Mike Tintner wrote:
Charles: Flaws in Hamlet: I don't think of this as involving general
intelligence. Specialized intelligence, yes, but if you see general
intelligence at work there you'll need to be more explicit for me to
understand what you mean. Now determining whether a particular
deviation from iambic pentameter was a flaw would require a deep
human intelligence, but I don't feel that understanding of how human
emotions are structured is a part of general intelligence except on a
very strongly superhuman level. The level where the AI's theory of
your mind was on a par with, or better than, your own.
Charles,
My flabber is so ghasted, I don't quite know what to say. Sorry, I've
never come across any remarks quite so divorced from psychological
reality. There are millions of essays out there on Hamlet, each one of
them different. Why don't you look at a few?:
http://www.123helpme.com/search.asp?text=hamlet
I've looked at a few (though not those). In college I formed the
definite impression that essays on the meaning of literature were
exercises in determining what the instructor wanted. This isn't
something that I consider a part of general intelligence (except as
mentioned above).
...
The reason over 70 per cent of students procrastinate when writing
essays like this about Hamlet, (and the other 20 odd per cent also
procrastinate but don't tell the surveys), is in part that it is
difficult to know which of the many available approaches to take, and
which of the odd thousand lines of text to use as support, and which
of innumerable critics to read. And people don't have a neat structure
for essay-writing to follow. (And people are inevitably and correctly
afraid that it will all take if not forever then far, far too long).
The problem is that most, or at least many, of the approaches are
defensible, but your grade will be determined by the taste of the
instructor. This isn't a problem of general intelligence except at a
moderately superhuman level. Human tastes aren't reasonable ingredients
for an entry level general intelligence. Making it a requirement merely
ensures that one will never be developed (whose development attends to
your theories of what's required).
...
In short, essay writing is an excellent example of an AGI in action -
a mind freely crossing different domains to approach a given subject
from many fundamentally different angles. (If any subject tends
towards narrow AI, it is normal as opposed to creative maths).
I can see story construction as a reasonable goal for an AGI, but at the
entry level they are going to need to be extremely simple stories.
Remember that the goal structures of the AI won't match yours, so only
places where the overlap is maximal are reasonable grounds for story
construction. Otherwise this is an area for specialized AIs, which
isn't what we are after.
Essay writing also epitomises the NORMAL operation of the human mind.
When was the last time you tried to - or succeeded in concentrating
for any length of time?
I have frequently written essays and other similar works. My goal
structures, however, are not generalized, but rather are human. I have
built into me many special purpose functions for dealing with things
like plot structure, family relationships, relative stages of growth, etc.
As William James wrote of the normal stream of consciousness:
"Instead of thoughts of concrete things patiently following one
another in a beaten track of habitual suggestion, we have the most
abrupt cross-cuts and transitions from one idea to another, the most
rarefied abstractions and discriminations, the most unheard-of
combinations of elements, the subtlest associations of analogy; in a
word, we seem suddenly introduced into a seething caldron of ideas,
where everything is fizzling and bobbing about in a state of
bewildering activity, where partnerships can be joined or loosened in
an instant, treadmill routine is unknown, and the unexpected seems the
only law."
Ditto:
The normal condition of the mind is one of informational disorder:
random thoughts chase one another instead of lining up in logical
causal sequences.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Ditto the Dhammapada, "Hard to control, unstable is the mind, ever
in quest of delight,"
When you have a mechanical mind that can a) write essays or tell
stories or hold conversations [which all present the same basic
difficulties] and b) has a fraction of the difficulty concentrating
that the brain does and therefore c) a fraction of the flexibility in
crossing domains, then you might have something that actually is an AGI.
You seem to be placing an extremely high bar in place before you will
consider something an AGI. Accepting all that you have said, for an AGI
to react as a human would react would require that the AGI be strongly
superhuman.
More to the point, I wouldn't DARE create an AGI which had motivations
similar to those that I see clearly exposed in many people that I
encounter. It needs to be willing to defend itself, in a weak sense of
the term, but not in a strong sense of the term. If it becomes the
driver of a vehicle, it must be willing to allow itself to be killed via
it's own action before it chooses to cause harm to a human. This isn't
a human goal structure (except in a very few non-representative cases
that I don't understand well enough to model).
I'm hoping for a goal structure similar to that of a pet dog, but a bit
less aggressive. (Unfortunately, I also expect it will be a lot less
intelligent. I'm going to need to depend of people to read a lot more
intelligence into it than is actually present. Fortunately people are
good at that.) The trick will be getting people to interact with it
without it having a body. This will, I hope, be an AGI because it is
able to learn to deal with new things. The emphasis here is on the
general rather than on the intelligence, as there won't be enough
computer cycles for a lot of actual intelligence. And writing an essay
would be totally out of the question. A simple sentence-based
conversation is the most I can hope for.
-------------------------------------------
agi
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