will never be invented. If we can't even solve alzheimers, or psychosis, or even depression, brain disorders which impact hundreds of millions of people every year, what level of hubris is necessary to think we have even 0.1% understanding of what goes on in our heads? We live in a society which refuses to even address, let alone help alleviate, mental illness, and you think we're going to be able to build, let alone maintain and debug, a simulated brain?
- _nalply 6y agoI think human intelligence can't be recreated but this is not neccessary. It's good enough if artificial intelligence is general enough to solve problems autonomously. I imagine AI as a different sentient species. A species which doesn't have instincts about food, excretion, reproduction and avoiding being eaten by predators. AI will be always different from humans because it is not useful to recreate all human instincts.
- simon_000666 6y agoImagine you tried to replicate your PC by creating a simulation of the CPU. Sure you could probably simulate some of the functions without too much difficulty, but the value of the PC is not in it’s CPU alone, it’s in the interaction of all the components, the screen, the ram, the disk, the keyboard, the GPU. Isolated these components provide a fraction of the value they do when they are combined and simulating the whole PC is an order of magnitude at least greater than simulating only the CPU because you also need to simulate the environment it’s in. I think this is what the author of the article is trying to say, not that it’s totally impossible just that we are nowhere near doing what needs to be done to effectively recreate the highly emergent properties (strong AI) of the human body.
- ebg13 6y ago> the value of the PC is not in it’s CPU alone, it’s in the interaction of all the components, the screen, the ram, the disk, the keyboard, the GPU That's fine. We can (and do) do those too. Pretending otherwise is weird. Authors of these kinds of articles always seem to start from positions that woefully misunderstand or misrepresent present scientific theory and capability. Like there's this weird information barrier where historians and philosophers of science regularly skip the part that involves understanding what's going on even though they're still supposed to talk about it. > you also need to simulate the environment it’s in You literally don't for the same reason that we don't have to simulate our own environment. The simulated me can just be in the same environment that I am. The environment isn't going anywhere.
- WealthVsSurvive 6y agoWell, of course. The line is the body. The human body is a line of ergodic behavior stemming back to the origin of not merely the species, but of life itself: a chemical that said "I am that I am" and became life by continuing form or not continuing form. You and I will do the same. The form is ultimately shaped by the environment. What made the environment? Now enter Human. What of this form made it so unique? The recognition of ergodic behavior itself! Now the beast could see the result of its behavior and so birthed prophesy, nightmares, & dreams. So that it might continue. Or not. I think ultimately, we're coming at the problem of AI from the wrong end, if we're attempting to mimic biological intelligence. I think the direction AI is taking has tremendous applications that will reshape humankind, but I do not think it will be comparable; it will be something new: the son of Man, not alive, not dead, all-seeing, judging and impartial to emotion. Either that, or we will place upon it's throne a sword and all shall perish.
- ilaksh 6y agoThe author is just totally ignorant of large amounts of AGI research. See Tenenbaum for example.
- mcguire 6y ago"The modern project of creating human-like artificial intelligence (AI) started after World War II, when it was discovered that electronic computers are not just number-crunching machines, but can also manipulate symbols. It is possible to pursue this goal without assuming that machine intelligence is identical to human intelligence. This is known as weak AI." Eeee, errr, well, no, it's not. Strong AI is the pursuit of human-level (not human-like), general purpose intelligence. Weak AI is the pursuit of solutions to difficult individual problems or classes of problems. Source: my AI classes, ca. 1989. This article isn't starting well. Edit: And I'm back after reading it all. There are two important points when evaluating philosophical arguments about artificial intelligence. 1. Have they introduced dualism? (Usually, it's "how have they snuck in dualism without admitting it." Sometimes it's easy to see, as in Searle's Chinese Room thing. Othertimes not so much.) 2. What happens if you continue with their own questions? Does it lead to an unpalatable (or simply wrong) conclusion? "The main thesis of this paper is that we will not be able to realize AGI because computers are not in the world." To start with number 2, who exactly is "in the world"? A blind person? A deaf person? A quadriplegic person? A deaf-blind-mute-quadriplegic-from-birth person? That poor bastard from Johnny Got His Gun? How about this laptop? A robot? A robot that is indistinguishable from a human being without physiological tests? The author started out with an elaborate discussion of human-like and non-human-like general intelligence, but now has unrolled that (Without suitable caution signs. Health and Safety are going to be pissed.) and is now only interested in human-like artificial general intelligence, only in something that resembles a human being: "As Hubert Dreyfus pointed out, we are bodily and social beings, living in a material and social world. To understand another person is not to look into the chemistry of that person’s brain, not even into that person’s “soul”, but is rather to be in that person’s “shoes”. It is to understand the person’s lifeworld." (And I'm going to go out on another limb and ask how well anyone, anywhere, understands some other persons' lifeworld. I don't think that is possible.) "However, there is a problem with both these quotations. If Harari and Crick are right, then the quotations are “nothing but” the result of chemical algorithms and “no more than” the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells. How can they then be true?" And here we have number 1. If materialism is right, how can those quotations be true? How can anything said or done by humans be true? They can't be; they're just biochemical algorithms, neurons, and molecules. Truth requires a soul, and a soul could completely grok some other person's lifeworld. Obviously. So clearly, nothing even remotely like Watson or AlphaGo would be intelligent. (Even if they're not intended to be general intelligences. Yes, he spent the last part of the article complaining that two systems weren't something that they were never intended to be, in spite of spending a large time at the beginning delineating that very difference.)
