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Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

This is possibly the worst article I have ever seen in Nature.

It is barely at the level of an undergraduate essay on AI (or AGI or ANI, as the author prefers). A hand-waving argument about "computers not being in the world" that relies on not bothering to define "computers", "being in" or "the world". Convenient avoidance of almost every more subtle anti-Searle/anti-Dreyfus critic (notably Dennett). Almost wilfull narrowing of a much broader argument about the nature of reality and the connection between causality and conventional parametric science, when these things lie at the heart of the author's argument (such as it is).

It is amazing that Nature chose to publish this.

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Note, is not in the the flagship journal, it's an affiliated journal under the Nature imprint. There are about 40 other such: https://www.nature.com/siteindex (see under "N").

It's a Springer joint. Note that the counterpart journal, Science, is published by the AAAS, and is not for profit the way Nature is. If you're interested in science, Science is a great one-stop shop and it's about $120 per year.

Sometimes one wonders whether the chase for exciting stories affects some Nature publications.

Slightly off-topic:

I would be interested in keeping up the latest cutting-edge science developements, but I expect a Nature subscription is too heavy-duty for that. Not necessarily because of the price, but I don't think I would end up using it.

Instead, what would fit my interests better would be a science newsletter that, say, once a month summarizes the most interesting recent developements and sends them to my inbox. I would then use that as a jump-off point and even read the full articles I care about in Nature.

Are there any such newsletters?

How about one of these e-letters [0] backed up by a Science digital subscription to actually read the content?

Referring to a recent TOC [1], the "Research Articles" would likely be more in-depth than you want, but there are also summarizing "Perspectives", "Features", and "Reviews" that I generally find OK for medium-difficulty reading.

[0] https://www.sciencemag.org/subscribe/get-our-newsletters

[1] https://science.sciencemag.org

Scientific American?

Note, is not in the the flagship journal, it's an affiliated journal under the Nature imprint.

Oh. Yes, there are lots of those. They publish too many overhyped battery technology articles. Don't know how bad it is in other fields.

Thanks for the clarification. I hadn't noticed the "not in the real Nature" status when reading it.

Same. I saw the domain name, and thought "How did this get published in Nature???"

Sure...the bar for Nature is really high...friends at my work have been through the editorial/revision process there and it's generally very demanding.

You're demanding that they exactly define what can't be exactly defined, and it's not going to happen ever. We're probably going to get closer and closer, but in the end we're still observing ourselves and reality from the inside.

I believe the goal of the article was to describe the differences between computers and humans, from the viewpoint of humans. What seems to be more popular these days is to start from the viewpoint of a computer and pretend humans are the same thing.

I'm not demanding that they are successful at "defining what can't be exactly defined". I would just like them to make an effort to do so.

The author's whole claims about "being in the world" and "tacit knowledege" are quite amenable to further, useful definition and expansion. For example, do they mean by "tacit" "not subject to an implementation in a way that could include an electronic digital computing device?" Or do they mean "not subject to explication by the human that carries said knowledge" ? By "being in the world" do they mean being a causal object or is merely being subject to the behavior of other causal objects sufficient? There are so many dimensions to both of these central concepts, and yet the author barely explores them at all.

The author also makes no effort to differentiate between computers and robots, even when such a distinction seems quite important if you're going to make claims about "being in the world".

The stated goal of the article was to show "Why General Artificial Intelligence will not be realized".

Ok, so show me a robot that has any clue how to ride a bike from observing others trying.

And it's not going to happen, because we're not there yet.

Show me a human who learned how to ride a bike by watching others.

My impression is that the general dynamics robots are already on a path that isn't hard to imagine becoming quite animal-learning like in the reasonable near-term future. Their body (as with any animal) is a mostly-given, as are the available control systems. Couple this to a NN-style learning process that takes place inside the robot rather than over there in the programmer's development system, and I'm not really sure I see an important distinction given the parameters of your question.

Not disagreeing with this.

Does anyone have a reasonable article or book making this point (for or against) that is well-researched and argued?

The fundamental problem this argument has is that computers are in the world. Probably not to the degree required and certainly not up to AGI. But, self driving cars and Boston dynamics exist. The gap between "in the world" and not isn't some insurmountable barrier. It's an engineering problem that's been solved to varying degrees by engineers and hobbyists.

There are so many great books on theory of mind, consciousness, embodied intelligence, and general/strong AI that it's hard to know where to begin.

For me, even though it is somewhat old at this point (e.g. definitely no big-data/ML approaches even considered) would be the anthology "The Mind's I" edited and annotated by Dennett and Hofstadter. It's not going to directly rebut this author's point, but definitely gives a deep and rounded overview of many of the issues involved in thinking about computers and minds as somehow related to each other.

But there are many, many others, almost any of which will be better than this article.

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