
To Keep Up with AI We Need Bigger Brains - jkuria
https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-keep-up-with-ai-well-need-high-tech-brains-1509120930
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Arun2009
I think the first thing we should do is to understand how superlative human
intellectual performance _as it exists today_ even works, and try to make it
commodity knowledge taught in everyday classrooms.

In a typical physics, mathematics or engineering curriculum, we learn a lot of
fields, such as mechanics, electrodynamics, calculus, signal processing,
control theory, and so on. But we don't learn about the human cognitive
processes that went into the discovery of those fields. At best we get a
caricatured view of the subject's history. Thus, you might learn that Galois
came up with the idea of groups. But what was he thinking when he did that?
What were the challenges that he was up against that inspired his idea? In
short, how did he _think_ , and how might we emulate him for our problems?
Ditto for Maxwell, Riemann, etc.

In all the courses that I took, there was none that explicitly taught me how
the mind solves challenging problems or comes up with creative solutions. This
knowledge is supposed to be somehow imbibed indirectly by learning the fields
themselves, which I think is very inefficient. We need to make dissemination
of this wisdom more systematic.

A parallel is the field of strength training, in which specific exercises,
equipment, and nutritional methods were discovered over a brief period of
time. The professional body builders of today are giants compared to their
peers over a century ago. Something similar needs to happen for cognitive
skills as well.

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internetman55
Bodybuilders today are on mass quantities of steroids, insulin, human growth
hormone, etc. The old strong men (Görner, Sandow, etc.) can compare favorably
with pretty much anyone not on PEDs today. In general they had smaller chests,
but I think that was an aesthetic choice, as I've heard large chests were
considered somewhat effeminate at the time.

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partycoder
Not only bigger brains. Human I/O as of now is limited.

Communicating one word at a time, one picture at a time or one sound at a time
is slow and has significant overhead.

AI doesn't need to transfer information one word, picture or sound at a time.
It can potentially pass on any arbitrary representation no matter how large,
at massive speeds.

Then, going back to humans: a human expert take decades to train. Once
trained, transferring that expertise involves starting the process again. Not
the case with AI. Take the state of an AI, serialize it, instance it thousands
of times, you've got thousands of experts.

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vacri
> _Communicating one word at a time, one picture at a time or one sound at a
> time is slow and has significant overhead._

We don't. We have massive parallelism in how we communicate. The aphorism "a
picture is worth a thousand words" is based on that.

All in all, AIs beat humans on _very specific_ problems, but they're worthless
for most tasks - and an AI that's specialised to one task is very rarely
suitable for another. You can get a human to do quite complex tasks _and_ use
initiative with only the simplest of instructions. Don't even need to be at
expert-level. Where is the AI that can wash, dry, and fold the clothes, change
the baby, make lunch and dinner, fix the leaky sink, and bring the dog in at
night? Yet that's a very humdrum day for a human.

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partycoder
A man in the middle ages thinks of the future of a time with more castles,
more knights, more kings. What you described is similar: an extrapolation of
the current state of AI, forever basically, even despite the overwhelming
evidence that AI is progressing far faster than evolution ever did in just a
few decades. This discussion is not about the current state of AI.

Despite the skepticism, strong AI will happen, maybe not in your lifetime but
close enough... after that, given the fact that our fitness function includes
dumb variables such as having nice hair my money is on the AI. Given a human
and a strong AI (human level intelligence AI), the AI would prevail.

e.g: When a human reads text, the human needs to reconstruct the semantic
meaning from the text. The AI can transfer semantic meaning directly. The AI
can even share trained neural ensembles or any computation device to perform a
specific task.

And btw, there is already some basic form of narrow intelligence built in your
washing machine, it's called fuzzy logic, so technically you already have a
form of AI washing your clothes.

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polotics
Hi partycoder, both for your (quote) "man in the middle ages", whose vision of
the future was biblical apocalypse real soon now, not more kings and castles,
and for your contemporary (quote) "human" whose future somehow is also an
apocalypse of sorts, if you are not yourself doing something to prevent/hasten
this future, may I put it to you that you are much more like a middle-ages man
than you think? Apocalypse are convenient exonerators.

~~~
partycoder
It seems you didn't get the point of the analogy. My point is that the outcome
of paradigm shifts are hard to predict. It would have been hard to predict for
a middle ages person to predict the Reinassance and everything that followed
after.

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known
There is a subtle difference between Knowledge and Intelligence

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pmontra
I can't read the full story because of the paywall so I can't be sure of the
point.

From the title it sounds as good as if we need bigger legs to keep up with
cars. However there are fundamental differences between moving around and
thinking. I'd be surprised to be able to get a bigger brain in time to be on
par with AIs. I'd be more surprised to have the time or the will to go through
all the training that would make me an expert in several fields. However we
already have specialized AIs in many fields. An example: I played a few
thousands of games of Go, a typical pro played tens of thousands, AlphaGo
millions. It had nothing else to do. I'll never match that, even with a bigger
brain.

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napa15
I assume it's some superifical point about robot AI being too advanced for
humans to debug.

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tim333
Paywall avoiding link:
[https://www.facebook.com/flx/warn/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.c...](https://www.facebook.com/flx/warn/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Fto-
keep-up-with-ai-well-need-high-tech-
brains-1509120930&h=ATPxGv1jZF_9OZ3TJIA4wFcJCEy1JjvwWfeI2yvlh44EarIXdySn1zl_FaI-
YvCLu6K66igrrEEgWCUBstwHHVdRiKCeqo5-isuccw&_rdr)

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trophycase
Or, you know, people could stand up for themselves and stop working on AI.

