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Agreed on both counts, but I think the bountied idea survives this...
Recognizing and criticizing ideas could be a requisite for tractably synthesizing any possible explanation (I suspect as much).
Ah, so if I understand correctly, there are two knobs affecting speed (elapsed time) for a given algorithm: the hardware, and the implementation of the algorithm. The given algorithm has a complexity, independent of those two, which is how the time and memory scales with an input.
Universal explainers
In the context of how AGI may work – which seems to be what Tyler is mostly interested in – the concept of a universal explainer might not get us very far. Creativity is the more fundamental concept, I think.
A person is a universal explainer, yes, but he could also use his creativity to come up with reasons not to create explanations.
https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/explain-irrational-minds
Universal explainers seek good explanations…
You sounded persuaded by https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/hard-to-vary-or-hardly-usable. As in, you agreed that people don’t seek good/hard-to-vary explanations.
So why still speak of good explanations?
Speed is a property of programs, too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_O_notation
Creativity isn't defined by its outputs but by its process. RNGs do not recognise or criticise ideas.
We could say a person is a program that can synthesize any possible explanation in finite time, excluding memory limitations. But this would again grant personhood to RNGs. For that matter, a counting program could just enumerate all possible binary strings up to its memory limit, in finite time...
A random number generator does not have universal creativity, because it is not a universal explainer: it can only generate explanations by accident. Universal explainers seek good explanations through conjecture and criticism.
Maybe... but "understanding" is too vague, I think. Doesn't understanding mean: can explain? But then this is just "can create any explanation" again. I think the core question is why a random program generator isn't a person, coming from Deutsch's definition of a person as a program that has explanatory universality -- can create any explanation (my thought here is that this definition isn't good enough on its own, given the random generator point).
Doesn't it? All explanatory knowledge is in the set of all possible programs, and a random program (or number) generator can generate any of those, given infinite time.
The definition of fitness for DNA also originated outside it, so this doesn't in itself suggest the system isn't actually creating new knowledge.
Understanding explanatory knowledge seems like a better criterion
Does not understand explanatory knowledge seems like a better criterion
A random number generator does not create explanatory knowledge.
By the latter standard, neither nature nor random number generators are people, which is sensible; nor can nature create any given possible knowledge tractably -- this is true because the fact that all possible knowledge exists is only by way of the multiverse, which is a process that cannot be simulated in its entirety, even by a quantum computer.
This wrongly implies speed is a property of programs, but it's a property of hardware.
This is a bad criterion because then random program generators are sometimes people.
An alternative criterion for personhood is speed: a person is a program that can synthesize any explanation in less than the lifetime of the universe, say.
Criticized per #4718: AIs are not "narrowly creative"; there is only creativity in the binary, universal sense, per Deutsch.
The definition of fitness that rendered Move 37 the best choice originated outside the system.
This highlights the core mystery of AGI/creativity: if it is the creation of something which cannot be deduced from existing rules (yet is still helpful, hard-to-vary, knowledge-bearing, etc.), how can it be programmed? In a sense it cannot, as Deutsch writes: "...what distinguishes human brains from all other physical systems is qualitatively different from all other functionalities, and cannot be specified in the way that all other attributes of computer programs can be. It cannot be programmed by any of the techniques that suffice for writing any other type of program." [https://aeon.co/essays/how-close-are-we-to-creating-artificial-intelligence]
If the human made Move 37 for the same reason as AlphaGo, it would not be creative. Such moves are creative when humans make them because they are not deducing them (they can't due to practical limitations). If something can be deduced, it is not creative. Creativity is the conjecture of a new structure which is not derivable/deducible/implicit via existing rules of inference. All AI-generated art is implicit in the training data and model design in the same sense, so is not being made via creativity.
If there had been no AlphaGo and no Move 37, and a human had made that move, as they have similar moves, it would no doubt be called creative genius (as similar moves have). Isn't the above a double standard?
Move 37 was not new knowledge. It was the winning choice in that situation before the AI ever existed, because it was deducible from the game's rules and the current board state. It was implicit knowledge, already contained in the system at that time. AlphaGo made it explicit, by finding it, like a search engine, but did not create it. If you calculate the trillionth digit of pi, you haven't created new knowledge, at least not in any sense we should mean. You have simply revealed a value that was already fixed by a definition.
The fact that Move 37 wasn't explicitly in the training data or the programmers is irrelevant to its status as knowledge. This is true for pi, and for all content created by AI at the time of this writing.