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>I was a deep learning skeptic. I doubted that you could get to intelligence by matrix multiplication for the same reason you can’t get to the Moon by piling up

>I was a deep learning skeptic. I doubted that you could get to intelligence by matrix multiplication for the same reason you can’t get to the Moon by piling up chairs I've always been fascinated by this example. I've also heard it referred to as climbing a tree won't get you to the Moon. Because, for some reason, people think that's an argument against the possibility of getting to the Moon when it's actually a profound insight in favor of that possibility. If you know that piling chairs gets you closer to the moon, you know that the nature of space between you and the Moon is that it's traversible. A criticism that would make more sense would be something along the lines of "piling up colors you won't get you any closer to the Moon", since colors aren't even the right kind of thing, and you can't aggregate them in a way that gets you spatially closer. Because that at least does not concede the fundamental relationship of spatial traverseability. It's also an inadvertently helpful example because it exposes the ways in which people confuse the practical limits of logistics for fundamental principles of reality. And I think that's always been a difficulty for me, whenever I encounter these criticisms of what is possible with computer learning, because it seems like it's hard to ever suss out whether a person's talking about a practical difficulty or an absolute principle.

zetalyrae 4y ago
On an abstract level, it's obvious that intelligent design, symbolic representations etc. aren't needed to build a mind, because we _evolved_ and evolution is a blind optimizer. But concretely, all the machine learning approaches had many obvious limitations (the volume of data, lack of generalization) until they suddenly didn't, and past a certain scale features of intelligence began to emerge.
- foldr 4y ago
  >On an abstract level, it's obvious that intelligent design, symbolic representations etc. aren't needed to build a mind, because we _evolved_ and evolution is a blind optimizer. This is playing pretty fast and loose. First of all, I wouldn't lump intelligent design together with the claim that symbolic representations are necessary to account for certain features of human intelligence (such as the classic Fodorian triad of compositionality, systematicity and productivity). Second, I just don't think the logic of your sentence works. Why does it make any more sense than the following? "It's obvious that fingers aren't needed to build a hand, because we _evolved_ and evolution is a blind optimizer." Maybe you can build a functional equivalent of a hand without giving it any fingers. But the mere fact that we evolved doesn't tell us anything about whether or not that is possible.
  - zetalyrae 4y ago
    The point is that at no point in evolutionary history did a cognitive scientist sit down and write a bunch of S-expression GOFAI rules for human cognition.
    - foldr 4y ago
      Of course not, but who is claiming that this happened? I'm not sure I can think of even single person who is both (i) an intelligent design advocate and (ii) explicitly committed to a symbolic model of human cognitive capacities. This seems like a straw man. You might as well say that at no point in evolutionary history did an embryologist ever write down a plan for the eight developmental stages of a human fetus.
      - _dain_ 4y ago
        the "intelligent design advocates" doesn't refer to creationists in this context, it refers to GOFAI people.
  - ElFitz 4y ago
    I might be wrong but I think it’s more of a "It’s obvious you don’t need to have fingers to build a hand that has fingers" than building a fingerless functional equivalent to a hand.
ben_w 4y ago
Interesting insight. For me, the (tree) analogy is that of an illusion of progress: while the treetop is closer than the ground, there is no tree that can ever be tall enough to get the rest of the way. So, it isn't supposed to be used to say "you can't do it at all", just "you can't do it like that". But metaphors get mixed as soon as they leave the bottle of text and enter the cocktail shaker of other people's minds, so I am unshocked by the usage you are criticising here.
- glenstein 4y ago
  >So, it isn't supposed to be used to say "you can't do it at all", just "you can't do it like that". And I'm of two minds on this, because I find that to be a respectable position, and in fact, for this reason, I hope you show up to continue debates on this because your voice would be helpful and counteracting what I believe is the less reasonable position. Depending on how long you've been following debates on the topic, which have raged from essentially the 1950s through now, I would guesstimate that "you literally can never get to the moon" has at least at times enjoyed dominance as the majority position, and when not the majority position, is at least credited as being a respectable one. And even in this dressed up reasonable version, it still feels wrong to me in an important way: if you did have a tree that was 328,900 miles tall, you could reach the Moon. There are so many opportunities along the way to mentally short circuit, and slip into practical considerations and lose sight of the principle. Of course no such tree exists, but it has critically illustrated that the entirety of the space from here to there is in principle traversable, and it's the insight into this principle that ultimately will get us from here to there. It does mean you need to shift your focus of research from arborism to jet propulsion, and that is the important point made by your version of this argument. But it amounts to joining the 'arborists' in championing the possibility of getting there rather than being a skeptic of the possibility, and I feel like most people making this point imagine themselves to be taking the sides of the skeptic.
- PoignardAzur 4y ago
