Charles,
It's a good example. What it also brings out is the naive totalitarian premises
of RSI - the implicit premise that you can comprehensively standardise your
ways to represent and solve problems about the world, (as well as the domains
of the world itself). [This BTW has been the implicit premise of literate,
rational culture since Plato].
The reason we encourage and foster competition in society - and competing,
diverse companies and approaches - is that we realise that
competition/diversity is a fundamental part of evolution, at every level, and
necessary to keep developing better solutions to the problems of life.
What cog sci and AI haven't realised is that humans are also individually
designed "competitively" with conflicting emotions and ideas and ways of
thinking inside themselves - a necessary structure for an AGI. And such
conflict inevitably stands in the way of any RSI.
It'd be interesting to have Minsky's input here, because one thing he stands
for is the principle that human/general minds have to be built kludge-ily with
many different ways to think - different knowledge systems. We clearly aren't
meant to - and simply can't - think, for example, just logically and
mathematically. Evolution and human evolution/history have relentlessly built
up these GI's with ever more complex repertoires of knowledge representation
and sensors, because it's a good and necessary principle - the more complex
you want your interactions with the world to be.
>
>Charles/MT:> If RSI were possible, then you should see some signs of
it within human society, of
> humans recursively self-improving - at however small a scale. You
don't because of this
> problem of crossing and integrating domains. It can all be done, but
laboriously and
> stumblingly not in some simple, formulaic way. That is culturally a
very naive idea.
I hope nobody minds if I interject with a brief narrative concerning a
recent experience. Obviously I don't speak for Ben Goertzel, or anyone else who
thinks RSI or recognizing superior intelligence is possible.
As it happened, I was looking for a new job a while back, and landed an
interview with a major corporate entity. When I spoke to the HR representative,
she bemoaned the lack of hiring standards, especially for her own department.
"It's impossible," she said, "As a consultant explained it to us a few years
ago, the corporation changes with each person we hire or fire, changes into a
related but different entity. If we measure the intelligence of a corporation
in terms of how well suited it is to profit from its environment, my job is to
make sure that people we hire (on average) result in the corporation becoming
more intelligent." She looked at me for sympathy. "As if all our resources were
enough to recognize (much less plan) an entity more intelligent than
ourselves!" She had a point. "What's worse, we're expected to hire new HR staff
and provide training that will make our department more effective at hiring new
people." I nodded. That would lead to recursive self improvement (RSI), which
is clearly impossible. Finally she said I seemed like the sympathetic sort, and
even though that had nothing to do with her worthless hiring criteria, I could
have the job and start right away.
I thought about the problem later, and eventually concluded that one
good HR strategy would be to form hundreds or thousands (millions?) of
corporations with stochastic methods for hiring, firing, training, merging and
creating spinoffs, perhaps using GP or MOSES or some such. Eventually,
corporations would emerge with superior intelligence.
The alternative would be a massive cross-disciplinary effort, only
imaginable by a super-neo-da Vinci character who's a master of psychology,
mathematics, economics, manufacturing, politics -- essentially every field of
human knowledge, including medical sciences, history and the arts.
I guess it doesn't look too hopeful, so we're probably going to be
stuck with hiring, firing and training practices that mean absolutely nothing,
forever.
Charles Griffiths
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription
-------------------------------------------
agi
Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now
RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/
Modify Your Subscription:
https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=111637683-c8fa51
Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
