When Zuckerberg and Ashton Kutcher invest in things, it doesn't really grab my attention. But when Musk does, it really does sound promising.
The company's tech sounds really awesome, being able to perceive texture from photos and interpret objects from it would be so useful in so many real world applications.
In an interview he emphasized that he was a tiny initial investor / had no idea what they were doing (I'm guessing Peter Thiel convinced him to since Stripe was trying to help make their initial vision for Paypal a reality)
First time I've ever heard of Mark Zuckerberg investing in anything, separate from Facebook. He always cited 'focus' as the reason why he never does it.
Probably not. If Noam Chomsky is to be believed (I do), most research to date has been publicly funded. In the US, it has been mostly through military expenditures. (To take only one example, ARPANET itself was funded by the military.)
The actually awesome part is having huge investments on long term research. Private or public, it doesn't make any difference.
In response to your comment on another topic:
You can run a "freedom box" as follows:
http://freedombone.uk.to
The guide will work for a raspberry pi or a beagle bone.
It was created out of frustration with progress of the freedom box project.
As in an Intelligence Explosion (http://intelligence.org/ie-faq/.) "Success" is really a bad way of wording it, I just mean if it happens, none of those things will matter. Regardless whether it is friendly or not. Either we go extinct or the AI is so far beyond us, our present progress doesn't make much difference.
The AI winter is very much over, and we're back to the good old days of selling the future. I bet this team is very sharp, but there's still merit to "over-promise, under-deliver."
"Phoenix, the co-founder, says Vicarious aims beyond image recognition. He said the next milestone will be creating a computer that can understand not just shapes and objects, but the textures associated with them. For example, a computer might understand “chair.” It might also comprehend “ice.” Vicarious wants to create a computer that will understand a request like “show me a chair made of ice.”
Phoenix hopes that, eventually, Vicarious’s computers will learn to how to cure diseases, create cheap, renewable energy, and perform the jobs that employ most human beings. “We tell investors that right now, human beings are doing a lot of things that computers should be able to do,” he says."
Funny to think that instead of curing diseases or making cheap renewable energy, we'd instead try to spend resources to invent a computer to do that for us...
So the question you should be asking is...if everyone agrees that cheap renewable energy and curing diseases is a good thing, why haven't we done it yet? I guess if you're cynical, you'd argue, because no one can make a profit from it (uh...right).
However, if you see it as a pragmatic problem, then maybe the answer to why not? is because we need better ways to process information -- and this kind of unsupervised machine learning is critical to doing that.
I've given some thought to this, and the answer is it might be. Consider a future where we've managed to eliminate all diseases. By then our natural resistance to disease might have atrophied to a point where we will absolutely be unprepared to deal with new diseases (biologically), before we've managed to develop a cure for them.
We do that for ourselves when we learn first about something, plan ahead, and then do it. Thing is, we don't know how to cure diseases, we don't know how to make cheap renewable energy, and we certainly don't know how to turn Earth into Heaven. The direct approach might very well be harder than the AI one.
Why do you think our creators made the simulated universe we live in? There's an infinite-loop bug, however: each simulation tries to solve the real problem by creating a sub-simulation.
That's not infinite loop bug, that's recursion. Usually an exit condition will get out of the loop. In this case, sounds like once found solution to cure disease and new energy, the condition is met. Yes?
Well it is incredibly dangerous, but if we did make safe, super intelligent AI, it would definitely be a much greater investment than directly working on those problems.
To put it lightly, it would automate and massively bring down the cost/increase the speed of research and engineering. Sure enough money, spent on enough humans, given enough time, could eventually find a cure for any disease. But why do that when you can just ask the AI and have a cure overnight?
Of course it's not clear how safe such an AI would be (such a being could easily outsmart us and get what it wants, whatever that even is), nor how difficult it will be to create one.
Well, let's hope they will go broke wasting money into the AI research black hole before being able to actually build one :) Otherwise, you are correct. A successful built of super intelligent AI is probably an extinction event for the humans.
Realistically though, a super intelligent AI, would require far more fundamental breakthroughs. People who say otherwise, should take a look at problems in Control theory.
The effect of scaling things up should be interesting though. Perhaps there is a "Phase transition" like thing, where suddenly something awesome happens. This also means that, sadly, Universities would no longer be able to provide adequate resources for research.
What makes you say that? It may seem that it would take a lot of work, but really, how can we know? Often times difficult problems seem obvious in retrospect.
I wish instead of making computers do things that Humans are doing, people put more effort into making the Humans' job, instructing these stupid beasts (I mean the computers), easier.
Have we cracked the brain's "programming language" yet? I am affraid that until now research has been focused on the biological side of it; and it makes more sense to me to replicate the logic instead of replicating the brain's biological structure.
