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I don't agree that brains can learn on their own, unsupervised. Firstly, the brain has a basic feedback mechanism, which can be thought of as basic supervision

I don't agree that brains can learn on their own, unsupervised. Firstly, the brain has a basic feedback mechanism, which can be thought of as basic supervision: it receives quick feedback on certain kinds of hardware issues its actions caused. Most computers don't even get a similar level of feedback (eg, that they tied up the cluster on junk computations). Secondarily, modern humans are booted through this mechanism by already running humans, in what is direct supervised learning: from the time we're infants -- and for the next two decades -- our actions are supervised, commented on, corrected and our exposure to materials is metered and selected to create a (theoretically) optimum consumption plan. That we get any results out of computers with a couple months of training when comparing them to humans with a couple decades of training is testament to the fact that computer learning is orders of magnitude more effective than human learning. I find it very strange that people leave out the 2 decades of hardware tuning and supervised knowledge building that humans get when discussing about how awful it is we having to train our machines if we want them to be smart.

DecoPerson 11y ago
Brains can definitely learn without supervision. Observe any child playing; they explore and learn from stimulus in ways far more sophisticated than our current machine learning models. An interesting aspect of brains vs machines is how brains can learn from other brains indirectly. When someone tags a database for a machine to learn from, that is a form of direct communication (the kind machines are good at). A crow can watch another crow use a stick as a tool, and in turn learns that a stick can be used as a tool. This requires a complex understanding of the situation.
- bryondowd 11y ago
  If you feed one AI a tagged data set to train it, I think you would be able to easily hook it up to an untrained AI to train the second AI. As in, pass the first AI an un-tagged input, get it's result, and pass the second AI the same input tagged with the first AI's result. That would be essentially the same thing as a crow learning from watching another crow, aside from the fact that the crows are self-directed.
gambiter 11y ago
> I don't agree that brains can learn on their own, unsupervised. Facts don't require your agreement. They're still facts. You're suggesting that the "2 decades of hardware tuning" is equivalent to programming, and that just isn't the case. While parents definitely provide instruction, each child's brain is fully on its own to program itself. It teaches itself how to make sense of the visual signals it's receiving from the retina... no one teaches a child up from down, how shading and colors differ, how to use both eyes in tandem to provide depth perception. It's all automatic and 'magical' in a way, because literally NOTHING you can do as a parent can speed that process up in any meaningful way. The same is true for hearing. You can't just upload your current understanding of the world... the closest you can come is by trying to help them along mechanically, by holding them up as they 'walk' their legs, for instance, but their brain is still figuring it out entirely independently. Showing the child how to move their legs is NOT the equivalent of showing them how to detect orientation using their inner ear, or teaching them how to send impulses to their muscles in the right order and at the right time, or teaching them to predict momentum so that they don't just fall on their face. > computer learning is orders of magnitude more effective than human learning The only reason one could even ATTEMPT to make that claim is that a computer's learning is something that can be copied digitally. A single machine can't even approach the learning abilities of the brain. Computers are so fundamentally different that it's not even a fair comparison to the computer... the brain will win every time. > I find it very strange that people leave out the 2 decades of hardware tuning and supervised knowledge building that humans get It's because it just isn't relevant. Take the most advanced AI available today, slap it in a robot and spend 2 decades raising it. I guarantee it won't end up anywhere close to a human in abilities or intelligence. If you can't see that, you're being intentionally obtuse.
- 1971genocide 11y ago
  The last part was funny. Modern robotics has been around for more than 20 years and there is no autonomy whatsoever. It might surprise many people who claim that AIG is 20-30 away from now that in robotics, something as simple as cup stacking is a major problem. If you can figure out how to do that you will get slightly famous. The brain and a computer work so fundamentally differently that its impossible to provide a single framework to compare them. This is why I used the metric of computational complexity but even that is not at all accurate. I think due to the tremendous amount of automation we have seen in the past 10-20 years, many programmer have difficulty appreciating the awesomeness of biological intelligence. Rather than view the success of automation as a failure of how human education works. By fully appreciating how complexity of the biological intelligence can we start to learn from it and append it.

DecoPerson 11y ago

Brains can definitely learn without supervision. Observe any child playing; they explore and learn from stimulus in ways far more sophisticated than our current machine learning models. An interesting aspect of brains vs machines is how brains can learn from other brains indirectly. When someone tags a database for a machine to learn from, that is a form of direct communication (the kind machines are good at). A crow can watch another crow use a stick as a tool, and in turn learns that a stick can be used as a tool. This requires a complex understanding of the situation.

bryondowd 11y ago
If you feed one AI a tagged data set to train it, I think you would be able to easily hook it up to an untrained AI to train the second AI. As in, pass the first AI an un-tagged input, get it's result, and pass the second AI the same input tagged with the first AI's result. That would be essentially the same thing as a crow learning from watching another crow, aside from the fact that the crows are self-directed.

gambiter 11y ago

> I don't agree that brains can learn on their own, unsupervised. Facts don't require your agreement. They're still facts. You're suggesting that the "2 decades of hardware tuning" is equivalent to programming, and that just isn't the case. While parents definitely provide instruction, each child's brain is fully on its own to program itself. It teaches itself how to make sense of the visual signals it's receiving from the retina... no one teaches a child up from down, how shading and colors differ, how to use both eyes in tandem to provide depth perception. It's all automatic and 'magical' in a way, because literally NOTHING you can do as a parent can speed that process up in any meaningful way. The same is true for hearing. You can't just upload your current understanding of the world... the closest you can come is by trying to help them along mechanically, by holding them up as they 'walk' their legs, for instance, but their brain is still figuring it out entirely independently. Showing the child how to move their legs is NOT the equivalent of showing them how to detect orientation using their inner ear, or teaching them how to send impulses to their muscles in the right order and at the right time, or teaching them to predict momentum so that they don't just fall on their face. > computer learning is orders of magnitude more effective than human learning The only reason one could even ATTEMPT to make that claim is that a computer's learning is something that can be copied digitally. A single machine can't even approach the learning abilities of the brain. Computers are so fundamentally different that it's not even a fair comparison to the computer... the brain will win every time. > I find it very strange that people leave out the 2 decades of hardware tuning and supervised knowledge building that humans get It's because it just isn't relevant. Take the most advanced AI available today, slap it in a robot and spend 2 decades raising it. I guarantee it won't end up anywhere close to a human in abilities or intelligence. If you can't see that, you're being intentionally obtuse.

1971genocide 11y ago
The last part was funny. Modern robotics has been around for more than 20 years and there is no autonomy whatsoever. It might surprise many people who claim that AIG is 20-30 away from now that in robotics, something as simple as cup stacking is a major problem. If you can figure out how to do that you will get slightly famous. The brain and a computer work so fundamentally differently that its impossible to provide a single framework to compare them. This is why I used the metric of computational complexity but even that is not at all accurate. I think due to the tremendous amount of automation we have seen in the past 10-20 years, many programmer have difficulty appreciating the awesomeness of biological intelligence. Rather than view the success of automation as a failure of how human education works. By fully appreciating how complexity of the biological intelligence can we start to learn from it and append it.