One thing that appears to be missing on the filial imprinting story is a mechanism allowing the “mommy” thought assessor to improve or at least not degrade over time.
The critical window is quite short, so many characteristics of mommy that may be very useful will not be perceived by the thought assessor in time. I would expect that after it recognizes something as mommy it is still malleable to learn more about what properties mommy has.
For example, after it recognizes mommy based on the vision, it may learn more about what sounds mommy makes, and what smell mommy has. Because these sounds/smalls are present when the vision-based mommy signal is present, the thought assessor should update to recognize sound/smell as indicative of mommy as well. This will help the duckling avoid mistaking some other ducks for mommy, and also help the ducklings find their mommy though other non-visual cues (even if the visual cues are what triggers the imprinting to begin with).
I suspect such a mechanism will be present even after the critical period is over. For example, humans sometimes feel emotionally attracted to objects that remind them or have become associated with loved ones. The attachment may be really strong (e.g. when the loved one is dead and only the object is left).
Also, your loved ones change over time, but you keep loving them! In “parental” imprinting for example, the initial imprinting is on the baby-like figure, generating a “my kid” thought assessor associated with the baby-like cues, but these need to change over time as the baby grows. So the “my kid” thought assessor has to continuously learn new properties.
Even more importantly, the learning subsystem is constantly changing, maybe even more than the external cues. If the learned representations change over time as the agent learns, the thought assessors have to keep up and do the same, otherwise their accuracy will slowly degrade over time.
This last part seems quite important for a rapidly learning/improving AGI, as we want the prosocial assessors to be robust to ontological drift. So we both want the AGI to do the initial “symbol-grounding” of desirable proto-traits close to kindness/submissiveness, and also for its steering subsystem to learn more about these concepts over time, so that they “converge” to favoring sensible concepts in an ontologically advanced world-model.
Just to be clear, I was speculating in that section about filial imprinting in geese, not familial bonding in humans. I presume that those two things are different in lots of important ways. In fact, for all I know, they might have nothing whatsoever in common. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(UPDATE: I guess the Westermarck Effect might be implemented in a Section-13.3-like way, although not necessarily.)
If the learned representations change over time as the agent learns, the thought assessors have to keep up and do the same, otherwise their accuracy will slowly degrade over time.
Yeah, that seems possible (although I also consider it possible that it’s not a problem; by analogy, catastrophic forgetting is famously more of an issue for ANNs than for brains).
If the learned representations do in fact change a lot over time, I’m slightly skeptical that it would be possible to solve that problem directly, thanks to the lack of an independent ground truth. For example, I can imagine a system that says “If I’m >95% confident that this is MOMMY, then update such that I’m 100% confident that this is MOMMY.” Maybe that system would work to keep pointing at the real mommy, even as learned representations drift. But also, maybe that system would cause the Thought Assessor to gradually go off the rails and trigger off weird patterns in noise. Not sure. Did you have something like that in mind? Or something different?
An alternative might be that, if the specific filial-imprinting mechanism gradually stops working over time, it deactivates at some point and the (now-adolescent) goose switches to some other mechanism(s), like “desire to be with fellow geese that are extremely familiar to me” a la Section 13.4.
Reminder that I know very little about goose behavior and this is all casual speculation. :)
Ok, so this is definitely not a human thing, so probably a bit of a tangent. One of the topics that came up in a neuroscience class once was goose imprinting. There’s apparently been studies (see Eckhard Hess for the early ones) that show that the strength of the imprinting (measured by behavior following the close of the critical period) onto whatever target is related to how much running towards the target the baby geese do. The hand-wavey explanation was something like ‘probably this makes sense since if you have to run a lot to keep up with your mother-goose for safety, you’ll need a strong mother-goose-following behavioral tendency to keep you safe through early development’.
Mother geese don’t change their appearance much over their lifetime. I doubt that a chick ever needs to update its mommy thought assessor.
The ‘my kid’ thought assessor in humans is easily fooled by puppies and baby rabbits. Spend a large proportion of your waking hours around a cute animal and your brainstem assumes that it is your child.
