Re: Seed AI (was: How hard a Singularity?)

From: James Higgins (jameshiggins@earthlink.net)
Date: Tue Jun 25 2002 - 12:50:06 MDT


At 05:57 PM 6/25/2002 +0200, Eugen Leitl wrote:
>On Tue, 25 Jun 2002, James Higgins wrote:
> > As he puts it an AI could easily be considered complex "in a
> > pedestrian sense", which is true. But in an engineering sense no one
> > yet knows exactly how complex a good AI implementation will be. The
>
>I can give you an upper bound: a human baby. That's a ballpark, you can
>go a bit lower.
>
>How many bits do you need to describe a baby? (Remeber, not the zygote. A
>a complete formed baby).

Why does it matter? How many bits does it take to fully describe a
toaster? We are NOT trying to recreate a human baby, we are trying to
create an Artificial Intelligence. One that, in fact, may end up thinking
and working in much different ways than human minds do. Thus the
complexity of a baby (which is pointless anyway since the heart, liver,
toes, etc. are irrelevant) or any other living thing is irrelevant.

> > complexity of the world, however, is completely irrelevant to the
> > problem (since we're not trying to create an Artificial World, just a
> > single Artificial Intelligence that would exist in it).
>
>What I'm saying is that an AI has to have a large fraction of the world to
>be represented in it before it even can start to learn. Because the world
>is dirty, and complex, the resulting architecture is that, too. The vessel
>may be elegant, but not the contents.

Also very much not true. If the AI only understood math but could learn
and actually invent new knowledge in that domain would it not be
Intelligent? Why would it have to know about cars, hamsters, pizza or the
like to succeed?

Also, an engineering solution NEVER has to be dirty and complex in order to
solve a dirty & complex problem. An inelegant solution will produce less
than reasonable performance and/or won't be flexible. Thus a successful AI
implementation will almost certainly be elegant, otherwise it would require
substantially more resources (computing power, memory, etc) or get stuck in
a rut shortly after leaving the gate. And thus would be beat to the punch
by the first elegant implementation to surface.

James Higgins



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