Makes a lot of sense, there's massive evolutionary pressure to build brains that have both incredible learning rate and efficiency. Its literally a life or death optimization.
It's especially impressive when you consider that evolution hasn't had very long to produce these results.
Humans as an intelligent-ish species have been around for about 10 million years depending on where you define the cutoff. At 10 years per generation, that's 1 million generations for our brain to evolve.
1 million generations isn't much by machine learning standards.
Other than our large neocortex and frontal lobe (which exists in some capacity in mammals), the rest of the structures are evolutionarily ancient. Pre-mammalian in fact.
This isn't that obvious to me with current tech. If you give me a novel task requiring perception, pattern matching and reasoning, and I have the option of either starting to train an 8 year-old to do it, or to train an ML model, I would most likely go with the ML approach as my first choice. And I think it even makes sense financially, if we're comparing the "total cost of ownership" of a kid over that time period with the costs of developing and training the ML system.
As I see it, "reasoning" is as fuzzy as "thinking", and saying that AI systems don't reason is similar to saying that airplanes don't fly. As a particular example, would you argue that game engines like AlphaZero aren't capable of reasoning about the next best move? If so, please just choose whatever verb you think is appropriate to what they're doing and use that instead of "reasoning" in my previous comment.
> . As a particular example, would you argue that game engines like AlphaZero aren't capable of reasoning about the next best move?
Yea, I probably wouldn’t classify that as “reasoning”. I’d probably be fine with saying these models are “thinking”, in a manner. That on its own is a pretty gigantic technology leap, but nothing I’ve seen suggests that these models are “reasoning”.
Also to be clear I don’t think most kids would end up doing any “reasoning” without training either, but they have the capability of doing so