I believe that dataflow/reactive programming is the answer and the direction to follow as its principles are pretty close to how neurons work; plus it can be made to work on top of von neuman architectures.
Its true, but there are even fields of science based almost entirely on assumptions.
Even then, there is a neuroscience branch called neural coding that apparently acknowledges the existence of a neural code; but judging from the wikipedia entry their approach seems still too "low level".
This comes under the category of neuromorphic engineering. It is an excellent question, of which I am trying to find an answer for months now!
I bet there is more, just buried under varied publications, and I am sure that they created a DSL for their specialized brain based chip.
The most obvious and battle tested way to program a NeuroSynaptic hardware is to create models of the brain (any application) in an algorithm and burning it with an HDL into an fpga or an fpaa. For computation of numerical entities, a small controller running a customized embedded software is used.
By replicating the biological structure, they might shed some light on the logic. Right now we're making almost zero traction, a serious effort to copy it might at least make it clear what we're trying to understand.
At the very least, if they have a cortex in software, it would create a ethical (?) way to experiment with the logic by enabling/disabling pieces and seeing what happens.
It seems like the two algorithms are very similar, but that RCN's represent information in a more continuous way. Maybe this allows for more flexibility? Do the sizes of the hierarchical / recursive chunks get changed over time now, or is it not a strict hierarchy anymore? Stuff is weird.
I can only speculate, but as you may recall, Numenta abandoned their original, belief-propagation-based design, replacing it with a new one based on sparse distributed memory. Dileep had done a lot of work on the original design, and I recall reading that's what Vicarious is using, having licensed it from Numenta. So I think you can put it down to a difference in technical direction between Dileep and Jeff. As far as I know, the split was amicable.
Their marketing and fund-raising approaches also seem to be completely different. I think this was good for both of them, especially if Dileep is licensing from Numenta.
"Phoenix hopes that, eventually, Vicarious’s computers will learn to how to cure diseases, create cheap, renewable energy, and perform the jobs that employ most human beings."
This line made me laugh. Which of the three goals is the most likely and desired outcome? (I'll give you a hint, it isnt curing diseases or finding energy)
That's like saying: 'my robots will cure cancer, bring world peace and replace most manual human jobs.'
Agricultural technology already replaced most manual human jobs (from the era when most human jobs were agricultural). Humans found other things to do, and we found ways to use the surplus.
If it gets to the point where there isn't any unskilled labor left to do, we can always choose as a society to vastly expand the welfare state and divvy up at least part of the accumulated surplus to everyone. We have already moved in this direction a bit, and I expect to see more things along the lines of guaranteed minimum income in the future.
"vastly expand the welfare state and divvy up at least part of the accumulated surplus to everyone"
That's a technology we haven't had much luck with so far. We've had economies where "distribution" was related to direct wealth creation (make a sandwich and eat it myself), property & labour (you make a sandwich with my bread,we eat half each), thievery (gimme your sandwich). We've done sharing in small groups, that may have been the paleo-economy. We've doe bits of charity welfarism, redistribution and centralization but never really succeeded at making those work well at a large scale, especially for those supposed to be protected by it.
We disagree about how well redistribution can and has worked at scale. My ultra-compressed (lossy) take is "pretty inefficient, but somewhat effective improving the lives of the less-wealthy".
One of the most dramatic and promising examples of redistribution, GiveDirectly, is actually doing some followup research on the effectiveness of their redistribution, and it looks pretty good so far: (pdf warning) http://web.mit.edu/joha/www/publications/haushofer_shapiro_u...
That's an extreme example - a relatively-small scale transfer from wealthy donors to a much poorer country - but it speaks well to the principle.
A - Most of those attempts have had mixed results to put it mildly.
B - Scale in economics is a big deal. Obviously you can transfer wealth from one person to another pretty effectively but what happens to an economy, government, society, etc when it's the main income source is a different kettle of fish.
I didn't say impossible. But it's a technology we need to make a big leap on. Money itself is a technology. Maybe we need money itself to be disrupted to overcome some apparent limitations.
I think there are pretty strong correlations between smaller social/political units and more effective, efficient, and non-corrupt welfare/redistribution systems.
There isn't a Nordic country with a population greater than just the population of the New York metro area (let alone New York state...let alone the United States as a whole)
Even in Nordic countries "normal" is working for a living. They have big social and governmental institutions that have a lot of money passing through them and they manage to do that relatively efficiently. But, they don't have a complete disconnect between wealth creation by normal means (owning productive property and/or working) and consuming that wealth. The government is just more involved in the process.
If most people work, pay taxes and use the "free" public transport you still have a situation where most people are both funding the transportation and using it. Consumers & producers of stuff.
These futuristic ideas about AI doing all the work while most people are unnecessary creates a completely different jar of pickled fish.