  I think if I had to pick a strawman expression to thoroughly defeat, it would be something like "You can't go to the moon by shooting a very big canon". Because on the one hand, yeah, no explosion-based canon is going to get you to the moon; there's just no way to give a payload enough initial momentum to escape the earth's gravity well without killing any humans in that payload. On the other hand, once you have canons, Newtonian physics, and an understanding that the moon is a very distant rock and not, like, a spirit god or something, then you have enough information to realize that going to the moon is only a matter of time and enough iterative improvements on those canons. It doesn't require inventing a completely novel technology like portals or teleporters or whatever. (Though it requires a ton of improvements in material science, engineering, computing, etc.) And I think it's meaningful that From the Earth to the Moon was Jules Vernes' third book, and A trip to the Moon the first science-fiction movie even made. People could see the writing on the wall. It's harder to make any predictions about AGI, because intelligence is a much fuzzier target than "reaching escape velocity". But it feels like neural networks are closer to the canon than to the pile of chairs: a basic concept that might not be capable of reaching general intelligence, but is only one or two steps removed from one that will reach it given enough engineering and money;
raincole 4y ago
I don't know. I've been using Copilot, ChatGPT, and Bing Chat intensively in the past month. So far I still think the metaphor "you can’t get to the Moon by piling up chairs" aged very well. > A criticism that would make more sense would be something along the lines of "piling up colors you won't get you any closer to the Moon", since colors aren't even the right kind of thing, and you can't aggregate them in a way that gets you spatially closer. Because that at least does not concede the fundamental relationship of spatial traverseability. No. I think you misunderstood what the chair metaphor is trying to say. It makes perfect sense, and if you replaced it with colors it would stop making sense. "You can’t get to the Moon by piling up chairs" means that even chairs and rockets share some attributes (helping you get higher), the difference between them is still qualitative, not quantitve. The problem isn't "we don't have enough chairs." "You can't get to the Moon by piling up colors" makes zero sense because colors and rockets share so few attributes and the metaphor falls flat. Is it true for AI? I don't know, and at this point, anyone who claims they knows for sure, is lying. But I don't think my experience with ChatGTP (GPT4 included) and Bing Chat disputes it.
- glenstein 4y ago
  >means that even chairs and rockets share some attributes (helping you get higher), the difference between them is still qualitative, not quantitve. I don't think so, because the needed 'quality' is the ability to traverse space. So I don't think I agree that the qualitative piece is missing. Perhaps the moon example is helpful here because the real solution, a rocket ship, uses propulsion rather than sheer mass, and so you could say that some function such as propulsion is 'qualitatively' lacking. But even that I believe exhibits the very form of confusion that I'm criticizing, which I'll explain below. >The problem isn't "we don't have enough chairs." Well, in a way it is. And at the risk of sounding like the type of question that Randall Monroe would answer in the book What If, even this most vulgar example would in a literal case prove true. Given enough chairs, they would topple over, but create a pile that overtime would spill and evenly distribute over the earth, and it would be the whole earth that grows until it's size is so large that it's close to the Moon. And, I wasn't even trying to make this point, but it's actually kind of a perfect example here because Chat GPT has made all of its progress by throwing chairs (data) at the problem.
akiselev 4y ago
You can't use chairs to get to the moon not because of distance but because of orbital mechanics. That's why chairs work and colors don't: you think you're getting closer by stacking chairs when in reality, all you're going to do is fall down. Until you grasp orbital mechanics, the concept of orbital velocity, and delta-V you can't possibly get to the moon. The distance might as well be infinite because the gravity well will pull you down. It's also a completely invisible problem until you really reach altitude unless you're got a lot of theoretical background which we don't have on artificial intelligence. We don't even really know what the AI rockets will look like when compared with AI chairs.
- glenstein 4y ago
  >That's why chairs work and colors don't: you think you're getting closer by stacking chairs when in reality, all you're going to do is fall down. People seem to keep missing this point, but no, in my hypothetical the chairs really do work because, in the end of the effectively increase the mass of the entire Earth, and in so far as the increasingly silly analogy sheds light on anything it's that the quantitative advancement does convey a qualitative benefit. Which, as it happens, is a perfect encapsulation of the way in which chat GPT has achieved its success thus far. It's also helpful because exposes the pitfall of the analogy in an important way, which is that the analogy purports to assert a category difference, but fails to do so. In your version, the new category is orbital mechanics, and I can just see the satisfaction radiating off your comment as you repeatedly imply a deficit of knowledge on the part of anyone who might disagree. But my analogy got from point a to point b while disregarding this entirely, because orbital mechanics is a means to the end of traversing distance, and not the only means, and not something that identifies a distinct fundamental category into which one must enter to traverse the distance. It's this confusion over methods and fundamental principles that is the entire point I was making in my original comment.

