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Pretty sure I read this same article a while back, and came away thinking it was pretty crap, and presented no substantive arguments. I can't be bothered to re-

Pretty sure I read this same article a while back, and came away thinking it was pretty crap, and presented no substantive arguments. I can't be bothered to re-read the whole thing right now, but it seems to jump right out of the gate with what I would consider some shaky assumptions, like the idea that AGI is necessarily "human like". I know I've beat this dead horse numerous times, but I do think it's critical to make the distinction between "human level" intelligence and "human like" intelligence. And I think we can have intelligence that is "human level", even in its generality, without necessarily being exactly "human like". Or perhaps without even particularly "human like" at all, much less exactly so.

andsoitis 4y ago
> "human level", even in its generality, without necessarily being exactly "human like" In what ways do you think it would be human-level, but without sharing characteristics ("human-like")?
- kitd 4y ago
  Not OP, but real human intelligence is far more emotional than we rational people would like to admit to. Our reasoning is guided (for better and worse) by a constant stream of subconscious biases, rising out of our desires and fears. No one is immune. Note that this is not necessarily a bad thing as in many (most?) cases, it allows us to short-circuit much mental effort. Nevertheless, those same biases can mislead us too. A human-like artificial intelligence would need a sense of value, or at least self-worth and aspiration, to mimic those biases to be fully human-like.
  - mindcrime 4y ago
    A human-like artificial intelligence would need a sense of value, or at least self-worth and aspiration, to mimic those biases to be fully human-like. Agreed. That said, I think the degree to which a given AI is "human like" is a value drawn from a continuum, not a binary "yes/no" dichotomy. Some AI's could be more or less "human like" than others, depending on how they are built / trained / etc. At least that's my position at the moment. I freely admit I can't prove it currently, and I'm not totally convinced anyone ever will. But maybe. Anyway, if you take that as a given for the sake of argument, I consider an interesting question to be "just how 'human like' do we actually want/need our AI's to be?"
- mindcrime 4y ago
  When I refer to this distinction, I mean something like the following (which overlaps to some extent with the distinction between "wide" and "narrow" AI, and I admittedly haven't tried very hard to formalize the difference): 1. We already have AI that is "human level" or even better than human level in the "narrow AI" sense. This part is trivial to see. AI's can beat humans at chess, dividing large numbers, and any number of tasks. But this is "narrow" and by and large the program that can play chess can't also drive a car or anything else. 2. With that established, if we took AI's from (1) above and did nothing but make them more generally applicable, so that the same program can play chess, drive a car, or calculate complex integrals, you'd arguably have something that could at least come close to being called "human level artificial general intelligence". 3. But nothing about establishing (2) above entails, so far as I can see, the necessity of the AGI having human like behaviors, emotions, desires, intentions, attitudes, etc. The easiest way to explain what I mean here is to think in terms of embodiment. It seems clear to me that some portions of our intelligence and behavior are tied up in the way we experience the world through our bodies. Even down to the analogies we construct and use and how we understand them. For example, we talk about "the stock market falling" or a person "falling down" (both in the literal sense or like the movie of the same name), or we say the level of a lake "fell", and I'd argue that some of the understanding of the abstract notion of "fallingness" is tied up in our visceral experience of falling. We know what it means to "fall" in a certain sense, because we have all fallen. We've experienced stumbling, being off balance, beginning to tip over, seeing the floor rush towards our noses, extending our hands to break our fall, getting carpet burn on our hands as a result, etc. And I posit that we can't really divorce those experiences from our subsequent learning and behaviors. And a (2) AGI, unless specifically built to be embodied, and to have that ability to experience the physical world, probably won't have the same attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, etc. That's not to say that you can't teach an AGI some notion of "fallingness" without it being embodied. My argument is simply that there is a distinction between "human level" and "human like" and that that distinction is largely related to our physical manifestation via our bodies. No formal proofs of any of this, but this general view informs my overall position towards AI / AGI in many ways. Others may or may not find it useful.
  - andsoitis 4y ago
    For the narrow AI cases, their goal or purpose is similarly tightly circumscribed. Do you also think that some goal is necessary for an intelligence to make sense? If so, what do you think that goal of an AGI would be?

andsoitis 4y ago

> "human level", even in its generality, without necessarily being exactly "human like" In what ways do you think it would be human-level, but without sharing characteristics ("human-like")?

kitd 4y ago
Not OP, but real human intelligence is far more emotional than we rational people would like to admit to. Our reasoning is guided (for better and worse) by a constant stream of subconscious biases, rising out of our desires and fears. No one is immune. Note that this is not necessarily a bad thing as in many (most?) cases, it allows us to short-circuit much mental effort. Nevertheless, those same biases can mislead us too. A human-like artificial intelligence would need a sense of value, or at least self-worth and aspiration, to mimic those biases to be fully human-like.
- mindcrime 4y ago
  A human-like artificial intelligence would need a sense of value, or at least self-worth and aspiration, to mimic those biases to be fully human-like. Agreed. That said, I think the degree to which a given AI is "human like" is a value drawn from a continuum, not a binary "yes/no" dichotomy. Some AI's could be more or less "human like" than others, depending on how they are built / trained / etc. At least that's my position at the moment. I freely admit I can't prove it currently, and I'm not totally convinced anyone ever will. But maybe. Anyway, if you take that as a given for the sake of argument, I consider an interesting question to be "just how 'human like' do we actually want/need our AI's to be?"
mindcrime 4y ago
When I refer to this distinction, I mean something like the following (which overlaps to some extent with the distinction between "wide" and "narrow" AI, and I admittedly haven't tried very hard to formalize the difference): 1. We already have AI that is "human level" or even better than human level in the "narrow AI" sense. This part is trivial to see. AI's can beat humans at chess, dividing large numbers, and any number of tasks. But this is "narrow" and by and large the program that can play chess can't also drive a car or anything else. 2. With that established, if we took AI's from (1) above and did nothing but make them more generally applicable, so that the same program can play chess, drive a car, or calculate complex integrals, you'd arguably have something that could at least come close to being called "human level artificial general intelligence". 3. But nothing about establishing (2) above entails, so far as I can see, the necessity of the AGI having human like behaviors, emotions, desires, intentions, attitudes, etc. The easiest way to explain what I mean here is to think in terms of embodiment. It seems clear to me that some portions of our intelligence and behavior are tied up in the way we experience the world through our bodies. Even down to the analogies we construct and use and how we understand them. For example, we talk about "the stock market falling" or a person "falling down" (both in the literal sense or like the movie of the same name), or we say the level of a lake "fell", and I'd argue that some of the understanding of the abstract notion of "fallingness" is tied up in our visceral experience of falling. We know what it means to "fall" in a certain sense, because we have all fallen. We've experienced stumbling, being off balance, beginning to tip over, seeing the floor rush towards our noses, extending our hands to break our fall, getting carpet burn on our hands as a result, etc. And I posit that we can't really divorce those experiences from our subsequent learning and behaviors. And a (2) AGI, unless specifically built to be embodied, and to have that ability to experience the physical world, probably won't have the same attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, etc. That's not to say that you can't teach an AGI some notion of "fallingness" without it being embodied. My argument is simply that there is a distinction between "human level" and "human like" and that that distinction is largely related to our physical manifestation via our bodies. No formal proofs of any of this, but this general view informs my overall position towards AI / AGI in many ways. Others may or may not find it useful.
- andsoitis 4y ago
  For the narrow AI cases, their goal or purpose is similarly tightly circumscribed. Do you also think that some goal is necessary for an intelligence to make sense? If so, what do you think that goal of an AGI would be?