On 06/07/06, Russell Wallace <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 7/6/06, William Pearson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> How would you define the sorts of tasks humans are designed to carry
> out? I can't see an easy way of categorising all the problems
> individual humans have shown there worth at, such as key-hole surgery,
> fighter piloting, cryptography and quantum physics.
Well, there are two timescales involved, that of the species and that of
the individual. The short answer to the first question is: survival in Stone
Age tribes on the plains of Africa. That this produced an entity that can do
all the things on your list invokes something between wonder and existential
paranoia depending on one's mood and predilections.
Wonder for me. This long timescale viewpoint is useful because it
tells us that there will be lots of programming in humans that is not
useful for a robot/computer to act and survive in the real world. For
example blindly copying a baby human neural net to a electronic robot
wouldn't be smart. it wouldn't have the inherent fear/knowledge to
stay away from water that it would need.
(The absence of any
steps of the Great Filter between the Tertiary and the Cold War is a common
assumption - but it is only an assumption. But I digress.)
On the individual timescale we're programmable general purpose problem
solvers:
This is an interesting term. If we could define what it means
precisely we would be a long way to building a useful system. What do
you think the closest system humanity has created to a pgpps is? A
generic PC almost fulfils the description, programmable, generic and
if given the right software to start with can solve problems. But I am
guessing it is missing something. As someone interested in RL systems
I would say an overarching goal system for guiding programmability,
but I would be interested to know what you think.
We're good at learning from our environment, but that only gets you
so far, by itself it won't let you do any of the above things because you'll
be dead before you get the hang of them.
So this whittles away AIXI and similar formalisms from the possible
candidates for being a pgpps.
However, our environment also
contains other people and we can do any of the above by learning the
solutions other people worked out.
Agreed. I definately think this is where a lot of work needs to be
done. There is a variety of different methods we can learn from
others. Copying others, getting instruction even just knowing
something is possible can enable you to get to the same end point
without exact copying, e.g. building an Atom bomb.
Will Pearson
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