[weavejester]

"When you get attacked in the forest by a guy in a clown costume with an axe you don't need to add that as a training input first before you make a run for it."

Sure, because it's already a training input. We'd run because we recognize the axe, the signs of aggression, the horror movie trope of an evil clown, and so forth. We have to teach "stranger danger" to children.

"There's no agency, liveliness, autonomy or learning in a dynamic real-time way to any of the systems we have, they're for the most part just static, 'flat', machines."

Well, that's at least in part because we design them that way. It's more convenient to separate out the "learning" and "doing" parts so we have control over how the network is trained.

[Barrin92]

>Sure, because it's already a training input

not in any meaningful sense, no. I can tell you, "if something's fishy about the situation, just leave". You can do this not because of some particular training inputs or examples I give you, but because you have common sense and a sort of personality and intuition for how to behave in the absence of data. If you told that sentence to a state of the art ML model you'd probably get "what fish?" as an answer.

>Well, that's at least in part because we design them that way

It's mostly because we have no idea how to design them anyway else. I think if anyone knew how to build complex agents with rich internal states that have the intent and communication abilities of humans we'd do that. It's not even really conceivable right now how you could have an ML type system that also can just directly adopt high level concepts dynamically just by communicating them.

[naasking]

> not in any meaningful sense, no. I can tell you, "if something's fishy about the situation, just leave"

"Fishy" is doing a lot of work in this sentence. How much training went into refining an instinct for what's "fishy"? Do you not agree that everyone has a different view on what's fishy?

> I think if anyone knew how to build complex agents with rich internal states that have the intent and communication abilities of humans we'd do that.

I'm not so sure. There doesn't seem to be much commercial value in having an agent with intent and its own goals, and most AI advancements are for commercial entities these days.

[weavejester]

"I can tell you, "if something's fishy about the situation, just leave". You can do this not because of some particular training inputs or examples I give you, but because you have common sense and a sort of personality and intuition for how to behave in the absence of data."

Only if I had a baseline to compare the situation to. If you took out all familiar elements, I'd have no way of telling whether a situation was normal or suspicious. My understanding of the word "fishy" is born from 300 thousand hours of training data.

"It's mostly because we have no idea how to design them anyway else. I think if anyone knew how to build complex agents with rich internal states that have the intent and communication abilities of humans we'd do that."

That's a different question. We can build machines that learn autonomously; they just don't have the capability of biological minds.