- blackrock 6y agoI think in order for AGI to be realized, the machine must be able to have algorithms that can dynamically work with new data, that it receives from its sensors, interprets it, and classify it. It must generate its own data, and classify it, organize it, compartmentalize it, and regularly subdivide it. And most importantly, it needs to be able to invalidate it. It needs to operate on a ”most likely” scenario, based on its own gathered evidence. Where the scenario is true, until it isn’t, and then it needs to find the new scenario. All of the data and information in the world, can not be encoded for the AGI, and manually spoon fed to it. This is the fallacy. It doesn’t scale. It cannot work, because it doesn’t operate on the “most likely” scenario. The whole concept would fall apart and crumble in on itself. This data fidelity issue was the problem that ultimately killed the symbolic AI attempts in the 70s, with all the Lisp programming, where they attempted to manually give knowledge to a robot. And then, after running out of money, they realized that they just couldn’t sustain creating all of the data manually. And the problem with today’s Deep Learning AI, is that it’s just a very fancy pattern matcher. It’s like a very fancy regular expression searcher, to give an analogy. The problem with today’s AI attempt, is the same problem that doomed the 1970s attempt: namely, the lack of data fidelity. At some point, you can’t have a human go around classifying everything for you. Given that, I still think AGI is possible, but a major rethinking is necessary to achieve it. The Deep Learning neural net ideas of today, will not achieve it.
- woeirua 6y agoWhen we talk about AGI, everyone always takes it for granted that an AGI would be human-like. But I think if you look at the complexity of the brain, and how poor our attempts to emulate it have been so far, I think it is almost a virtual certainty that the first successful attempts at AGI will create non-human intelligence. In many ways, I expect that our creations will find us to be as unrelatable as we consider dolphins or other highly intelligent animals.
- Strilanc 6y ago> In the book [Dreyfus] argued that an important part of human knowledge is tacit. Therefore, it cannot be articulated and implemented in a computer program. [...] [...] [...] These skills cannot just be learned from textbooks. They are acquired by instruction from someone who knows the trade. This is a classic example of the Mind Projection Fallacy [1], where a property of how you think is assumed to be a property of reality. It's true, for humans, that it is simply not possible to be told how to ride a bike and then be good at riding a bike. No matter how carefully and completely you explain to a human what they will have to do, when you put them on a bike for the first time they will struggle. The mistake is assuming that this "have-to-really-do-it" effect is a limitation intrinsic to bike-riding-knowledge instead of a limitation in human learning and communication mechanisms. The mistake is assuming this property will generalize to all bike riding systems. In a computer system, what would be tacit knowledge for a human is no longer tacit. If you create a computer program that can successfully control one bike riding robot, that program can be copied to a freshly built bike riding robot of the same make. The new robot will then successfully ride a bike the first time it is placed on it, without any hint of the human "have-to-really-do-it" struggling phase. It can be intuitively useful to imagine computers as having the ability to "super communicate" in a way that humans simply can't. That has its advantages, and its disadvantages. If you had super communication you could super-explain to a blind person what it was like to see and if they ever did gain their sight there would be no "Oh so that's what you meant" moment. On the other hand, a heroin addict could super-explain being addicted to heroin to you. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_projection_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_projection_fallacy
- mekkkkkk 6y agoVery true. It seems closely related to the problem with qualia, which I've always thought of similarly. Instinctively it seems impossible to describe the color green to someone who has never seen it. Seeing it seems to add "something" that is impossible to acquire in any other way. But this is because of our physical limitations, rather than the existence of some ephemeral quality. If we would have total knowledge and full ability of introspection, I don't see why we wouldn't be able to accurately predict the subjective experience of any input, including colors.
