[kowdermeister]

What would prevent you to create a NN with a specific configuration whose goal is to come up with goals based on past knowledge to optimize on a certain parameter or thousands of parameters? You can train it on social media profiles, analyze hundreds of years of books, there's tons of data that cover how people act an various situations. I don't see how a set of goals is not simply another vector space.

> but parsing the real world and deriving intentions from your understanding of it is a light year away. 300 years is a guess; no one has a clue any more than anyone has an idea about an interstellar drive.

They need to filter the real world as we do. Focus, attention, sleeping, dreaming, chasing rewards, staying alive... we do this without effort, but we've had 150k years (counting from first homo sapiens) to train our brains to filter out noise efficiently and act on meaningful signals.