Watching David Suzuki tonight, i had a thought. It’s unusual in the sense that it seems simple enough, but i don’t recall having heard it from any other source. What if AGI is evolving? Current attempts at AI are narrowly focused, finding relatively interesting ways to solve local problems. But as those solutions become ubiquitous, more complexity will be required to solve larger and larger problems. This, in a sense, is what AI has been doing.
I don’t recommend David Suzuki’s recent shows. Originally a fruit fly specialist become science champion for the masses, he has evolved (no pun intended) into a pontificating self-righteous prick who is never at a loss to criticize anyone who doesn’t share his eco-philosophies. (Witness his recent idea of jailing politicians who resist GHG reduction policies, for which his university student audience gave him a standing ovation.) The Nature of Things was once a fascinating show where you could be dazzled with the latest biological, geological, *-ological findings. It’s still that – and the nature footage has only become more astounding, i must admit – but the formula of every show is now a double facepalm of hook-em, reel-em-in, and pound their faces in – using his trademark lulling, gentle intonations – with how the human race is raping Mother Gaia.
Anyway, what can i say, i was inspired. Not so much by David or the show, but by how life has evolved to thrive near a 200 degree sulphur-belching sea floor volcano. I won’t get into the details of the show (go and watch, it if you can stand the preaching). But over the years i’ve developed an annoying habit of thinking about everything i perceive as what-does-this-tell-me-about-AGI.
Orange Roughy can live over 100 years. Longer than most humans. But just from the one hour show i can pretty much conclude that they’re about as intelligent as any other fish. (No, they don’t live near the sulphur volcanoes… forget about that for now.) But as the show pointed out, life in the deep sea is pretty stable. One day is a lot like the next. That’s assuming they even recognize that such a thing as a day exists, because if they don’t, one 3 seconds is much like the next 3 seconds. In an environment like that, for what would you need intelligence? Here on the surface we’re confronted with extreme light, temperature, and humidity variations. Maybe our 2 dimensional existence makes thing easier, but then maybe it makes things harder?
But back to the point. Watching the little crabs and squid and see-through shrimp i became amazed at how they had adapted so perfectly to their specific environments. Kind of like narrow AI. Max Harms wrote a narrow AI-style script that demolished every bio-inspired script to date in the GoiD donut task, but that’s the way it is: narrowly focused approaches will be faster and more efficient than AGI. But the same AGI will survive in more contexts. Thus, what we need is a problem with many unrelated contexts for which only a single solution will do. Then we might finally start down the AGI road.