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Well. Isn’t machine learning Skinner’s ideas applied to computers? This is what gave us the Deepl translator, and the Tesla FSD Beta. The other approaches, base
by leobg 5y ago
Well. Isn’t machine learning Skinner’s ideas applied to computers? This is what gave us the Deepl translator, and the Tesla FSD Beta. The other approaches, based on “cognitive psychology” and structuralism, on the other hand, we have, at least in technology, left behind in the 1990.
(And that influence likely is not just one of ideas, but also of people. “The Dream Machine”, the book on Licklider and the early days of computing mentions that some of the early computer pioneers shared the same office building with Skinner.)
- tsimionescu 5y agoOnly reinforcement learning is based on Skinner's ideas - neural networks are instead based on purely mathematical and statistical methods - bakcpropagation and gradient descent. Other methods such as Support Vector Machines and Genetic Algorithms are also completely unrelated. RL is useful for certain constrained problems, such as game playing, but it does not generalize well. Additionally, all current ML methods are extremely slow to converge (they require enormous training sets compared to most biological learning), and they generalize pretty poorly outside their initial domain. So, their success is not a good argument in favor of Skinner's models being a good model for biological learning.