Reinforcement learning requires a well defined goal and a well defined way to quantitatively measure progress along that goal. In reality these don't exist without a hand of God guiding you. In the case of machine learning that hand of God is our own. Even given infinite processing power, you could not construct a reinforcement learning system that would mimic humanity's progress - it simply is a nonstarter due to the nature of reinforcement learning itself.
Conceptually, it's really not as hard as you make it seem. There are layers, but once you peel them away there's only one thing left, which all living things share: the drive to survive (maintain internal state parameters within a certain range by accessing nutrition, protection from environmental elements, security from other survival-seeking entities, reproduction to pass on genes, etc). No need to bring God/gods into it.
There's also no need to specifically mimic humanity's progress; that's just an accident of survival facilitated by opposable thumbs and language ability. We've already made machines with the base abilities, and emulated the drive (see evolutionary algorithms[0] for example). We just need to put it all together in a few units and let them "loose" to evolve on their own for a while. It took humans ~300,000 years to get where we are today; I'm positive that it'll take machines a small fraction of that. Nothing special.
And what exactly is ridiculous about it?
Reinforcement learning requires a well defined goal and a well defined way to quantitatively measure progress along that goal. In reality these don't exist without a hand of God guiding you. In the case of machine learning that hand of God is our own. Even given infinite processing power, you could not construct a reinforcement learning system that would mimic humanity's progress - it simply is a nonstarter due to the nature of reinforcement learning itself.
Conceptually, it's really not as hard as you make it seem. There are layers, but once you peel them away there's only one thing left, which all living things share: the drive to survive (maintain internal state parameters within a certain range by accessing nutrition, protection from environmental elements, security from other survival-seeking entities, reproduction to pass on genes, etc). No need to bring God/gods into it.
There's also no need to specifically mimic humanity's progress; that's just an accident of survival facilitated by opposable thumbs and language ability. We've already made machines with the base abilities, and emulated the drive (see evolutionary algorithms[0] for example). We just need to put it all together in a few units and let them "loose" to evolve on their own for a while. It took humans ~300,000 years to get where we are today; I'm positive that it'll take machines a small fraction of that. Nothing special.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm
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