Who else are you thinking of when you talk about “algorithmically-minded, AI-adjacent neuroscientists”? A lot of scientific research seems done nowadays online, so I’m wondering whether I need to know the relevant twitter accounts/forums/whatever if I want to keep up with this research.
Also, I feel like people misinterpret the no-free lunch theorem. (One of) the theorems states that for any algorithms A and B, there are approximately as many prior functions on which A outperforms B as vice versa. But like, we don’t care about most prior functions, we care about kolmogorov complexity relative to us. So what if an AGI algorithm fails on tonnes of priors that are alien to ours?
Who else are you thinking of when you talk about “algorithmically-minded, AI-adjacent neuroscientists”?
For example, off the top of my head, Tim Behrens, Jeff Hawkins, Josh Tenenbaum, Konrad Kording, Peter Dayan, Randall O’Reilly, every neuroscientist at DeepMind, many many others. The “Brain Inspired” podcast is good, it focuses on this area.
Also, I feel like people misinterpret the no-free lunch theorem…
Yes, but note that Blake does not make that particular mistake: “Now, all that being said, the proof for the no free lunch theorem, refers to all possible tasks. And that’s a very different thing from the set of tasks that we might actually care about. Right? Because the set of all possible tasks will include some really bizarre stuff that we certainly don’t need our AI systems to do.”
Yes, but note that Blake does not make that particular mistake
Yeah, good point. I think I was blindly pattern matching the consecutive mentions of “no free lunch” and “can’t get much better than humanity” to mean they believe the former strongly implies the latter. Probably because I don’t have a good model of his views, so I just interpert them as having whatever model fits some of his statements.
Who else are you thinking of when you talk about “algorithmically-minded, AI-adjacent neuroscientists”? A lot of scientific research seems done nowadays online, so I’m wondering whether I need to know the relevant twitter accounts/forums/whatever if I want to keep up with this research.
Also, I feel like people misinterpret the no-free lunch theorem. (One of) the theorems states that for any algorithms A and B, there are approximately as many prior functions on which A outperforms B as vice versa. But like, we don’t care about most prior functions, we care about kolmogorov complexity relative to us. So what if an AGI algorithm fails on tonnes of priors that are alien to ours?
For example, off the top of my head, Tim Behrens, Jeff Hawkins, Josh Tenenbaum, Konrad Kording, Peter Dayan, Randall O’Reilly, every neuroscientist at DeepMind, many many others. The “Brain Inspired” podcast is good, it focuses on this area.
Yes, but note that Blake does not make that particular mistake: “Now, all that being said, the proof for the no free lunch theorem, refers to all possible tasks. And that’s a very different thing from the set of tasks that we might actually care about. Right? Because the set of all possible tasks will include some really bizarre stuff that we certainly don’t need our AI systems to do.”
In an earlier draft, I had a section echoing what you’re saying, but decided it was a bit off-topic, since again Blake is making a different argument. So I deleted it. Eliezer has also written up that argument at https://arbital.com/p/nofreelunch_irrelevant/ & https://intelligence.org/2017/12/06/chollet/.
Yeah, good point. I think I was blindly pattern matching the consecutive mentions of “no free lunch” and “can’t get much better than humanity” to mean they believe the former strongly implies the latter. Probably because I don’t have a good model of his views, so I just interpert them as having whatever model fits some of his statements.
Thanks for the recommendations.