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Comment by eudox | Hacker News Reader

>After all the total quantity of intelligence and hard work available around is millionfold what you can provide –you're just a drop of water in the ocean. Rather use your imagination, the one thing that makes you a beautiful unique snowflake. Intelligence and hard work should be merely at the service of our imagination. Think outside of the box. Break out. Shake the axioms.

Given this sort of nonsense, it's no surprise the author is (Probably, since they all are) some kind of vitalist. He probably doesn't think brain emulations are people!

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This is not a good Hacker News comment. It's snarky, resorts to name-calling, and presents no substantive view. Thus its signal/noise ratio is poor.

Several people have observed that HN threads are sensitive to initial conditions. Threads seem to go more off the rails when a dismissive one-liner becomes the top comment early. I'm not sure how one could test this, but it does strike me as valid.

All: Please don't post dismissive one-liners. They don't just lower the signal/noise ratio a little—they add a significant risk of lowering it a lot. It's better to post nothing.

When you do comment, please do so "in the spirit of colleagues cooperating in good faith to figure out the truth about something". That's a pg phrase which captures the desired quality of HN so well that we intend to add it to the site guidelines.

> I would like to simply argue that scientific progress is in fact linear

I stopped reading right there. The model that the author is looking for to express his ideas is "logistic growth", or "S curves".

Well he said if you kept giving the AI exponentially more computing resources it would get linear growth.

I think it's fairly obvious that providing 1 computer exponentially more resources isn't much different from creating exponentially more brain simulations...

Why is it nonsense?

There are very, very few people who are capable of arguing against an idea on its merit if that idea clashes strongly with their worldview. Usually the cognitive dissonance of a differing worldview eclipses understanding to the point that anything with a wildly different context is just "insane."

"Intelligence" as we have come to understand it is not some magical thing, not some exotic element that's impossible to fabricate. In fact, it's probably something mundane and insultingly simple when we get to the core of it.

Reproducing intelligence is mostly a matter of finding the correct formula, the right structures, the right technology. After that it will be boring, ordinary, even disposable. This doesn't sit well with some people who reject that on an emotional level even if they can't figure out any concrete reason why. It just can't be.

We already have enough hardware to fake intelligence, to make a believable Turing Test candidate that could win, but we've yet to figure out how. That much will become clear in the coming decades, guaranteed.

If you look at the progression in computer chess programs, where they were pathetic for the longest time until things came together and the performance of them rose exponentially, matching and then eclipsing grandmasters, it's inevitable that the same pattern will play out in the artificial intelligence space.

> "Intelligence" as we have come to understand it is not some magical thing

I agree that intelligence can be replicated. My preferred definition of intelligence is broad. Intelligence is a system that has i/o & a feedback cycle. Thus, I think all matter & concepts have intelligence. Of course, there are higher forms of intelligence, such as human intelligence (which is not limited to the brain as we have a complete nervous system & more generally, autonomous cells).

I still think it's magical, however. Even if we understand all of the rules & procedures, the experience of it all coming together fills me with awe. It's like playing a game where you understand the rules, yet you can achieve zen & a higher consciousness when playing. Another example is Fractals. The driving equation is simple, yet infinite complexity & beauty is created.

> Reproducing intelligence is mostly a matter of finding the correct formula, the right structures, the right technology. After that it will be boring, ordinary, even disposable. This doesn't sit well with some people who reject that on an emotional level even if they can't figure out any concrete reason why. It just can't be.

Animals & possibly lower life forms have evolved emotions. It's an important part of what drives us to do whatever we do. I would not be surprised if AI will need emotions to reach higher intelligence.

I have also been driven to honor all life & intelligence. I see the interconnections within the system of existence & aspire to respect all of it's parts. When I hold such a mindset, I'm at my best.

Emotion may be necessary for human-like intelligent systems, however I think you've missed his point. He's not saying that emotion will not be created or emerge in synthetic intelligent systems; rather he's saying that emotional arguments, rather than logical arguments, are rubbish.

In other words, "I don't want this to be true, because I don't like the implications, therefore I think that it is not true" is not sound. Whether or not emotion plays an important role in intelligence is irrelevant.

> he's saying that emotional arguments, rather than logical arguments, are rubbish.

