Contriving

Reshared post from +Kaj Sotala

> [Q:] Do you think we can actually get to generalized AI?

> [A:] I think to get to superintelligence we might currently be missing differences of a “kind,” in the sense that we won’t get there by just making our current systems better. But fundamentally there’s nothing preventing us getting to human-like intelligence and beyond.

> To me, it’s mostly a question of “when,” rather than “if.”

> I don’t think we need to simulate the human brain to get to human-like intelligence; we can zoom out and approximate how it works. I think there’s a more straightforward path. For example, some recent work shows that ConvNet* activations are very similar to the human visual cortex’s IT area activation, without mimicking how neurons actually work.

> [*SF: ConvNet, or convolutional network, is a type of artificial neural network topology tailored to visual tasks first developed by Yann LeCun in the 1990s. IT is the inferior temporal cortex, which processes complex object features.]

> So it seems to me that with ConvNets we’ve almost checked off large parts of the visual cortex, which is somewhere around 30% of the cortex, and the rest of the cortex maybe doesn’t look all that different. So I don’t see how over a timescale of several decades we can’t make good progress on checking off the rest.

> Another point is that we don’t necessarily have to be worried about human-level AI. I consider chimp-level AI to be equally scary, because going from chimp to humans took nature only a blink of an eye on evolutionary time scales, and I suspect that might be the case in our own work as well. Similarly, my feeling is that once we get to that level it will be easy to overshoot and get to superintelligence.

> On a positive note though, what gives me solace is that when you look at our field historically, the image of AI research progressing with a series of unexpected “eureka” breakthroughs is wrong. There is no historical precedent for such moments; instead we’re seeing a lot of fast and accelerating, but still incremental progress. So let's put this wonderful technology to good use in our society while also keeping a watchful eye on how it all develops.