zetalyrae 4y ago

On an abstract level, it's obvious that intelligent design, symbolic representations etc. aren't needed to build a mind, because we _evolved_ and evolution is a blind optimizer. But concretely, all the machine learning approaches had many obvious limitations (the volume of data, lack of generalization) until they suddenly didn't, and past a certain scale features of intelligence began to emerge.

foldr 4y ago
>On an abstract level, it's obvious that intelligent design, symbolic representations etc. aren't needed to build a mind, because we _evolved_ and evolution is a blind optimizer. This is playing pretty fast and loose. First of all, I wouldn't lump intelligent design together with the claim that symbolic representations are necessary to account for certain features of human intelligence (such as the classic Fodorian triad of compositionality, systematicity and productivity). Second, I just don't think the logic of your sentence works. Why does it make any more sense than the following? "It's obvious that fingers aren't needed to build a hand, because we _evolved_ and evolution is a blind optimizer." Maybe you can build a functional equivalent of a hand without giving it any fingers. But the mere fact that we evolved doesn't tell us anything about whether or not that is possible.
- zetalyrae 4y ago
  The point is that at no point in evolutionary history did a cognitive scientist sit down and write a bunch of S-expression GOFAI rules for human cognition.
  - foldr 4y ago
    Of course not, but who is claiming that this happened? I'm not sure I can think of even single person who is both (i) an intelligent design advocate and (ii) explicitly committed to a symbolic model of human cognitive capacities. This seems like a straw man. You might as well say that at no point in evolutionary history did an embryologist ever write down a plan for the eight developmental stages of a human fetus.
    - _dain_ 4y ago
      the "intelligent design advocates" doesn't refer to creationists in this context, it refers to GOFAI people.
- ElFitz 4y ago
  I might be wrong but I think it’s more of a "It’s obvious you don’t need to have fingers to build a hand that has fingers" than building a fingerless functional equivalent to a hand.

ben_w 4y ago

Interesting insight. For me, the (tree) analogy is that of an illusion of progress: while the treetop is closer than the ground, there is no tree that can ever be tall enough to get the rest of the way. So, it isn't supposed to be used to say "you can't do it at all", just "you can't do it like that". But metaphors get mixed as soon as they leave the bottle of text and enter the cocktail shaker of other people's minds, so I am unshocked by the usage you are criticising here.

glenstein 4y ago
>So, it isn't supposed to be used to say "you can't do it at all", just "you can't do it like that". And I'm of two minds on this, because I find that to be a respectable position, and in fact, for this reason, I hope you show up to continue debates on this because your voice would be helpful and counteracting what I believe is the less reasonable position. Depending on how long you've been following debates on the topic, which have raged from essentially the 1950s through now, I would guesstimate that "you literally can never get to the moon" has at least at times enjoyed dominance as the majority position, and when not the majority position, is at least credited as being a respectable one. And even in this dressed up reasonable version, it still feels wrong to me in an important way: if you did have a tree that was 328,900 miles tall, you could reach the Moon. There are so many opportunities along the way to mentally short circuit, and slip into practical considerations and lose sight of the principle. Of course no such tree exists, but it has critically illustrated that the entirety of the space from here to there is in principle traversable, and it's the insight into this principle that ultimately will get us from here to there. It does mean you need to shift your focus of research from arborism to jet propulsion, and that is the important point made by your version of this argument. But it amounts to joining the 'arborists' in championing the possibility of getting there rather than being a skeptic of the possibility, and I feel like most people making this point imagine themselves to be taking the sides of the skeptic.
PoignardAzur 4y ago
I think if I had to pick a strawman expression to thoroughly defeat, it would be something like "You can't go to the moon by shooting a very big canon". Because on the one hand, yeah, no explosion-based canon is going to get you to the moon; there's just no way to give a payload enough initial momentum to escape the earth's gravity well without killing any humans in that payload. On the other hand, once you have canons, Newtonian physics, and an understanding that the moon is a very distant rock and not, like, a spirit god or something, then you have enough information to realize that going to the moon is only a matter of time and enough iterative improvements on those canons. It doesn't require inventing a completely novel technology like portals or teleporters or whatever. (Though it requires a ton of improvements in material science, engineering, computing, etc.) And I think it's meaningful that From the Earth to the Moon was Jules Vernes' third book, and A trip to the Moon the first science-fiction movie even made. People could see the writing on the wall. It's harder to make any predictions about AGI, because intelligence is a much fuzzier target than "reaching escape velocity". But it feels like neural networks are closer to the canon than to the pile of chairs: a basic concept that might not be capable of reaching general intelligence, but is only one or two steps removed from one that will reach it given enough engineering and money;