That's true if the system in question is entirely based on logic. That means it's probably a static (non-creative) system, as emotions often are involved in creative systems. Note that creating a logical system is itself a creative system.

Side note: part of arguments are about framing the system. Often times, disagreements arise because the parties aren't even talking about the same system. A party will often be focused on a subsystem or an entirely different system.

And what about concepts like art, love, beauty, morality? Are these also simply "computations" of some sort?

I believe your argument holds true for all intelligence that relies on logic. However, I would put forth that the full definition of "intelligence" includes logic, and also something else, let's call it "beyond logic".

For example, see Gödel's incompleteness theorems [1].

You will find that there are statements that can be "true but unprovable". Statements that are "true but unprovable" cannot be computed. But that doesn't make them untrue.

Therefore, there are limits to artificial intelligence.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...

>And what about concepts like art, love, beauty, morality? Are these also simply "computations" of some sort?

Yes. I would argue that they are no more abstract than any other pattern recognition and the fact that they can be differentiated by perception makes them computable.

You fundamentally ask the "Qualia" question, which for my part at least is well understood to be an emergent property of having perception.

The Godel question is always brought up as though it is some kind of trump card - though it is not. It simply states that, we don't think that the universe can simulate itself without inconsistency. Call that a limit if you want but AI is complete well before we have a consistent universal model.

If I were you I would be more worried about the münchhausen trilemma

The point isn't that everything can be proven, the point is that human brains have no special abilities that can't be emulated by computers. If you emulate every neuron and neurotransmitter in the brain with a sufficiently powerful computer, you will get an intelligence that has the same perception of love, beauty, blah blah blah that people think somehow set them apart from all other matter in the universe.

In addition, once you have it modeled, its possible invent a computer that loves more deeply than any human ever could. Who understands and appreciates the human concept of beauty better than any human ever could etc.

We know these things are emergent properties of very slow meat processors, and therefore can be recreated again on very fast silicon processors.

I believe you are correct: human brains have no special abilities that can't be emulated by computers.

But I also think that "human" == "brain" is far from a given, and that is an implicit assumption of this viewpoint.

Are you talking about sensory perception, hormones from the rest of the body affecting cognition and emotion? Any of those effects could be replicated as well.

If you're talking about a non-materialistic view of the mind: http://youtu.be/Juriylw7B0g

> And what about concepts like art, love, beauty, morality? Are these also simply "computations" of some sort?

Yes, all that we are is contained within our skulls, in some sort of mess of chemical reactions and computations built ontop of those chemical reactions. Our detailed understanding of those reactions and relationships is limited at this point, however there has been nothing to suggest that anything that "is us" is operating outside of the laws of physics.

In other words, we are materialistic.

That leaves the question of if we are algorithmic. According to the Church-Turing-Deutsch principle, we are. Some people, most notably Roger Penrose, disagree.

Penrose's objection to the algorithmic nature of the mind is rooting in Gödel's incompleteness theorems (I suspect you are familiar with his objections, maybe read his books on the topic?). However it is important to remember that Penrose does not argue against a materialistic mind, merely the algorithmic mind. He believes that there are quantum phenomenon in your wetware that are essential to the human mind, and which allow a violation of the Church-Turing-Deutsch principle.

If he is correct (and I believe that he is not. evidence for such a essential quantum phenomenon is absent), then it doesn't really matter. What it would mean is that any computer constructed to run a human-like intelligence would need to take advantage of those same quantum phenomenon. Anything a materialistic (although not algorithmic) mind can do, a sufficiently advanced materialistic computer can do as well.

The issue I have with your statement is that I don't see why we are special? What about our machinery makes us any more fit to be intelligent than a hunk of doped silicon? I mean, it all seems to come down to electrons flowing through (meat or metal) circuits. Of course, whether or not you feel the same way might partially depend on your religious beliefs. I guess I just don't see anything special about our wetware that couldn't be reproduced on silicon (eventually).

There may be limits, depending on your definition of "logic", but there is no part of the incompleteness theorem that exempts the particular type of computer that happened to evolve over the last few millions of years. There is no spark that is fundamentally unreplicable, despite being replicated every time humans reproduce. Art, love, beauty, and morality are parts of our desires that don't correspond neatly to the idea of self-interested maximization of material wealth or whatever, but there is no rule that an AI must have a simple objective function: one could be built with such goals or without them, with useless ones (paperclip maximizer) or weird ones (e.g. complete disregard for the well-being of the self).

