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A.I. Developer Challenges Pro-Human Bias
destinyland writes "After 13 years, the creator of the Noble Ape cognitive simulation says he's learned two things about artificial intelligence. 'Survival is a far better metric of intelligence than replicating human intelligence,' and "There are a number of examples of vastly more intelligent systems (in terms of survival) than human intelligence." Both Apple and Intel have used his simulation as a processor metric, but now Tom Barbalet argues its insights could be broadly applied to real life. His examples of durable non-human systems? The legal system, the health care system, and even the internet, where individual humans are simply the 'passive maintaining agents,' and the systems can't be conquered without a human onslaught that's several magnitudes larger."
By redefining intelligence to have nothing to do with what anybody means by intelligence, he can then claim that other systems exhibit more intelligence. Like a rock, presumably, since it survives far better than humans. I think this may be an example of somebody getting too interesting in specifics of tree-bark, and forgetting about the forest.
Survival is a terrible metric of intelligence. By that standard, lions and tigers and bears are the most intelligent species on the planet.
They were, then we started shooting them. Who's the smartest one now, bitches?
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By that standard, lions and tigers and bears...
<Dorothy>Oh my!</Dorothy>
The CB App. What's your 20?
You mean stupid. Most lions and tigers are endangered, if not close to extinction, and bears aren't too well off either.
A better example would be insects, like mosquitoes.
MRSA is, of course.
Or maybe a species that we can't afford to exterminate. Bees or spiders maybe? Or perhaps a species of bacteria important to our digestion? When there are two species X and Y, and X could in theory slay Y, but cannot live without Y, while Y can live without X but cannot slay X, which one is 'smarter'?
Reading the article, it struck me as a good explanation of why AI is not getting anywhere.
By the authors criterion the solar system would take a huge number of people to shut down, and thus would be vastly more intelligent than any collection of surviving knives and forks used at AI conferences. I think that answers the other complaint of the author as well,
"There is a lack of scholarship in this area. This is, in large part, because most ideas about intelligence are deeply and fallaciously interconnected with an assumed understanding of human intelligence."
Oh well,
Stephan
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
You're right; that fake word refuses to die.
The available documentation for Noble Ape is fairly shallow and opaque, it describes a simple scripting language, and some high leve discussion about space, time, and so on... but that's about it. Where's the AI? How exactly does the model simulate an ape, what's the relationship of the model to ApeScript? Where, in short, is the FAQ?
The banking system is another example of a system much better than human intelligence for survival and resilience. Oh wait...
It persuaded us to save its "life", didn't it?
... and that's when the C.H.U.D.'s came at me.
Unsurprisingly, most of the people here haven't read, or perhaps not really absorbed, what TFA discusses, and are jumping to quick and irrelevant conclusions.
The author explains that Survival is a good metric of Intelligence, and he uses humans as an example. One human can definitely kill one lion, bear, mosquito, single bacteria, etc. if equipped with his intelligently designed tools such as a gun, or a mosquito zapper, antibacterial soap. He uses these tools, intelligently, to kill one bear, and hence, the human is more intelligent. However, if you take 10 bears, then sure, they may be able to kill the 1 human, but that means they are less intelligent, and take more numbers.
He simulates intelligence this way, and he defines a simulation as any environment with applied constraints, and that may include the internet, legal system, your neighbourhood community, etc.
So here's what he says: A system, such as the health care or legal system, will not be shutdown by one person. In fact, it probably won't even be shutdown by 10 people, maybe 100. And hence, the system is vastly more intelligent than a human, intrinsically since we worked in numbers to evolve this system.
I think it's a very interesting way of looking at intelligence. Again, this is all based Mr. Barbalet's assumptions.
Sharks man, freaking sharks.
Exactly. The next evolutionary level: sharks with laser-beams.
There's something to be said for focusing on low-level survival issues, but one can do more than pontificate about it. As someone who's worked on legged locomotion control, I've made the point that a big part of life is about not falling down and not bumping into stuff. Unless you've got that working, not much else is going to work. Once you've got that working well, the higher level stuff can be added on gradually. This is bottom-up AI, as opposed to top-down AI.
Bottom-up AI is now mainstream, but it was once a radical concept. I went through Stanford at the height of the expert systems boom in the mid-1980s, when abstraction was king and the logicians were running the AI programs. The "AI Winter" followed after they failed.
Rod Brooks made bottom-up AI semi-respectable, but he went off onto a purely reactive AI tangent, with little insect robots. That works, but it doesn't lead to more than insect-level AI. My comment on this was that it was a matter of the planning horizon for movement planning. Purely reactive systems have a planning horizon of zero. That works for insects, because they are small and light, and can just bang feelers into obstacles without harm.
As creatures get bigger and faster, they need a longer planning horizon. The minimum planning horizon for survival is your stopping distance. (This is explicit in autonomous vehicle work.) Bigger and faster animals need better motion planners. This is probably what drove the evolution of the cerebellum, which is most of the brain in the mammals below the primates.
I've had horses for many years; I was on horseback an hour ago. Horses are interesting in this respect because they're big, fast, have very good short-term motion planning, but do little long-term planning. Horse brains have a big cerebellum and a small cortex, which is consistent with horse behavior. This gives a sense of what to aim for in bottom-up AI; good motion control, good vision, defer work on the higher level stuff until we have the low-level stuff nailed.
That's happening. The DARPA Grand Challenge, especially the 2006 season with driving in traffic, forced some work on the beginnings of short term situational awareness. BigDog has some of the low-level motion control working really well, but BigDog isn't yet very good at picking footholds. They're just getting started on situational awareness. There's some good stuff going on in the game community, especially in programs that can play decent football. This problem is starting to crack.
Short-term planning in these areas revolves around making predictions about what's going to happen next. The ability to ask "what-if" questions about movement before trying them improves survival enormously. This kind of planning isn't combinatoric, like traditional AI planning systems. It's more like inverting a simulation to run it as a planner.
I have no idea how we get to "consciousness", but if we can get to horse-level AI, we're well into the mammal range. I encourage people to work on that problem. There's enough compute power to do this stuff now without beating head against wall on CPU time issues. There wasn't in the 1990s when I worked on this.
I think we've defined intelligence almost like the halting problem, it's everything can't be solved by an algorithm and every time we find something solved by an algorithm we exclude it. Every time computers and robots do something we reduce it to mere execution of an algorithm, even when the algorithm wasn't defined by a human like in neural nets. As long as it stays within the problem domain we'll never consider it intelligent, intelligence is creativity and thinking outside the box. The best sign of intelligence in a Chess program would be "Want to play a game of Go instead?"
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Huh? Please tell me that was a fucking joke.
Lets just go with cyanobacteria. Not harmful, but the first photosynthisizing critters on earth. They created stromatolites a couple of billion years ago, and they are still doing it today, but on a much reduced scale. As far as they can tell the stromatolites in Sharks Bay Australia today are the same as the ones 2.8 billion years ago. The roaches we have today aren't the same species of roaches they had 354-295 million years ago. Notice that order of magnitude difference?
MRSA. That's an interesting thought.
But I think normal human G.I. flora are much more intelligent than any variety of staph aureus. These colonies have surrounded themselves with incredibly complex biological organisms that actually have the demonstrated the ability to surround themselves with non-biological constructions that have even allowed some of the G.I. colonies to travel off planet.
Now maybe some of you don't buy that line of reasoning. Well, just think about this: All those reports of alien abductions where the humans experienced anal probes? Obviously the aliens are attempting to communicate with the G.I. flora who are the truly dominant species of Earth.
Will
That's "what" you "said", right?
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!