raincole 4y ago

I don't know. I've been using Copilot, ChatGPT, and Bing Chat intensively in the past month. So far I still think the metaphor "you can’t get to the Moon by piling up chairs" aged very well. > A criticism that would make more sense would be something along the lines of "piling up colors you won't get you any closer to the Moon", since colors aren't even the right kind of thing, and you can't aggregate them in a way that gets you spatially closer. Because that at least does not concede the fundamental relationship of spatial traverseability. No. I think you misunderstood what the chair metaphor is trying to say. It makes perfect sense, and if you replaced it with colors it would stop making sense. "You can’t get to the Moon by piling up chairs" means that even chairs and rockets share some attributes (helping you get higher), the difference between them is still qualitative, not quantitve. The problem isn't "we don't have enough chairs." "You can't get to the Moon by piling up colors" makes zero sense because colors and rockets share so few attributes and the metaphor falls flat. Is it true for AI? I don't know, and at this point, anyone who claims they knows for sure, is lying. But I don't think my experience with ChatGTP (GPT4 included) and Bing Chat disputes it.

glenstein 4y ago
>means that even chairs and rockets share some attributes (helping you get higher), the difference between them is still qualitative, not quantitve. I don't think so, because the needed 'quality' is the ability to traverse space. So I don't think I agree that the qualitative piece is missing. Perhaps the moon example is helpful here because the real solution, a rocket ship, uses propulsion rather than sheer mass, and so you could say that some function such as propulsion is 'qualitatively' lacking. But even that I believe exhibits the very form of confusion that I'm criticizing, which I'll explain below. >The problem isn't "we don't have enough chairs." Well, in a way it is. And at the risk of sounding like the type of question that Randall Monroe would answer in the book What If, even this most vulgar example would in a literal case prove true. Given enough chairs, they would topple over, but create a pile that overtime would spill and evenly distribute over the earth, and it would be the whole earth that grows until it's size is so large that it's close to the Moon. And, I wasn't even trying to make this point, but it's actually kind of a perfect example here because Chat GPT has made all of its progress by throwing chairs (data) at the problem.

akiselev 4y ago

You can't use chairs to get to the moon not because of distance but because of orbital mechanics. That's why chairs work and colors don't: you think you're getting closer by stacking chairs when in reality, all you're going to do is fall down. Until you grasp orbital mechanics, the concept of orbital velocity, and delta-V you can't possibly get to the moon. The distance might as well be infinite because the gravity well will pull you down. It's also a completely invisible problem until you really reach altitude unless you're got a lot of theoretical background which we don't have on artificial intelligence. We don't even really know what the AI rockets will look like when compared with AI chairs.

glenstein 4y ago
>That's why chairs work and colors don't: you think you're getting closer by stacking chairs when in reality, all you're going to do is fall down. People seem to keep missing this point, but no, in my hypothetical the chairs really do work because, in the end of the effectively increase the mass of the entire Earth, and in so far as the increasingly silly analogy sheds light on anything it's that the quantitative advancement does convey a qualitative benefit. Which, as it happens, is a perfect encapsulation of the way in which chat GPT has achieved its success thus far. It's also helpful because exposes the pitfall of the analogy in an important way, which is that the analogy purports to assert a category difference, but fails to do so. In your version, the new category is orbital mechanics, and I can just see the satisfaction radiating off your comment as you repeatedly imply a deficit of knowledge on the part of anyone who might disagree. But my analogy got from point a to point b while disregarding this entirely, because orbital mechanics is a means to the end of traversing distance, and not the only means, and not something that identifies a distinct fundamental category into which one must enter to traverse the distance. It's this confusion over methods and fundamental principles that is the entire point I was making in my original comment.