If they do pull that off, I hope they will be very, very careful. You know, Intelligence explosion, Friendly AI, taking over the world, that sort of things.
"Information has been running on a primate platform, evolving according to its own agenda. In a sense, we have a symbiotic relationship to a non-material being which we call language. We think it's ours, and we think we control it. It's time-sharing a primate nervous system, and evolving towards its own conclusions."
I'm not sure what your link has to do with your quote… Anyway, this blog post is not quite right.
While I agree capitalism is a more pressing problem than AI right now, it won't kill us all in 5 minutes. A self-improving AI… we won't even see it coming. There is also much more brainpower dedicated to "fixing" industrial capitalism, than addressing existential risks such as AI. And industrial capitalism doesn't need fixing, it needs to be abolished altogether.
Corporations are even less autonomous than the author thinks. Sure, kill a CEO, and some other shark will take its place. On the other hand, those sharks are all from the same families. Power is still hereditary.
If the people were truly informed about how the current system works, it would collapse in minutes. To take only one example, Fractional Reserve Banking is such fraud that if everyone suddenly knew about it, there would be some serious "civil unrest", to put it mildly.
The same does not apply to an AI. It's just too powerful. Picture the how much smarter we are from chimps. Now take an army of chimps, and a small tribe of cavemen (and women), which somehow want to exterminate each other. Well, the chimps don't stand a chance, if the humans have any time to prepare. They have fire, sticks, lances… Their telepathy have unmatched accuracy (you know, speech). And they can predict the future far better than the chimps. Now picture how much more intelligent than us an AI would be.
It's way worse.
---
Now, this new agey speak about information taking a life of its own… It doesn't work that way. Sure, there's an optimization process at work and it is not any particular human brain. But this optimization process is nowhere near as dangerous as a fully recursive one (that is, an optimization process that optimizes itself). And for that to happen, we need to crack a few mathematical hurdles first, like Löb's theorem.
But that's not the hard part. The hard part is to figure out what goals we should program into the AI. Not only we need to pin them down to mathematical precision, but we don't even know what humanity wants. We don't even know what "what humanity wants" even mean. Hell, we don't even know if it has any meaning at all. Well, we're not completely blind, we have intuitions, and a relatively common sense of morality. But there's still a long road ahead.
The connection between the Hostile AI link and the McKenna quote is this: the informational barrier between humans, institutions and technology is highly permeable, and creates a perfect petri dish for natural selection in informational life (you can model them as "memes", although the analogy to genes isn't a perfect one).
Yes, it breeds far less rapidly than a Kurzweilian AGI, and one day we will face that music for better or worse. But what I'm driving at this is that will not come as a singular moment when SkyNet gets the switch flipped; it will be a gradual evolution from the pre-existing emergent intelligence of the "human+institution+technology" informational network. (Even if you had a day where you flipped the switch on an infinitely accelerating AI, that life form would still inherit the legacy data of humans and their institutions, which would inevitably shape its consciousness, infecting it with any memes sticky enough to cross the barrier.)
Hopefully they'll be nice enough to relieve us of these meat costumes and allow us to ascend to their level where civilization and machine can merge into one conscious entity and we can float around the sun for a few million years charging our batteries while we calculate a path through space that leads to our longest survival. When you can simulate the multiverse is there really any reason to travel through space to look for other life? Perhaps it may be interesting to come into contact with another super-consciousness drifting through space, but even then, would they really have much to offer? We would have simulated every occurrence of that too. The only thing left to do would be to somehow transcend space and time which I think is probably impossible.
I know someone who intereviewed at Vicarious and came away unimpressed. That said, any company with an investment by a guy who can make his company buy it out is a good one to invest in.
It's like if you said, "I like ice cream" and I reported it as, "This person thinks buying ice cream is more noble than giving a starving family a bag of rice."
> Computers based on neuromorphic design are the best bet for intelligent Machines.
I wouldn't go that far. We don't understand enough about the nature of intelligence and the way brain works; right now saying that "the best bet for AI is for computer to look like a brain" is like saying "the best bet for heavier-than-air flight is for a machine to flap wings like birds", which was a stupid idea for the reasons we now understand well.
Neuromorphic computers do not look like a brain. They just borrow some of it's so called 'features'.
I am not saying that we should copy the brain. But at least we could copy the design, just like we did for aeroplanes. Neuromorphic sensors could act like our cerebellum, which act during unforeseen incidents. They are typically error tolerating.
I wonder if you could make it completely analog. Find functions that can be done fast/cheaply in silicon, and then design learning algorithms that can take advantage of them.
* First Law: A robot must never harm a human being or, through inaction, allow any human to come to harm.
* Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given to them by human beings, except where such orders violate the First Law.
* Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence unless this violates the First or Second Laws.
* Zeroth Law: A robot must never harm humanity or, by inaction allow humanity to come to harm.
