[extropy-chat] SIAI: Donate Today and Tomorrow

[Eliezer Yudkowsky]

Mike Lorrey wrote:
> 
> On that score, and regarding the discussion/argument you and I had over
> beers at Extro5, have you read the interview in Wired with Jeff
> Hawkins? He asserts that AI research has been a failure because human
> intelligence is really just a massive memory machine:

Mike, I'm reasonably damn certain I didn't have a beer at Extro 5, nor 
indeed at any other point in my existence.

> http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/view.html?pg=3
> 
> I had made the same assertion that day in 2001: that intelligence is
> just a matter of a massive lookup table and an engine capable of using
> it effectively. Now the inventor of the PDA is making the same
> assertion. Perhaps people don't help because they don't think you are
> approaching the problem effectively.

I'm afraid I don't remember that conversation.  But I'm more sure that 
intelligence is not a massive lookup table than I am that I never drank 
beer at Extro 5.  In the latter case my memories of never drinking beer 
could have been faked by some deceiving demon, while the former is a matter 
of math.

You tellin' me there ain't no Bayes in humans?  Cuz Bayes ain't a lookup 
table.  Sure, you can simulate the inputs and outputs of any finite process 
using a lookup table, but that doesn't mean the lookup table would be small 
enough to fit in the observed physical universe.

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