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> A chief goal of artificial intelligence is to build machines that think like people. I disagree with the topic sentence. The goal should not be to "build ma

> A chief goal of artificial intelligence is to build machines that think like people. I disagree with the topic sentence. The goal should not be to "build machines that think like people", but to build machines that think, period. The way humans think is unlikely to be the optimal way to go about thinking anyways. Instead of talking about thinking, we should be talking about function. Less philosophy and more reality. Can the system reason itself through various representative challenges as well as or better than human? If yes, it doesn't much matter how it does it. In fact, it's probably for the best if we can create AI that thinks completely different than humans, has no consciousness or self awareness, but still can do what humans can do and more.

trash_cat 3y ago
We don't make planes based on how birds flap their wings.
randcraw 3y ago
The topic sentence was the mantra of nearly all AI research back in the days of good-old-fashioned-AI, AKA symbolic AI. Understanding how reasoning is implemented by our brains was a much more compelling prospect than being able to implement 'intelligence' compositionally but without understanding how software achieved it -- which is largely where we find ourselves now. Today's AI is theory-free leaving us unenlightened about the continuum of intelligence -- across species, or within a human as our brain matures or goes pathological. Many scientists outside the AI field have long shared an interest in the objective of how to "think like people" using software. Far fewer care if the AI is inexplicable (or if it can't be dissected into constituent components, thereby enabling us to explore the mind's constraints and dependencies among its cognitive processes).
mcguire 3y ago
The problem here is, how do you know that your machine thinks if it doesn't think like humans? Game AIs are functionally much better than humans but no one believes they can think, right? Oh, but if you are arguing for AI from a specialized tool standpoint and not a general intelligence standpoint, if you are talking about "weak" AI rather than "strong" AI, then I'm right there with you. :-)
pixl97 3y ago
The problem here is this breaks the much more complicated issue of alignment. The paperclip optimizer is a great parable here. If you build your intelligence to build as many paperclips as cheaply as possible don't be surprised when said intelligence disassembles you and the rest of the universe to do so. So yea, HOW starts mattering a whole lot when you want to ensure it understands that it shouldn't do some particular things.

trash_cat 3y ago

We don't make planes based on how birds flap their wings.

randcraw 3y ago

The topic sentence was the mantra of nearly all AI research back in the days of good-old-fashioned-AI, AKA symbolic AI. Understanding how reasoning is implemented by our brains was a much more compelling prospect than being able to implement 'intelligence' compositionally but without understanding how software achieved it -- which is largely where we find ourselves now. Today's AI is theory-free leaving us unenlightened about the continuum of intelligence -- across species, or within a human as our brain matures or goes pathological. Many scientists outside the AI field have long shared an interest in the objective of how to "think like people" using software. Far fewer care if the AI is inexplicable (or if it can't be dissected into constituent components, thereby enabling us to explore the mind's constraints and dependencies among its cognitive processes).

mcguire 3y ago

The problem here is, how do you know that your machine thinks if it doesn't think like humans? Game AIs are functionally much better than humans but no one believes they can think, right? Oh, but if you are arguing for AI from a specialized tool standpoint and not a general intelligence standpoint, if you are talking about "weak" AI rather than "strong" AI, then I'm right there with you. :-)

pixl97 3y ago

The problem here is this breaks the much more complicated issue of alignment. The paperclip optimizer is a great parable here. If you build your intelligence to build as many paperclips as cheaply as possible don't be surprised when said intelligence disassembles you and the rest of the universe to do so. So yea, HOW starts mattering a whole lot when you want to ensure it understands that it shouldn't do some particular things.