this paper is far from “showing this definitively”
even if we bought this negative result as somehow “proving impossibility”, i’m not convinced plasticity is necessary for intelligence
huge respect for richard sutton though
even if we bought this negative result as somehow “proving impossibility”, i’m not convinced plasticity is necessary for intelligence
huge respect for richard sutton though
More specifically: it is highly implausible that an AI system could learn to improve itself beyond human capability if it does not have long-term plasticity: how would it be able to reflect upon and extend its discoveries if it's not able to learn new things during its operation?
(That said, I agree plasticity is key to the most powerful systems. A human race with anterograde amnesia would have long ago gone extinct.)
If I'm a human tasked with editing video (which is the field my startup[0] is in) and a completely new video format comes in, I need the long term plasticity to learn how to use it so I can perform my work.
If a sufficiently intelligent version of our AI model is tasked with editing these videos, and a completely new video format comes in, it does not need to learn to handle it. Not if this model is smart enough to iterate a new model that can handle it.
The new skills and knowledge do not need to be encoded in "the self" when you are a bunch of bytes that can build your successor out of more bytes.
Or, in popular culture terms, the last 30 seconds of this Age of Ultron clip[1].