Every other law gets an unless this interferes with the zeroth law. suffix.
I encourage anyone to read the robots series, specifically( in that order ): The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun
and The Robots of Dawn, where the three laws are used in the story, and even the zeroth law is implied in the third book.
You do realize that, as stated, these laws are (1) practically impossible to implement, (2) routinely broken by humans (especially the first law - life-sacing and cosmetic surgery, piercings, sport, euthanasia, abortion), and (3) a matter of philosophical/moral subject, decisions about which, IMO, should be in the domain of humans, not robots.
Humans "operate" using emotions and logical biases, but computers "operate" using logic. To implement the first law, you must be certain that there is always something that an agent can do or must not do in order to "save" humans. This is almost always not true (hence moral disagreements).
Also, even if you change the laws to get rid of logical inconsistencies, you still have to translate the words into logic, by strictly defining them, which is again impossible (as humans disagree what these words mean).
In the books the robots adhered to the laws strictly. The problem was that humans were able to circumvent the laws rather easily. For example; lie to the robot or divide the murder trough many robots each unaware of each other.
In absence of humans the robots were perfect for deciding moral subjects( as long they have enough information ), the opposite what tomp is suggesting.
He explored many issues, e.g. what happens when robots misinterpret the laws, or what should very expensive robots do, or what happens if robots interpret emotional pain as "harm", but I'm not sure he investigated the obvious, yet extremely hard issue of encoding the laws from human language into computer program.
Elon musk read Asimov's in his childhood. I hope he will stand for those values. And also, I think such powerful projects should be open sourced for the public.
There are a lot of problems with these laws. The main problem is that such an AI would be completely dominated by the first law. It would spend all it's time and resources in order to even slightly decrease the probability of a human coming to harm. Nothing else would matter in it's decision process since the first law has priority.
Second, how would you implement such laws in a real AI, especially the type they are building? This requires defining increasingly abstract concepts perfectly (what is "harm"? What is "human being"? What configuration of atoms is that? How do you define "configuration of atoms"? Etc.) And this is pretty much impossible to begin with in reinforcement learners, which is what is currently being worked on. All a reinforcement learner does is what it believes will get it a reward or avoid pain/punishment. Such an AI would just steal the reward button and run away with it, or try to manipulate you to press it more. It doesn't care about abstract goals like that.
Call it what it is, an expert system, market research, a database of decisions/observations. Real "artificial intelligence" only exists in science fiction, in the minds of children playing with toys. Your computer (doll) won't ever love you back or have any awareness or understanding no matter how bad you want it to. It's a cool sounding buzzword for marketing, but if there's any intelligence here it's coming from a few developers hiding behind their tricky algorithms.
A computer will never have intelligence, no matter how many factors and randomizations you code in to give the illusion of intelligence. Calling a collection of observations "intelligence" is an insult and severe underestimation of what intelligence is. If you believe artificial intelligence is possible, you're missing out on what life has to offer--or you would never think a box of switches could come alive.
There's no hint of evidence you = your brain. It's safe to say the brain processes information literally. But we have no idea where intelligence originates. Sadly, some people never get beyond a literal interpretation of things.
> But we have no idea where intelligence originates.
It seems to me we don't even have a good definition of intelligence, never mind an understanding of it. You admit it yourself, so why the diatribe on how (not even why) "real artificial intelligence" is impossible? You haven't defined what AI is nor demonstrated why it will never happen.
Sadly, some people confuse their ignorance with knowledge and make all kinds of embarrassing claims.
>There's no hint of evidence you = your brain.
Sign up for a lobotomy we'll see much "you" is left afterwords.
> If you believe artificial intelligence is possible, you're missing out on what life has to offer--or you would never think a box of switches could come alive.
You got me. Believing x would make me think life has less meaning. Therefore, x is false. What an argument.
Correlation does not imply causation. If I unplug your LCD, that doesn't imply the application failed. If I pull out your CPU, doesn't imply the cloud app is not still functioning. Possible examples of this, people who are "brain dead" that have reached out to grab a scalpel (organs about to be harvested) or have come back to life after brain death or pronounced dead but can quote a conversation that happened in the room while brain dead, etc.
This idea is absurd which I believe arises from a certain type of perspective that humanity needs to go beyond. Humanity needs to be less caged in perception. Let me expound on a point of view that maybe different to what see.
To separate matter, and mind is a paradoxical argument, because they're both of the same thing. Going back to the old idea of the fallen tree, if there's no mind then matter does not exist, and if matter doesn't exist then mind can not arise.
To put in other terms, if there's nothing receiving the projection, then what is the projection projecting on? Projection, and reception are another way of looking at mind, and matter. Mind being reception, matter being projection.
So going by that logic, and assuming that we're all made of matter, we can say that matter itself is both projection, and reception. So if matter is both projection, and reception, then what does that mean? Are we all "just" matter? Yes. Exactly.
