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by narvind 3164 days ago
How I wish Marvin Minsky would have stayed alive for one more year and seen this. He would have been so happy!
3 comments

In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.

“What are you doing?”, asked Minsky.

“I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe” Sussman replied.

“Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky.

“I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play”, Sussman said.

Minsky then shut his eyes.

“Why do you close your eyes?”, Sussman asked his teacher.

“So that the room will be empty.”

At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html

So Sussman was right the first time?
A random net has some random preconception. That doesn't mean it's a bad idea to try random preconceptions.
And he would have still said that deep learning lacks any sort of common sense understanding that's necessary to get close to human level intelligence.
I think he was cryopreserved, so he surely will be surprised once they wake him up in the future, assuming cryonics really works.
I'd certainly be surprised if I ever woke up from being cryopreserved. Which isn't to say that I'd object to the process if I had the disposable income and an understanding/cooperative family support structure, which I do not.
I wonder if it would be more popular if the cost was reduced to something similar to a regular funeral. It seems it might be a more cheery send off even if the chances of it working are questionable.
You can already buy an insurance plan that will pay for it in some states, and that's reasonably priced. In my case religious family members would never let it go down though even if the finances were solved.