- rsa25519 6y agoI often see AGI being discounted based on machines lacking expressiveness. Of course, text isn't as complex as human expression (I assume?), but isn't that how we're communicating right now? I think it's expected to assume each other have General Intelligence. If so, wouldn't it be unfair to hold machines to a higher standard?
- booleandilemma 6y agoThink how funny this would be if we are, in fact, part of a massive computer simulation.
- godelski 6y agoEmbodiment being a killer feature for AGI seems weird to me. Not only is "what is a body" vague, but it is entirely possible to build a body. So why would it prevent AGI? We do know that embodiment is a sufficient condition for general intelligence: if we assume humans have general intelligence then it is clearly a sufficient condition. But the question of necessary is more interesting because we have to actually ask what embodiment means. Is a computer a embodied machine? What about a robot that can explore its environment? What about a simulation with an environment? If no, what makes us distinct? If yes, does embodiment even matter? To me it is clear that feature space is the more important issue. It is also clear that embodiment helps with creating a more complex and rich feature space. The ability to move around and interact with your environment greatly expands the complexity of the environment. I think the bigger question is about our ability to create rich enough environments to generate intelligence. Even if we can get machines in bodies, can we get them into the complex and evolving environmental pressures that we experienced over millions of years (without robots living for similar timescales)? It is reasonable to think that at some point in time we'd be able to have that kind of computational power. It is also possible that the learning function is incredibly difficult. With a large and complex feature space there are many local extrema and it may be possible that general intelligence is only possible with a few of these (essentially we can have an estimation similar to the Drake Equation). But overall, I'm not sure there really is any issue that means AGI is impossible. Maybe at current knowledge and computational limits, maybe for all of the foreseeable future! But I don't see any limitations in physics that are killers.
- mindcrime 6y agoEmbodiment being a killer feature for AGI seems weird to me. For the record, I have just argued in a different thread, that this stuff is not needed for "AGI", at least not the way I perceive it as being defined. And I believe that way is consistent with others in the field. But... if you'll allow my use of the distinction between "human level" intelligence and "human like" intelligence, then I will say that I think embodiment is important to the latter. Why? Because I believe a lot of our learning is experiential, and especially the learning that yields a lot of our very basic "model of the world" ideas. Take our "intuitive metaphysics" - there are objects in the world. Objects can't be in two different places at the same time. Two objects can't be in the same place at the same time. Etc. etc. And likewise our "intuitive epistemology" which we use to decide what things are true, and so on. I believe that it will be very difficult (although perhaps not impossible) to give an AI very human like equivalents to these things, as well as "intuitive physics" (things fall over when they're off balance, you can't stand a pencil up on it's sharpened point, etc.) without having it "experience" a lot of these things. Now the really interesting spin on that is whether or not a virtual body in a simulation would suffice to a degree. If you built a really hyper-realistic "fake world" using a really advanced game engine with somewhat realistic physics and what-not, and "put" the AI "in" that world... maybe it would learn some, or most, or even all, of what we learn. I doubt it would be "all", but who knows?
- abetusk 6y agoHere is, to me, the relevant line: "Hubert Dreyfus, who argued that computers, who have no body, no childhood and no cultural practice, could not acquire intelligence at all. One of Dreyfus’ main arguments was that human knowledge is partly tacit, and therefore cannot be articulated and incorporated in a computer program. " I have not read the rest of the article but in the introduction it's stated: "The article further argues that this is in principle impossible, and it revives Hubert Dreyfus’ argument that computers are not in the world." Wiktionary defines tacit as "Not derived from formal principles of reasoning" [1]. So the main argument is that humans have intelligence that is impossible to express through reason or codification. In other words, humans have a literal soul, divorced from physical world, that cannot be expressed in our physical world thus making any endeavour to create artificial intelligence impossible. This is a dualist line of reasoning and, in my opinion, is nothing more than theology dressed up in philosophy. I would much rather the author just flat out say they are a dualist or that they reject the Church-Turing thesis.
- dynamite-ready 6y agoI'm not sure. If we think about it mechanically, and the output of the a computer system is a function of it's input, then perhaps we are woefully underestimating the role of the body as both a monitor and input system.
- mordymoop 6y agoThese people are still going to be publishing this garbage after AIs are the ones writing the articles.
