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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

> But our bugs aren't sacred and special.

I'd agree about sacred, but I have a hunch they may indeed be special… or at least useful. Current AI requires far more examples than we do to learn from, and I suspect all our biases are how evolution managed to do that.

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Humans are trained on petabytes of data. From birth, we ingest sights, sounds, smells etc. Imagine a movie of every second of your life. And an audio track of every second of your life. Etc. Etc.

Humans get a lot of data.

And you didn't even count the data from million of years of evolution. The brain doesn't come as a blank slate when you're born.

That's literally what I was saying when I wrote "our biases are how evolution managed to do that".

Not sure "biases" gives the evolved structures in our brain enough credit. Maybe the functions of those structures could be emergent, in a large enough network, but that would be very different context to what a human sees in its extremely rapid development. The rapid learning could be from the unique architecture. The free running feedback loop (consciousness) that we have seems like a good example of how different our architecture is, with our ability to continuously prompt ourselves, and learn from those prompts.

Yeah but I disagreed about your point "Current AI requires far more examples than we do to learn from", since I think you need to count the amount of data that was seen by all your ancesters, maybe even starting from the first self-replicating molecule, billion years ago.

Fair enough. I wouldn't go quite that far — at absolute most I would accept since the first prototype of a neural cell — but the estimates I've seen for what data/training AGI would need if it requires a simulated re-run of modern human evolution to be trained is more than current (or at least recent) AI.

Humans get a lot of data.

AI gets more examples.

Tesla autopilot has a movie of every second it's active, for every car in the fleet that uses it. It has how many lifetimes of driving data now? And yet, it's… merely ok, nothing special, even when compared to all humans including those oblivious of the fact they shouldn't be behind a wheel.

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