Meanwhile, the rest of the airport has improved. Free public wi-fi is commonplace (good riddance to Boingo hotspots) and power outlets are often easy to find. Plus, more people in the lounge means fewer people in the terminal.
+1. What's new "since the 80s" are faster computation, larger datasets, and a handful of mathematical breakthroughs that enable once-intractable algorithms. It's obvious that human general intelligence operates in frontiers that are plainly outside the scope of computation.
>It's obvious that human general intelligence operates in frontiers that are plainly outside the scope of computation.
IMO, the two most important properties of human cognition are that it evolved through natural selection, and that it is embodied, meaning that it is part of a feedback loop between perception and action. I don't see why either of these things requires having a biological brain or body. It's true that current methods aren't close to achieving these things, but there's nothing in principle stopping us from creating evolved, embodied intelligences either in simulations or in robots.
Despite our best efforts, we are deeply irrational. Our thinking is based on instinct, not on core principles; it's a top-down approach driven by feelings.
Off topic - a pet peeve of mine is seeing humans termed as “irrational”. Please forgive my rant, as it is not personally targeted at you.
We only seem “irrational” when we are talking about a narrow view of “rationality”, i.e., as defined by the cold hard logic of machines. We do not question why we have this definition of rationality. Our “irrationality” simply seems so because we have not bothered to understand the larger complexity of our evolutionary programming. It’s the same as not bothering to understand how a car works, and then claiming that the car works on magic. If one understands how it works, then it is no longer magic. In the case of humans, we may never fully understand how we work, but we can work towards a compassionate understanding of the same.
Absolutely on point. I would argue that irrationality isn't even possible. If person A thinks or behaves "irrationally" according to person B, there is simply a difference in perception between the two. A large percentage of those perceptions are created inside one's own mind which may or may not be aligned with the rest of the universe.
It sounds like your main objection is with conflation of "irrational" with "wrong". It's helpful to describe an extreme fear of heights as "irrational" but from an evolutionary point of view it might in fact be correct because it keeps those genes that give the rest of the population a healthy fear of heights in the gene pool. I think these are different concepts and a person can be both irrational and correct in their behaviour.
Why is instinct not computable? That seems way easier to compute than rational thinking based on principles, it's just "if this, do that" and machine learning should be able to do that easily
Everything in the universe must by definition be rational. Chemical reactions always happen a certain way, physics always works a certain way, numbers add up the same every time.
If something seems irrational, that's because there are rational things layered on top of one another in a way that creates a misapprehension in a partially-informed observer.
> Everything in the universe must by definition be rational.
Why? You assume nature must be comprehensible to us because you define it that way? Nature's not under any obligation to us.
> If something seems irrational, that's because there are rational things layered on top of one another in a way that creates a misapprehension in a partially-informed observer.
Possible irrational things: Collapse of the wave function, consciousness, why anything exists. There's also non-computable functions, paradoxes like the liar paradox, and the inability to refute various skeptical possibilities like living in a simulation.
Combine that with the fact that all models are wrong, some are just more useful. We can't model the entire universe with perfect accuracy without the model being the universe, which means there are always things left out. Our rational explanations are approximations.
We can't look at quantum mechanics and call it irrational. The way the universe works is by definition the right / correct / only way. If logic points one way and reality points another, the logic isn't taking everything into account.
You're confusing the map for the territory. Rationality is something that makes sense for us. That need not apply to nature. It's misplaced to say that nature is rational. Nature just is.
So nature cannot be irrational. For instance: we had the very logical Newtonian mechanics. But Mercury's orbit did not make sense. Later on Einstein saw another layer of logic that put both Newton and Mercury in more context, and now both make sense again.
When we see things now that make no sense, it indicates faults in our mental models, not in the things.
In the context of a person behaving or thinking "irrationally": their brain is just atoms and chemicals. It has to work right. If their behaviour and thoughts do not line up to reality, that's a feature of said brain.
Perhaps the irrationality is due to the brain giving too much weight to certain factors, or perhaps they are in fact behaving perfectly logically given what they know and you don't. Perhaps its workings can be improved in software, or in the next hardware generation.
But there's no spooky mechanism that can't in principle be modelled and implemented in a different architecture, ie, transistors.
Quantum mechanics works the same way every time. Being random doesn't mean they're not working the same way every time, the distribution never changes.
Given that a sufficiently resourced computer ought to be able to run a subatomic-level simulation of an entire human brain, and while acknowledging the usual counterpoint vis a vis C. elegans/OpenWorm but deeming it irrelevant on longer timescales, your take seems quite arrogant. “Outside the scope of computation” is an awfully broad claim.
No, you don't, but if you're taking all the data at a "subatomic level" you will have so much memory required than unless you have some kind of memory I haven't heard of, it will need to take that into account because the memory alone will have a volume of significant light-time dimensions.
You need something like 3 petabytes just to model the neurons. There are 100 trillion atoms in a neuron. And he said subatomic, so you need some significant factor of that, plus you have to save some state.
So 300 trillion petabytes+ might be a memory the size of the moon. I think relativity does matter at that scale. Also, you will probably have to mine silicon asteroids and invent an AI factory to make the memory, and power it with what, fusion?
So yeah, just model the brain at the subatomic level, bro, it's easy bro, and you're just a naysayer for saying it can't be done, bro.
But, please. If you have a solution to this, don't post it on HN, file a patent. Not just for the model, but for the revolutionary new dense memory, the location of silicon asteroids, the planetary memory factory, the power source for it, and so on.
If you were to try to build such a simulation, given the natural limits of real hardware, wouldn’t some form of relativity be a necessary feature of the simulation to avoid segfaults, rather than something simply to take into account while constructing the hardware?
In the sense that rather than something to take into account while building the system, it is an emergent property from the fact that any such system has resource limitations.
More often, cars at a red light need to clear a path ASAP for emergency vehicles approaching from behind. The cars at the front of the line have nowhere to go except past the intersection, running the light.
As always, use your best judgement rather than blindly following rules. This is also why cops, prosecutors, judges, and juries have discretion about applying the law, because the law simply cannot be blindly applied.
(Which is why I object to mandatory sentencing laws.)
