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Richard_Loosemore comments on The Brain as a Universal Learning Machine - Less Wrong
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A very good question indeed. Although ... there is a depressing answer.
This is a core-belief issue. For some people (like Yudkowsky and almost everyone in MIRI) artificial intelligence must be about the mathematics of artificial intelligence, but without the utility-function approach, that entire paradigm collapses. Seriously: it all comes down like a house of cards.
So, this is a textbook case of a Kuhn / Feyerabend - style clash of paradigms. It isn't a matter of "Okay, so utility functions might not be the best approach: so let's search for a better way to do it" .... it is more a matter of "Anyone who thinks that an AI cannot be built using utility functions is a crackpot." It is a core belief in the sense that it is not allowed to be false. It is unthinkable, so rather than try to defend it, those who deny it have to be personally attacked. (I don't say this because of personal experience, I say it because that kind of thing has been observed over and over when paradigms come into conflict).
Here, for example, is a message sent to the SL4 mailing list by Yudkowsky in August 2006:
So the immediate answer to your question is that it will never be treated as a matter of urgency, it will be denied until all the deniers drop dead.
Meanwhile, I went beyond that problem and outlined a solution, soon after I started working in this field in the mid-80s. And by 2006 I had clarified my ideas enough to present them at the AGIRI workshop held in Bethesda that year. The MIRI (then called SIAI) crowd were there, along with a good number of other professional AI people.
The response was interesting. During my presentation the SIAI/MIRI bunch repeatedly interrupted with rude questions or pointed, very loud, laughter. Insulting laughter. Loud enough to make the other participants look over and wonder what the heck was going on.
That's your answer, again, right there.
But if you want to know what to do about it, the paper I published after the workshop is a good place to start.
Link?
Sorry, was in too much of a rush to give link.....
Loosemore, R.P.W. (2007). Complex Systems, Artificial Intelligence and Theoretical Psychology. In B. Goertzel & P. Wang (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2006 AGI Workshop. IOS Press, Amsterdam.
http://richardloosemore.com/docs/2007_ComplexSystems_rpwl.pdf
Excuse me, but as much as I think the SIAI bunch were being rude to you, if you had presented, at a serious conference on a serious topic, a paper that waves its hands, yells "Complexity! Irreducible! Parallel!" and expected a good reception, I would have been privately snarking if not publicly. That would be me acting like a straight-up asshole, but it would also be because you never try to understand a phenomenon by declaring it un-understandable. Which is not to say that symbolic, theorem-prover, "Pure Maths are Pure Reason which will create Pure Intelligence" approaches are very good either -- they totally failed to predict that the brain is a universal learning machine, for instance.
(And so far, the "HEY NEURAL NETS LEARN WELL" approach is failing to predict a few things I think they really ought to be able to see, and endeavor to show.)
That anyone would ever try to claim a technological revolution is about to arise from either of those schools of work is what constantly discredits the field of artificial intelligence as a hype-driven fraud!
Okay, so I am trying to understand what you are attacking here, and I assume you mean my presentation of that paper at the 2007 AGIRI workshop.
Let me see: you reduced the entire paper to the statement that I yelled "Complexity! Irreducible! Parallel!".
Hmmmm...... that sounds like you thoroughly understood the paper and read it in great detail, because you reflected back all the arguments in the paper, showed good understanding of the cognitive science, AI and complex-systems context, and gave me a thoughtful, insightful list of comments on some of the errors of reasoning that I made in the paper.
So I guess you are right. I am ignorant. I have not been doing research in cognitive psychology, AI and complex systems for 20 years (as of the date of that workshop). I have nothing to say to defend any of my ideas at all, when people make points about what is wrong in those ideas. And, worse still, I did not make any suggestions in that paper about how to solve the problem I described, except to say "HEY NEURAL NETS LEARN WELL".
I wish you had been around when I wrote the paper, because I could have reduced the whole thing to one 3-word and one 5-word sentence, and saved a heck of a lot of time.
P.S. I will forward your note to the Santa Fe Institute and the New England Complex Systems Institute, so they can also understand that they are ignorant. I guess we can expect an unemployment spike in Santa Fe and Boston, next month, when they all resign en masse.