Which, if you think carefully enough, means that he's neither interested nor capable of (creating) AGI.
He, like many engineers, think intelligence is a kind of engineering; so you just need to build something that works.
Intelligence is all about coping under failure. It is a lot more like, 'acting safely when you dont have the answers you need' than 'answering questions correctly'.
That latter impulse resigns the whole field to cheap mimicry. These guys arent even starting from the right point, nor could they, being engineers.
> Intelligence is all about coping under failure. It is a lot more like, 'acting safely when you dont have the answers you need' than 'answering questions correctly'.
This is the first time I see this definition of intelligence.
My first impression is that this is a relevant aspect of intelligence, but very far from "all about". (other aspects being things like "abstract thought", world knowledge, agency, ...)
> That latter impulse resigns the whole field to cheap mimicry
AIs are inherently non-human intelligence. (I like the shoggoth-comparison [1]). AI companies go to great length to make them behave more human-like. If you look at earlier AIs (e.g. when they play games against humans), you will find that human experts (e.g. the people they play against) they will often note, that the AI behaves very unhuman and un-understandable in certain aspects (e.g. they make a move that seems utter non-sense at first, but will be very important 40 moves latter in the game). (I should note, that the opposite is true as well: sometimes the AI surprises the expert by exhibiting very human-like behavior)
I wouldnt count AI as intelligent. I have a definition grounded in empirical observations of actually intelligent systems -- start there, and generalise very carefully.
The reason intelligence has evolved in animals is because we do not have the answers. All of modern AI is focused on how to extract behaviour from answers -- rather than how to cope when they arent present.
Intelligence is the solution to the problem that evolution cannot adapt life fast enough. Evolution is the kind of 'intelligence' AI has: delete the failures; know the answers.
The intelligence of interest, in animals, is live adaption to one's environment. It's ecological rationality brought about by sensory-motor adaption.
This is why we find the NN-type solutions to problems deeply unsatisfying. We arent missing something: there is no "there" there. It's just a compression of the answer space.
This is really disappointing: the intelligent solution is the interesting one! Modern AI finds ways of solving problems without intelligence.
>He, like many engineers, think intelligence is a kind of engineering; so you just need to build something that works.
Intelligence is what intelligence is. You don't know what it is even if you dearly believe you do. Nobody really does. We construct ways to probe it, at least to probe the aspects of it we find useful.
>That latter impulse resigns the whole field to cheap mimicry.
"Mimicry" is an assertion that is essentially meaningless. You mean to tell me the plane is fake flying ? Lol Okay. The bee might just as well accuse a bird of mimicry. This is a very rubbish line of argument an astonishing number of people seem to have trapped themselves in. The idea that internal processes matter anything more than a means to an end.
> You don't know what it is even if you dearly believe you do
Right, but you know enough -- of course! -- to say that I do not know.
I've written the first draft of a book on animal intelligence. I doubt neither you nor Carmack have even thought that a study of actually intelligent systems (animals) should even enter the conversation.
No no, of course, it's just going to be a modulo trick.
>Right, but you know enough -- of course! -- to say that I do not know.
I simply know that sincerely believing something to be so has no actual bearing on truth. I know that results are what matter because that is what we employ with each other. And because that's the only thing Evolution "cared" about.
>I've written the first draft of a book on animal intelligence.
That's good for you.
>I doubt neither you nor Carmack have even thought that a study of actually intelligent systems (animals) should even enter the conversation.
I do know that this study is not the be all end all. Why would I be concerned with following one example of biology to a T when even Nature itself does not (Flight and the bee and the bird amongst others).
>No no, of course, it's just going to be a modulo trick.
There is no trick. There is only what flies and what does not. Trick flying is not a distinction that exists. Reality does not play tricks.
>He, like many engineers, think intelligence is a kind of engineering; so you just need to build something that works.
It is quite plainly possible to produce a system at least as intelligent as a human literally through random chance, based solely on what happens to work. That is, in fact, the sole example we have for how to make anything like AGI.
Human-level intelligence has never emerged from random chance. We humans evolved, and that's via a Darwinistic process of natural selection - which is about as far from random chance as one could get.
Mutations are random - they provide the raw material for evolutionary selection. Evolution itself is absolutely not random chance.
He, like many engineers, think intelligence is a kind of engineering; so you just need to build something that works.
Intelligence is all about coping under failure. It is a lot more like, 'acting safely when you dont have the answers you need' than 'answering questions correctly'.
That latter impulse resigns the whole field to cheap mimicry. These guys arent even starting from the right point, nor could they, being engineers.