- empath75 6y agoIn 2030, Nature will publish an article written by an AI claiming that AIs will never be able to publish an article in Nature.
- RoutinePlayer 6y agoEvery pronouncement that AGI will NEVER be achieved is equivalent as saying that AGI does not exist in the universe. So, I guess this biological AGI entity writing this note does not exist.
- mindcrime 6y agoRight. Because if a carbon based / biological machine like a human can be an AGI, what reason - in principle - is there to say that the same can't be done with a different (perhaps silicon centric) machine? To suggest otherwise feels, to me, like indulging in a form of mysticism which holds up human life as something being "beyond" science.
- yellowapple 6y agoOr, at the very least, that we can't artificially create a carbon-based machine capable of general intelligence? Like, even if there's something magical about neurons that can't be replicated through conventional electronics, we could certainly put a bunch of actual neurons in chips and use those instead.
- hobofan 6y agoI'm wondering if that's just the philosophers form of thinking "there is no way a machine could ever do my job" which exists in virtually all professions.
- Animats 6y agoYes, it's a rerun of Dreyfus. A more useful question is "what can't machine learning do"? Each generation of AI technology has solved some problems, then hit a wall. (I had the unfortunate experience of going through Stanford CS in the mid-80s, when expert systems had hit a wall but the faculty was in denial about that.) Is there some way to get "common sense", defined as "knowing if something bad is going to happen before you do it", from machine learning? So far, no. DARPA is funding work on it, though.[1] The Allen Institute even has a competition.[2] Both are verbal, though; they work on text statements. [1] https://www.darpa.mil/program/machine-common-sense https://www.darpa.mil/program/machine-common-sense [2] https://www.tau-nlp.org/csqa-leaderboard https://www.tau-nlp.org/csqa-leaderboard
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y agoThis is possibly the worst article I have ever seen in Nature. It is barely at the level of an undergraduate essay on AI (or AGI or ANI, as the author prefers). A hand-waving argument about "computers not being in the world" that relies on not bothering to define "computers", "being in" or "the world". Convenient avoidance of almost every more subtle anti-Searle/anti-Dreyfus critic (notably Dennett). Almost wilfull narrowing of a much broader argument about the nature of reality and the connection between causality and conventional parametric science, when these things lie at the heart of the author's argument (such as it is). It is amazing that Nature chose to publish this.
- mturmon 6y agoNote, is not in the the flagship journal, it's an affiliated journal under the Nature imprint. There are about 40 other such: https://www.nature.com/siteindex https://www.nature.com/siteindex (see under "N"). It's a Springer joint. Note that the counterpart journal, Science, is published by the AAAS, and is not for profit the way Nature is. If you're interested in science, Science is a great one-stop shop and it's about $120 per year. Sometimes one wonders whether the chase for exciting stories affects some Nature publications.
- maest 6y agoSlightly off-topic: I would be interested in keeping up the latest cutting-edge science developements, but I expect a Nature subscription is too heavy-duty for that. Not necessarily because of the price, but I don't think I would end up using it. Instead, what would fit my interests better would be a science newsletter that, say, once a month summarizes the most interesting recent developements and sends them to my inbox. I would then use that as a jump-off point and even read the full articles I care about in Nature. Are there any such newsletters?
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y agoScientific American?
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- bcatanzaro 6y agoIt kills me that Slatestarcodex was deleted but this was published in Nature.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ars 6y ago> Once grown, this brain knows nothing about objects in the physical world. Unfortunately this experiment has already been done, on an abused girl named Genie. > one can imagine, the know-nothing brain will learn to She was never able to learn. So does this refute your premise, or will you say "that's different"?
- sago 6y agoI am a profoundly disabled person, unable to do very many things physically. I guess they've shown that my intelligence will never be general.
- meh2frdf 6y agoYou’re an instance of a class. The class is where intelligence emerged.
- type0 6y ago> Most of us are experts on walking. However, if we try to articulate how we walk, we certainly give a description that does not capture the skills involved in walking. because it's largely automatic for us, we need to know where to go but not how https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gait_(human)#Control_of_gait_by_the_nervous_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gait_(human)#Control_of_gait_b... with AI this means we can automate more than we need to genuinely understand, often times approximation gives good enough solution we humans often fool ourselves on how capable we actually are, but then yet without training in dangerous situation we simply act on instinct and impulse
- historyremade 6y agoListen people, Reverse Engineering Brain like Reversing Windows. Yep, some guys did it but still not far from perfect.
