I’d like to add two pieces of evidence in favor of the weak unlearnability hypothesis:
(1) Humpback whales have songs that can go on for days. Despite decades of study, we don’t really understand what they’re saying.
(2) The output of machine learning algorithms (e.g. Google’s Deep Dream) can be exceedingly counterintuitive to humans.
Whales are our distant cousins and humans created machine learning. We might reasonably suppose that actual aliens, with several billion years of completely independent evolution, might be much harder to understand.
Re aliens—Fair enough. Some very simple alien, perhaps the Vulcan equivalent of a flatworm, may be well within our capability to understand. Is that really what we’re interested in?
Re machine learning—The data for machine learning is generally some huge corpus. The question is whether we’re even capable of understanding the data in something like the manner the algorithm does. My intuition says no, but it’s an open question.
I’d like to add two pieces of evidence in favor of the weak unlearnability hypothesis:
(1) Humpback whales have songs that can go on for days. Despite decades of study, we don’t really understand what they’re saying.
(2) The output of machine learning algorithms (e.g. Google’s Deep Dream) can be exceedingly counterintuitive to humans.
Whales are our distant cousins and humans created machine learning. We might reasonably suppose that actual aliens, with several billion years of completely independent evolution, might be much harder to understand.
If they are complex, this seems obvious. Simple, less so.
Even ignoring hardware, they can be modeled as being programmed by the data. Perhaps we don’t understand the data?
Re aliens—Fair enough. Some very simple alien, perhaps the Vulcan equivalent of a flatworm, may be well within our capability to understand. Is that really what we’re interested in?
Re machine learning—The data for machine learning is generally some huge corpus. The question is whether we’re even capable of understanding the data in something like the manner the algorithm does. My intuition says no, but it’s an open question.