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I think he's saying something along the lines that intelligence is mutually exclusive to learning. If we create a neural net that has the equivalent knowledge

I think he's saying something along the lines that intelligence is mutually exclusive to learning. If we create a neural net that has the equivalent knowledge and intelligence of a human 5 year old but that neural net learns slower and was produced on 10 trillion pieces of data then we STILL have created a sentient AI despite the fact the learning algorithm is shit.

epgui 4y ago
I don’t know if that’s what they meant, but what you’re saying is interesting. I would soften the idea a little bit by noting that as a little human grows up and learns more things, its brain plasticity goes down over time. AFAIK there’s no evidence that learning “saturates” the ability to learn other things, and the loss of plasticity is probably mainly linked to aging and/or other factors, but functionally the effect is very much the same: humans that know a lot of things typically have less capacity for learning.
- deltaonefour 4y ago
  Anterograde amnesia is a condition where a human has lost his/her ability form new memories, aka learn. They can't remember anything past 3 minutes*. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeiMhUlipTk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeiMhUlipTk These people are clearly still sentient. There is still some form of memory there but the overall mechanism is largely gone.
notahacker 4y ago
I think the point is more that the way the five year old learns isn't similar to assimilate massive quantities of data related to the desired output and perform mathematical transformations on it, even at a subconscious level (and the five year old definitely has a "conscious level" driving it too). The learning speed isn't the issue, it's that the neural net is doing a fundamentally different thing from the five year old brain (and so its "knowledge" is also going to be orthogonal). Which doesn't stop neural networks being immensely useful (and even significantly more useful than humans in relevant domains, especially five year old humans), but might well stop them from being sentient. Neural nets are probably already better at passing Turing tests than five year olds, but the five year old's love of mummy doesn't come from statistical analysis of a corpus of texts about love and mummies.
- axg11 4y ago
  We don’t even know what sentience is. We don’t have a good way of defining sentience, nor a common definition. If we were to definitively create sentience, there wouldn’t be a universal consensus on whether we had actually created it.
axg11 4y ago
Yes, thank you for explaining this more clearly :)

epgui 4y ago

I don’t know if that’s what they meant, but what you’re saying is interesting. I would soften the idea a little bit by noting that as a little human grows up and learns more things, its brain plasticity goes down over time. AFAIK there’s no evidence that learning “saturates” the ability to learn other things, and the loss of plasticity is probably mainly linked to aging and/or other factors, but functionally the effect is very much the same: humans that know a lot of things typically have less capacity for learning.

deltaonefour 4y ago
Anterograde amnesia is a condition where a human has lost his/her ability form new memories, aka learn. They can't remember anything past 3 minutes*. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeiMhUlipTk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeiMhUlipTk These people are clearly still sentient. There is still some form of memory there but the overall mechanism is largely gone.

notahacker 4y ago

I think the point is more that the way the five year old learns isn't similar to assimilate massive quantities of data related to the desired output and perform mathematical transformations on it, even at a subconscious level (and the five year old definitely has a "conscious level" driving it too). The learning speed isn't the issue, it's that the neural net is doing a fundamentally different thing from the five year old brain (and so its "knowledge" is also going to be orthogonal). Which doesn't stop neural networks being immensely useful (and even significantly more useful than humans in relevant domains, especially five year old humans), but might well stop them from being sentient. Neural nets are probably already better at passing Turing tests than five year olds, but the five year old's love of mummy doesn't come from statistical analysis of a corpus of texts about love and mummies.

axg11 4y ago
We don’t even know what sentience is. We don’t have a good way of defining sentience, nor a common definition. If we were to definitively create sentience, there wouldn’t be a universal consensus on whether we had actually created it.

axg11 4y ago

Yes, thank you for explaining this more clearly :)