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Comment by moxious | Hacker News Reader

#2 is definitely wrong. We aren't a collection of similar hacks; we are qualitatively different because we include the ability to gain new heuristics and to cross apply the ones we already have. No clever library of strung together hacks will have these 2 properties. In the same way, an ant hill is not just a bunch of ants, it has so many emergent properties that thinking of it in terms of its components is a mistake

We should however think more expansively about intelligence than just the sort humans have. The goal doesn't need to be straight mimicry of humans

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> In the same way, an ant hill is not just a bunch of ants, it has so many emergent properties that thinking of it in terms of its components is a mistake

The thing about emergent behavior is that you just have to take enough entities and organize them the correct way, and the behavior appears, unexpectedly, and out of nowhere.

If it is really emergent, then nobody (what includes me and you) has no idea how far we are from a general intelligence at all.

An emergent property is precisely one that obtains unexpectedly from simple components. For instance, it is supposed by some that the universe truly consists of nothing more than electrons and quarks and what have you which interact in relatively simple ways, and that subjective human experience emerges from that. We then have a situation that is easier for us to reason about using higher level concepts, but there isn't a chapter in the laws of physics called "subjective human experience". That's in the book called "diverse applications of the basic laws of physics".

In any case, I dispute your facts too. I don't think we have the ability to cross apply our heuristics. I can calculate fairly accurately a lot of mathematical problems when I'm riding my bike, but put me in a maths class and I'm stuffed. I don't have independent access to those hacks.

A neural network that can train neural networks is capable of learning new heuristics. That is a thin meta-algorithm on top of a standard function approximation algorithm.

EDIT: I should also add that reinforcement learning more directly falsifies your claim.

> we include the ability to gain new heuristics and to cross apply the ones we already have.

Maybe our collection of hacks includes hack generation hacks (they cannot work reliably of course).

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