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SimonF comments on The Irrationality Game - Less Wrong
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Yes!
Humans are "designed" to act intelligently in the physical world here on earth, we have complex adaptations for this environment. I don't think we are capable of acting effectively in "strange" environments, e.g. we are bad at predicting quantum mechanical systems, programming computers, etc.
But we can recursively self optimize ourselves for understanding mechanical systems or programming computers, not infinitely, of course, but with different hardware, it seems extremely plausible to smash through whatever ceiling a human might have.with the brute force of many calculated iterations of whatever humans are using,
And this is before the computer uses it's knowledge to reoptimize it's optimization process.
I understand the concept of recursive self-optimization und I don't consider it to be very implausible.
Yet I am very sceptical, is there any evidence that algorithm-space has enough structure to allow for effective search to allow such an optimization?
I'm also not convinced that the human mind is good counterexample, e.g. I do not know how much I could improve on a the sourcecode of a simulation of my brain once the simulation itself runs effectively.
I count "algorithm-space is really really really big" as at least some form of evidence. ;)
Mind you by "is there any evidence?" you really mean "does the evidence lead to a high assigned probability?" That being the case "No Free Lunch" must also be considered. Even so NFL in this case mostly suggests that a general intelligence algorithm will be systematically bad at being generally stupid.
Considerations that lead me to believe that a general intelligence algorithm are likely include the observation that we can already see progressively more general problem solving processes in evidence just by looking at mammals. I also take more evidence from humanity than you do. Not because I think humans are good at general intelligence. We suck at it, it's something that has been tacked on to our brains relatively recently and it far less efficient than our more specific problem solving facilities. But the point is that we can do general intelligence of a form eventually if we dedicate ourselves to the problem.
You're putting 'effectively' here in place of 'intelligently' in the original assertion.
I understand "capable of behaving intelligently" to mean "capable of achieving complex goals in complex environments", do you disagree?
I don't disagree. Are you saying that humans aren't capable of achieving complex goals in the domains of quantum mechanics or computer programming?
This is of course a matter of degree, but basically yes!
Can you give any idea what these complex goals would look like? Or conversely, describe some complex goals humans can achieve, which are fundamentally beyond an entity with a similar abstract reasoning capabilities as humans have, but lack some of humans' native capabilities for dealing more efficiently with certain types of problems?
The obvious examples are problems where a slow reaction time will lead to failure, but these don't seem to tell that much about the general complexity handling abilities of the agents.
I'll try to give examples:
For computer programming: Given a simulation of a human brain, improve it so that the simulated human is significantly more intelligent.
For quantum mechanics: Design a high-temperature superconductor from scratch.
Are humans better than brute-force at a multi-dimensional version of chess where we can't use our visual cortex?
We have a way to use brute force to achieve general optimisation goals? That seems like a good start to me!
Not a good start if we are facing exponential search-spaces! If brute-force would work, I imagine the AI-problem would be solved?
Not particularly. :)
But it would constitute an in principle method of bootstrapping a more impressive kind of general intelligence. I actually didn't expect you would concede the ability to brute force 'general optimisation' - the ability to notice the brute forced solution is more than half the problem. From there it is just a matter of time to discover an algorithm that can do the search efficiently.
Not necessarily. Biases could easily have made humans worse than brute-force.