the key failure of Deutsch's stance: he assumes all statistical methods must be fundamentally naive.
I don't want to speak for Deutsch, but since I'm sympathetic to his point of view I'll point out that a better way to formulate the issue would be to say that all statistical methods rest on some assumptions and when these assumptions break the methods fail.
This is about equivalent to assuming all statistical methods operate on small data sets.
Not at all. The key issue isn't the size of the data set, the key issue is stability of the underlying process.
To use the calendar example, you can massively increase your data set by sampling not every day but, say, every second. And yet this will not help you one little bit.
restriction on the size and complexity of the data set is completely arbitrary.
Not really. Things have to computable before the heat death of the universe. Or, less dramatically and more practically, the answer to the question must be received while there is still the need for an answer. This imposes rather serious restrictions on the size and complexity of the data that you can deal with.
and correctly applies the complex world theory to produce the right prediction.
Sometimes correctly. And sometimes incorrectly. Brains operate more by heuristics than by statistical methods and the observation that a heurstic can be useful doesn't help you define under which constraints statistical methods will work.
You do realize that people are working on logical uncertainty under limited time, and this could tell an AI how to re-examine its assumptions? I admit that Gaifman at Columbia deals only with a case where we know the possibilities beforehand (at least in the part I read). But if the right answer has a description in the language we're using, then it seems like E.T. Jaynes theoretically addresses this when he recommends having an explicit probability for 'other hypotheses.'
Then again, if this approach didn't come up when the authors of "Tiling Agents" discuss utility maximization, perhaps I'm overestimating the promise of formalized logical uncertainty.
Folks here should be familiar with most of these arguments. Putting some interesting quotes below:
http://aeon.co/magazine/being-human/david-deutsch-artificial-intelligence/
"Creative blocks: The very laws of physics imply that artificial intelligence must be possible. What's holding us up?"
He also says confusing things about induction being inadequate for creativity which I'm guessing he couldn't support well in this short essay (perhaps he explains better in his books). Not quoting here. His attack on Bayesianism as an explanation for intelligence is valid and interesting, but could be wrong. Given what we know about neural networks, something like this does happen in the brain, and possibly even at a concept level.
His final conclusions are disagreeable. He somehow concludes that the principal bottleneck in AGI research is a philosophical one.
In his last paragraph, he makes the following controversial statement:
This would be false if, for example, the mother controls gene expression while a foetus develops and helps shape the brain. We should be able to answer this question definitively once we can grow human babies completely in vitro. Another problem would be the impact of the cultural environment. A way to answer this question would be to see if our Stone Age ancestors would be classified as AGIs under a reasonable definition