Why are modern neural networks rapidly getting better at social skills (e.g. holding a conversation) and intellectual skills (e.g. programming, answering test questions), but have made so little progress on physically-embodied tasks such as controlling a robot or a self-driving car?
Easier to train, less sensitive to errors: neural nets do produce ‘bad’ or ‘uncanny’ outputs plenty of times, but their errors don’t harm or kill people, or cause significant damage (which a malfunctioning robot or self-driving car might).
How does this model account for “intuitive geniuses”, who can give fast and precise answers to large arithmetic questions, but do it by intuition rather than explicit reasoning? (I remember an article or blog post that mentioned one of them would only answer integer square roots, and when given a question that had an irrational answer, would say “the numbers don’t feel right” or something like that. I couldn’t find it again though.)
It’s not that surprising that human intuitive reasoning could be flexible enough to build a ‘mental calculator’ for some specific types of arithmetic operations (humans can learn all kind of complicated intuitive skills! It implies some amount of flexibility.) It’s still somewhat surprising: I would expect human reasoning to have issues representing numbers with sufficient precision. I guess the calculation would have to be done digit by digit? I doubt neurons would be able to tell the difference between 2636743 and 2636744 if it’s stored as a single number.
Easier to train, less sensitive to errors: neural nets do produce ‘bad’ or ‘uncanny’ outputs plenty of times, but their errors don’t harm or kill people, or cause significant damage (which a malfunctioning robot or self-driving car might).
It’s not that surprising that human intuitive reasoning could be flexible enough to build a ‘mental calculator’ for some specific types of arithmetic operations (humans can learn all kind of complicated intuitive skills! It implies some amount of flexibility.) It’s still somewhat surprising: I would expect human reasoning to have issues representing numbers with sufficient precision. I guess the calculation would have to be done digit by digit? I doubt neurons would be able to tell the difference between 2636743 and 2636744 if it’s stored as a single number.