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Comment by not_a_moth

8 years ago

But humans are "preprogrammed with information about the nature or structure of the environment"... i.e. 2 million years of the evolution of genus homo, and far beyond that too.

If real human intelligence is preprogrammed to a massively large extent, sounds like you are holding simulated human intelligence to a double standard.

Nothing in two million years of evolution programmed us to do programming. There is no common abstraction between it, and ape-on-the-savanna type problems.

Yet, nearly every human being can be taught how to program... But we aren't anywhere close to building an AI that can.

also, why assume computer intelligence is going to work similarly to human intelligence? I would assume that one potential way for it to work is to run simulations using data from sensors in the environment, and make more accurate predictions on an effect an action would have.

If such a machine can exist (and i believe it can, as computing power increases), then AI surely will follow sooner rather than later.

  • Fair for narrow tasks, but for general intelligence I think it will still need to account for the coordinates of real human intelligence; human intelligence as we know it is driven by intuition, emotion, preprogrammed evolutionary thinking, immersion in a culture and a language, etc. I don't think you can isolate a sort of pure reasoning module and with only that achieve general intelligence.

    Either way I feel like the task of achieving AGI through simulating human intelligence is probably easier, since we have billions of examples of this type of intelligence surrounding us. Granted, even though we're immersed and surrounded by it, it's kind of absurd that we still can't really model it.

    • > achieving AGI through simulating human intelligence

      but how do you know that human intelligence can be made super? May be there's limitations to human intelligence, and simulating it will not get us a super intelligence.

      > It's almost an absurdity of our existence that we're immersed and surrounded by it yet still can't model it.

      Good point. However, i think a facet of intelligence is how well a model the being under question can create of the 'real' world. Humans do a very good job compared to most animals, but there's plenty of room for improvement since humans only have limited data to model with.

      A machine can have input from basically an unlimited number of sensors, which include things a human mind doesn't cope with (like EM rays not of the visible spectrum). Therefore, i postulate that an AI that simulate humans won't beat an AI that's ground up built to take advantage of more data.

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