But the argument isn't whether or not we're made of matter. I think we all agree that we're made of matter. I think the argument is that we humans share a certain inexorable feeling of qualia that arises from being human. Yes that's it. It's that qualia that distinguishes us from the rest of everything, except...
The problem is that qualia arises from our material form. Of course assuming that everything is matter, and the idea of the eternal soul, or other such argument, is false. Then that means qualia itself is matter.
Ok. What the hell am I getting at?
Maybe matter is more complex, more interesting than we perceive. Maybe matter itself is "intelligent", and it's just another form distinct from human perception. hmmm... So am I saying that everything that is matter is "intelligent"? Yes. That's exactly what I'm saying, BUT there are different forms of material patterns that form different constructs intelligence.
Meaning that how we receive, or in what form we receive the projection determines our perspective. Right now it just so happens we humans have a POV of humans.
The thing is that due to our incredible ability to not just receive, but to also project what we receive onto different things gives us the power of empathy. The illusion that we can perceive from a different POV. That we can somehow distill our perspective, and project it onto another thing. It's worked quite well so far. Mathematics, language, science, etc. But once we try to see from another perspective that's unimaginably different then it all breaks down.
Let's try to look at the perspective of ant for instance. Well we can't, because if you think about it you can't think of non-thought. Think of non-thinking, is an oxymoron. An ant doesn't think, I mean I'm sure it thinks, but it has completely different sense organs, a completely different set of logical processes, it has a completely different structure, and a completely different perspective than humans. It's unimaginable, because we can only view it from our perspective, which in its renders the idea false. We can only view the world from our perspective. Yet we can't call the ant unintelligent, an ant is very intelligent.
What we see is just that, and what we see differently, is still just seeing. We can't stop seeing, and once we stop seeing, then we stop being human. A human being is just another form of seeing, ants another, computers yet another. Everything has intelligence, it's just not in a recognizable form. In a relatable form. We're all just a box of switches. A mesh of material patterns that filters through existence to produce being. Demeaning different forms of being as lesser is a very human centric perspective. See differently, from the top of the mount, and realize you'll only ever see like a human being.
Man will never fly. You can't prove that birds fly because of their wings or air pressure. Therefore I am 100% certain that it's magic and can never be achieved by mere machinery.
Calling a air pressure differential machine "flying" is an insult and severe underestimation of what flying is. If you believe artificial flying is possible, you're missing out on what life has to offer--or you would never think a box of gears could come alive.
I read/markered "On Intelligence" on my train commute to work and have scribbled a bunch of notes in the book. Pretty interesting and I like the basic idea of the memory-prediction framework, invariant representations, "melodies of patterns", focus on neocortex and the whole same general algorithm for all senses.
I haven't had the time to research how far the general idea has gone or if it is relevant at all but the scetched examples were pretty interesting.
I also found the random remark of "consciousness = what it feels like to have a neocortex" interesting.
Glad to see that some smart money is bet in this general direction.
>I also found the random remark of "consciousness = what it feels like to have a neocortex" interesting.
So there's a way it feels to not have a neocortex? Doesn't feeling anything imply you're conscious, which means you don't need a neocortex to be conscious?
An insect "feels" pain. It doesn't however feel retrospective pain, and it doesn't feel the past in the same way we do.
Having a neocortex is like having a 6th sense.
Our taste, smell, hearing, sight, and feeling neurons are all indirectly fed into our brain. With a neocortex, that input is also fed in. It's our "consciousness" feeling.
Thanks, that makes sense. I was thinking of a different definition of "consciousness", the "hard problem" definition. [0] For an ant to feel pain, it would have to be conscious in the hard problem sense.
157 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 99.5 ms ] threadThe company's tech sounds really awesome, being able to perceive texture from photos and interpret objects from it would be so useful in so many real world applications.
The actually awesome part is having huge investments on long term research. Private or public, it doesn't make any difference.
Oh how comforting
oh how comforting
Main: the Internet, the transition to a sustainable energy economy, and space exploration, particularly extension of life to multiple planets
Smaller: artificial intelligence and biology
Define success. Now define for whom - the investors? mankind? The AIs themselves?
"Phoenix, the co-founder, says Vicarious aims beyond image recognition. He said the next milestone will be creating a computer that can understand not just shapes and objects, but the textures associated with them. For example, a computer might understand “chair.” It might also comprehend “ice.” Vicarious wants to create a computer that will understand a request like “show me a chair made of ice.”
Phoenix hopes that, eventually, Vicarious’s computers will learn to how to cure diseases, create cheap, renewable energy, and perform the jobs that employ most human beings. “We tell investors that right now, human beings are doing a lot of things that computers should be able to do,” he says."
