timtyler comments on Existential Risk and Public Relations - Less Wrong
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Of course there will be significant insights into the AGI problem over the coming decades -- probably many of them. My point was that I don't see AGI as hard because of a lack of insights; I see it as hard because it will require vast amounts of "ordinary" intellectual labor.
...but you don't really know - right?
You can't say with much confidence that there's no AIXI-shaped magic bullet.
That's right; I'm not an expert in AI. Hence I am describing my impressions, not my fully Aumannized Bayesian beliefs.
AIXI-shaped magic bullet?
AIXI's contribution is more philosophical than practical. I find a depressing over-emphasis of bayesian probability theory here as the 'math' of choice vs computational complexity theory, which is the proper domain.
The most likely outcome of a math breakthrough will be some rough lower and or upper bounds on the shape of the intelligence over space/time complexity function. And right now the most likely bet seems to be that the brain is pretty well optimized at the circuit level, and that the best we can do is reverse engineer it.
EY and the math folk here reach a very different conclusion, but I have yet to find his well considered justification. I suspect that the major reason the mainstream AI community doesn't subscribe to SIAI's math magic bullet theory is that they hold the same position outline above: ie that when we get the math theorems, all they will show is what we already suspect: human level intelligence requires X memory bits and Y bit ops/second, where X and Y are roughly close to brain levels.
This, if true, kills the entirety of the software recursive self-improvement theory. The best that software can do is approach the theoretical optimum complexity class for the problem, and then after that point all one can do is fix it into hardware for a further large constant gain.
I explore this a little more here
The article linked to in the parent is entitled:
"Created in the Likeness of the Human Mind: Why Strong AI will necessarily be like us"
Good quality general-purpose data-compression would "break the back" of the task of buliding synthetic intelligent agents - and that's a "simple" math problem - as I explain on: http://timtyler.org/sequence_prediction/
At least it can be stated very concisely. Solutions so far haven't been very simple - but the brain's architecture offers considerable hope for a relatively simple solution.
That seems like crazy talk to me. The brain is not optimal - not its hardware or software - and not by a looooong way! Computers have already steam-rollered its memory and arithmetic -units - and that happened before we even had nanotechonolgy computing components. The rest of the brain seems likely to follow.