Hopefully if we ever do build some super AI (I'm not opining on any particular time frame in which this might happen, just on theoretical possibility), it will share a variety of our values, and will therefore want to include such values in any AIs it builds, and so on. But values are fundamentally arbitrary - look at the variety of values in human cultures, and consider how much more alien we should expect a nonhuman intelligence to be.

You are spewing complete nonsense. So far as anyone knows the human brain is not capable of doing anything that can't be done by a general purpose computer. There is absolutely no reason to suspect otherwise.

Gödel's incompleteness theorem (and everything else) apply just as strongly to biological brains as to silicon ones.

> If you look at the progression in computer chess programs, where they were pathetic for the longest time until things came together and the performance of them rose exponentially, matching and then eclipsing grandmasters, it's inevitable that the same pattern will play out in the artificial intelligence space.

Chess programs started beating grandmasters when they built computers big enough to recurse a few dozen levels down the dynamic programming tree. Other than a few brainy programming optimizations and some well-chosen search heuristics (like e.g. learning all of Kasparov's opening repertoire) it was all brawn as far as I know. With its countable state space and discrete, turn-based dynamics, chess actually strikes me as one of the easier AI problems you can pose.

If you want a sense of how truly far away we are from real AI go check out what they are doing in computer vision. Classification performance on tasks that a four-year-old could execute without error is in the single digits in some cases (http://image-net.org/challenges/LSVRC/2012/analysis/). It is indeed difficult to imagine a human-like AI in this domain without some sort of singularity occurring, but no one I talk to thinks that such a thing is near.

I disagree strongly. He was using chess as an example of how progress can increase exponentially, not how artificial intelligence is close.

Object recognition is another good example with major breakthroughs in recent years leading to massive improvements. They are already very close to, and in some cases exceeding, human ability.

Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

Let's say I accept that higher, human-like, intelligence is reproducible.

It still doesn't follow that beyond that is some sort of yet in-conceived 'super intelligence'; that intelligent machines can outstrip humanity in any meaningful way and build even more intelligent machines than themselves and on and on in a virtuous cycle as the Singularity predicts.

Given that we have assumed human-like intelligence is reproducible, let's assume only slightly further that intelligence can be represented as some pattern, P, that can be reproduced in media other than human brains (I'm assuming you are meaning "reproducible" in terms of "reproducible within a machine", not the uninteresting meaning of "Every human born has reproduced intelligence").

If P exists, we have all kinds of faster, better, more durable strata we could encode it into than the one evolution happened to hit upon, and that encoding alone could be considered 'super intelligence' in the sense that it would easily out-think you and I. That may not necessarily imply that P can be improved upon exponentially (but if I were your stock advisor---or for that matter, licensed to be so---I'd humbly suggest that wagering against the _total possibility_ that something can be improved tends to be a losing wager). But it wouldn't take too many improvements to get orders of magnitude past our slower-than-a-speeding-bullet organic thought machinery.

It's worth noting that Kurzweil's book doesn't necessarily predict infinite, unbounded growth in intelligence (I'd assume that what we'd call "intelligence" is susceptible to the S-curve of diminishing returns like other technologies). But one doesn't need infinite, unbounded intelligence growth to build something that fundamentally transforms the world we live in.

> encoding alone could be considered 'super intelligence' in the sense that it would easily out-think you and I.

>But it wouldn't take too many improvements to get orders of magnitude past our slower-than-a-speeding-bullet organic thought machinery.

These are HUGE leaps to make.

Not to mention that thinking faster =\= thinking better, which is to say that there is no reason to assume that faster intelligence would not be understandable to the human brain.

I think we're debating definitional points. In this context, I was equating thinking faster and thinking better; if you and I would---when faced with a problem---arrive at conclusion Q, and the AI would arrive at Q twice as fast, it's thinking better.

So if we distinguish thinking faster (I've doubled the rate at which the algorithm runs) from thinking better (I've refined the algorithm so it only takes half as many "brain cycles" or what have you), I don't disagree that there's no guarantee that a faster AI would improve its own algorithm---but I would disagree that a human-level AI with twice the thought speed of a human wouldn't "outstrip humanity." It stands to reason that it should be able to outstrip humanity on any problem domain requiring cognition, simply by definition of measurement (if the machine is coming up with answers twice as fast as its human counterparts, it's "outstripping humanity").

