[enki]

as per http://paulbohm.com/pdf/10.1.1.76.5543.pdf and http://paulbohm.com/pdf/general_limitations.pdf learning by example requires many more examples than the kolmogorov complexity of the target concept.

T then is not just the life experience of one human - to learn from observation by example, to reconstruct a human, you'd need to observe the life experiences of trillions and trillions of humans to gain sufficient information about humans to narrow down the possible implementations that match human behavior not just mechanically given the same input, but also given new previously untested input.

at 3gb encoded as dna the search space already is huge, but that ignores that the genome alone doesn't contain the information needed to read it. (e.g. you need a living thing to use the DNA, for it to make sense)

[platypii]

Well I guess I have some citations to read later, but intuitively I just have a hard time believing that lack of training data is the problem. There's so incredibly much data available on the internet. If that was the limiting factor, it would just be a matter of throwing more data at T to increase the amount of information in M, but that doesn't help if we haven't found the right machine learning algorithm L. And searching that space is the real challenge of AI. To search that space we either need human experts, huge amounts of computational power to brute force, or some combination thereof. We've tried human experts alone for decades, without much success, so I think it's likely that we will need some computational assistance to find the right algorithms. That's why AI people love throwing around graphs of Moore's law.

[enki]

not if the amount of training data required to learn by example is exponential or even combinatorial. we might not even be in the same ballpark. all data ever recorded on digital media might not be enough to learn even a simple intelligence without assumptions about structure.

a kind of analogous problem is: can you learn how to build a living thing purely from digitally recorded DNA samples, if you don't have access to the internal structure of any living thing? How many dna samples would you need?