RE: How big is an FAI solution? (was Re: [sl4] to-do list for strong, nice AI)

From: Bradley Thomas (brad36@gmail.com)
Date: Thu Oct 22 2009 - 21:01:38 MDT


>A human-software hybrid is likely to be as powerful as an AI and not
Friendly-by-construction. Humans are sufficiently mentally broken that I
wouldn't expect it to be Friendly-by-good-luck either. If the Friendly AI
problem is worth solving, then maybe we don't want any human-software
hybrids until we have an FAI that seems competent and claims it's safe to
do.

Anyone who uses software is already a human-software hybrid. They're just
not hard-wired to full bandwidth yet.

Brad Thomas
www.bradleythomas.com
Twitter @bradleymthomas, @instansa
 

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-sl4@sl4.org [mailto:owner-sl4@sl4.org] On Behalf Of Tim Freeman
Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2009 10:24 PM
To: sl4@sl4.org
Subject: Re: How big is an FAI solution? (was Re: [sl4] to-do list for
strong, nice AI)

From: tim@fungible.com (Tim Freeman)
>The PDF file at http://www.fungible.com/respect/talk-mar-2009.pdf is
><1MB. A real definition would include training data that would
>probably be a few GB's. Start reading at
>http://www.fungible.com/respect/index.html.

From: Matt Mahoney <matmahoney@yahoo.com>
>Training an AI by watching people will only define "human" as far as
>the cultural beliefs of the people it observes.

That might be true for some AI, but it's not a criticism of the algorithm
I'm pointing to. Training that AI more than "watching people". It's given
video that's annotated to say who is present and what they are doing and
what they are perceiving, so it's the beliefs of the people annotating the
video that matter, not the cultural beliefs of the people appearing in the
video. (The prior probability distribution also matters, of course, but
that's fixed.)

>It will fail utterly in the case of future human-software hybrids that
>don't yet exist.

Well, it will say *something*. Whether that's failing utterly depends on
what you want and what it does, and I don't know either of those. This is
all complicated by the fact that some of these future human-software hybrids
will surely be insane by our standards, so perhaps we don't want the AI
caring much what they want.

A human-software hybrid is likely to be as powerful as an AI and not
Friendly-by-construction. Humans are sufficiently mentally broken that I
wouldn't expect it to be Friendly-by-good-luck either. If the Friendly AI
problem is worth solving, then maybe we don't want any human-software
hybrids until we have an FAI that seems competent and claims it's safe to
do.

>Humans can recognize faces in videos without much effort. That doesn't
>make it easy. In fact the training data that allows you to do this
>consists of, among other things, several years worth of high resolution
>video.

I agree about the time period that people actually observe. I wouldn't call
human vision high-resolution, but that's minor. Although people get that
much video, I don't agree that they need it to do facial recognition. There
are programs that do facial recognition and they must not get that much
training data.

>Landauer measured the complexity of human long term episodic memory to
>be on the order of 10^9 bits.

I don't dispute that estimate. I do dispute the claim that it's relevant.
The only way it can be relevant is if understanding who is present and what
they are doing and what they are perceiving is a significant portion of what
humans do with all that long term memory. For example, the learning that has
to happen from the training data includes nothing about planning or
motivation or domain knowledge outside of this specific vision problem. It
includes nothing I learned in school and nothing I learned after age 8 or
so.

Why do you make up stories about why the problem is so hard? Do you perhaps
want people to give up? Do you think you gain status by spouting marginally
relevant large numbers? Something else?

-- 
Tim Freeman               http://www.fungible.com           tim@fungible.com


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