On 15 Jun 2014, at 03:34, Pierz wrote:
On Saturday, June 14, 2014 11:52:02 AM UTC+10, Liz R wrote:
On 13 June 2014 23:35, Russell Standish <li...@hpcoders.com.au> wrote:
On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 01:44:25AM -0700, Pierz wrote:
> Yes. But I have to wonder what we're doing wrong, because any
sophisticated
> piece of modern software such as a modern OS or even this humble
mailing
> list/forum software we are using is already "hugely mind-bogglingly
> incremental". It has evolved over decades of incremental improvement
> involving thousands upon thousands of workers building up layers of
> increasing abstraction from the unfriendly silicon goings-on down
below.
> And yet Siri, far from being a virtual Scarlett Johannson, is
still pretty
> much dumb as dog-shit (though she has some neat bits of crystallised
> intelligence built in. Inspired by "She" I asked her what she was
wearing,
> and she said, "I can't tell you but it doesn't come off."). Well,
I'm still
> agnostic on "comp", so I don't have to decide whether this
conspicuous
> failure represents evidence against computationalism. I do however
consider
> the bullish predictions of the likes of Deutsch (and even our own
dear
> Bruno) that we shall be uploading our brains or something by the
end of the
> century or sooner to be deluded. Deutsch wrote once (BoI?) that the
> computational power required for human intelligence is already
present in a
> modern laptop; we just haven't had the programming breakthrough
yet. I
> think that is preposterous and can hardly credit he actually
believes it.
>
It overstates the facts somewhat - a modern laptop is probably still
about 3 orders of magnitude less powerful than a human brain, but with
Moore's law, that gap will be closed in about 15 years.
Moore's law appears to have stopped working about 10 years ago,
going by a comparison of modern home computers with old ones. That
is, the processors haven't increased much in speed, but they have
gained more "cores", i.e. they've been parallelised, and more memory
and more storage. But the density of the components on the chips
hasn't increased by the predicted amount (or so I'm told).
No - we are hitting limits now in terms of miniaturization that are
posing serious challenges to the continuation of Moore's law. So
far, engineers have - more or less - found ways of working around
these problems, but this can't continue indefinitely. However, it's
really a subsidiary point. If we require 1000x the power of a modern
laptop, that's easily (if somewhat expensively) achieved with
parallelization, a la Google's PC farms. Of course this only helps
if we parallelize our AI algorithms, but given the massive
parallelism of the brain, this should be something we'd be doing
anyway. And yet I don't think anyone would argue that they could
achieve human-like intelligence even with all of Google's PCs roped
together. It's an article of faith that all that is required is a
programming breakthrough. I seriously doubt it. I believe that human
intelligence is fundamentally linked to qualia (consciousness), and
I've yet to be convinced that we have any understanding of that yet.
I am familiar of course with all the arguments on this subject,
including Bruno's theory about unprovable true statements etc, but
in the end I remain unconvinced. For instance I would ask how we
would torture an artificial consciousness (if we were cruel enough
to want to)? How would we induce pain or pleasure? Sure we can
"reward" a program for correctly solving a problem in some kind of
learning algorithm, but anyone who understands programming and knows
what is really going on when that occurs must surely wonder how
incrementing a register induces pleasure (or decrementing it, pain).
Anyway. Old hat I guess. My point is it comes down to a "bet", as
Bruno likes to say. An statement of faith. At least Bruno admits it
is such.
I do more than admit this. I insist it has to be logically the case
that it needs an act of faith.
That is also the reason why I insist that it is a theology. It is, at
the least, the belief in a form of (ditital) reincarnation.
As things stand, given the current state of AI, I'd bet the other way.
Comp is not so nice with AI. Theoretical AI is a nest of beautiful
results, but they are all necessarily non constructive. We cannot
program intelligence, we can only recognize it, or not. It depends in
large part of us.
In theoretical artificial intelligence, or learning theory(*), the
results can be sum up by the fact that a machine will be more
intelligent than another one if she is able to make more errors, to
change its mind more often, to work in team, to allow non falsifiable
hypothesis, etc.
Machine's intelligence look like this. Whatever theory of intelligence
you suggest, a machine will be more intelligent by not applying it.
Intelligence is a protagorean virtue too, if not the most typical. It
escapes definitions.
Bruno
(*) The work of Putnam, Blum, Gold, Case and Smith, Oherson, Stob,
Weinstein.
However, it is also true that having a 1000-fold more powerful
computer does not get you human intelligence, so the programming
breakthrough is still required.
Yes, you have to know how people do it.
Quote from ... someone: "If the brain were so simple we could
understand it, we'd be so simple we couldn't."
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