Re:The Limits of Machine Learning
by TheOtherHobbes on Monday September 26, 2016 @07:50PM
(#12586591)
Because it would be interesting to solve a wider class of problems. And having a deeper insight helps define which data to look at.
Having said that - I'm always bemused that AI is supposed to compete with a hypothetical single human brain, and that the Turing Test is supposed to prove we have AI when we can build a brain that appears human.
Learning is a social activity, not an individual one. Individual brains are useless without social training and access to culture.
And some humans are actually quite stupid.
A machine that passes the Turning Test for a hypothetical middle-of-the-bell curve human isn't so interesting a thing.
I'm not sure what you mean by a "fixed program". Is a statistical clustering algorithm not a "fixed program"? Even the human brain is running some "fixed program", as we cannot reprogram our brains to efficiently run general sorting algorithms on "bare neurons".
> "general problem solving ability" seems about right for some value of "general"
It may be more useful than nothing at all, but I don't see how it conveys too much information. Clearly, a universal Turing machine has a "general problem solving ability" for much more general values of "general". So I'm not sure how much information "general problem solving" conveys. More importantly, why do we even need a definition? Statistical learning is very effective at solving some useful problems. Why do we need to philosophize about the relationship between those algorithms and human intelligence before we have more data?