Artificial Intelligence – Insanely Complicated, Hopelessly Inadequate
lrb.co.uk
lrb.co.uk
> One of the reasons Cantwell Smith believes that our oversimplified assumptions about ontology can explain the failure of the symbolic logic employed by what’s sometimes called Good Old-Fashioned AI, or GOFAI, is that more recent, and more successful, approaches to AI don’t depend on this kind of symbolic reasoning.
This puts forth a false dichotomy. The fact that classical first order logic assumes the rules are perfect does not invalidate all symbolic approaches. There are several types of modal logic that can be used to manage the idea of imperfect rules and imperfect, or subjective, knowledge about the world, even before starting with fuzzy or probabilistic logic.
In general, everything that can be talked about by humans, in principle, should be considered at the reach of symbolic approaches. That’s tautological, I know, but people seemingly have difficulties seeing the forest for the trees, as they restrict their mental model of symbolic logic to a 70s brand of prolog / Horn clause based predicate logic.
> everything that can be talked about by humans, in principle, should be considered
> at the reach of symbolic approaches
If you read War and Peace, and I read War and Peace, even if our experience of the reading might be slightly different, it will be due to how we react to it, and to which passages we tend more attention; and we will generally agree on what Tolstoy wanted to communicate - not only on the words themselves, but on the world constructed, and the implications of it that are not explicitly described.
Another way to look at it: we don’t have any evidence that we need more than a symbolic approach to replicate what we do with language: and we have built a whole civilization based on written education, which is based in symbols.
To me, if you can operate on a model that you use to understand a bit of the world, serialize it into communication, and make it so that the other understands it, that evidences intelligence, but I agree that it is not a demonstration.
I have not read Marcus’s book and I don’t follow him a lot, but I think that they are also advocating a mixed approach.
War and Peace is like a textual Xray of Tolstoy's brain, some of it being descriptive of what he saw while writing it. If our models are similar enough, together we'll see the same things he saw while we read it.
It gives example after example of how we repeatedly attempt to make classical AI work and it fails. The goal overall of the article seems to be to claim that ML is the correct path because hard logic based AI is too complex and will never work.
I think this is a bad view because it doesn't acknowledge that both are necessary.
It is painfully obvious that humans have an internal dialog, and that the subconscious also engages in a sort of thought process involving tokens as well.
There are clearly many possibilities that we consider as people. These possibilities follow something close to logic but heavily influenced by notions that have been built through a non-logical process ( our "beliefs" )
What is hopelessly inadequate is pure neural networks and/or trained ML. To ever approach anything similar to human thought we will have to use tokens.
Doing that is very difficult but not insanely so. Using the word insane implies that such a process is not guided by some predetermined logical system. I agree it is not fully logical, but not that it is insane.
The article is too dismissive of classical AI and seems to imply that those pursuing it are wasting our time.
This is the most common way for humans to experience thought but it is by no means necessary. [1] Weirder still, we know that only half of a brain is needed to operate a human body + consciousness since people with hemispherectomies exist and basically the same as before their operations.
I think you could roughly characterize capsule networks [2] as approaching something like the communication between sub networks you described.
Honestly I don't think you're wrong wrt token passing, but I think it probably looks like those tokens are actually compressions of sub network data rather than expressions themselves.
[1] https://www.dazeddigital.com/science-tech/article/44494/1/li...
Information I've seen/heard/read indicates that people are able to understand language and have an area of the mind dedicated to it from very early in life. The same is true for other sorts of behavior.
This to me indicates that DNA has hardcoded "instructions" on how to configure a mind to be able to process tokenized information from the start.
It is entirely possible that every section of the mind is just a huge freeform fpga that is initialized by DNA, but I think it is more hardwired than that.
Game of life has certain structures that can replicate themselves or eat other pieces though, so it is entirely possible that certain initialization leads to things that appear to be hardwired structure.
I agree that the mind is distributed, and have also seen the experiments where people continued to function with disparate brains when the connection between the halves was separated.
My thought on it is that there are many subconscious thought streams that we are normally unaware of. People who become aware of them are thought to be crazy, but really I think the normal blocks from their conscious reasoning are just weak.
I agree also that some people don't have the same "internal dialogue" and the stream of tokens are not equal to words like we communicate with others. I don't think that invalidates that there is some sort of token stream though.
The question I've always had is "how much of consciousness shuts down when you sleep" and/or "does staying awake longer mean your conscious thought process gains more access to the rest of your mind". My speculation is that the latter is true, because if you stay awake too long you will appear to be "crazy".
