I disagree with your breakdown. There are several key divides:
Concrete vs abstract
Continuous vs discrete
spatial vs symbolic
deliberative vs reactive
I can be very deliberative, thinking in 2-d pictures (when designing a machine
part in my head, for example). I know lots of people who are completely
reactive in the symbolic world, hearing and replying to words by reflex
("Yes, dear"). (Believe it or not, this can even happen when typing messages
to mailing lists.)
Spatial to symbolic actually happens quite early in evolution. A housefly has
to recognize a pattern on its eyes and decide all at once to flee or not --
it can't fly off with just the half its body the threat appears to. It has
classified the picture of you with your flyswatter into a discrete category.
A crow bending a wire as a tool is deliberating but thinking in concrete
terms, rather than abstractions. In fact, the jump to abstraction is probably
the most human-specific, latest biologically, of the distinctions. But it is
*easy* for a computer, which starts out working with, and being understood
by, abstractions in the first place.
I claim that we can and do think in each of the 16 modes implied by the above
(and others as well).
I think the key to AI is not so much to figure how to operate in any given one
of them, but how to operate in more than one, using one as a pilot wave or
boundary condition for another. *Creating* symbols from continuous
experience. Forming a conditioned reflex by deliberation and practice.
Figure out the reduction ratio of a planetary gear drive as a function of the
number of teeth on the sun and planet gears. You can't do it without using
both visualization and algebra.
Now go out onto the tennis court and return a high kick serve wide to your
forehand in the deuce court. You have to watch the server's motion, the
ball's trajectory, estimate its spin, predict its flight after the bounce,
note whether it was in the service court and decide whether to stop play and
call it out, decide where to return it and with what stroke, all in less than
a second. Purely reactive, but also an irreducible mixture of the spatial and
symbolic.
Josh
On Tuesday 29 April 2008 04:46:29 am, Russell Wallace wrote:
...
> In biological evolution, S came first, of course. It was hard - likely
> a hard step in the Great Filter - to make D on top of S. It was done,
> still, and he who thinks we should try S first, then D, is not
> necessarily irrational, even though I disagree with him.
>
> I have some outline ideas on how to make S, but not scalably, not that
> would easily generalize. So I think D should come first; and I think I
> now know how to make D, in a way that would hopefully then scale to S.
> I do not, of course, expect anyone except me to believe those personal
> claims; but they are my reasons for believing the right path is D then
> S.
>
> Is there a consensus at least that AGI paths fall into the two
> categories of D-then-S or S-then-D?
>
-------------------------------------------
agi
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