Also, bootstrapping is highly effective in countless other contexts within computer science, what do you think will prevent it from being applicable to this problem?
And maybe that's what human level AI will end up being: Just search every possibility till you find the one that works. For everything, including speaking with a person.
But it just doesn't have that spark of true intelligence.
So I'll qualify my earlier statement, brute force AI might happen. But AI based on elegant intelligence will not.
Is there a difference? I think so. For some things it won't matter, but for others it will. Somehow human level intelligence manages to cut through immense search spaces and find the answer (like the game Go) - how does it do that? No one knows. But there is clearly something different about it compared to brute force intelligence.
We just don't understand intelligence (not the brain, intelligence) well enough to duplicate it, never mind improve it.
And I don't think we ever will because to understand something complex you have to be more complex than that thing, but by definition we can not be more complex than ourself - so understanding our own intelligence will always be beyond us.
That's the objective part.
The subjective part is that I personally believe that intelligence is not physical. The brain mediates it, but the source is elsewhere.
The soul maybe, or that we are really game characters in an MMOG.
As for your second claim, well, I suppose it is subjective, though I would prefer the term "speculative."
Where does the human brain fall on that spectrum? It might take us a few more decades to figure out the details of how it works, but I doubt we'll find elegance so much as a ton of hyperparallel brute force plus a few dirty tricks that evolution kludged together to prevent the whole thing from falling apart (most of the time, anyway).
> But there is clearly something different about [elegant intelligence] compared to brute force intelligence.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by this distinction and how the human brain does not constitute "brute force"?
Humans can play it - it's impossible for a human to brute force it, there is not enough computation available in the brain to brute force it. (Your "hyperparallel brute force" idea.)
Yet humans can play it anyway. There is something else there that makes it possible.
And the human brain self trains! That's the really amazing part - no one has to think of some clever optimization or algorithm to make it work like you would if you wanted a computer to play "elegantly".
> none of it is elegant
What is "elegant" to you?
A biological brain, for all intents and purposes, is a big mess. By comparison an ALU in silicon is much neater.
The way we "think" by forming associations and recalling the most striking ones we've formed seems awfully chaotic/arbitrary and unreliable. By comparison the way a search engine works by scoring words and phrases and optimizing for recall and precision seems so much neater.
> But it just doesn't have that spark of true intelligence.
What is "true intelligence" to you? Perhaps you meant just human intelligence?
Perhaps "true ingelligence" is just sufficiently adavanced technology (i.e. "magic")?
> Somehow human level intelligence manages to cut through immense search spaces and find the answer (like the game Go) - how does it do that?
Except of course when it doesn't, right? Isn't that why we're looking at AI?
It's not really our own mertit, but we already know how to create more humans with human-level intelligence. It's neither afully efficient nor awfully reliable, but seems to work well enough for "practical purposes".
The allure of AI is being able create something more than that. Requiring it to make the same mistakes as humans and to work in similarly unpredictable ways in order to appear genuine then seem like the wrong goals.