> An AI with any sort of generalizable reasoning ability would just need basic sources
That is a completely unsupportable assertion.
That is a completely unsupportable assertion.
Humans don't learn anything of substance just from being told the strict rules, we also learn from a wealth of examples expressed through a variety of means some of which is formal, some poetic, some even comedic.
Heck, we wouldn't even need Stack Overflow to begin with if we could learn things just from basic sources.
Throw in the standard library documentation, and that's exactly how many of us learned how to program before projects like stackoverflow or even the web existed for the public. We took those rules, explored the limits of them using the compiler, and learned.
Stackoverflow is, IMO, a shortcut through portions of the exploration and learning phase. Not a bad thing, but importantly it's not required either.
No one learned Java or C by reading either of the following documents:
https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jls/se10/html/index.htm...
https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1256.pdf
It's cool to romanticize the past though.
Humans do this.
Not perfectly, no, but we do.
As the only general intelligences we know of so far, I'd say it's support for the assertion that an AI with general reasoning abilities wouldn't need SO or other examples to figure out how to do specific tasks.