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Comment by mathgeek | Hacker News Reader

> When you think about the difficulties of such a loosely defined problem, it's hard to buy into the real-world fears of AI.

My belief is that one day, in the not too distant future, we'll be saying that it's hard to believe we ever considered such things difficult for AI.

Consider that an AI can literally keep "reloading the last save file" indefinitely and simply try different commands until it finds one that advances the game successfully. A little bit of guided learning to confirm that its doing well, and suddenly you've got an AI that plays Skyrim.

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> Consider that an AI can literally keep "reloading the last save file" indefinitely and simply try different commands until it finds one that advances the game successfully. A little bit of guided learning to confirm that its doing well, and suddenly you've got an AI that plays Skyrim.

And if you give a monkey a typewriter he will eventually write the complete works of shakespeare and if you play the powerball enough you'll eventually hit a $1.5 Billion dollar jackpot but there are easier ways to read Shakespeare and more profitable ways to get a billion dollars.

What makes humans (specifically their brains and the brains of other species) so powerful is it doesn't need hundreds at attempts at playing pacman or Skyrim before it wins. There are definitely applications where it's not unreasonable to expect an AI to have the correct answer to most possibilities at its disposable (handwriting detection, for instance) but the most useful applications will be if/when AI can solve problems that rarely have similar inputs (global economics, for instance).

The core difference with AI is that it is adaptable. Sure, flailing around and happening to do something useful isn't clever, but if we can reinforce useful behaviours something more closely resembling intelligence can emerge.

> What makes humans (specifically their brains and the brains of other species) so powerful is it doesn't need hundreds at attempts at playing pacman or Skyrim before it wins.

The average human is terrible at playing Skyrim, Pac-Man, and video games in general. Someone who has never even looked at a computer will have a hard time playing Skyrim or any other video game without many hours of practice. And, most video games draw upon stuff that humans already know, like moving around in a physical world, and a concept of self, which gives them a huge advantage over AI right from the start.

You could even say that one of humans' super powers is forgetting just how much practice went into learning something.

I've been walking for 28 years and I still trip sometimes. That's almost 31,000 hours of practice, if we assume an average of just 3 hours of basic movement per day. Even going to the bathroom counts.

And when it comes to image/object recognition, I've had 163,000+ hours of practice. And I still see stuff I don't recognize plenty of times. Hell, optical illusions still fuck me up.

Now just imagine what an AI could do with that much practice/data.

one that advances the game successfully

What context does an AI have for knowing what it even means to advance the game? A game like Skyrim carries a HUGE baseline assumption that the player is familiar with what it's like to be a human being, living in a human culture rich with history and conflict.

Imagine trying to teach a jellyfish how to play Skyrim. That's kind of where we're at right now.

> What context does an AI have for knowing what it even means to advance the game?

Whatever context we decide that it has. We can guide it to prefer scenarios where the character doesn't die, or go as deep as having it rate its own results with a weighted scale.

> Imagine trying to teach a jellyfish how to play Skyrim. That's kind of where we're at right now.

The difference is that we don't have the ability to both redefine the jellyfish's goals and modify how it controls its interactions with the world.

Whatever context we decide that it has. We can guide it to prefer scenarios where the character doesn't die, or go as deep as having it rate its own results with a weighted scale.

Then we're not really talking about AGI anymore, but a Skyrim-playing engine. Do you see the difference? A human being didn't evolve to play Skyrim, so building your AI with specific knowledge of Skyrim is cheating.

A proper AI should be able to learn to play Skyrim just as well as it could learn to play Chess or Super Mario Bros or any other video game we throw at it, including games not invented until after the AI is written. This is much, much harder than building something that can just play Skyrim.

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