Mike,
Quick response. Don't get the wrong idea: I am *very* much committed
to the idea that developmental/adaptive processes are crucial, and that
we cannot build a full, adult mind from scratch. (Not sure what I said
to give the opposite impression, but never mind). This is extremely
important.
Evolution, on the other hand, is less important. One design is enough
to try to pin down: a vast sequences of designs, I don't need ;-).
Richard Loosemore.
Mike Tintner wrote:
Very good, Richard. Agree to great extent. Yes the human mind is a
complex, interdependent system of subsystems, and you can't chop them off.
[Yes BTW to the "insanity", i.e. literally out-of-the-human-mind, nature
of sci. psychology. First, no mind - behaviourism. Then, yes there's a
mind, but only an unconscious mind. Then, 1990's, oh we do have a
conscious mind too. And still we only study consciousness, as a set of
faculties, and not Thought - the conscious mind's actual streams of
debate - the geology, if you like, but not the geography of human
thought.].
But what you seem to be missing out is the evolutionary (&
developmental) standpoint. The human mind evolved. And it also has to
develop in stages through childhood, which to a limited extent
recapitulates evolution.
So you have to understand why the human system had to evolve and has to
develop in those ways. You can't just attempt to recreate, say, an
already-developed adult human mind by a super-Manhattan project. We're
nowhere near ready for that yet.
(An interesting thought BTW here is that adaptivity itself adapts,
becomes more sophisticated through life - and evolution evolves).
Sure, Ben, AGI does not have to copy the evolution of mind exactly, but
there are basic principles there of constructing a mind that I think do
have to be adhered to, just as there were basic principles of flight..
For example, here nearly everyone seems to be talking about plunging in
and creating a sophisticated intellectual mind more or less
straight-off, but it takes the human brain roughly 13-20 years to
develop physically and mentally to where it is able to intellectualise -
to handle concepts like "society" and "development" and "philosophy."
Why? I would argue because those powers of abstraction have been
grounded in gradually building up a picture tree of underlying images
and graphics, of great depth, with extraordinary CGI powers of
manipulating them. An abstract concept, for example, like "society",
I'm suggesting, is based on a lot of images in the brain - and you have
to have them to handle it - as you do all such abstract concepts..
----- Original Message ----- From: "Richard Loosemore" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, April 25, 2007 4:59 PM
Subject: [singularity] Re: Why do you think your AGI design will work?
Joshua Fox wrote:
Ben has confidently stated that he believes Novamente will work (
http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?m=3
<http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?m=3> and others).
AGI builders, what evidence do you have that your design will work?
This is an oft-repeated question, but I'd like to focus on two
possible bases for saying that an invention will work before it does.
1. A clear, simple, mathematical theory, verified by experiment. The
experiments can be "pure science" rather than technology tests.
2. Functional tests of component parts or of crude prototypes.
Maybe I am missing something in the articles I have read, but do
contemporary AGI builders have a verified theory and/or verified
components and prototypes?
Joshua,
I happen to think your question is a very important one. I am writing
a paper on something very close to that question right now, so I want
to summarize what I have said there.
First of all, I think a lot of the replies to your post went off at a
tangent: inventing a test means nothing (no matter how much fun it
is) if the justification for the test is nonexistent. It doesn't
matter how many tests people pull out of thin air, the whole point of
your question was WHY should we believe this or that test, or WHY
should we believe this or that definition of intelligence, or WHY
should we believe this or that design for an AGI is better than any
other.
What we need is the BASIS that anyone might have for asserting the
superiority of one answer over another .... except personal judgment.
But:
This 'basis' is completely missing from all of AI research. AI is
just one great big free-for-all exploration, based on personal
judgements that are often kept away from the limelight, to build
something that works as well as human intelligence. There are no
principled approaches, there are only hidden
assumptions/preconceptions/guesses, on top of which are layered
various kinds of formalism that are designed to make it look more
scientific. (And if it seems outrageous to say that so many people
are being so self-deceiptful, take a quick look at the history of
behaviorism, in psychology.... very similar story, same conclusion).
The above is meant to be a position statement: I believe that I can
justify it by means of a long essay, with lots of evidence, but let's
just take it for granted right now, so I can move on to the next step.
Here is what I think is happening.
1) Everyone is actually borrowing crucial ideas from the design of the
human cognitive system, including those people who say they are not.
I say this because every approach to AI involves something borrowed
from the human design: even pure mathematical logic was based on some
ideas that the Ancient Greeks had about how their minds worked. Most
people borrow just a little (nobody is trying, yet, to borrow most of
the human design).
