| > If I am following you correctly, you are arguing that walking is a harder problem than language because it took much longer to evolve. This is a thorny subject. So I am saying that in some objective way, walking is harder than language because Nature took millions/billions of years to traverse the solution space. Then... once we had a huge number of preconditions existing, then we had the development of language. I am not saying that this means if it takes 10 years to develop language with some artificial means that it will take 100,000 years to develop walking. What I am pointing to is that we ought to appreciate that if even blind natural selection took that long, then the possibility space to develop a nervous system must be much larger than we have anticipated. As evidence of this: consider how (at least in popular culture, but also in comp sci in the old days) we developed chess playing computers and it was broadly assumed that breakthroughs in getting robots to walk and talk would soon follow through. That did not happen. It was a natural assumption but it was wrong. > This seems to assume that a facility for language and advanced mathematics is independent of the existence of a nervous system capable of flexibly interacting with the environment, but it seems plausible, indeed probable, that language, consciousness and math depend heavily on the prior neural infrastructure, and their development was the most recent step in a process that has been going on since the evolution of the first synapse. I don't know the answer to that. On different days I think one or the other is true. On Day #1 I think Nature obviously required walking before talking, but we could develop them differently, just has we didn't need to develop better horses to produce cars. On Day #2 I think to myself there's a deeper sense in which you really do require walking before talking because otherwise why didn't Nature develop biological microlife which evolved communications ability long before it developed legs. So... > On the other hand, I am skeptical of the somewhat popular view that the key to generalized AI is to make robots that interact more thoroughly with their environment, and that they will then find their own way to language and consciousness. We cannot be certain consciousness or intelligence are high probability events once you have life. We could be like those French artifact makers who made such exquisite mechanical toys for the aristocracy but ultimately got nowhere whereas the English inventors meddling with water and steam power really kicked off a revolution. Who is Silicon Valley is genuinely looking at the fundamentals of A-Life or AI? OpenAI? MIRI? Stanford? DARPA? |