Artificial Intelligence Research

He makes the correct point that roughly-human-level AI’s will have dramatically different strengths and weaknesses from human being, due to different sensors and actuators and different physical infrastructures for their cognitive dynamics.  But he doesn’t even touch the notion of self-modifying AI – the concept that once an AI gets smart enough to modify its own code, it’s likely to get exponentially smarter and smarter until it’s left us humans in the dust.

therefore if AI closely enough emulates the human brain it won’t radically self-modify either

Rather, I think the problem is that the field of AI has come to focus on “narrow AI” – programs that solve particularly, narrowly-defined problems – rather than “artificial general intelligence” (AGI). 

cognitive science, artificial general intelligence, philosophy of mind and abstract mathematics

So what we’re doing is creating commercial narrow AI programs, using the software framework that we’re building out with our AGI design in mind.

I tend to largely agree with his take on the brain

I think he oversimplifies some things fairly seriously – giving them very brief mention when they’re actually quite long and complicated stories.  And some of these omissions, in my view, are not mere “biological details” but are rather points of serious importance for his program of abstracting principles from brain science and then re-concretizing these principles in the context of digital software.

One point Hawkins doesn’t really cover is how a mind/brain chooses which predictions to make, from among the many possible predictions that exist.

Hawkins proposes that there are neurons or neuronal groups that represent patterns as “tokens,” and that these tokens are then incorporated along with other neurons or neuronal groups into larger groupings representing more abstract patterns.  This seems clearly to be correct, but he doesn’t give much information on how these tokens are supposed to be formed. 

So, what’s wrong with Hawkins’ picture of brain function?  Nothing’s exactly wrong with it, so far as I can tell.

But Edelman then takes the concept one step further and talks about “neural maps” – assemblies of neuronal groups that carry out particular perception, cognition or action functions.  Neural maps, in essence, are sets of neuronal groups that host attractors of neurodynamics.  And Edelman then observes, astutely, that the dynamics of the population of neuronal groups, over time, is likely to obey a form of evolution by natural selection.

How fascinating if the brain also operates in this way!

Hawkins argues that creativity is essentially just metaphorical thinking, generalization based on memory.  While this is true in a grand sense, it’s not a very penetrating statement.

Evolutionary learning is the most powerful general search mechanism known to computer science, and is also hypothesized by Edelman to underly neural intelligence.  This sort of idea, it seems to me, should be part of any synthetic approach to brain function.

Hawkins mentions the notion, and observes correctly that Hebbian learning in the brain is a lot subtler than the simple version that Donald Hebb laid out in the late 40’s.   But he largely portrays these variations as biological details, and then shifts focus to the hierarchical architecture of the cortex. 

Hawkins’ critique of AI, which in my view is overly harsh.  He dismisses work on formal logic based reasoning as irrelevant to “real intelligence.” 

So – to sum up – I think Hawkins’ statements about brain function are pretty much correct

What he omits are, for instance,   The way the brain displays evolutionary learning as a consequence of the dynamics of multiple attractors involving sets of neural clusters The way the brain may emergently give rise to probabilistic reasoning via the statistical coordination of Hebbian learning

Learning of predictive patterns requires an explicit or implicit search through a large space of predictive patterns; evolutionary learning provides one approach to this problem, with computer science foundations and plausible connections to brain function; again, Hawkins does not propose any concrete alternative.

crucial question of how far one has to abstract away from brain function, to get to something that can be re-specialized into efficient computer software.  My intuition is that this will require a higher level of abstraction than Hawkins seems to believe.  But I stress that this is a matter of intuitive judgment – neither of us really knows.

Of course, to interpret the Novamente design as an “abstraction from the brain” is to interpret this phrase in a fairly extreme sense – we’re abstracting general processes like probabilistic inference and evolutionary learning and general properties like hierarchical structure from the brain, rather than particular algorithms. 

Although I’m (unsurprisingly) most psyched about the Novamente approach, I think it’s also quite worthwhile to pursue AGI approaches that are closer to the brain level – there’s a large space between detailed brain simulation and Novamente, including neuron-level simulations, neural-cluster-level simulations, and so forth.