4 ms·

So therefore protein complexes are intelligent? This is literally the watchmaker argument with the nouns swapped out.

username90 6y ago
What? Our computers can't even do the tasks that even the simplest of general purpose intelligences in the wild can, how can we say that we are making progress towards general purpose AI? If we were making progress, like first fruit fly, then ant, then a mouse etc, then I'd see it. But now? Its just toys. Maybe I'm wrong, but it is pretty easy to not be impressed when they still can't do simple things that insects can do.
- Veedrac 6y ago
  Our computers also don't know how to do all sorts of complex biological manufacturing that small groups of proteins can do inside cells. Thus your measure of intelligence also says that protein complexes are intelligent, but they aren't, so your argument is invalid. As I said, this is literally the watchmaker argument with the nouns swapped out. Ant minds are not general intelligences, they are programs created by natural evolution. Their pathfinding and identification and anthill-making and communication are all fixed programs in their genetics, not learnt during life. They cannot execute other programs.
  - username90 6y ago
    > Ant minds are not general intelligences The fact that you don't consider ants as general intelligences means you agree that we aren't making progress towards general intelligences, since ants intelligence is way closer to general intelligence than any computer program we have. > Their pathfinding and identification and anthill-making and communication are all fixed programs in their genetics, not learnt during life. They only born with some bases, they intelligently comes up with fine tuned parameters to make them work in practice. Hence they learn. If you don't call this "intelligence" they you can't consider the "AI" we do today "intelligent". I mean, every model a computer executes was invented by a human, the computer only optimized the parameters. I mean, insects can learn to recognize arbitrary objects without anyone giving them training data or a reward function, they just do it on their own. That is a part of general intelligence. The way we do AI can never achieve that, since it always relies on human intelligence to decide all of those things meaning we just get out some optimized function that can fuzzy match input data.
    - Veedrac 6y ago
      > The fact that you don't consider ants as general intelligences means you agree that we aren't making progress towards general intelligences, since ants intelligence is way closer to general intelligence than any computer program we have. Please don't argue like this. It's your job to explain what you think is true, and my job to explain what I think is true. Up to this point in this conversation I explicitly haven't taken a stance about how generally intelligent our best AI are, because it's pointless to argue that until the epistemics are valid. In fact I didn't intend to argue past that point at all; I'm objecting to bad arguments, not the position per se. > The way we do AI can never achieve that This is not meaningfully true. We have unsupervised image recognition, for example, and there's plenty of work on all sort other unsupervised learning of all sorts of things. The idea that insects ‘don't have a reward function’ is not really valid; a reward function is just the function you're optimizing on.
      - username90 6y ago
        I still don't see your point. The way we do AI today is that we have a static dataset, train a fuzzy function and then let it do work in production. The production model doesn't identify when it makes mistakes and update itself like every animal does. Ants does this. They don't do it perfectly, but they do it. So the way I see it until AI starts meaning only models that updates themselves as they evaluate input it is a pointless term. Currently basically every single instance of AI you see people talk about are just dumb immutable functions. Edit: And to clarify, I believe it is impossible to reach human level intelligence without having a model that mutates itself as it tries to solve the problem. Humans are smart since we learn while doing, not that we first take a long course before we start doing.
        Veedrac 6y ago
        There is plenty of research on exactly this sort of learning-while-doing, termed ‘online learning’. It's easiest to train on IID data, and also common to train in specific RL environments, because those paper over some issues with catastrophic forgetting and overfitting, and it's also preferable to do all the compute-intensive updates during training for efficiency. However, lots of people agree that online learning is fundamental to cracking AGI, and it's neither neglected nor unsuccessful.

What? Our computers can't even do the tasks that even the simplest of general purpose intelligences in the wild can, how can we say that we are making progress towards general purpose AI? If we were making progress, like first fruit fly, then ant, then a mouse etc, then I'd see it. But now? Its just toys. Maybe I'm wrong, but it is pretty easy to not be impressed when they still can't do simple things that insects can do.

Veedrac 6y ago
Our computers also don't know how to do all sorts of complex biological manufacturing that small groups of proteins can do inside cells. Thus your measure of intelligence also says that protein complexes are intelligent, but they aren't, so your argument is invalid. As I said, this is literally the watchmaker argument with the nouns swapped out. Ant minds are not general intelligences, they are programs created by natural evolution. Their pathfinding and identification and anthill-making and communication are all fixed programs in their genetics, not learnt during life. They cannot execute other programs.
- username90 6y ago
  > Ant minds are not general intelligences The fact that you don't consider ants as general intelligences means you agree that we aren't making progress towards general intelligences, since ants intelligence is way closer to general intelligence than any computer program we have. > Their pathfinding and identification and anthill-making and communication are all fixed programs in their genetics, not learnt during life. They only born with some bases, they intelligently comes up with fine tuned parameters to make them work in practice. Hence they learn. If you don't call this "intelligence" they you can't consider the "AI" we do today "intelligent". I mean, every model a computer executes was invented by a human, the computer only optimized the parameters. I mean, insects can learn to recognize arbitrary objects without anyone giving them training data or a reward function, they just do it on their own. That is a part of general intelligence. The way we do AI can never achieve that, since it always relies on human intelligence to decide all of those things meaning we just get out some optimized function that can fuzzy match input data.
  - Veedrac 6y ago
    > The fact that you don't consider ants as general intelligences means you agree that we aren't making progress towards general intelligences, since ants intelligence is way closer to general intelligence than any computer program we have. Please don't argue like this. It's your job to explain what you think is true, and my job to explain what I think is true. Up to this point in this conversation I explicitly haven't taken a stance about how generally intelligent our best AI are, because it's pointless to argue that until the epistemics are valid. In fact I didn't intend to argue past that point at all; I'm objecting to bad arguments, not the position per se. > The way we do AI can never achieve that This is not meaningfully true. We have unsupervised image recognition, for example, and there's plenty of work on all sort other unsupervised learning of all sorts of things. The idea that insects ‘don't have a reward function’ is not really valid; a reward function is just the function you're optimizing on.
    - username90 6y ago
      I still don't see your point. The way we do AI today is that we have a static dataset, train a fuzzy function and then let it do work in production. The production model doesn't identify when it makes mistakes and update itself like every animal does. Ants does this. They don't do it perfectly, but they do it. So the way I see it until AI starts meaning only models that updates themselves as they evaluate input it is a pointless term. Currently basically every single instance of AI you see people talk about are just dumb immutable functions. Edit: And to clarify, I believe it is impossible to reach human level intelligence without having a model that mutates itself as it tries to solve the problem. Humans are smart since we learn while doing, not that we first take a long course before we start doing.
      - Veedrac 6y ago
        There is plenty of research on exactly this sort of learning-while-doing, termed ‘online learning’. It's easiest to train on IID data, and also common to train in specific RL environments, because those paper over some issues with catastrophic forgetting and overfitting, and it's also preferable to do all the compute-intensive updates during training for efficiency. However, lots of people agree that online learning is fundamental to cracking AGI, and it's neither neglected nor unsuccessful.