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Comment by _yosefk | Hacker News Reader

You can't program a brain the way you can program computers. You can't program NNs either, im that sense. They have their place, I work for a company shipping them now with hw acceleration. Let's ignore the role of RAM here amd the fact that NNs are not like real neurons and let me grant the point that it's not a vNA, programming model-wise. Most of computing however will not be NN-based because you want to program things precisely, and the brain is terrible at executing commands precisely.

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But that's the thing - I don't want to program things precisely! Most people don't. I want to tell my computer what I want in plain English, and I want it to understand me, translate my wish into actions, and perform those actions. Just like a human servant would do. That's the future of programming (or so we should hope, at least).

Well, I would say it sounds like you want a computer that understands you imprecisely so it can account for the idiosyncrasies of human communication, but I think you still want it to carry out the action it's decided you want in a precise manner. Protocol negotiation does not lend itself to imprecise ordering of actions or commands.

Of course. If I hire a human servant, I will expect him to understand me even when I'm not very precise in my commands, and perform the action I wanted precisely. In fact, the best servant is the one who does what you want before you have to ask him, right?

That's exactly what I expect from computers in the future.

I don't know why you're assuming the AI is smart enough to perfectly understand what you want even with incomplete knowledge but is stupid enough to need your help even though it's effectively capable of doing everything by itself.

Because it's a servant, not a master.

It's perfectly possible to have an automaton that's good at predicting needs and inferring outcomes without assuming that it can set independent goals of its own without being prompted.

One is driven by external stimuli in a deterministic way, which makes it a computer like any other.

The other is internally directed - which edges into questions of sentience, free-will, and independent mentation, and is unknown territory for CS.

Siri and Viv are already heading in the former direction. Siri has some nice canned responses which can create a fun illusion of a personality, but not many developers - and even fewer NLP designers - are going to tell you Siri is independently goal seeking.

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