- mindcrime 6y agoThis article is a muddled, ridiculous mess. I read the first few paragraphs and couldn't motivate myself to do any more than skim the rest. As far as I can tell, there's nothing new here, and the author's argument that "AGI will not be realized" might be true if you stick to his ad-hoc definition of AGI, which seems to conflate "human level" intelligence and "human like" intelligence. Yes, it's probably true that AI's will not have "human like" intelligence, for some of the reasons cited. Lack of embodiment and the associated experiential learning is the chief reason that I would personally cite for why this is true. However, that line of reasoning is completely irrelevant unless A. make the mistake of conflating "human like" and "human level" OR B. you very specifically demand that your AI must be "human like." Everybody else realizes that the goal is to build an AI that is as general as human intelligence, not necessarily to build an artificial human. Edit: To go back to the embodiment issue for a moment... I think embodiment is important. I've been playing around with building a trivial little shell to pack some AI research in, that can be carried around (initially), and "experience" the world via a variety of different sensors. And I do think, again, that embodiment will probably be necessary to get an AGI that can "act human". I just don't see that as being the goal. Yeah, yeah, Turing Test, blah, blah, I know. As much respect as I have for Turing (and it's a lot, obviously) I don't actually consider the Turing Test to be very interesting, vis-a-vis evaluating an AI. In fact, I think focusing on it could be harmful, because it seems that getting an AI to pass it amounts to teaching the AI to lie well. This seems counter-productive to me. As for why I think embodiment would matter to making a "human like" (as opposed to "human level") AGI: it mainly comes down to experiential learning. Imagine, if you will, what you know about the meaning of terms like "fall", or "fall down". How much of your knowledge of this is rooted in that fact that you, in your body, have fallen down? And how does that play into your ability to construct metaphors involving other things "falling"? And so on. But I don't think any of this stuff is necessary to make an AGI that can operate at a human level of generality and solve useful problem on our behalf. And by "operate at a human level of generality" I mean something approximately like "the same AI software, with appropriate training, can do anything from playing chess, to driving a car, to coming up with new theories in physics and chemistry (and so on).
- natch 6y agoI guess the author is not aware of Rodney Brooks or any number of other long existing proponents of having AI be embodied. And that’s not even taking into account that the network, its data, and sensors attached to it, and their data all fill the role of a kind of embodiment in an environment if that’s something the author thinks is missing.
- tjk_ 6y agoIm no AGI expert, but I am a big fan of Robert Miles who, coincidentally, made a kind of video rebuttal to this article ~3 years ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6Oigy1i3W4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6Oigy1i3W4
- ypcx 6y agoI wonder what the GPT-3[1] has to say about this. While it can't exhibit reasoning, I wouldn't bet that it is completely off the path getting there. Call me crazy but I think we are about a year from first general reasoning algorithms. [1] https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3 https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3
- alexfromapex 6y agoBecause we still don’t truly understand the underpinnings of consciousness
- sasaf5 6y agoI came to this article expecting a logical proof of why AI was impossible, but instead found the following tautological argument: hard AI, which I define as intelligence with tacit knowledge, which in turn I define as knowledge that cannot be ran in algorithms, is impossible to be ran in algorithms. Disappointing. My counterpoint: is there anything that cannot be ran in algorithms? The way I see it the only thing stopping me from simulating every atom in a brain is computational power.
- ibeckermayer 6y agoThe primary thing stopping you from simulating every atom in a brain is a lack of knowledge about atoms and the brain. AFAIK we can't even simulate hydrogen and oxygen atoms with enough detail to get the emergent properties of water.
- sasaf5 6y agoAFAIK for hydrogen we can, but for oxygen the nucleus is already too big to simulate all the phenomena from first principles. Anyway, the fact we haven't been able to do it is not a proof that it's impossible. The article claims that impossibility.
- friendlybus 6y agoWe have mapped the nervous system of a basic crustacean completely and it hasnt made any of the hard problems easier.
- proc0 6y agoI think the neighboring thread nailed it. Tacit knowledge boils down to Cartesian dualism, and like the article claims there is something special and unreachable by computation. I agree this is not the case, everything points to our brains being information processing organs.
- bmitc 6y ago> is there anything that cannot be ran in algorithms? The way I see it the only thing stopping me from simulating every atom in a brain is computational power. I am not for sure I understand the specifics of what you mean by "is there anything that cannot be ran in algorithms?", but there are plenty of things that are not computable or decidable in computation. These are theoretical constraints. There are also practical constraints that effectively increase the list of these things.
