olalonde comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong

25 Post author: orthonormal 26 December 2011 10:57PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (1430)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: olalonde 25 April 2012 12:41:07AM *  0 points [-]

Human level intelligence is unable to improve itself at the moment (it's not even able to recreate itself if we exclude reproduction). I don't think monkey level intelligence will be more able to do so. I agree that the SIAI scenario is way overblown or at least until we have created an intelligence vastly superior to human one.

Comment author: Vulture 25 April 2012 02:22:54AM 2 points [-]

Uh... I think the fact that humans aren't cognitively self-modifying (yet!) doesn't have to do with our intelligence level so much as the fact that we were not designed explicitly to be self-modifying, as the SIAI is assuming any AGI would be. I don't really know enough about AI to know whether or not this is strictly necessary for a decent AGI, but I get the impression that most (or all) serious would-be-AGI-builders are aiming for self-modification.

Comment author: olalonde 25 April 2012 11:21:47AM 0 points [-]

Isn't it implied that sub-human intelligence is not designed to be self-modifying given that monkeys don't know how to program? What exactly do you mean by "we were not designed explicitly to be self-modifying"?

Comment author: Vulture 26 April 2012 01:09:18AM 0 points [-]

My understanding was that in your comment you basically said that our current inability to modify ourselves is evidence that an AGI of human-level intelligence would likewise be unable to self-modify.

Comment author: adamisom 25 April 2012 03:13:22AM 0 points [-]

This is a really stupid question, but I don't grok the distinction between 'learning' and 'self-modification' - do you get it?

Comment author: Vulture 25 April 2012 04:16:56AM 2 points [-]

By my understanding, learning is basically when a program collects the data it uses itself through interaction with some external system. Self-modification, on the other hand, is when the program has direct read/write acces to its own source code, so it can modify its own decision-making algorithm directly, not just the data set its algorithm uses.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 25 April 2012 04:48:00AM 1 point [-]

This seems to presume a crisp distinction between code and data, yes?
That distinction is not always so crisp. Code fragments can serve as data, for example.
But, sure, it's reasonable to say a system is learning but not self-modifying if the system does preserve such a crisp distinction and its code hasn't changed.