[ExI] sciam blog article

Robin D Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu
Wed Mar 30 14:51:29 UTC 2016


On Mar 29, 2016, at 8:47 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki <rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com<mailto:rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com>> wrote:



On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 8:02 AM, Robin D Hanson <rhanson at gmu.edu<mailto:rhanson at gmu.edu>> wrote:

What is the evidence that one merely needs to model the cortex well to have a machine that can do most jobs as well or better than humans?

### You need more than the cortex model to do everything a human does but a cortex model should suffice for all the intelligent, non-automatic actions. Walking, simple emotions, basic sensor signal processing, manual dexterity require a lot of non-cortical activity. The stuff of intelligence, such as hierarchies of cognitive representations or libraries of high-level behavior templates, are largely contained in the cortex.

I would list the following lines of evidence in favor of the cortex being the seat of general human intelligence:

1. Lesion studies in humans and animals
2. Functional correlate studies in humans and animals
3. Comparative anatomy of humans and primates
4. Genetics of humans and primates
5. History of AI development

You go on to argue that the cortex is our most uniquely human brain part and arguably the seat of our most general reasoning abilities. But even if these are true, they don’t at all speak to the overall abilities of a system which only had the equivalent of a cortex.

If you put a deep neural network with 2000 layers on top of whatever powers ATLAS robots you could get a pretty close facsimile of a human mind in a clumsy human body.

Here you seem to claim that everything but the cortex is relatively trivial - that  we already have all those abilities modeled, and all we need is to add a cortex to have a complete system. THAT is the claim for which I’d like to see evidence.

Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu<mailto:rhanson at gmu.edu>
Future of Humanity Inst., Oxford University
Assoc. Prof. Economics, George Mason University
See my new book: http://ageofem.com









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