2) The only reason that any AI design works is because something was
borrowed from the human design.
There are no objective reasons why AI systems should be intelligent,
no matter how much the logicians might argue that what they do is
'deriving true facts about the world by means of truth-preserving laws
of inference'. This is just post-hoc rationalization that leaves out
all the little bits and pieces they insert into their systems to make
them work in practical situations. Those mathematical laws of
inference do not guarantee that the systems are intelligent, they just
guarantee that if you load up a system with a bunch of facts you can
derive a bunch of others.... these are two very different claims.
3) If you step back and ask, objectively, whether we should borrow a
lot of the human design, or just take a few snippets and then
embellish them, you can come to a serious conclusion, based on our
understanding of complex systems: the
grab-a-few-snippets-and-then-embellish-them approach is the most
ridiculous of all. This approach is almost certain to fail because if
you want to emulate a complex system then the dumbest, most lunatic
approach of all is to take a quick glance at its low level mechanisms
and then pretend that your quick glance can be the root of a
development process that will lead to the same global behavior as the
original... basically, you are trapping yourself in a Can't Get There
From Here situation.
4) If the above problem (item 3) is real, then we would expect to see
a number of features in AI research:
(a) Avoidance of the crucial areas where the complexity will get
you, like true symbol grounding [CHECK],
(b) Encouraging progress at first because of the borrowing from the
human design, followed by stagnation [CHECK],
(c) Repeated cycles in which everyone climbs on a new idea-bandwagon
to try to get around the limitations of the previous one, followed by
good progress and then stagnation [CHECK],
(d) Very little to show for years of mind-numbing theorem-proving
[CHECK],
(e) Double standards by those who claim to be using rigorous
scientific (i.e. mathematical) techniques ... the core of what they do
is rigorous, to be sure, but they keep very quiet about the fact that
they have to add completely arbitrary machinery to 'constrain' their
theorem proving engines, so they won't just prove everything in the
universe before deciding whether to put the jam on top of the bread or
the bread on top of the jam. In other words, these people are just
hackers, like their predecessors. [CHECK],
(f) Distractions from the goal of building a working AGI, like
people who invent abstract, impossible-to-build AI 'systems' (actually
just pure math fantasies), because they love math more than they love
the idea of actually getting anything to work [CHECK],
(g) No overall progress, because this approach (borrowing a few
ideas from the human design, glorifying them as basic assumptions, and
then pretending that it is possible to make a complete AGI system by
embellishing and extending those first, arbitrarily chosen ideas) is
ultimately going to hit a glass ceiling. The approach will be able to
make some limited progress with all the aspects of intelligence that
do not depend on too much complexity (like getting the system to build
its own concepts and its own high-level learning mechanisms), but this
will only produce fragile systems that have to have their hands held
in an exponentially increasing way as we try to push them to do more
intelligent things.
That last point is the only one we don't know about yet: come back in
fifty years and see if, with no cahnge in approach, the situation is
still as daft as it is today.
Every one of the AI or AGI projects that I see now is doing the same
thing. All borrowing a few chunks from the human design, all
pretending that they don't need to borrow the entire human design, all
just making it up from a 'design' that is actually someone's best
guess, with only personal intuition as their ultimate justification
for why their best guess is the one that will work. All, I predict,
will make some progress until they hit the glass ceiling.
So what is the way out? The only way out, I claim, is to be honest
about the fact that the human design is the source of inspiration, and
get serious about borrowing from it in a massive, systematic way.
I am not saying that everyone should just do cognitive science: the
folks over there are just as screwed up as the AI community, though
for slightly different reasons.
What we actually need is a true middle path, neither conventional AI
nor cognitive science/psychology, but something in between. Absent a
better name, I am now referring to that middle course as 'Theoretical
Psychology'.
So the answer to your question is like this:
Nobody has a clue what a formal theory of AGI would look like, because
in the end there cannot be any such thing: the function "being
intelligent" is not definable in an objective, non-circular way. So I
am afraid you cannot ask for either experimental science or verifiable
functional components. Unfortunately, a lot of AI's problems are
wrapped up in the fact that people simply cannot get their heads
around this idea. They will one day, but why do we have to wait?
The best we can do is to use the human design as a close inspiration
-- we do not have to make an exact copy, we just need to get close
enough to build something in the same family of systems, that's all --
and set up progress criteria based on how well we explain and
understand that design.
Sounds like it would be very unsatisfying to someone who was a
mathematican, doesn't it? Horrible, nasty, empirical science. That's
why, sadly, mathematicians should not be doing AI.
Richard Loosemore
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