I think you’re underselling the developmental power of a culture. Bits of your brain literally don’t grow properly if you’re not raised in a human culture. Ignore a baby at the wrong points in its development and it’ll fail to ever be able to learn any language, feel certain emotions or comprehend some social constraints.
Not denying this at all. Just pointing out that the brain makes astonishingly good use of very noisy and arbitrary input when it does get exposed to other language-using humans, compared to what you’d expect any sort of machine learning AI to be capable of. I’m a lot more impressed at a thing made of atoms getting to be complex enough to be able to start the learning process than the further input it needs to actually learn the surrounding culture.
Think about it this way: Which is more impressive, designing and building a robot that can perceive the world and move around it and learn things as well as a human growing from infant to adulthood, or pointing things to the physically finished but still-learning robot and repeating their names, and doing the rest of the regular teaching about stuff thing people already do with children?
(For anyone offended at the implied valuation, since Parenting Human Children Is The Most Important Thing, imagine that the robot looks like a big metal spider and therefore doesn’t count as a Parented Child.)
My basic idea here is that the newborn baby crawling about is already a lot more analogous to an AI well in the way of going FOOM than a bunch of scattered clever pattern recognition algorithms and symbol representation models that just need the overall software architecture design to tie them together, since the things that stop humans from going FOOM might be a lot more related to physiological shortcomings than the lack of extremely clever further design. The baby has moved from being formed from the initial hard design information that went in it into discovering the new information it needs to grow from its surroundings. I’d be rather worried about an AI that reaches a similar stage.
My basic idea here is that the newborn baby crawling about is already a lot more analogous to an AI well in the way of going FOOM than a bunch of scattered clever pattern recognition algorithms and symbol representation models that just need the overall software architecture design to tie them together
I’ll credit that. A baby is a machine for going FOOM.
(Specifically, I’d guess, because so much has to be left out to produce a size of offspring that can be born without killing the mother too often. Hence the appalling, but really quite typical of evolution, hack of having the human memepool be essential to the organism expressed by the genes growing right.)
Not denying this at all. Just pointing out that the brain makes astonishingly good use of very noisy and arbitrary input when it does get exposed to other language-using humans, compared to what you’d expect any sort of machine learning AI to be capable of. I’m a lot more impressed at a thing made of atoms getting to be complex enough to be able to start the learning process than the further input it needs to actually learn the surrounding culture.
Think about it this way: Which is more impressive, designing and building a robot that can perceive the world and move around it and learn things as well as a human growing from infant to adulthood, or pointing things to the physically finished but still-learning robot and repeating their names, and doing the rest of the regular teaching about stuff thing people already do with children?
(For anyone offended at the implied valuation, since Parenting Human Children Is The Most Important Thing, imagine that the robot looks like a big metal spider and therefore doesn’t count as a Parented Child.)
My basic idea here is that the newborn baby crawling about is already a lot more analogous to an AI well in the way of going FOOM than a bunch of scattered clever pattern recognition algorithms and symbol representation models that just need the overall software architecture design to tie them together, since the things that stop humans from going FOOM might be a lot more related to physiological shortcomings than the lack of extremely clever further design. The baby has moved from being formed from the initial hard design information that went in it into discovering the new information it needs to grow from its surroundings. I’d be rather worried about an AI that reaches a similar stage.
I’ll credit that. A baby is a machine for going FOOM.
(Specifically, I’d guess, because so much has to be left out to produce a size of offspring that can be born without killing the mother too often. Hence the appalling, but really quite typical of evolution, hack of having the human memepool be essential to the organism expressed by the genes growing right.)
How much larger do you estimate babies would be if they came pre-installed with the information they appallingly lack?
Presumably at least with a more fully-developed brain. It does quite a bit of growing in the first couple of years.