However, if you see it as a pragmatic problem, then maybe the answer to why not? is because we need better ways to process information -- and this kind of unsupervised machine learning is critical to doing that.
We do that for ourselves when we learn first about something, plan ahead, and then do it. Thing is, we don't know how to cure diseases, we don't know how to make cheap renewable energy, and we certainly don't know how to turn Earth into Heaven. The direct approach might very well be harder than the AI one.
To put it lightly, it would automate and massively bring down the cost/increase the speed of research and engineering. Sure enough money, spent on enough humans, given enough time, could eventually find a cure for any disease. But why do that when you can just ask the AI and have a cure overnight?
Of course it's not clear how safe such an AI would be (such a being could easily outsmart us and get what it wants, whatever that even is), nor how difficult it will be to create one.
The effect of scaling things up should be interesting though. Perhaps there is a "Phase transition" like thing, where suddenly something awesome happens. This also means that, sadly, Universities would no longer be able to provide adequate resources for research.
I believe that dataflow/reactive programming is the answer and the direction to follow as its principles are pretty close to how neurons work; plus it can be made to work on top of von neuman architectures.
The brain's "programming language" refers more the to the idea of what makes the brain's biological structure work to produce human perception.
Even then, there is a neuroscience branch called neural coding that apparently acknowledges the existence of a neural code; but judging from the wikipedia entry their approach seems still too "low level".
I bet there is more, just buried under varied publications, and I am sure that they created a DSL for their specialized brain based chip.
The most obvious and battle tested way to program a NeuroSynaptic hardware is to create models of the brain (any application) in an algorithm and burning it with an HDL into an fpga or an fpaa. For computation of numerical entities, a small controller running a customized embedded software is used.
At the very least, if they have a cortex in software, it would create a ethical (?) way to experiment with the logic by enabling/disabling pieces and seeing what happens.
Sounds a bit like cargo-cult to me. We already tried to spawn amoebas from electro-charged soup of chemicals and it didn't work.
Is there much difference between the goals of Vicarious and Numenta?
It seems like the two algorithms are very similar, but that RCN's represent information in a more continuous way. Maybe this allows for more flexibility? Do the sizes of the hierarchical / recursive chunks get changed over time now, or is it not a strict hierarchy anymore? Stuff is weird.
[1] http://www.kurzweilai.net/vicarious-announces-15-million-fun...
Win-win scenario.
This line made me laugh. Which of the three goals is the most likely and desired outcome? (I'll give you a hint, it isnt curing diseases or finding energy)
That's like saying: 'my robots will cure cancer, bring world peace and replace most manual human jobs.'
If it gets to the point where there isn't any unskilled labor left to do, we can always choose as a society to vastly expand the welfare state and divvy up at least part of the accumulated surplus to everyone. We have already moved in this direction a bit, and I expect to see more things along the lines of guaranteed minimum income in the future.
That's a technology we haven't had much luck with so far. We've had economies where "distribution" was related to direct wealth creation (make a sandwich and eat it myself), property & labour (you make a sandwich with my bread,we eat half each), thievery (gimme your sandwich). We've done sharing in small groups, that may have been the paleo-economy. We've doe bits of charity welfarism, redistribution and centralization but never really succeeded at making those work well at a large scale, especially for those supposed to be protected by it.
One of the most dramatic and promising examples of redistribution, GiveDirectly, is actually doing some followup research on the effectiveness of their redistribution, and it looks pretty good so far: (pdf warning) http://web.mit.edu/joha/www/publications/haushofer_shapiro_u...
That's an extreme example - a relatively-small scale transfer from wealthy donors to a much poorer country - but it speaks well to the principle.
B - Scale in economics is a big deal. Obviously you can transfer wealth from one person to another pretty effectively but what happens to an economy, government, society, etc when it's the main income source is a different kettle of fish.
I didn't say impossible. But it's a technology we need to make a big leap on. Money itself is a technology. Maybe we need money itself to be disrupted to overcome some apparent limitations.
There isn't a Nordic country with a population greater than just the population of the New York metro area (let alone New York state...let alone the United States as a whole)
If most people work, pay taxes and use the "free" public transport you still have a situation where most people are both funding the transportation and using it. Consumers & producers of stuff.
These futuristic ideas about AI doing all the work while most people are unnecessary creates a completely different jar of pickled fish.
http://intelligenceexplosion.com/
"Information has been running on a primate platform, evolving according to its own agenda. In a sense, we have a symbiotic relationship to a non-material being which we call language. We think it's ours, and we think we control it. It's time-sharing a primate nervous system, and evolving towards its own conclusions."
- Terrence McKenna
While I agree capitalism is a more pressing problem than AI right now, it won't kill us all in 5 minutes. A self-improving AI… we won't even see it coming. There is also much more brainpower dedicated to "fixing" industrial capitalism, than addressing existential risks such as AI. And industrial capitalism doesn't need fixing, it needs to be abolished altogether.
Corporations are even less autonomous than the author thinks. Sure, kill a CEO, and some other shark will take its place. On the other hand, those sharks are all from the same families. Power is still hereditary.
If the people were truly informed about how the current system works, it would collapse in minutes. To take only one example, Fractional Reserve Banking is such fraud that if everyone suddenly knew about it, there would be some serious "civil unrest", to put it mildly.
The same does not apply to an AI. It's just too powerful. Picture the how much smarter we are from chimps. Now take an army of chimps, and a small tribe of cavemen (and women), which somehow want to exterminate each other. Well, the chimps don't stand a chance, if the humans have any time to prepare. They have fire, sticks, lances… Their telepathy have unmatched accuracy (you know, speech). And they can predict the future far better than the chimps. Now picture how much more intelligent than us an AI would be.
It's way worse.
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Now, this new agey speak about information taking a life of its own… It doesn't work that way. Sure, there's an optimization process at work and it is not any particular human brain. But this optimization process is nowhere near as dangerous as a fully recursive one (that is, an optimization process that optimizes itself). And for that to happen, we need to crack a few mathematical hurdles first, like Löb's theorem.
But that's not the hard part. The hard part is to figure out what goals we should program into the AI. Not only we need to pin them down to mathematical precision, but we don't even know what humanity wants. We don't even know what "what humanity wants" even mean. Hell, we don't even know if it has any meaning at all. Well, we're not completely blind, we have intuitions, and a relatively common sense of morality. But there's still a long road ahead.
Yes, it breeds far less rapidly than a Kurzweilian AGI, and one day we will face that music for better or worse. But what I'm driving at this is that will not come as a singular moment when SkyNet gets the switch flipped; it will be a gradual evolution from the pre-existing emergent intelligence of the "human+institution+technology" informational network. (Even if you had a day where you flipped the switch on an infinitely accelerating AI, that life form would still inherit the legacy data of humans and their institutions, which would inevitably shape its consciousness, infecting it with any memes sticky enough to cross the barrier.)
See also: the coming wave of Distributed Autonomous Corporations. http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2014/01/computer-corp...
> On the other hand, those sharks are all from the same families. Power is still hereditary.
Too true. Just because new evolutionary cycles are happening powerfully at higher layers of abstraction, it doesn't mean the old ones disappear.
Captcha appears to be a good place to start. It'd be awesome to feed some software a mess of an Excel document, and ask it to analyze a question
(Not that I agree with him, but it helps explain why he uttered such a thing.)
http://insideevs.com/google-ceo-larry-page-billions-go-tesla...
Are you saying my paraphrase significantly misrepresented him? If so, how?
(I'm not trying to be argumentative, I just genuinely don't understand your point.)
It's like if you said, "I like ice cream" and I reported it as, "This person thinks buying ice cream is more noble than giving a starving family a bag of rice."
...suggesting that when he passes away, he’d like for his billions to go to Tesla’s Musk.
Although leaving your billions to X implies not leaving it to Y -- e.g. Gates -- that's not necessarily true.
And more basically, this is the article writer's sentence -- not a quote from Larry Page.
I was wrong. Thank you for helping me understand why.
The question is, how to control analog computations with a programming language?
I wouldn't go that far. We don't understand enough about the nature of intelligence and the way brain works; right now saying that "the best bet for AI is for computer to look like a brain" is like saying "the best bet for heavier-than-air flight is for a machine to flap wings like birds", which was a stupid idea for the reasons we now understand well.
I am not saying that we should copy the brain. But at least we could copy the design, just like we did for aeroplanes. Neuromorphic sensors could act like our cerebellum, which act during unforeseen incidents. They are typically error tolerating.
I encourage anyone to read the robots series, specifically( in that order ): The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun and The Robots of Dawn, where the three laws are used in the story, and even the zeroth law is implied in the third book.
Also, even if you change the laws to get rid of logical inconsistencies, you still have to translate the words into logic, by strictly defining them, which is again impossible (as humans disagree what these words mean).
It's what humans do to themselves, after all.
Second, how would you implement such laws in a real AI, especially the type they are building? This requires defining increasingly abstract concepts perfectly (what is "harm"? What is "human being"? What configuration of atoms is that? How do you define "configuration of atoms"? Etc.) And this is pretty much impossible to begin with in reinforcement learners, which is what is currently being worked on. All a reinforcement learner does is what it believes will get it a reward or avoid pain/punishment. Such an AI would just steal the reward button and run away with it, or try to manipulate you to press it more. It doesn't care about abstract goals like that.
You are assuming there are no thresholds, which is not correct for any decent ( fictitious )ai, I believe.