- tlb 6y agoIf you accept Dreyfuss’ argument that a computer can’t acquire some kinds of knowledge without a body, there’s a fairly obvious workaround. Give it a robot body. And in fact, many research projects are doing this. The Dreyfussians may retreat to their motte and say, well, a robot body can’t give it the experience of walking barefoot through the grass so it can’t be fully general because there’s something people know that it can’t. But it’ll surely know things we can’t, and we’ll have to admit that humans don’t have fully general intelligence either. Wr just think we do because we can’t think of the ideas we can’t think.
- proc0 6y agoYes, Boston Dynamics and DeepMind should start collaborating.
- staycoolboy 6y ago"640K ought to be enough for anybody." (I know, Gates never said it, but no one posted this yet and I felt it my duty.)
- 29athrowaway 6y agoTo better understand the brain, you have to not only talk about its cognitive functions, but all of it. Then you will understand what it is really for. Your body stays alive by keeping levels within certain range. There are many functions in your body that have as an objective controlling those levels and your brain controls them at different levels of automation. Like your heart rate, sweating, urine output, etc. But not everything can be automated, because some situations are more complex: finding a place with the right temperature, access to nutrients, and breathable air, etc. That is where decision making comes in... survival-oriented decision making. And that was what resulted in us developing what we today call intelligence. When you disembody learning, and put it in an abstract evolutionary environment where survival only depends on solving an abstract problem, the result will not necessarily be an "AGI", a self-preserving, self-aware intelligence that is adapted to survive a wide range of scenarios. But if you changed that environment, made it very hostile and constantly changing, it could eventually lead to the evolution of an AGI.
- glenstein 6y ago>But not everything can be automated, because some situations are more complex This is where you lost me. You are very right that brains do all kinds of things to regulate the body that we don't usually think of as influencing thought. But we can't model those because they're too complex? I don't think environmental variables are too complex. But (1) if those are important, we can model them too and (2) it may be that we don't need to model computer 'thinking' after the structure of human brains anyway to solve problems intelligently. And (3) the totality of things an AGI might be 'aware of', even without simulating biology, could very well mean that the 'intelligence' of a system is nestled in a complex web of variables that give it the ability to have the equivalent of our tacit knowledge. That's probably an informational question rather than a question of needing to simulate biology.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoNot all decision making is rational. If you are in the jungle and a lion comes at you, you will not have time to sit down and think what to do, and your brain is prepared to act in those situations as well.
- pier25 6y agoI know nothing about AI but my ignorant impression is that there are essentially two ways to achieve AGI: 1) We somehow model GI artificially, which seems like an impossible task. 2) Or instead we just model the fundamental neural mechanisms (dentrites, axons, etc) and find a way to copy the state of a brain into a sufficiently powerful computer. Is this correct or are there different approaches?
- jmpman 6y agoIf I get Level-5 driving, so I really care how it was achieved? In order to get Level-5 driving, the car must be able to identify a construction worker directing traffic, versus a random homeless guy, drunk, and directing traffic into to current water main construction pit. Does that require general AI? Given enough examples of drunk homeless people directing traffic into water main construction, maybe we don’t. It’ll be 100 years into the future before we’ve amassed that level of knowledge, but maybe it can happen.
- jariel 6y agoThere is a better explenation: there's no practical point to GAI. Humans are automatons - so we see a 'single unit' of intelligence. The Internet is a vastly connected system. A 'basic robot' in a factory in China can have access to 'all the world's information'. The power of 'masses of data, services, systems' all combined, means that 'the Internet' itself, in the broadest sense, will be much more intelligent than any GAI anyhow. Example: Is Siri 'AI'? We don't think of 'Siri' as a thing, rather a service, a front end to a lot of things. Well - 'Siri' is going to get really, really smart and be able to do a ginormous number of things in the future, including have 'human level' conversations with you, predict your needs and moods. She'll be talking to a billion people at once! Isn't that even 'beyond' GAI? The factory will be able to take a design, command robots to prepare, place orders for parts, design work schedules for humans, prepare shipping, anticipate problems. The factory is waay smarter than a human, is it 'GAI'? Siri, the Factory, your car, the grid of traffic, the financial system, distribution networks - it's all working together to do things utterly beyond any individual 'GAI'. And as these things develop, there really never is a real economic driver for a true, atomic style 'GAI' like you see in the movies. There's no reason for a company to spend $500B building a 'Data' from Star Treck - because everything he could do, would otherwise be performed much more efficiently, cheaply and intelligently by a system or group of systems oriented towards those tasks.
