> Simplicity is the grail of physics, not AI. Physicists win Nobel Prizes when they discover a previously unknown underlying layer and explain its behaviors. We already know what the ultimate bottom layer of an Artificial Intelligence looks like; it looks like ones and zeroes. Our job is to build something interesting out of those ones and zeroes. The Turing formalism does not solve this problem any more than quantum electrodynamics tells us how to build a bicycle…

> Physics envy in AI is the search for a single, simple underlying process, with the expectation that this one discovery will lay bare all the secrets of intelligence. The tendency to treat new approaches to AI as if they were new theories of physics may at least partially explain AI’s past history of overpromise and oversimplification…

> The effects of physics envy can be more subtle; they also appear in the lack of interaction between AI projects. Physics envy has given rise to a series of AI projects that could only use one idea, as each new hypothesis for the one true essence of intelligence was tested and discarded.

Apart from the fact that assumptions are by-design unjustified, which brings to the explanation that science is, more or less, an arbitrary explanation to the real truth, I have the following question:

Why should the science take the real-world to be true? My question is, in particular, about the “application of faith” as advocated by many people. No, it is not about religion. Consider, for example, Hysenberg’s uncertainty principle, one possible interpretation of it being this:

1. Locating an electron involves passing a photon on it.
2. The electron can be located, if the photon collides with it.
3. The electron is located now, but the photon absorption makes electron energy change.
4. This, in turn causes variation in it’s momentum.
5. Therefore, locating an electron and its speed at the same time is not possible with complete precision (almost).

This explains a (thought) experiment, that does not happen, if we want to, but otherwise happens all the time. Isn’t this an indication of faith? So, could there be other physical phenomena, that do not happen if tried to be observed, but using a different machinery can be proven to happen?

AI is a machine, it obeys the laws of physics. If someone builds a calculator, it will “mindlessly” calculate every answer (if it’s bug free and the hardware is not broken), independelty whether or not multiplying numbers is intellectually fulfilling or not.

Intellectual fulfillment is something that needs to be programmed into any machine, it doesn’t “emerge” automatically from somewhere.

If you make a machine and you program it to build paperclips, and the program is correct, then by definition it will build paperclips without judging the asthetic pleasurement or intellectual fulfillment of such actions.

A for-loop doesn’t break down the laws of physics and start to ponder about human ideas even if the current AI’s humans are familiar with (i.e. other biological brains) tend to ponder about such ideas. If a for-loop magically changes itself, then either there’s a bug and it wasn’t a correct program in the first place, or the laws of physics have been broken down by some mysterious force..

Any problem that humans can solve, e.g., playing chess at a grandmaster level, is by any reasonable definition tractable!

I also think there could be something aesthetically pleasing about a paperclip that an AI would find endlessly entertaining. Why do I think that? Because the history of art shows us that humans themselves can obsess over mundane objects, using them in countless creative ways, sometimes even making deep intellectual statements through their art. Did Duchamp teach us nothing?!

Just think of the paperclip maximising AI as a cross between a hobbyist, a scientist working within very specific and self imposed limits and a transgressive, post modern auteur.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.6658

What’s your take Scott?

And its second and third task?

I always say that if you could have something as absurd as a cockroach maximizer, you could have a paperclip maximizer. And we do have cockroach maximizers – they’re called cockroaches.