
Artificial Intelligence Is Lost in the Woods - jonbaer
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/408171/artificial-intelligence-is-lost-in-the-woods/?href=
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visarga
> A machine with a conscious (simulated) mind can feel wonderful on the first
> fine day of spring and grow depressed as winter sets in

No, that's a human perspective, based off our bodily needs for sun, air and
nature. It's got nothing to do with conscious AI.

Instead of "consciousness", which is a slippery word, meaning many things to
many people, with implications in neurology, physics, AI and religion, we
should use the RL framework.

In reinforcement learning, you only need to define 3 things: perception,
action and reward. They are clear cut, don't leave so much to interpretation
and have direct applications in AI agents and robots; human brains use RL as
well.

If we ask ourselves: can we make a general RL agent? Can we master perception,
action selection and learning from sparse rewards? Well, it's a whole
different game when put in these concrete terms. We don't get lost in qualia,
dualism, monism, what it's like to be a bat, hard problem, and other armchair
consciousness philosophy concepts.

Perception/action selection/reward is enough to describe consciousness.