I have never been able to express myself freely without being downvoted and/or attacked to all hell and back. This particular identity is me just being who I am and not giving a damn if I am rejected. I'm just so very tired of filtering my thoughts and ideas.
The person I truly am is radical and flamboyant. The world does not want that person typically. Thank you for your appreciation of my comments here; I will continue this identity for what it is worth until it is downvoted to oblivion.
I will share a bit on this since it is relevant to the topic of my thoughts and whether they are allowed in society.
When I was very young I kept a detailed diary. I did so because I believe any who strive for greatness must do so, as an obligation to those who study their lives when they are finally acknowledged for what they have contributed to humanity. ( whether while alive or after death )
What I wrote even as a child was equal in length to the bible. I was writing my diary in DOS on 286 computers, before any online blog existed. I published the entirety of my diary on the internet publicly. It was online for many years. It is still in fact accessible on archive.org if enterprising souls dig enough.
Eventually my sister discovered that my diary was online and bitched about it. She said that I have no right to publicly share the details of my life for all to see. She involved my parents, and they together came to me and demanded I remove it from the internet.
I have always considered that to be an attack on my freedom and evidence of exactly how much people are ashamed of who they are and present a fake front of themselves. I believe that we as humans should always strive to be the best people we can, and be unafraid of being known in detail, because being known as one is is the ultimate way to face oneself and confront your flaws immediately.
In the years that have passed since then I went through many rounds of using various online communication mechanisms. Every single one I've ever used from I've been rejected from and/or banned from. This includes the long period of time where I never cussed because I believed it to be wrong. After so many iterations of this I've accepted that my ideas are unwanted in the world.
I still attempt to communicate the truth as I see it and share ideas openly in an attempt to improve the world, but so much of it falls on deaf ears and is met with anger that I barely bother any more.
I've been fired from so many of the jobs I've held, simply because I refuse to keep my ideas to myself. Good or bad it doesn't matter; no one wants to be shown up by a person 2 or 3 levels below them.
I've been fired for "doing my job too well" and "being too smart". I've had multiple employers say I am the most talented engineer they have ever met in the process of terminating my employment. I'm not even surprised any more. It is simply inevitable at any position I hold, whether it be a level 1 software engineer or CTO. I've done both.
I've been in national news, and it is impossible to control the media. They make up whatever they find sensational and publish lies, and you can't really do much of anything about it unless you are independently wealthy to be able to sue them and cover all costs till you win.
I've written my own fiction novel as well. Perhaps I will publish it when I am feeling particularly generous to the world...
I've written so much code in so many languages it is very easy to just stop caring about the entirety of it and throw in the towel, because even the most beautiful code is thrown by the wayside the majority of the time.
If and when I see something worth commenting on, I give it a go.
I understand how you feel though. Doing the same thing over and over but getting the same result is the very definition of insanity.
>It is entirely possible that every section of the mind is just a huge freeform fpga that is initialized by DNA, but I think it is more hardwired than that.
I agree that it is more hardwired than that. We have too much wetware devoted to various tasks, the most notable of which is visual processing, for it to just be completely freeform. Although it's pretty interesting just how close the wetware comes to resembling an FPGA. People who are blind from birth don't just let all that processing power to go waste [1].
> My thought on it is that there are many subconscious thought streams that we are normally unaware of. People who become aware of them are thought to be crazy, but really I think the normal blocks from their conscious reasoning are just weak.
I think your view is supported by our current understanding of the evidence [2]. It's interesting to think what other processes might be running silently in our subconscious.
> I agree also that some people don't have the same "internal dialogue" and the stream of tokens are not equal to words like we communicate with others. I don't think that invalidates that there is some sort of token stream though.
I didn't mean to imply the token stream idea itself was bad, just that it being in the form of language doesn't hold up. I agree with you that there is some sort of token stream going on.
> The question I've always had is "how much of consciousness shuts down when you sleep" and/or "does staying awake longer mean your conscious thought process gains more access to the rest of your mind". My speculation is that the latter is true, because if you stay awake too long you will appear to be "crazy".
I'm not sure this is a question of gaining access to more of one's mind rather than it is an abstraction beginning to leak. When functioning properly all this information should returned in process when the brain scans its state. But when we lack sleep the summarization process might brake down. If the brain operates in a sleep deprived state for long enough connections may begin to form where they shouldn't introducing bugs in the brain's ability to perform state summary. There is some interesting research into how chronic lack of sleep may contribute to alzheimer's [3]. This research is by no means conclusive and I am not anywhere close to being a neuroscientist, but its interesting nonetheless.
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/how-does-human-ech... [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4059570/ [3] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/sleep-d...