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Comment by emmab | Hacker News Reader

> capable of making decisions without billions of data points, just like humans do.

Doesn't this ignore transfer learning? Humans have orders of magnitude more than billions of data points over their lifetimes.

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Computers get billions of data points for a single topic/task. Humans get exposed to ginormous amounts of data that's less focused. The amount of sensory information we are taking in is incredible. That information isn't focused on a single task, but we can apply learnings from one field and apply it to another. If a human is trained to sort out foul fruit the human already knows how to generally differentiate between different objects they are looking at, smelling etc. They already know about apples; they already knows that fruit can spoil. It's just combining existing knowledge and skills. On a more complicated task like learning a new language the advantages are similar. I'd bet that a sufficiently large, neutral network that already knows how to perform many tasks would be faster at learning new ones as well.

Additionally, we have absurd amounts of information baked into our genes that give us big head starts on network architectures, motion, vision, etc.

Yeah, compressed using zip there's about 50MB difference between a bacteria and a human... at least kurzweil said something like that ;D

The genes have no information about the world, just information on how to form a nervous system.

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