I also hold to the assertion that it wouldn't take too many improvements to get orders-of-magnitude past organic brains. The fastest nerve impulses are clocked in the range of 120 m/s. If you took the pattern of a human brain and replaced the meat with electronic switching, you'd be improving the raw rate of flow by about a million. Given that you've already conceded hypothetically that P is reproducible, electronics alone (without such niceties as optic fiber for any really big jumps), you'd be looking at the processes of P occurring at an (upper-bound) million times the speed it does in the human brain. Does this prove a lower-bound improvement? No; after all, it's not raw speed but switching and parallelization that matters if we're replicated a human brain.

But I submit to you that the lower bound of improvement by transitioning from meat to electronic is probably more than '2'. ;)

I wish I could reply to your last comment directly. HNs comment system is sometimes beyond my understanding.

I make the better vs. faster distinction because, if merely faster, the creative works and solutions to problems such an intelligence could cook up would be fathomable to humans, whereas if they are thinking better somehow, that is not a given. Kurzweil, Vinge et al predict intelligence that would leave ordinary humans behind.

It could be that the problem space (reality) and 'algorithms' (for lack of a better term) used to approach that problem space in what we would term creative and intelligent ways, are as such that even a million fold increase in raw speed would not help very much.

All that being said, I hope we do create durable intelligence at least up to our own capabilities. I personally think it is our responsibility to seed our part of the universe with intelligence and that is really the only practical way to extend intelligence into the wider cosmos.

For one machines could simply be faster than humans. Transistors are thousands to millions of times faster than neurons. In the time it takes a human to solve a problem, an AI could solve thousands. Not to mention improvements in the algorithm itself, or increasing the size of a brain.

I see little justification in the article for the assertion that creativity/imagination^ is something unique and distinct from other aspects of intelligence.

Any system that explores solutions will need to speculate on which branch of decisions will have the greatest chances of yielding a desirable outcome. Any system with enough power to fully explore all possibilities will have enough power to discover other possibilities that it lacks the power to fully explore within it's SLAs. Different intelligent systems that employ different pruning techniques or heuristics will have different "creativities". The more sophisticated the intelligent system, the greater the range of 'creative' thought.

I've seen little reason to think that creativity is some sort of "special sauce" that would not become commoditized as the rest of intelligence is commoditized. Why shouldn't it?

^ Imagination without creativity is merely simulation, something that nobody doubts is mechanical. I therefore conclude that the author is actually identifying creativity as special.

There's a couple of ways I see to go with this discussion. I'll explore both...

1. We are in a temporal frame. The evolution of intelligence has gotten us to this point. Right now, high creativity is unique to humans. I agree that the possibility exists for humans to create creative beings.

2. The definition of creativity is broad at the moment. Pursuits that are defined as "creative" are also changing. As we learn more about creativity (zoom into the definition), we will identify more nuances of creativity. Indeed, it may loop back to a fundamental notion of cognition which itself may be related to a fundamental notion of self-perpetuating systems creating the best possible outcome for it's lineage.

I suspect that creativity is akin to a driving force. So in a fractal system, "creativity" or "emotional drive" is the equation which creates/generates the fractal over time.

I think that it is easiest (and therefore best ;) to define creativity by what we can observe about it, without any internal knowledge about it. So basically "creativity" is some sort of black-box that generates novel outcomes (for a broad sense of outcomes).

On the face of it, I think that for this definition of creativity, I think you could do by simply logically exploring problem spaces that have not been explored before, or by exploring branches in problem spaces that have not been explored before. Maybe throw in a source of randomness when deciding what to explore, to explore possibilities that may not otherwise make sense but could nevertheless lead to interesting outcomes. (The equivalent of a chemist randomly fucking around in his backyard shed).

Some of my friends and I practice a sort of very limited mechanical creativity in the form of a drinking game. We invent new "startup ideas" by ad libbing into the phrase "The ____ of ____", where both blanks are existing companies. We then explore that idea and speculate on what such a company would actually entail. "The Twitter of Githubs", maybe that's a company build around the idea of sharing code snippets, like gists? Not a very interesting idea, but I'm sober at the moment. ;)

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