5 ms·

No. But with the caveat that it can only truly grasp things that are self contained systems of text. Allow me to give examples: Transit wayfinding: A train ser

No. But with the caveat that it can only truly grasp things that are self contained systems of text. Allow me to give examples: Transit wayfinding: A train service is nothing more than a list of stations it goes to, a station is nothing more than a list of train services that stop there. Nothing about the physical nature of trains or commuting is needed to have a discussion about train lines or to answer questions like "how many transfers does it take from x to y?". You could never have seen a train in your life or even a map of a train, if you've studied the dual lists of stations and services there's nothing more to learn. Chess (and other board games): Standard Chess notation is a list of sequential move made by each player in the format [piece name][x coordinate][y coordinate]. Eg RB6 represents moving the Rook to column B row 6. Chess can be understood entirely in terms of a game of passing a paper back and forth, appending a new token each time, and the rules of the game expressed entirely in terms of how the next token must match the previous part of the list. At no point is it needed to have actually seen the physical board based representation of the game. The machine is grounded in a text based existence. Conversational and linguistic objects are its literal physical objects. Anything outside of that, well it can understand lions and "large" the same we understand atoms and "eigen-states". Experience may ground language, but you are free to ground language in a different reality with different basic constituents and relations. If AGI were to emerge out of trading bots, they would have a language grounded in money and trades. If it emerged out of a bot made to play Diplomacy, it would be a consciousness with the body of a nation state and the atoms of its world would be bits of plastic on a map of Europe. Grounding in our particular reality isn't strictly necessary, but it is helpful if the goal is to make something adept at the modalities of our particular existence and conversational form.

bravura 4y ago
I acknowledge your point that there might be rich ineffable depths that could be present in the game of Go that are beyond the ken of human understanding or even imagination. But I fail to see how an AI whose entire domain of knowledge is limited to board games, or financial trading, would qualify as artificial general intelligence. Unless you take a radical decentering viewpoint that human experience is just one kind of intelligence, and aren't all kinds of intelligence equally valid? That would be glib. Of course we want superhuman drug discovery algorithms that don't understand the pleasure of a sunny day. But most people, when they speak of the topic of AGI, mean: encompassing the scope of human experience.
- IIAOPSW 4y ago
  >But I fail to see how an AI whose entire domain of knowledge is limited to board games, or financial trading, would qualify as artificial general intelligence. Let me recast this: >I fail to see how an I whose entire domain of knowledge is limited to low energy physics, or the large mass limit, would ever qualify as general intelligence. You see the problem. You can extrapolate just fine beyond the reality of Newtonian physics and Euclidean geometry which is native to you. A trading bot AGI could talk about things that aren't money, it would just be using money related objects with money related properties to tell this narrative picture of a world which isn't money. Not too different from the sort of analogies we use all the time to map hard concepts back to the space we find natural. So let me answer your question with a question. What makes a substrate of properties like "size" and "color" and "texture" a better reality to be grounded in than properties like "buy price", "sell price", "dividend"? Is the former uniquely suited for intelligence to generalize beyond that given domain, or is it possible that all groundings are good as any other?
  - r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
    Very interesting question! I would argue that concepts like "size", "colour", "texture" are grounded in a more base level of reality than concepts such as "buy price", "sell price", "dividend" etc. The former set of concepts relate to aspects of the physical world as perceived by creatures that inhabit that world, while the latter refer to social constructs of the human socio-economic world that are themselves reliant on abstract human concepts of utility, value, the market etc. This thought is not fully developed but I'm drawn to the idea that if an intelligence is grounded in an understanding of a more base level of reality it will find it easier to generalize beyond any one given domain. I could be entirely wrong of course.
    - IIAOPSW 4y ago
      But how do you determine the basicness level of reality? And how do you know there isn't a layer lower than our own?
      - 4y ago
tsimionescu 4y ago
The problem with this line if thinking is that human language is not some self-consistent logical system you can reason about independently of its physical origins the way chess or transit or game systems are. Instead a large part of the meaning of language is carried by shared human understanding of physical objects and events. Edit: to give an example, the phrase "is it warm outside?" can be plausibly replied to in several ways, but the meaningful ones require knowing something about location and weather and human biology. No pure language-based learner can give the correct response without some kind of sensory-based information (in practice, that would come from some "oracle" based on weather services and location detection in current systems).
- bravura 4y ago
  Aside, but I'll meander to the heart of your point: As an American who's lived in Canada and Europe, I'll freely acknowledge the superiority of the metric system to imperial measures. EXCEPT celsius. With Fahrenheit, you can describe a temperature with a single digit: in the thirties, in the forties, etc. In Celsius, you're forced to add an extra bit of precision: low tens, high tens, etc. Celsius-lovers find this argument infuriating and will go through all sorts of contortions to justify it: But what about the boiling point of water? Who cares about the boiling point of water? Scientists. Chefs. But 99% of the time we talk about temperature, we care about the weather. And this is sort of the point we're both getting at. That human-like intelligence is of particular value to us, in addition to non-human superintelligence at particular domains. postscript: The anti-Fahrenheit thing is more a discomfort and lack of familiarity. An easy technique for explaining the intuition behind fahrenheit, for describing the weather, is "what percent 'hot' is it"? 80F is 80% hot. Not totally hot. Good-natured people will usually appreciate this rubric. The sort of people who enjoying sorting grains of rice will persist in winnowing the chaff here and perhaps point out that I'm mixing metaphors.
  - jbotz 4y ago
    The boiling point of water may not be very significant to daily human experience, but the freezing point is, at least for people who don't live in the tropics. Celcius does better there than Fahrenheit, doesn't it? What "percent cold" is it in Fahrenheit land? Also I don't like your argument that "only scientists" care about the boiling point of water because we live in a scientific society and for it to function well it is extremely important that everybody has at least some basic scientific literacy. Having separate temperature scales for scientists and "common folk" is at least one little step away from that goal.