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- jablongo 6y agoGiven the epic title I was pretty unimpressed by this line of thinking. The argument seems to rely on (among other things) certain presumed implications of “Computers not inhabiting the world” - a comical line of reasoning that cites a lack of a childhood among other absurd reasons for why computers can’t be intelligent. The author assumes that intelligence can only be derived from experiencing the world in full... which seems to imply that paraplegics are inhibited from intelligent thought. Taking that further - are we not capable of intelligent thought during dreams? Fjelland goes on to argue that with no way to fully interact with the world computers are barred from intelligence. Firstly there’s no reason for us to believe that computers will stop broadening the methods by which they connect to, measure, and actuate the world around them. Secondly it seems plausible that a person locked in a room with a radio to communicate with the outside world would eventually acquire intelligence without ever fully experiencing the world.
- proc0 6y ago> Secondly it seems plausible that a person locked in a room with a radio to communicate with the outside world would eventually acquire intelligence without ever fully experiencing the world. I'm not sure about that. A person locked in a room with a radio would probably go crazy or recess into some primitive mental state. Also, the article specifically claims that General Intelligence has this requirement of embodiment, not just intelligence as you imply. However I agree with your first conclusion that AI will eventually include bodies and it won't take long to integrate software intelligence and embodied intelligence to get something greater that could resemble AGI.
- jablongo 6y agoEven if I agree that he would “probably” go crazy, I just need more than 0 of my millions of AGI candidates to successfully navigate the perils of their relative sensory deprivation in order to have achieved AGI.
- littlestymaar 6y ago> that AI will eventually include bodies and it won't take long to integrate software intelligence and embodied intelligence to get something greater that could resemble AGI. Probably but there will be at least two really difficult challenges: - the hardware part (building the actual body) is far from easy, and still out of reach as of today. - the “intelligence” needed to control a “body” is super super hard too. Having children gives you some insight on the relative difficulty of problems. Facial/object recognition is learned in months, body control requires years to learn. And we're talking about fundamental problems for living animals, so you'd guess it's been pretty well optimized by natural selection.
- seek3r00 6y ago“To put it simply: the overestimation of technology is closely connected with the underestimation of humans.”
- yalok 6y agoIrrespective of the main topic, this citation rings a good warning: “Jerone Lanier has argued that the belief in scientific immortality, the development of computers with super-intelligence, etc., are expressions of a new religion, “expressed through an engineering culture” (Lanier, 2013, p. 186).”
- rutherblood 6y agoWhatever the criticisms of this paper may be, I get where it and Dreyfus is getting at. Even Hofstader had a lot to say about this but the guy was ignored to hell after his first book itself, I guess he has lost faith in the entire enterprise. One problem with computer scientists and AI researchers is the level of arrogance that they display about their state of knowledge. It would have had been good for us to rather engage with the larger body of philosophical work (which has a long tradition of thinking about how the mind works, how meaning and cognition emerge, how such embodied cognition interacts with the world) and then conduct empirical research trying to verify a philosophical paradigm rather than just going at it blindly by sometimes assuming mind can be reduced to logical systems and sometimes trying to simulate a reductionist and incomplete model of neural networks.
- rutherblood 6y agoWhy do we think computers can achieve intelligence? Where did this idea ever first come from? it sounds almost childish if one traces the history and wild misconception it must have emerged from. The idea maybe dates to Turing? maybe even Leibnitz? What was the idea based on? On seeing that some machines can "behave" i.e. do things a human does? And they started thinking if ultimately that machine might be able to do everything a human does? That a human is nothing but a " complicated machine" in the sense that we can formulate complex but finite rules for its behavior? maybe even simple rules which when applied on appropriate substrates would lead to "emergence" of such behaviors? That is a BIG assumption to make really. Intelligence and cognition here are treated as lists of rules which can be applied to any substrate. An electronic computer is just one substrate. i should also be able to do this on a sufficiently giant mechanical computer. Even physics seem to have this rule-obssessed assumption. Can we really simulate the universe AS IT IS? Sure we can some parts of it. But is there a theory of everything really? After such a theory we would need to know nothing. physics would be pretty much done with. This theory would explain all observations in the past, present and future of anything we make in the universe. Even in our search for the smallest particles can such a "bottoming out" ever take place? EDIT: grammar
- scoot_718 6y agoIt's a very unconvincing argument that culture, bodies or childhood are required for intelligence. Moreover, that computers could not have any of them (or functional equivalents, if in fact they are of any functional use at all). I don't buy that the single data point that is Human intelligence has much to say about the possible bounds or limits of general intelligence. Computers inhabit a world. They have interactions. Seems sufficient to me. As for culture - they have enough learning material of human culture, and it's not impossible to train multiple AI intelligences at the same time to create a culture of their own. Surely at some point in history Humans developed their culture from nothing? As for childhood - attempts at AI already have training periods where they are given training data, made more plastic and develop against simple situations before moving on to more complex situations. The (also terrible and wrong) Chinese room argument is more convincing.
