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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3620505" data-attributes="member: 4937">That was the paradigm that people tried through much of the '80's when they realized it wouldn't be trivial.  It had some interesting results (like the program that plays 20 questions with you), but at this point I don't think anyone thinks its going to produce emergent intelligence.  Except, we are starting to realize that that is actually how people intelligence works.  We've come to realize that people don't learn to walk - they are born knowing how to walk.  They just wait for the hardware to grow into the algorithm, and then they do a big compile and suddenly they are off and running.  I've had the oppurtunity actually watch children do this and it is (from my vantage as a programmer) just phenomenal.  There have been recent breakthroughs in cracking how this is done.Similarily, we've come to realize that people don't learn how to talk.  They are born understanding human language, and at some point they start filling thier database with rules and sounds that correspond to what they recognize as language and at some point they compile and they can talk.  This is likewise just amazing to watch, and it allows us to speculate at the limits of what languages humans can 'learn'.  What I'm trying to say is that limiting what can emerge is not only possible, but it is probably impossible to not limit what can emerge, because what we think of as 'strong intelligence' probably doesn't really exist.  What does exist is a collection of algorithms for soft intelligence which are sufficiently broad and applicable that working in parallel they can simulate hard intelligence.  But, without the algorithm for that class of functionality, its virtually impossible for it to emerge.  Why?  I put forward that this is just another example of refusing to view AIs as anything other than people.  It is intuitive to you that emergent AI's will be naive and childlike because that's what emerging human personalities are like.  But your human intuition is a very poor guide to non-human things, in the same way that your human intuition that the sun revolves around the earth (anyone can go out and observe it) is a poor basis for understanding things that are radically outside of evolved human experience (the very big universe, for example). The more interesting question is, "How do you explain broccoli to a child?"  And the answer is, the child already understands broccolli, or rather its already hardwired to recognize the trait of having broccolli-ness and to associate a certain sort of sound with things that have that trait.  So explaining broccolli to a child is easy.  On the other hand, the child is not hard-wired to understand 'six-dimonsional-ness', and indeed no human can understand six diminsionality in the same way that they understand broccolli.  It's impossible for them because the algorithm for doing it is not there.  They can approximate understanding of six dimensionality only by using some other algorithm (what that algorithm is isn't yet clear) but its clearly inefficient at doing it.  Moreover, although we can learn, we can never teach ourselves to understand sixth dimensionality in the same fashion we intuitively understand brocolli-ness.  So, the question of explaining broccoli to a machine involves figuring out some algorithm for pattern matching that is approximately as efficient as the utterly amazing human pattern matching algorithm (and believe me, its amazing), and then explaining broccolli to that machine will be as easy as explaining it to a child.  If I could figure how a toddler blinks at broccolli and instantly breaks down broccolli-ness into its component patterns so that they can after once glance recognize all broccolli as broccolli for the rest of thier life, I could retire a wealthy and famous man.</blockquote>

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