I have been following this for a while and have taken the time to understand it in a little detail. While it does not provide the 'answers', it does frame the question of 'what is an intelligent machine?' in a very precise manner. It's interesting work, what it needs is for someone to now work out how to build much better models and plug them into the framework provided by AIXI.
Yes! Not enough people get this. Anonymous is a name for a loose, evolving affiliation of ideas, it is not a specific group of people. It personifies a set of beliefs, a view of the world, it allows a hive mind to express itself as an individual. It allows the ideas to speak for themselves. In so doing it allows those ideas to evolve more rapidly.
I am not well versed in history, so I can't say if this is novel, but it is a fabulous idea.
It is clear to me that, just as thought can emerge from the movement of charge between networks of neurons so can it emerge from the chatter of a million people. The same processes are at work, you might call it 'emergence' but I suspect that our mathematics does not yet capture it's description adequately.
This is the kind of system we need to develop and enhance if we are to create a better world. Our social structure is prescriptive and too rigidly hierarchical, it has broken away from it's dynamic, organic roots and lost touch with the magic that seems to generate flexible and resilient structure out of nothing.
If you accept the isomorphism between the mind and society, then you may see that the internet is radically disruptive. It has made communication orders of magnitude faster and it has changed the topology of the network described by society. This is changing us, quickly. For better or worse remains to be seen. But I suspect the effects of the internet revolution are only now beginning.
Perhaps I'm just seeing what I want to see...
The battle outside ragin'
Will soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'
I honestly don't think you can make it much simpler. That is not to say it is simple, just that it is by nature not simple. You can dress the concepts up, make them look nice with a graphical front end, but really the complexity comes from the abstract notions implicit in functions to be performed. You can tailor things by building libraries of functions to perform common tasks, but these abstractions are never going to be sufficient. What is required is a method of translating from the world we are most familiar with, described by our natural language, into the world described by the language of the computer. The translator needs to understand the context of the natural language requirement and find its correct representation in binary. This is the job of the programmer. An automated solution may well be able to pass the Turing test. That being said, I often think about how to leverage machine learning to help bridge the language gap. Evolving an application is an interesting idea, where the requirements are drip fed to the system through the language of the UI the program should present. Translations from some physical representation, cogs, roads, queues, etc might be useful since it is instinctive to many people yet more precise in its descriptive power than spoken language.
I agree. It would certainly take decades for them to master the technology. It might even take them 50 years. A lot of the knowledge required is implicit in the industry taken as a whole. Put me in the stone age with a manual for making bronze. I would be proud of myself If I managed to forge something useful inside of a lifetimes work. Where does the ore come from? How do I extract it? Precisely how do I get the fire hot enough? Similarly, if I knew how to create a warp drive, there is absolutely no guarantee that I could actually build one with current day tech. It might take a decade just to produce one of the required components.
To be fair, I'm pretty sure he had his tongue firmly in his cheek. But point well made. Whenever this point comes up I think of a scene from 'the cube', is it a massive conspiracy or utter incompetence combined with some kind emergent process?
I suppose the question is: Are there appropriate abstractions which would bring conceptual simplicity to these systems? I find it hard to believe that there is not. A system which does not have such a property is more difficult for natural selection to operate upon. The changes which are likely to happen to a lineage over the course of time are likely to have evolved to be likely to move the lineage closer to a locally optimal phenotype. I do not think that a system which is incompressible, would display such dynamics, the system would be chaotic and small changes in the genotype would lead to divergent phenotypes wrt the fitness landscape. Perhaps the appropriate abstractions are spread out both temporaly and spatially.
The question of time is deeper than this. Why is it that your brain or for that matter any physical system is dependent on it's previous configurations? Why is it that there is such a thing as previous? The mathematical descriptions of reality we have devised are symmetrical in time...
I can imagine a universe where alternate number like systems are more appropriate as heuristics for day to day living. Why should every universe be easily described through isomorphisms to the infinite cyclic group? Why could a universe not be more easily understood (compressed) within the minds of it's inhabitants with systems which are non-abelian groups? Perhaps you could say that there can exist no universes where intelligent beings can exist which contain aspects which are compressible using such systems. But you would have to prove it.
I think the arrow of time question is very interesting, I would love to see and understand an answer to this before I die.
I experience this. But my addiction is for information, technical articles, scientific papers in mathematics, physics, machine learning, biology. Now I can do it all on my phone anywhere, anytime. Texting and social media are of little interest to me... Do you think this is still something I should worry about?