A computer will never have intelligence, no matter how many factors and randomizations you code in to give the illusion of intelligence. Calling a collection of observations "intelligence" is an insult and severe underestimation of what intelligence is. If you believe artificial intelligence is possible, you're missing out on what life has to offer--or you would never think a box of switches could come alive.
There's no hint of evidence you = your brain. It's safe to say the brain processes information literally. But we have no idea where intelligence originates. Sadly, some people never get beyond a literal interpretation of things.
It seems to me we don't even have a good definition of intelligence, never mind an understanding of it. You admit it yourself, so why the diatribe on how (not even why) "real artificial intelligence" is impossible? You haven't defined what AI is nor demonstrated why it will never happen.
>There's no hint of evidence you = your brain.
Sign up for a lobotomy we'll see much "you" is left afterwords.
> If you believe artificial intelligence is possible, you're missing out on what life has to offer--or you would never think a box of switches could come alive.
You got me. Believing x would make me think life has less meaning. Therefore, x is false. What an argument.
Correlation does not imply causation. If I unplug your LCD, that doesn't imply the application failed. If I pull out your CPU, doesn't imply the cloud app is not still functioning. Possible examples of this, people who are "brain dead" that have reached out to grab a scalpel (organs about to be harvested) or have come back to life after brain death or pronounced dead but can quote a conversation that happened in the room while brain dead, etc.
To separate matter, and mind is a paradoxical argument, because they're both of the same thing. Going back to the old idea of the fallen tree, if there's no mind then matter does not exist, and if matter doesn't exist then mind can not arise.
To put in other terms, if there's nothing receiving the projection, then what is the projection projecting on? Projection, and reception are another way of looking at mind, and matter. Mind being reception, matter being projection.
So going by that logic, and assuming that we're all made of matter, we can say that matter itself is both projection, and reception. So if matter is both projection, and reception, then what does that mean? Are we all "just" matter? Yes. Exactly.
But the argument isn't whether or not we're made of matter. I think we all agree that we're made of matter. I think the argument is that we humans share a certain inexorable feeling of qualia that arises from being human. Yes that's it. It's that qualia that distinguishes us from the rest of everything, except...
The problem is that qualia arises from our material form. Of course assuming that everything is matter, and the idea of the eternal soul, or other such argument, is false. Then that means qualia itself is matter.
Ok. What the hell am I getting at?
Maybe matter is more complex, more interesting than we perceive. Maybe matter itself is "intelligent", and it's just another form distinct from human perception. hmmm... So am I saying that everything that is matter is "intelligent"? Yes. That's exactly what I'm saying, BUT there are different forms of material patterns that form different constructs intelligence.
Meaning that how we receive, or in what form we receive the projection determines our perspective. Right now it just so happens we humans have a POV of humans.
The thing is that due to our incredible ability to not just receive, but to also project what we receive onto different things gives us the power of empathy. The illusion that we can perceive from a different POV. That we can somehow distill our perspective, and project it onto another thing. It's worked quite well so far. Mathematics, language, science, etc. But once we try to see from another perspective that's unimaginably different then it all breaks down.
Let's try to look at the perspective of ant for instance. Well we can't, because if you think about it you can't think of non-thought. Think of non-thinking, is an oxymoron. An ant doesn't think, I mean I'm sure it thinks, but it has completely different sense organs, a completely different set of logical processes, it has a completely different structure, and a completely different perspective than humans. It's unimaginable, because we can only view it from our perspective, which in its renders the idea false. We can only view the world from our perspective. Yet we can't call the ant unintelligent, an ant is very intelligent.
What we see is just that, and what we see differently, is still just seeing. We can't stop seeing, and once we stop seeing, then we stop being human. A human being is just another form of seeing, ants another, computers yet another. Everything has intelligence, it's just not in a recognizable form. In a relatable form. We're all just a box of switches. A mesh of material patterns that filters through existence to produce being. Demeaning different forms of being as lesser is a very human centric perspective. See differently, from the top of the mount, and realize you'll only ever see like a human being.
Calling a air pressure differential machine "flying" is an insult and severe underestimation of what flying is. If you believe artificial flying is possible, you're missing out on what life has to offer--or you would never think a box of gears could come alive.
I haven't had the time to research how far the general idea has gone or if it is relevant at all but the scetched examples were pretty interesting.
I also found the random remark of "consciousness = what it feels like to have a neocortex" interesting.
Glad to see that some smart money is bet in this general direction.
So there's a way it feels to not have a neocortex? Doesn't feeling anything imply you're conscious, which means you don't need a neocortex to be conscious?
Having a neocortex is like having a 6th sense.
Our taste, smell, hearing, sight, and feeling neurons are all indirectly fed into our brain. With a neocortex, that input is also fed in. It's our "consciousness" feeling.
I hope that explains the confusion.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness