Creativity is just search.
Correct, but not helpful; when you say "just search," that's like saying "but Dark Matter is just physics." The physicists don't have a good explanation of Dark Matter yet, and the search people don't have a good implementation of creativity (on the level of concepts) yet.
I agree that there's a lot more work to be done in AI. We need to find better learning and search algorithms. What I disagree with is that the work must be this kind of philosophical work that Deutsch is proposing. I think the work that needs to be done is very much engineering work.
It is not obvious to me that Deutsch is familiar with ideas like Solomonoff induction, Pearl's work on causality, and so on, and thinks that they're inadequate to the task. He might be saying "we need a formalized version of induction" while unaware that Solomonoff already proposed one.
I made it clear what I mean:
Search that is possibly guided by experience solving similar problems. By learning from past experiences, search becomes more efficient.
I agree that there's a lot more work to be done in AI. We need to find better learning and search algorithms.
Why did I mention this at all? Because there's no other way to do this. Creativity (coming up with new unprecedented solutions to problems) must utilize some form of search, and due to the no-free-lunch theorem, there is no shortcut to finding the solution to a problem. The only thing...
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