- rdlecler1 6y agoMy theory on this is that embodiment will be necessary (but not sufficient) as the physical world provides a consistent data model where high order learning can be built on. In effect this becomes the model to bootstrap off of.
- d3nigma 6y agoI disagree with Dreyfus's view about strong ai. It's like saying that all lifeforms in the universe are carbon based, because we are carbon based lifeforms. But that's not necessarily true. I am a huge fan of bio-inspired engineering, however, and I think imitating/simulating "growing up" could be a reasonable approach to human-like intelligence. This phase of life is key for our understanding of the world. We define and refine our values and evolve from a blob of cells to a conscious being by observing our surroundings and acquiring huge amounts of knowledge. If this concept (refined by evolution over the last million years) is good enough for humankind, it is certainly good enough for human made intelligence. The biggest problem here is efficiency and complexity. We still don't know all mechanisms of our brain and we are not capable (yet) to simulate 100 billion neurons, each connected to up to 30.000 other neurons. That's the main problem here!
- rsecora 6y ago>>> We know this phenomenon from everyday life. Most of us are experts on walking. However, if we try to articulate how we walk, we certainly give a description that does not capture the skills involved in walking. All the article is based on statements like the previous one. Scientifically is possible to nullify it with a counterargument. [1] Boston dynamics Atlas. https://youtu.be/rVlhMGQgDkY https://youtu.be/rVlhMGQgDkY [2] Boston dynamics parkour. https://youtu.be/_sBBaNYex3E https://youtu.be/_sBBaNYex3E QED.
- theptip 6y agoI’ve always been quite skeptical of philosophers arguing that a given potential scientific achievement is impossible; logic alone cannot be used to answer practical questions like these, much though philosophers would like to claim this field. On to concrete criticisms, most of this article is irrelevant; you can skip straight to the last few paragraphs as the arguments there are largely unsupported and stand on their own: > Conclusion: computers are not in the world The main thesis of this paper is that we will not be able to realize AGI because computers are not in the world. I think it’s a valid criticism of the current breed of ANI algorithms, and is a problem that we will need to address (though it might turn out to be less of a problem than the author thinks). But to claim that computers will _never_ inhabit the world, and are logically incapable of doing so, seems trivially refutable to me. Why can’t an AGI have a childhood wired up to a robotic body, where it interacts with people and the world, thereby learning a tacit model of physical and social causality? Currently this might be science fiction, but to say it cannot happen in a hundred, or a thousand years seems arrogantly certain to me, and to claim it is logically impossible is to be epistemologically confused.
- rutherblood 6y agoUnlike most of the comments here, i'd say i am at the very least sympathetic to the views in this article. But even I have to say, this is a badly written paper. A whole lot of talking, various anecdotes and quotes but nothing to show for. This is just finger-wagging...never is any light thrown upon this mysterious "being embodied in the world" and somehow out of the blue a discussion on causality's importance in cognition comes about and fizzles out without having said anything of substance
- axilmar 6y agoIn 80 years we have gone from nothing to deep learning. In the next 80 years, we will have AGI, and in the next 8000 years humans will be androids/cyborgs. That we haven't managed to create true AGI for now doesn't mean anything. It's like the case for the aeroplane: there were even mathematicians that "proved" things heavier than the air cannot fly.
- Digit-Al 6y agoWe can't create artificial intelligence because we have absolutely no idea what intelligence and consciousness really are. You can't recreate what you don't understand and we are not even close to understanding what makes us, us. An analogy I've thought of is this. A modern jetliner is a miracle of engineering, aerodynamics, electronics, and programming. If the average person on the street, such as myself, was tasked with attempting to recreate one the best that would be achieved would be an extremely crude model that could not even achieve the most basic task of an aircraft: taking off and flying. Thus it is with researchers trying to recreate human intelligence.