Mike Tintner wrote:
Charles,
We're still a few million miles apart :). But perhaps we can focus on
something constructive here. On the one hand, while, yes, I'm talking
about extremely sophisticated behaviour in essaywriting, it has
generalizable features that characterise all life. (And I think BTW
that a dog is still extremely sophisticated in its motivations and
behaviour - your idea there strikes me as evolutionarily naive).
Were I to try to model the complete goal structure of a dog, then I
would agree with you. That wasn't my intent. I meant more like
"respond to the interactor with an apparent emotional value rather like
that of a family's dog to a member of the family". And I'm not thinking
of a dog that believes it ought to be the pack alpha. (Sorry for that
bit of "mind reading", but as one doesn't exactly know what a dog is
thinking I don't see any alternative.)
Clearly even a primitive AI (even narrow AI) will have more shared
linguistic behavior than a human and a dog do. But the human and the
dog share a lot of body language. This will need to be emulated with
reasonable substitutes. Also clearly the AI and the dog will fill
different niches (even the Aibo). As such, identical reactions wouldn't
be useful.
Even if a student has an extremely dictatorial instructor, following
his instructions slavishly, will be, when you analyse it, a highly
problematic, open-ended affair, and no slavish matter - i.e. how he is
to apply some general, say, deconstructionist criticism instructions
and principles and translate them into a v. complex essay.
The problem isn't that he was dictatorial, that implies a kind of
clarity that was lacking. And I'm not talking about just one
instructor. It was common in the classes that one normally called the
Humanities.
In fact, it immediately strikes me such essaywriting, and all
essaywriting, and most human activities and animal activities will be
a matter of hierarchical goals - of, off the cuff, something v.
crudely like - "write an essay on Hamlet" - "decide general
approach"... "use deconstructionist approach" - "find contradictory
values in Hamlet to deconstruct"...etc.
I think that hierarchy is an oversimplification. If the instructor were
willing to accept any good work that met the provided specification,
then I might not consider that it would require a super-human AGI to
accomplish. This, however, was not my experience. One was expected to
determine the instructors implicit desires. As such, if one is not
human, then it is a task that a merely human level AGI (without the
human specialized modules) could not perform. Even humans experience
indifferent success rates.
But all life, I guess, must be organized along those lines - the
simplest worm must start with something crudely like : "find food to
eat"..."decide where food may be located" "decide approach to food
location " etc.. (which in turn will almost always be conflicting with
opposed emotions/motivations/goals like "get some more sleep" .."stay
cuddled up in burrow.." )
I don't think you verbalizations match the actualities, and I'd prefer
to start from an amoeba encountering a scent trail as the simplest
model. Even there one gets learning. But there it's clear that the
system is responding directly from its current state to sensory
impressions. (This is also true in more complex entities, but it is
more obscure in such cases. E.g., consider the difficulty in seeing
something that one doesn't expect to see vs. the ease of seeing what one
expects to see.)
....Hierarchical goals are surely fundamental to general intelligence.
I don't think that goals are exactly hierarchical. At any time some are
more important than others, but the importance varies with opportunities
available and current need states.
Interestingly, when I Google "hierarchical goals" and AI, I get v.
little - except from our immediate friends, gamers - and this from:
"Programming Game AI by Example" Mat Buckland:
"Chapter 9: Hierarchical Goal Based Agents
This chapter introduces agents that are motivated by hierarchical
goals. This type of architecture is far more flexible than the one
described in Chapter 2 allowing AI programmers to easily imbue game
characters with the brains necessary to do all sorts of funky stuff.
Discussion, code and demos of: atomic goals, composite goals, goal
arbitration, creating goal evaluation functions, implementation in
Raven, using goal evaluations to create personalities, goals and agent
memory, automatic resuming of interrupted activities, negotiating
special path obstacles such as elevators, doors or moving platforms,
command queuing, scripting behavior."
Anyone care to comment about using hierarchical goals in AGI or
elsewhere?
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).
. 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.
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