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There is definitely some requirements to achieve that otherwise every simulation would be able to achieve it. The million dollar question is what are those requ

There is definitely some requirements to achieve that otherwise every simulation would be able to achieve it. The million dollar question is what are those requirements. imo, your environment needs a certain level of complexity (what this level is no one knows), your fitness function (or whatever you use) needs a certain level of complexity and your simulation needs to run for a very long time (how long no one knows). If you think about it, our universe is incredibly rich in complexity and detail and even then, it took about 9 billion years for carbon based life to appear on Earth. So surely, in your much less complex environment, you will need the same or more "time"

jrowen 2y ago
The complexity and detail in our universe create an incredibly vast search space, which may hinder development rather than promote it. To speed it up we need to be able to narrow the search space by cutting some stuff out and simplifying the model. Do we need to model atoms? Molecules? Organelles? DNA? Some other made up building block? I have been intrigued by artificial life because I think it takes a more holistic look at that question than AI. I feel like starting with the neuron is kind of a huge assumption, how have we ruled out or accounted for the importance of all the more basic building blocks and developmental milestones of life? I also think the environment is critical. We formed and evolved as a product of our environment, we have to find food in it; our goals, behaviors and fitness level are largely dependent on/derived from it. An AI doesn't have an environment. It doesn't have any sense of living and being in a place. It can't care about anything. It's not going to see an apple fall and wonder why that happens. It's not alive or doing anything when it's not called to process an input into an output. It makes things up by stitching together words that it has no actual context or experienced meaning for. I find it hard to believe that we're going to achieve anything resembling the interesting characteristics of humans with these abstract Chinese Rooms.
- jrowen 2y ago
  I just had a thought that "intelligence" could be a misnomer or red herring in all this. A lot of modern AI seems to be built around "getting the right answer," performing measurably better on some task. But that's not really what makes humans interesting, and I don't think that's what most people dream of with AI. I would say that it's actually emotion that makes us interesting. I wonder how things would be different if it had been called Artificial Emotion. Emotion is more about experience than correctness. We need something that has some kind of "lived" experience that we can relate to. Feeding a billion words into a system of weights is just not it.
  - Bluestein 2y ago
    Seconded.- (For what little it might be worth, I have recently posted/commented along these very lines ...)
  - Bluestein 2y ago
    Seconded.- (For what little it might be worth, I have recently posted/commented along these very lines ...) Edited: Found it! - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40898635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40898635 This is not an indication of any merit in the comment :) ... but as a way to showcase "prior art" in that we are thinking in similar directions (along with many people, I'm sure ...)
- Bluestein 2y ago
  > have been intrigued by artificial life because I think it takes a more holistic look at that question than AI. Totally in agreement.- > I feel like starting with the neuron is kind of a huge assumption, A warranted one, but a huge one, indeed, nonetheless ...

jrowen 2y ago

The complexity and detail in our universe create an incredibly vast search space, which may hinder development rather than promote it. To speed it up we need to be able to narrow the search space by cutting some stuff out and simplifying the model. Do we need to model atoms? Molecules? Organelles? DNA? Some other made up building block? I have been intrigued by artificial life because I think it takes a more holistic look at that question than AI. I feel like starting with the neuron is kind of a huge assumption, how have we ruled out or accounted for the importance of all the more basic building blocks and developmental milestones of life? I also think the environment is critical. We formed and evolved as a product of our environment, we have to find food in it; our goals, behaviors and fitness level are largely dependent on/derived from it. An AI doesn't have an environment. It doesn't have any sense of living and being in a place. It can't care about anything. It's not going to see an apple fall and wonder why that happens. It's not alive or doing anything when it's not called to process an input into an output. It makes things up by stitching together words that it has no actual context or experienced meaning for. I find it hard to believe that we're going to achieve anything resembling the interesting characteristics of humans with these abstract Chinese Rooms.

jrowen 2y ago
I just had a thought that "intelligence" could be a misnomer or red herring in all this. A lot of modern AI seems to be built around "getting the right answer," performing measurably better on some task. But that's not really what makes humans interesting, and I don't think that's what most people dream of with AI. I would say that it's actually emotion that makes us interesting. I wonder how things would be different if it had been called Artificial Emotion. Emotion is more about experience than correctness. We need something that has some kind of "lived" experience that we can relate to. Feeding a billion words into a system of weights is just not it.
- Bluestein 2y ago
  Seconded.- (For what little it might be worth, I have recently posted/commented along these very lines ...)
- Bluestein 2y ago
  Seconded.- (For what little it might be worth, I have recently posted/commented along these very lines ...) Edited: Found it! - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40898635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40898635 This is not an indication of any merit in the comment :) ... but as a way to showcase "prior art" in that we are thinking in similar directions (along with many people, I'm sure ...)
Bluestein 2y ago
> have been intrigued by artificial life because I think it takes a more holistic look at that question than AI. Totally in agreement.- > I feel like starting with the neuron is kind of a huge assumption, A warranted one, but a huge one, indeed, nonetheless ...