Feelings, emotions and even biases are just algorithms
Recently, I heard a loud crash in my backyard. As I rushed outside, I found a strange oblong and metallic craft, damaged and half-buried in a muddy crater, a gaping hole ripped in its side. When I peered cautiously inside, I discovered a shaken but unharmed alien staring back at me, its quivering gelatinous brain illuminated by billions of blinking lights, resembling a miniature data center.
“Are you OK?” I yelled.
The alien said nothing. Instead, a series of words flickered on a monitor attached to its chest:
EVENT E1 OCCURRED NOW AT UNKNOWN LOCATION L1 ANIMATE-OBJECT SELF S1 AT…How to progress toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)
- Basic pattern recognition. Extract features from raw sensory inputs; for example, the ears convert raw sounds to frequency maps; the eyes convert visual inputs to feature maps (used for facial recognition, etc.) Associate new perceptions with existing memories (via dimension reduction). Use algorithms to actively filter out irrelevant stimuli (habituation) and ignore stimuli after repeated exposure (adaptation).
- Mental representation. Mentally represent and simulate the state of the environment. Track physical objects across time, space and sensory inputs, and understand that physical objects are solid, can support other objects, and can otherwise affect…
…and how to fix it
What’s wrong with AI?
If you want to know what’s wrong with current theories of artificial intelligence (AI) — and avoid the next AI winter —just ask a neuroscientist.
In “How We Learn,” neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene outlines how babies apply a rich assortment of prior models to understand people, objects, time, space and causality. Babies don’t use anything remotely like current AI techniques, except perhaps in the pattern recognition capacity of the senses.
Today’s AI neural networks are shallow and imperfect. They attempt to learn everything at the same level, gleaning superficial statistical regularities in data and shallow features in…
What could be worth more than that?
Scientists have discovered that an asteroid 230 million miles from Earth called “16 Psyche” appears to be 90% metallic, composed of nickel and iron. NASA has plans to visit the 120-mile-wide asteroid in 2026.
Psyche is large for an asteroid, but smaller than a planet. So small, in fact, that its surface gravity is only 0.015 times that of Earth. If you were to race across the surface of Psyche at 409 miles per hour, you’d achieve escape velocity and lift off into space.
The value of the metal in the asteroid is estimated at $10,000 quadrillion. That’s a lot…
Artificial General Intelligence
And the implications for human intelligence
At a minimum, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) should explain how common human cognitive tasks are accomplished:
- Planning and Acting
- Recognizing Objects and Situations
- Predicting the Future
- Attributing Sources and Errors
- Understanding Cause and Effect
- Reasoning and Advocating
- Understanding the Motives of others
A graph is a handy way to enable these cognitive abilities and represent the state of the environment (observable world). For example, we might recognize a dog as a specific instance of a prototypical dog. …
Hint: It’s all about feeling, emotion, and common sense.
Elon Musk famously warned that “with artificial intelligence (AI), we are summoning the demon.” He feared that AI might suddenly spin out of control and put society at risk. Ironically, AI must succeed if Musk is to deliver on his promise of self-driving autonomous cars that can navigate through bad weather, poorly marked roads, and novel emergency situations.
In the past two decades, AI has made great strides. Computers can now handily beat human chess masters, as well as world champions at the ancient game of Go. Two AI methods in particular — reinforcement learning (RL) and agent-based modeling (ABM)…
Rob Vermiller
A computer scientist with a passion for AI and Cognitive Science.
