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by treesprite82 1434 days ago
> based on all the data it's seen before?

> it's closer to another virtual layer on top of the ever growing virtual layers

I'd claim similar can be said for us. Don't forget to count the billions of years of evolution through which we've been adjusting to the environment.

> At least with our brains we can adapt and learn any task that has never been encountered before

Modern language models can, to a certain degree, follow novel instructions.

Or if there's some indication of success/progress, it can learn from that.

1 comments

There's just something I can't describe with words about what it lacks today - where it's possibly more philosophical than technical. Humans have to direct the machines where to go and what to do. So today mathematically machines can only live within the subset of whatever set we define them to operate in. They can alter the set and do complex operations within the set - like combine new words and "Invent some new language" with the set of words but they cant break out of that set and operate within a completely different set of objects. For example if you taught them to write a book in english they couldn't invent symbols like manderine and create a language in that sense. They can only operate with english words. Humans for example operate within the universal set and within all dimensions we can percieve. Even in todays state of the art if we gave robots all the sensors that we have they still couldn't evolve with their environment like we could. If it's cold for 100s and thousands of years they wouldn't adapt and grow hair on their bodies or invent fire like we would with current algorithm or neural nets. They would just keep doing whatever they're programmed to do within their set of "stuff" for lack of a better term. And better yet if you taught them they need to survive and so they would develop fire or some similar technology to help their survival would they eventually become philanthropic and help others survive even though they're programmed for their survival like humans have done? Or would you have to tell them change their model and they need to help others? How does a machine currently learn like this in todays state of the art? Machines currently need new parameters and input to learn from everything we give them wether it's rules/lanauge or more generally a set of things. I'm still under the impression that we're not dealing with artificially intelligent beings at this time but obviously just my opinion and maybe i'm not up-to-date on the state-of-the-art.
> There's just something I can't describe with words about what it lacks today - where it's possibly more philosophical than technical

My personal viewpoint is that there's nothing inherently special about biological intelligence that can't theoretically be reproduced with electronics, but that today's AI has some practical limitations like no significant persistent internal state. I saw an "Inner Monologue" paper by Google Robotics recently which could be a step in the right direction.

> Humans for example operate within the universal set and within all dimensions we can percieve.

Our brain's direct output is electrical signals to a set of muscles. I don't think there's anything in particular stopping a physical robot from having similar generality of operating space.

> Even in todays state of the art if we gave robots all the sensors that we have they still couldn't evolve with their environment like we could

Ability to evolve seems mostly orthogonal to intelligence to me. If humans instead came about by an intelligent creator or gradient descent, wouldn't we still be intelligent? AI adapting to the environment through gradient descent or self-modification should be fine and faster than evolution.

> or invent fire like we would with current algorithm or neural nets. They would just keep doing whatever they're programmed to do within their set of "stuff" for lack of a better term

In virtual environments, neural networks have adapted to changes and learned new strategies, even those not intended by the creators. [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kopoLzvh5jY