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Comment by jokoon | Hacker News Reader

I wish AI scientists would try to work on this instead of machine learning.

Machine learning has much more humble goals: fitting a bunch of data to a curve.

Despite all the hype around chatGPT, I have yet to see any model that asks me a question (without being programmed to do so). Today, my son asked me out of the blue: "Why do people write on paper?" and "What are our walls made of?" and "Why don't we paint our house yellow?". I don't care to live extraordinarily long, but I'd give my right arm to have a quick peek into the future just to see how much of the brain's underlying mysteries will be decoded in, say, 100 or 1,000 years.

I wish we would work on bio hardware which closely resemble the brain.

I don't care if it's running on silicon or on some brain like tissue, I just care I can 3d print and train human-like thinking assistants.

LLMs ask questions without being programmed to do so.

that anecdote about a child asking question is a really impressively relevant point about AI

In Jaron Lanier's review of John Markoff's book "What the Dormouse Said", he mentioned an exchange between Douglass Engelbart and Marvin Minsky:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110312232514/https://www.ameri...

>Engelbart once told me a story that illustrates the conflict succinctly. He met Marvin Minsky — one of the founders of the field of AI — and Minsky told him how the AI lab would create intelligent machines. Engelbart replied, "You're going to do all that for the machines? What are you going to do for the people?" This conflict between machine- and human-centered design continues to this day.

Intelligent machines can't be of benefit to people?

I have difficulty believing Englebart could have been so short-sighted.

I have no problem believing you totally missed the point.

But they are: https://research.google/teams/connectomics/

Numenta tries to do something like that: reverse engineer the neocortex (so not a fly's brain). It does have some insights but I think it's still a long way.

You really believe we’d be better off doing no machine learning research at all?

Machine learning? We'd be better off with way less technology in general... if we manage to survive tech induced climate change and/or potential nuclear annihilation without billions dying that is...

What about modern medicine, modern agriculture, modern chemistry?

Billions would die without those as well.

There are billions of people alive just now because of technology. Poverty is rapidly being eradicated with the help of technology. Child mortality in the third world is rapidly going down due to the spread of technology and the knowledge how to use it. Food production is at an all-time high with the help of technology. The planet is far greener with a far larger forest cover than it was a century ago both due to technological developments which made agriculture far more productive and due to the increased CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere. The potential for nuclear annihilation has kept the (first?) cold war from going hot [1], providing a rare period of detente/relative peace in Europe. This now seems to have come to an end so it is to be hoped that rational minds will prevail where it comes to the use of nuclear weapons as they did for the last ~80 years.

Technology has its downsides as well but often it is possible to use more technology to solve problems caused by the use of technology, e.g. filters on smokestacks, fast breeder reactors to solve the problems with nuclear waste, etc. In other words there is a need for more technology, not less. It is also necessary to make technology accessible to more people than it currently is, not by handing out widgets to "the poor" but by enabling those with the will and the capacity to build up their own capacity to produce and use it. It is technology which will solve any problems caused by a changing climate, whether that be a rise or drop in temperature and the resulting effects on precipitation. It is technology which will keep the population from ever increasing to the breaking point simply because people feel the need to have many children since so many of them do not survive past their early years.

[1] ...although there have been plenty of proxy wars in Africa, Asia as well as South-America

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