How to Create a Mind
I believe how thinking works has many parallels with how visual perception works, because they both use the same underlying hardware. Chunking and hierarchy are super primitive and very likely are abilities that permeate the brain. Kurzweil (I know, I know) in his book How To Create A Mind writes about how we read: For example, to recognize a written word there might be several pattern recognizers for each different letter stroke: diagonal, horizontal, vertical or curved. The output of these recognizers would feed into higher level pattern recognizers, which look for…
Kurzweil's "Singularity" is upon us, but he's now being cagey about it. He says it's still years away. His interview with Lex Fridman[0] was pretty tame - I didn't learn much new from it. Kurzweil deflected the Singularity segment to be a discussion about the history of computer power. Remember that Kurzweil is Director of Engineering[1] at Google, with the mandate to "bring natural language understanding to Google"[2]. He started there in 2012, just after publishing his book, "How to Create a Mind"[3], and that's exactly what he and his team have been doing for ten years. Publication of…
I've been working through the following book: http://www.amazon.com/How-Create-Mind-Thought-Revealed/dp/06... And it has a chapter (2 and 3) on stepping through exactly what algorithms and data structures Einstein used to figure out that time itself slows down for you to explain why traveling at fractions of the speed of light does not change how fast light passes you by. More important than guessing time as the variable property, he was expert at creating experiments to disprove his hypothesis. "If this is the case, we should be able to do this exact experiment to expose the exact value…
Not to be a dick, but "they also might not". The article doesn't present many good reasons for believing augmented biological intelligence will be superior. Or even what that means, ie, for how long? Obviously the human brain is an existing form of intelligence, so in that sense it may be easier to bootstrap from. But ultimately, augmentations to the brain would be limited by the requirement of being attached to a brain. The space of augmented brains is a tiny subset of the space of possible intelligent systems. There's comparatively unlimited scope for superior designs to augmented brains…
On the first point, I think the difference is a quite more subtle. Remember I talked about properties, not processes. Maybe when I said "mental" properties I oversimplified. The model McGinn is criticizing works like this: The mind has mental properties because it is composed of agents (homuniculi) that exhibit a certain kind of mental, or at the very least, not-physical property (non-physical in the sense that they don't belogn to a physical theory). For example, one could try to explain mentality in terms of modules of the brain that are information processing agents. But then, how do we…
McGinn says that "thinking about London while in Miami" involves no pattern recognition, because no senses are involved. But Kurzweil's claim is pattern recognition is key to memory, and certainly memory is involved when recollecting London. It's fine to disagree with Kurzweil's claim about memory, but to imply he's discovered a big loophole ("this point seems totally obvious and quite devastating") and suggest Kurzweil thinks patterns only apply to our senses, is completely silly. McGinn's tirade against anthropomorphic language is also silly. It's obviously something he's trotted out from…
We can all agree Kurzweil is past his intellectual expiration date. The saddest part here is he wasted such a good title, "How to Create a Mind," repeating his historical non-usable drivel (not to mention it sounds like a Culture series book). My current "create a consciousness" track is to get something with pattern completion completion working (NB: aspie nerds often fail this step interpersonally ("Oh, Hello!" "blank stare"), but not intellectually/professionally ("What does this thingamajigger do?" "Oh, well, that's there because historically we used a 3.2 bit kernel to operate the Arm…
The thing about Ray Kurzweil is that he's basically entertainment, in the same way William Gibson or George Lucas are entertainment. He excites and inspires the lay population, but is ultimately pretty weak on the non-fiction part. There aren't any scientists that are saying, "hey, no, that whole advancing technology thing sounds like a terrible idea!" Of course that would be awesome. The reason Kurzweil gets ragged on by the scientific community is because when it comes to specific claims and technical details, his batting average is terrible. His books are notorious for making…
IBM, Facebook, Nuance, and most importantly: Google Google Google. "Google Search Will Be Your Next Brain"[1] is a good start, plus it's follow-up[2]. Some lay-of-the-land, least-to-most cool IMO: * Facebook's interest is in AI for social purposes (face recognition, NLP), rather than AGI (reason DeepMind turned them down). But they're still solidly in the field / a worthy target. * IBM has been interested in AGI for a very long time, hence Watson. NLP, neural nets, machine learning, etc. Dig into Watson, lots of fun here. * Nuance. Smaller, Dragon Speak. NLP & Markov Models primarily, but…
Great post, and thank you for the link to Hinton's coursera page - I didn't know about that. I also hope to learn a thing or two from your github code. But it was so depressing to read this: > Now, when I say Artificial Intelligence I’m really only referring to Neural Networks. There are many other kinds of A.I. out there (e.g. Expert Systems, Classifiers and the like) but none of those store information like our brain does (between connections across billions of neurons). This is a middle-brow dismissal of almost the entire field of A.I. because it does not meet an unnecessarily narrow…