Hacker News Reader

Comment by johann28 | Hacker News Reader

You're over-glorifying humans. We're still just a savannah ape and our skills reflect that.

What? The brain has not only solved the vision problem (reconstructing depth from still images, recognising the objects in the scene, and filling in the occluded parts), it has also solved the motion problem of coordinated the movement of our ~300 muscles (given constraints, how do I move from A to B, or pickup the cup, or do a handstand), as well as solved the memory problem (basically infinite memory, with some sort of priority system for removing unused/old memories so we can always learn more). Additionally it solved the communication problem with language that computers still can't parse properly. It is so smart it is even conscious, and self-aware as well as death-aware.

This is not over-glorifying. That is fact.

If you have to forget, your memory is not infinite. My computer's HD is infinite, but you have to remove programs that you don't use.

Well technically yes, but I could counter argue that we have 'living memories' that we can not only replay at any time (any of them, without any buffering or delay), but also change and combine with other memories to create new memories. Additionally if someone tells you something the brain can search all your memories in what seems to be a microsecond and pull up the relevant ones (file search on steroids, that can even search every single frame in all your recorded movies).

Much more useful than static data on a hard drive.

Except when you can't remember something and you have to spend seconds, or even minutes trying to remember it.

A hard drive would find it much faster.

The brain doesn't "solve" tasks. That's cart before horse thinking. Our whole concept of "vision" only exists because eyes and visual cortices exist. I know it seems like a philosophical nitpick, but saying that the visual cortex is good at vision is like saying that water is good at being wet or being surprised that your soup is perfectly fitting the shape of your bowl.

Now, the human brain is definitely a complicated thing to study and understand (by whom? by itself!), but framing it as if the brain was a computer that received a task that it then solved, is the wrong way of thinking about this.

I know, I was approaching it from your angle, the current state of ML, and explaining it from that context. You support ML but then refer to humans as 'just apes' in a derogatory fashion. I was just pointing out that in fact these dumb apes solved all your ML problems a very long time ago.

There's evidence that our savannah ape ancestors experienced unpredictable climate conditions, so it's not that humans are adapted to savannah life, but rather constantly changing conditions that require an adaptable brain:

http://humanorigins.si.edu/research/climate-research/effects

Reply on news.ycombinator.com