John G. Rose wrote:
[snip]
Building a complex based intelligence much different from the human brain
design but still basically dependant on complexity is not impossible just
formidable. Working with software systems that have designed complexity and
getting predicted emergence and in this case cognition, well that is
something that takes special talent. We have tools now that nature and
evolution didn't have. We understand things through collective knowledge
accumulated over time. It can be more than trial and error. And the existing
trial and error can be narrowed down.
Ah, but now you are stating the Standard Reply, and what you have to
understand is that the Standard Reply boils down to this: "We are so
smart that we will figure a way around this limitation, without having
to do any so crass as just copying the human design."
The problem is that if you apply that logic to well-known cases of
complex systems, it amounts to nothing more than baseless, stubborn
optimism in the face of any intractable problem. It is this baseless
stubborn optimism that I am trying to bring to everyone's attention.
In all my efforts to get this issue onto people's mental agenda, my goal
is to make them realize that they would NEVER say such a silly thing
about the vast majority of complex systems (nobody has any idea how to
build an analytical theory of the relationship between the patterns that
emerge in Game Of Life, for example, and that is one of the most trivial
examples of a complex system that I can think of!). But whereas most
mathematicians would refuse to waste any time at all trying to make a
global-to-local theory for complex systems in which there is really
vicious self-organisation at work, AI researchers blithely walk in and
say "We reckon we can just use our smarts and figure out some heuristics
to get around it".
I'm just trying to get people to do a reality check.
Oh, and meanwhile (when I am not firing off occasional broadsides on
this list) I *am* working on a solution.
Richard Loosemore
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agi
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