[extropy-chat] Eugen Leitl on AI design

[Eliezer Yudkowsky]

Eugen Leitl wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 02, 2004 at 08:21:29AM -0400, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote:
> 
>>wondering why you think you can give hardware estimates for intelligence 
>>when you claim not to know how it works.  I used to do that too, convert 
>>synaptic spikes to floating-point ops and so on.  Later I looked back on my 
>>calculations of human-equivalent hardware and saw complete gibberish, 
>>blatantly invalid analogies such as Greek philosophers might have used for 
>>lack of any grasp whatsoever on the domain.  People throw hardware at AI 
>>because they have absolutely no clue how to solve it, like Egyptian 
>>pharaohs using mummification for the cryonics problem.
> 
> Many orders of magnitude more performance is a poor man's substitute for
> cleverness, by doing a rather thorough sampling of a lucky search space.

Right.  But it automatically kills you.  Worse, you have to be clever to 
realize this.  This represents an urgent problem for the human species, but 
at least I am not personally walking directly into the whirling razor 
blades, now that I know better.

> I think (based on my layman's understanding of current state of the art) 
> a connectionist, very probably a spiking architecture is vital.

What on Earth does that have to do with intelligence?  That is building a 
wooden airfield and hoping that someone brings cargo.

-- 
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence