John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

Re:John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general int... by bildung on Thursday November 14, 2019 @06:10AM (#21534502)

Every child reinvents the concept. It wasn't there on birth, and the word and phrases didn't contain it. That's a bit difficult topic to wrap ones head around, but it is critically important to differ between signified (the concept) and signifier (the words etc.).

The child develops concepts and is able to create and evaluate inferences, and thus able to understand metaphors etc.

The concept is what most AI approaches lack. Googles image search can identify apples, and cherries, and probably can categorize both as fruits, but it can't infer that this probably contains seeds, is a living being etc.

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Re:John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general int... by simonh on Thursday November 14, 2019 @06:21AM (#21534558)

Or even that it is a three dimensional object, or what that means.

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Re:John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general int... by mrd999 on Thursday November 14, 2019 @10:01AM (#21535852)

You're the only person who mentioned metaphors here. My intuition tells me metaphors will be key to developing AGI. Metaphors literally generalize; they predict; they organize and catalogue. Formation, testing, and introspection of metaphors seems to be a way forward.

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Re:John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general int... by bildung on Friday November 15, 2019 @03:00AM (#21543120)

If you are interested in this direction of research: There is a big body of work regarding human cognitive processes and the role of metaphor. I would suggest "Philosophy in the flesh" by Lakoff and Johnson. A hefty work, but that was one of the publications that fundamentally changed my perspective on the human mind. The concept of embodied reasoning was eye-opening for me.

As I have an academic background in learning theory and developmental psychology, I'm pretty pessimistic about the current AI trend, autonomous driving etc. Most smart people in the field are chasing what are effectively more efficient regression functions for over 60 years now, and I almost never stumble upon approaches that have looked at what we know about actual human learning processes, development of the self etc.

Moravec's paradox[1] IMO should have been an inflection point for AI research. This is the level of problems AI research has to tackle if it ever wants to create AGI.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

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Re:John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general int... by jimsmart on Thursday November 14, 2019 @02:10PM (#21538344)

Related: Martin Hilpert has an excellent lecture/video on metaphor, as part of his Cognitive Linguistics course. Well worth a watch if this is a topic that interests you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0BYLpwSM6E

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