Comment by BoiledCabbage
8 years ago
Once we get computers as smart as a mouse, we'll be at most 3-5 years or so computers as smart as a human. We will have solved at the major challenges in AGI and it will simply be a scale problem then.
Saying we don't have mouse level AGI is simply saying human AGI is greater than 5 years away, which isn't a remotely contentious statement.
The difference in intelligence between an amoeba and a mouse is enormous compared to a mouse and us. People greatly under appreciate how intelligent and close to human a mouse/bird/pig are in the grand scheme of things. Emotions, behaviors, motivations, goal setting, memory it's all there already. A flat worm, an ant, a fly - those are the large stepping stone accomplishments.
Think about rate of very long distance communication in humans. It took us tens of thousands of years to get to 2.4 kps dial up modems, and only few decades to get to common 300Mbps. The important signal is seeing a 100bps modem, not a 100Mbps connection.
So the real question is how long until we can replicate a worm's intelligence?
> Once we get computers as smart as a mouse, we'll be at most 3-5 years
But how long did it take Nature to get from a mammal with mouse-level intelligence to a human-level brain. I think 200-ish million years [0].
You might be right that a mouse is a good indicator of high-level intelligence and that you don't need human-level intelligence to make a good AI, but there might still be some considerable way to go until we have an AI that can significantly outperform us.
[Edit - I agree that natural selection wasn't aiming or directed, and thus wasn't forced to be as fast as we could be. But a human's higher brain functions might not be simple incremental improvements over a mouse's, and there could still be a long way to go]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammal
Nature wasn’t really aiming. So it’s not a valid basis of time estimates.
How long did it take nature to go from T-Rex to chickens?
There’s no reason to believe human level intelligence to be an inevitable result of evolution. It just happend.
> But how long did it take Nature to get from a mammal with mouse-level intelligence to a human-level brain
Not that I agree with the sentiment in the GP, but it took a relatively short time from the first development of multicellular life until nervous systems developed and an even shorter amount of time to go from small mammal intelligence to human intelligence. However, evolution isn't about "progress" as we understand it. The most we can say with regards to intelligence and evolution is that human intelligence satisfied a niche that existed at a certain place and time.
How long did it take Nature to get from nothing to a mouse? About 20 times as long.
So I think the estimate of 3-5 years might be realistic, but the artificial mouse is a long way away, IMO.
Keep in mind that nature uses a somewhat directional random process. How much of those 200-ish million years were spent waiting on selection pressures to promote bigger brains?
I was thinking about human intelligence today and thought about how anything at the tail end of a normal distribution usually produces quite a perverse result. Then I realized we are at the extreme tail end of the intelligence distribution in the animal kingdom. No wonder we manifest all manner of odd results.
I'm not sure creating an intelligence that even supercedes our own will lead to anything good. If anything I'd expect things to get even more perverse.
You have no rational basis for that 3 - 5 year estimate. That's just picking numbers out of the air.
The basis is the complexity growth trend that we have already observed in computing (and most other human endeavors)
There is zero evidence that progress toward AGI follows Moore's Law. And we observe much slower complexity growth in most other human endeavors.
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> Once we get computers as smart as a mouse, we'll be at most 3-5 years or so computers as smart as a human. We will have solved at the major challenges in AGI and it will simply be a scale problem then.
Why? What challenges?
Maybe this isn't what you meant, but I'm curious why you would put a Fly ahead of an Ant in the stepping stones.
Can you make a Turing Ant without a Turing Ant Colony?
mouse, crow, worm, human, all running on neurons. You simulate one you can simulate a berzillion.
> worm's intelligence
Done.
http://openworm.org/
Alas, it's not even close to "done." It's a work in progress and a surprisingly difficult one.
For context, the worm (c. elegans, at least) has a very stereotyped nervous system with 302 neurons. The anatomy, down to the cellular level, is known incredibly well. Their behavioral repertoire is not huge and they're fairly easy to study. Nevertheless, we can't even simulate a worm very accurately. (There was a good twitter thread about why yesterday: https://twitter.com/OdedRechavi/status/1086992699528544256)
The human eyeball has about 120M rods, 6.5M cones, and projects to a brain containing ~86B neurons, which is about 8-9 orders of magnitude more cells. The number of possible interactions scales even faster. In summary, we're not close, not at all....
When biology comes into play, you can see how weak our understanding and abilities are. We can barely simulate small proteins of a few thousand atoms. Accurately simulating an entire cell is (at the moment) in the realm of science fiction. Only inaccurate abstractions can be used to model it.
However I have to object in a way about the brain. To me, there's an unanswered question: Is the rest of the human brain as simple and "generic" as the convolutional neural networks we made inspired by the vision system? Or is each networks' architecture and "algorithms" developed specifically for a task? In the latter case we might still be a very long way from anything resembling AGI.
However my personal estimation is that most of the things we do can be modeled using existing tools when scaled and modified appropriately (ie RNNs). There's also the ugly job of stitching those systems together, but it's not that different from what happens in nature.
Not done. OpenWorm is a project to create a worm simulation. An important distinction.
More like “overdone”, it’s a cellular simulation including the brain as a first step.
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