bravura 4y ago

I acknowledge your point that there might be rich ineffable depths that could be present in the game of Go that are beyond the ken of human understanding or even imagination. But I fail to see how an AI whose entire domain of knowledge is limited to board games, or financial trading, would qualify as artificial general intelligence. Unless you take a radical decentering viewpoint that human experience is just one kind of intelligence, and aren't all kinds of intelligence equally valid? That would be glib. Of course we want superhuman drug discovery algorithms that don't understand the pleasure of a sunny day. But most people, when they speak of the topic of AGI, mean: encompassing the scope of human experience.

IIAOPSW 4y ago
>But I fail to see how an AI whose entire domain of knowledge is limited to board games, or financial trading, would qualify as artificial general intelligence. Let me recast this: >I fail to see how an I whose entire domain of knowledge is limited to low energy physics, or the large mass limit, would ever qualify as general intelligence. You see the problem. You can extrapolate just fine beyond the reality of Newtonian physics and Euclidean geometry which is native to you. A trading bot AGI could talk about things that aren't money, it would just be using money related objects with money related properties to tell this narrative picture of a world which isn't money. Not too different from the sort of analogies we use all the time to map hard concepts back to the space we find natural. So let me answer your question with a question. What makes a substrate of properties like "size" and "color" and "texture" a better reality to be grounded in than properties like "buy price", "sell price", "dividend"? Is the former uniquely suited for intelligence to generalize beyond that given domain, or is it possible that all groundings are good as any other?
- r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
  Very interesting question! I would argue that concepts like "size", "colour", "texture" are grounded in a more base level of reality than concepts such as "buy price", "sell price", "dividend" etc. The former set of concepts relate to aspects of the physical world as perceived by creatures that inhabit that world, while the latter refer to social constructs of the human socio-economic world that are themselves reliant on abstract human concepts of utility, value, the market etc. This thought is not fully developed but I'm drawn to the idea that if an intelligence is grounded in an understanding of a more base level of reality it will find it easier to generalize beyond any one given domain. I could be entirely wrong of course.
  - IIAOPSW 4y ago
    But how do you determine the basicness level of reality? And how do you know there isn't a layer lower than our own?
    - 4y ago

tsimionescu 4y ago

The problem with this line if thinking is that human language is not some self-consistent logical system you can reason about independently of its physical origins the way chess or transit or game systems are. Instead a large part of the meaning of language is carried by shared human understanding of physical objects and events. Edit: to give an example, the phrase "is it warm outside?" can be plausibly replied to in several ways, but the meaningful ones require knowing something about location and weather and human biology. No pure language-based learner can give the correct response without some kind of sensory-based information (in practice, that would come from some "oracle" based on weather services and location detection in current systems).

bravura 4y ago
Aside, but I'll meander to the heart of your point: As an American who's lived in Canada and Europe, I'll freely acknowledge the superiority of the metric system to imperial measures. EXCEPT celsius. With Fahrenheit, you can describe a temperature with a single digit: in the thirties, in the forties, etc. In Celsius, you're forced to add an extra bit of precision: low tens, high tens, etc. Celsius-lovers find this argument infuriating and will go through all sorts of contortions to justify it: But what about the boiling point of water? Who cares about the boiling point of water? Scientists. Chefs. But 99% of the time we talk about temperature, we care about the weather. And this is sort of the point we're both getting at. That human-like intelligence is of particular value to us, in addition to non-human superintelligence at particular domains. postscript: The anti-Fahrenheit thing is more a discomfort and lack of familiarity. An easy technique for explaining the intuition behind fahrenheit, for describing the weather, is "what percent 'hot' is it"? 80F is 80% hot. Not totally hot. Good-natured people will usually appreciate this rubric. The sort of people who enjoying sorting grains of rice will persist in winnowing the chaff here and perhaps point out that I'm mixing metaphors.
- jbotz 4y ago
  The boiling point of water may not be very significant to daily human experience, but the freezing point is, at least for people who don't live in the tropics. Celcius does better there than Fahrenheit, doesn't it? What "percent cold" is it in Fahrenheit land? Also I don't like your argument that "only scientists" care about the boiling point of water because we live in a scientific society and for it to function well it is extremely important that everybody has at least some basic scientific literacy. Having separate temperature scales for scientists and "common folk" is at least one little step away from that goal.