One thing that appears to be missing on the filial imprinting story is a mechanism allowing the “mommy” thought assessor to improve or at least not degrade over time.
The critical window is quite short, so many characteristics of mommy that may be very useful will not be perceived by the thought assessor in time. I would expect that after it recognizes something as mommy it is still malleable to learn more about what properties mommy has.
For example, after it recognizes mommy based on the vision, it may learn more about what sounds mommy makes, and what smell mommy has. Because these sounds/smalls are present when the vision-based mommy signal is present, the thought assessor should update to recognize sound/smell as indicative of mommy as well. This will help the duckling avoid mistaking some other ducks for mommy, and also help the ducklings find their mommy though other non-visual cues (even if the visual cues are what triggers the imprinting to begin with).
I suspect such a mechanism will be present even after the critical period is over. For example, humans sometimes feel emotionally attracted to objects that remind them or have become associated with loved ones. The attachment may be really strong (e.g. when the loved one is dead and only the object is left).
Also, your loved ones change over time, but you keep loving them! In “parental” imprinting for example, the initial imprinting is on the baby-like figure, generating a “my kid” thought assessor associated with the baby-like cues, but these need to change over time as the baby grows. So the “my kid” thought assessor has to continuously learn new properties.
Even more importantly, the learning subsystem is constantly changing, maybe even more than the external cues. If the learned representations change over time as the agent learns, the thought assessors have to keep up and do the same, otherwise their accuracy will slowly degrade over time.
This last part seems quite important for a rapidly learning/improving AGI, as we want the prosocial assessors to be robust to ontological drift. So we both want the AGI to do the initial “symbol-grounding” of desirable proto-traits close to kindness/submissiveness, and also for its steering subsystem to learn more about these concepts over time, so that they “converge” to favoring sensible concepts in an ontologically advanced world-model.
Thanks!
Just to be clear, I was speculating in that section about filial imprinting in geese, not familial bonding in humans. I presume that those two things are different in lots of important ways. In fact, for all I know, they might have nothing whatsoever in common. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(UPDATE: I guess the Westermarck Effect might be implemented in a Section-13.3-like way, although not necessarily.)
Yeah, that seems possible (although I also consider it possible that it’s not a problem; by analogy, catastrophic forgetting is famously more of an issue for ANNs than for brains).
If the learned representations do in fact change a lot over time, I’m slightly skeptical that it would be possible to solve that problem directly, thanks to the lack of an independent ground truth. For example, I can imagine a system that says “If I’m >95% confident that this is MOMMY, then update such that I’m 100% confident that this is MOMMY.” Maybe that system would work to keep pointing at the real mommy, even as learned representations drift. But also, maybe that system would cause the Thought Assessor to gradually go off the rails and trigger off weird patterns in noise. Not sure. Did you have something like that in mind? Or something different?
An alternative might be that, if the specific filial-imprinting mechanism gradually stops working over time, it deactivates at some point and the (now-adolescent) goose switches to some other mechanism(s), like “desire to be with fellow geese that are extremely familiar to me” a la Section 13.4.
Reminder that I know very little about goose behavior and this is all casual speculation. :)
Ok, so this is definitely not a human thing, so probably a bit of a tangent. One of the topics that came up in a neuroscience class once was goose imprinting. There’s apparently been studies (see Eckhard Hess for the early ones) that show that the strength of the imprinting (measured by behavior following the close of the critical period) onto whatever target is related to how much running towards the target the baby geese do. The hand-wavey explanation was something like ‘probably this makes sense since if you have to run a lot to keep up with your mother-goose for safety, you’ll need a strong mother-goose-following behavioral tendency to keep you safe through early development’.
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2011/12/imprinting
Mother geese don’t change their appearance much over their lifetime. I doubt that a chick ever needs to update its mommy thought assessor.
The ‘my kid’ thought assessor in humans is easily fooled by puppies and baby rabbits. Spend a large proportion of your waking hours around a cute animal and your brainstem assumes that it is your child.