My intuition is that the cellular machinery and prenatal environment are required much more for meeting the biochemical needs of a human embryo than as providers of extra information. The hard part where you need to have a huge digital data string mostly exactly right is in the DNA, while the growth environment is more of a warm soup that has an intricate mixture of stuff but is far too noisy to actually carry anything close to the amount of actionable information the genome does.
Standard notions are also selling short the massive amount of very clever work the newborn baby’s brain is already doing when it starts to learn things that lets it bootstrap itself to full intelligence. It manages to do this from other people who mostly just give it food every now and then and make random attempts to engage it in conversation instead of doing the sort of massively intricate and laborous cognitive engineering they’d have to pull off if the newborn baby’s brain would actually need the similar sort of hard complexity a programmable general-purpose computer or a ovarian cell without a DNA does before it can have a go at turning into an intelligent entity.
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. Etc.
That is, the hardware grows to meet the software and data, because (as usual) the data/software/hardware divides in the brain are very fuzzy indeed.
(This suggests Kurzweil was plausibly approximately correct about the genome having the information needed to make the brain of a fresh-out-the-womb newborn, but that the attention-catching claim he was implicitly making of emulating an interesting, adult-quality brain based on the amount of information in a genome is rather more questionable.)
(And, of course, it brings to mind all manner of horribly unethical experiments to work out the minimum quantity of culture needed to stimulate the brain to grow right, or what the achievable dimensions of “right” are. You just can’t get the funding for the really mad science these days.)
Of course, the baby’s brain goes actively looking for cultural data. I will always treasure the memory of my daughter meowing back at the cat and trying to have a conversation with it and learn its language. Made more fun by the fact that cats only meow like that in the first place as a way of getting humans to do things.
I’ve heard anecdotes about things like children spontaneously developing their own languages even when completely deprived of language in their environment, which would weakly indicate the contrary position. Unfortunately, I don’t know whether to trust said anecdotes—can anyone corroborate?
There are reports of twins bootstrapping off each other, from the principle of noise->action->repeatnoise, called idioglossia. Seems is not that great actually as language. This NYT blog post suggests the words are more babble than language, which matches how my daughter spoke to the cat: English intonation and facial expressions, meowy babble as words. The Wikipedia article on cryptophasia says “While sources claim that twins and children from multiple births develop this ability perhaps because of more interpersonal communication between themselves than with the parents, there is inadequate scientific proof to verify these claims.”
I’ve heard anecdotes about things like children spontaneously developing their own languages even when completely deprived of language in their environment, which would weakly indicate the contrary position. Unfortunately, I don’t know whether to trust said anecdotes—can anyone corroborate?
There are examples of groups of deaf people developing languages together, but generally over a generation or two, and in large groups. The most prominent such case is Nicaraguan sign language.
That’s not an example of “completely deprived of language in their environment”—the article says “by combining gestures and elements of their home-sign systems …”
Yes, you are correct. There were pre-existing primitive sign systems that started off. It isn’t an example of language developing completely spontaneously.
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.)
My intuition is that the cellular machinery and prenatal environment are required much more for meeting the biochemical needs of a human embryo than as providers of extra information. The hard part where you need to have a huge digital data string mostly exactly right is in the DNA, while the growth environment is more of a warm soup that has an intricate mixture of stuff but is far too noisy to actually carry anything close to the amount of actionable information the genome does.
Standard notions are also selling short the massive amount of very clever work the newborn baby’s brain is already doing when it starts to learn things that lets it bootstrap itself to full intelligence. It manages to do this from other people who mostly just give it food every now and then and make random attempts to engage it in conversation instead of doing the sort of massively intricate and laborous cognitive engineering they’d have to pull off if the newborn baby’s brain would actually need the similar sort of hard complexity a programmable general-purpose computer or a ovarian cell without a DNA does before it can have a go at turning into an intelligent entity.
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. Etc.
That is, the hardware grows to meet the software and data, because (as usual) the data/software/hardware divides in the brain are very fuzzy indeed.
(This suggests Kurzweil was plausibly approximately correct about the genome having the information needed to make the brain of a fresh-out-the-womb newborn, but that the attention-catching claim he was implicitly making of emulating an interesting, adult-quality brain based on the amount of information in a genome is rather more questionable.)
(And, of course, it brings to mind all manner of horribly unethical experiments to work out the minimum quantity of culture needed to stimulate the brain to grow right, or what the achievable dimensions of “right” are. You just can’t get the funding for the really mad science these days.)
Of course, the baby’s brain goes actively looking for cultural data. I will always treasure the memory of my daughter meowing back at the cat and trying to have a conversation with it and learn its language. Made more fun by the fact that cats only meow like that in the first place as a way of getting humans to do things.
I’ve heard anecdotes about things like children spontaneously developing their own languages even when completely deprived of language in their environment, which would weakly indicate the contrary position. Unfortunately, I don’t know whether to trust said anecdotes—can anyone corroborate?
There are reports of twins bootstrapping off each other, from the principle of noise->action->repeatnoise, called idioglossia. Seems is not that great actually as language. This NYT blog post suggests the words are more babble than language, which matches how my daughter spoke to the cat: English intonation and facial expressions, meowy babble as words. The Wikipedia article on cryptophasia says “While sources claim that twins and children from multiple births develop this ability perhaps because of more interpersonal communication between themselves than with the parents, there is inadequate scientific proof to verify these claims.”
There are examples of groups of deaf people developing languages together, but generally over a generation or two, and in large groups. The most prominent such case is Nicaraguan sign language.
That’s not an example of “completely deprived of language in their environment”—the article says “by combining gestures and elements of their home-sign systems …”
Yes, you are correct. There were pre-existing primitive sign systems that started off. It isn’t an example of language developing completely spontaneously.
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.