The degree to which modern AI has given up on trying to understand tractable, thinking systems and just builds them by brute force is interesting. Our understanding of cognition hasn't improved even as we're able to build systems that have near-human performance in some areas.https://twitter.com/QuantaMagazine/status/1192107096604590082 …
-
Show this thread
-
This has interesting consequences. One is the "money laundering for bias" issue, where machine systems you don't understand pick up on all sorts of latent patterns in the data you feed them. But my favorite is that it removes a favorite fantasy about recursive self-improvement
2 replies 12 retweets 48 likesShow this thread -
Transhumanists have been obsessed for years with the nightmare of an AI that starts to recursively self-improve, and in a few hours takes over the world. They take it more seriously than my breezy phrasing of it implies. They have also learned to not talk about it in public
3 replies 5 retweets 46 likesShow this thread -
But implicit in this fever dream is the notion that minds are designed, first by their human creators, and then by their owners, iteratively, to be smarter. With the messy kind of AI we have in practice, this feedback loop doesn't work.
1 reply 7 retweets 40 likesShow this thread -
It doesn't work for the same reason you can't repeatedly do brain surgery to make yourself better at brain surgery. The brain is a hot goopy mess with everything interconnected. Now our best AI algorithms are becoming like that, too.
3 replies 7 retweets 38 likesShow this thread -
Replying to @Pinboard
If struggling toward human-equivalent intelligence (with all of its flawed physicality) is the goal, shouldn't everyone have expected roughly this approach?
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @slightlylate
They were hoping to reach beyond-human levels of intelligence. Just like you can't evolve a motorcycle from a cheetah, the belief is there are areas of "mind space" that are much better than human, but may be inaccessible by evolutionary algorithms, though accessible to designers
1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
But none of that was grounded in a deep understanding of intelligence (our own or any other). Could really go for some Engelbart-style augmentation, TBH.
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.
& Web Standards TL; Blink API OWNER
Named PWAs w/
DMs open. Tweets my own; press@google.com for official comms.