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Comment by icebraining | Hacker News Reader

But they do build on previous knowledge (that's the training part), it's just the such knowledge is built from scratch, rather than taught by others.

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A human can learn something through a fairly small amount of specific knowledge via written, verbal, etc instruction.

All the data and the training process together are very clunky in comparison.

IE, an inability to be taught by others is a serious limitation to say the least.

Perhaps we can learn from small data, perhaps that’s an illusion. How much of our mind is hard-wired by our genes, our genes being a very slow-learning form of intelligence?

Or, when we see “one” example of a new animal (for example), do we see a single picture? Or do we see it moving for about a second? Effectively multiple images? And, having previously learned a general model for physics, stereoscopic vision, and lighting, does that one second of motion gives us the size, shape, and a guess at the musculature of the animal?

If you strip those advantages, how many training examples do we need? The examples of people blind from birth or from extreme youth who regain vision in adulthood[0] implies that we learn a lot in our youth about how to see, which we can share between recognition tasks we learn later. Keeping those basic skills — avoiding “catastrophic forgetting” — still seems to be a rare and advanced feature in AI, but it’s not impossible.

There is still a lot we don’t know about how our own minds work. We might be closer than we realise, or much further.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_May_(skier) amongst others. I never did find the name of the guy who learned to see from touching a monkey statue…

It's certainly worth keeping in mind the limitations that you describe and human's learning activity is certainly not as the rationalist intuition. But to take these limitation as entirely characterizing human activity seems bend the stick too far the other way and fly in the face of the many ways humans have modified their environment and adapted to those modifications and fairly often learned with only a few examples. And sure, plausibly a fair portion of those quick adaptation involve reworking basic facilities like vision. The whole thing is consistent with the neocortex sitting on top of the rest of brain and serving as a means to rewire it.

> A human can learn something through a fairly small amount of specific knowledge via written, verbal, etc instruction.

This demands the mastery of language which is a very high bar. Most animals haven't achieved this, so I think if you expect to get a computer to learn this way before being able to reason as well before you consider it having intelligence, you would also have consider most animals not having intelligence as well.

> This demands the mastery of language which is a very high bar. Most animals haven't achieved this

Then avoid language as medium. Many animals can learn from being shown an action once and apply it to themselves.

But it's not transferable. If you teach the AI to play checkers, you don't use that knowledge when trying to teach it chess.

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